Donovan continued his gangbusting in western New York through the next two years, even when it meant raiding the Saturn Club, the leading blue-blood club in Buffalo. “Of course, Bill Donovan, Ganson Depew, Bradley Goodyear, and I were all members,” recalled Frank Raichle. “Members had private lockers in which we kept our private booze. When Donovan hauled [gangland chief] Lester Cameron into court, he testified that one of his customers was the Saturn Club, and Bill warned club members time and again that they could not get around the Prohibition laws simply by keeping their liquor in lockers.”
“What kind of man would raid his own club?” scoffed Bradley Goodyear, Donovan’s friend and law partner.
Goodyear would have been well advised not to scoff. Newspaperman George G. Sher was in Donovan’s office the night of the Saturn Club raid. “Go ahead, boys,” Sher remembered Donovan telling the government agents. “I’ve warned these fellows three times. For all their prestige, they are no better than eastside saloons.”
Recalling the evening in a letter to Herbert Hoover in 1929, Sher, by then managing editor of the Philadelphia Record, wrote, “Even now, the spirit of his enthusiasm sweeps over me as I recall the picture of him standing over the switchboard in his shirt sleeves waiting to give the word ‘go’ to a little band of government agents. And that at midnight when many men of Colonel Donovan’s social standing would be enjoying some function or at home with their charming families.”
“Dry Chief Michael H. Stapleton and his Merrie Men,” as the Buffalo Evening News editor emeritus Alfred H. Kirchhofer labeled them, struck in the middle of the night. They broke into the lockers, each of which had the name of its owner on the door, and determined who was in violation of the law. When the story hit the morning papers, the Who’s Who of Buffalo were identified as lawbreakers. The stories detailed exactly what was in each socialite’s locker.
“The locker of Seymour H. Knox, Sr., for example, held a mere pint of whiskey,” Kirchhofer noted. “One of the best stocked lockers at the Saturn Club was charged jointly to Shelton Weed and ‘an eminent local jurist’ whose name was covered up. Mr. Weed claimed entire ownership, thus absolving his brother-in-law . . . Louis B. Hart, a genial host and bon vivant, as well as surrogate of Erie County, and deeply embarrassed by the incident because of his judicial office.”
The uproar was still mounting when Donovan’s men raided the Buffalo Country Club, another lair of the socially prominent, where he was also a member. If somehow a leading citizen had escaped the Saturn Club raid, he now was incriminated in the country club raid. Committees of outraged club members were formed to fight Donovan. Club members took a pledge never to speak to him again, and Bradley Goodyear, who resigned in anger from the Donovan law firm, was one who never again spoke to him. Donovan’s prominent brother-in-law, Dexter Rumsey, told everybody that it was exactly what might be expected from a moralistic Irishman with no sense of the proprieties. It is said that Ruth Donovan also never forgave him for embarrassing her family and their friends. Proper Buffalo had been revealed as amusingly improper.
“The Affair of the Lockers touched many eminent, respectable pillars of society,” reported Buffalo Magazine six years later, “brought some of them unwelcome notoriety, which they felt Donovan was responsible for, broke up long-standing friendships and disrupted Donovan’s own law firm, and left scars in his personal relations which have not yet healed.”
A wag lampooned Donovan with a story that went around Buffalo: There was once a top sergeant known for his picturesque language. One day a private came to him grousing about a certain lieutenant who was making life miserable for him because of his insistence on the meticulous performance of certain unnecessary tasks. The sergeant listened to the complaints and then burst out, “That blankety-blank looie is just plain dooty struck!”
“Duty struck” Donovan was praised by his admirers for his devotion to his office and scorned by most of his own social set in Buffalo as a traitor to his class. What had happened, asked his critics, to the engaging young Irishman who had formed and led Troop I, had gone off to France and returned a war hero, and had shown such brilliance at the bar?
When a reporter from the Buffalo Times asked Donovan why he had raided the Saturn Club, he said, “Just as the crowd takes the cut of its clothes from its leaders, so also does it take its moral tone from them.”
Donovan’s remaining friends maintained that he had had no choice in the matter. He could not refrain from the raids without violating his oath of office, and he could not withhold the names from the newspapers. To do so would have meant one law for the poor and another for the rich, one law for strangers and another for his friends. His enemies insisted that he had engineered the whole thing to grab headlines and further his political ambitions. They also spread a rumor that Bill Donovan, the moralistic public official, had an immoral side to his private life. Some of his late hours, they said, weren’t spent at the office at all but in the company of young women. When this gossip reached Ruth Donovan, her embarrassment and anger increased. She was left with a lasting wound when it became clear that there was more than a little truth to the rumors.
“I’ve heard the affair of the lockers discussed from California to Paris,” Frank Raichle stated, “and there is no doubt that to this day Buffalo has still not forgiven Bill Donovan. When Herbert Hoover was considering Bill Donovan as attorney general or secretary of state, Buffalonians, instead of helping him to achieve high office, did everything they could to defeat him.”
Ganson Depew stood by Donovan, but later in the year he died as a result of a polo accident. Bill Donovan, once the darling of the Buffalo Establishment, was now persona non grata. All the rest of his life, he was to feel the bitterness of this first serious reversal in his fortunes, but to all appearances he paid no attention. He traveled to Ottawa and talked to Canadian government officials about the feasibility of an international customs convention, which would help to close the Niagara border to illegal drugs and liquor. He persuaded Washington to take up the matter, and later in 1923 when a conference was held in Ottawa, he was the leading member of the American delegation. With the signing of an agreement, customs officers of the United States and Canada joined to combat smuggling. The convention would help catch violators of both countries’ laws.
Donovan may have lost ground in his political career, but he was still a much admired soldier. In 1922 he had been elected national president of the Rainbow Division Veterans Association. More satisfying to Bill Donovan, early the following year he took the train down to New York City where, on January 17, 1923, at the jam-packed Lexington Avenue Armory, Maj. Gen. Robert L. Bullard presented the Congressional Medal of Honor that Donovan had been awarded in 1918 for his gallantry in France. General Bullard spoke eloquently and concluded, “I congratulate you on not having to die on the field of battle to get this medal as many have in our wars.”
Fourteen hundred survivors of the regiment’s campaign in France roared their approval until the armory shook. They shouted even louder when Donovan handed the medal over to the regiment for custody.
“A regiment lives by its traditions,” said Donovan. “The noble tradition we have inherited impels me to ask that this medal remain in the Armory, there to serve as a recognition of the valor of our regiment, as an incentive to those who enlist under its standard, but most of all as a memorial to our brave and unforgotten dead.”
In January 1923, Ruth and Bill Donovan sailed for Europe, where they stayed for three months. They enjoyed themselves thoroughly, looking up old friends and making new ones. At the same time, Donovan’s investigations into what was happening and going to happen in Europe continued.
In Berchtesgaden he met a young political activist, six years his junior, who in 1919 as an agent of the German Army had enlisted in the obscure German Workers’ Party to spy on it from within. He had become something other than an agent; in fact, he was soon a member of the party’s executive committee and had been instrumental in changing its na
me to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Radical ideas were flourishing in the depressed Germany of 1923, and the new party trumpeted a jingoistic pride in the German people and a hatred for the bumbling Weimar Republic.
There were rumors that the party leader planned a march on Berlin. His name was Adolf Hitler, and Donovan was never to forget his meeting with him at the Pension Moritz, where Hitler lived at the time.
The Adolf Hitler that Bill Donovan met that March evening in the Bavarian Alpine resort confided in him as people were likely to do throughout his life. Hitler talked about his gentle Czech mother, Klara, and about his father, a brutal man who had struck him as a boy, and had beaten his pet dog until it wet on the carpet. “I never wet the carpet,” Hitler told Donovan.
The evening was a monologue. Hitler told of his injury by a gas attack in 1918 and said that his eyes had never been right since. He talked about music: He disliked the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms and preferred to listen to Wagner. He sipped his beer and whistled the “Swan Song” from Lohengrin, breathing in and out in a strange way so that the whistle never ceased. He was, Hitler said, like Christ driving the Jewish moneylenders from the temple. He was damp with perspiration when he finished talking. When it was time for the sympathetic American to leave, Hitler clasped Donovan’s hand and shook it warmly.
Was Adolf Hitler merely a strange young man twisted by a sordid childhood? Donovan did not think so. Germany was a nation in profound trouble, and Hitler had a curious magnetism. As for Hitler, he was never to forget Donovan.
On April 18, Ruth and Bill Donovan returned to New York on the White Star liner Majestic. When shipboard reporters asked him what he thought of conditions in Europe, Donovan said that things were much improved but that the people were depressed. He did not mention the overwhelming problems he saw confronting the Weimar Republic in Germany.
13
With the Department of Justice
WHILE DISTRICT ATTORNEY DONOVAN was racket-busting in western New York, Harry Daugherty, attorney general of the United States, was bringing notoriety to the Harding administration with his poker and liquor parties at Howard Mannington’s little green house on K Street, his stock market speculations, and the sale of Department of Justice liquor permits. With the death of President Harding on August 2, 1923, the Teapot Dome scandal erupted. At the Senate hearings that began in October, Daugherty’s involvement in the sale of naval oil lands also became evident.
On March 1, 1924, on a return trip to Buffalo from Florida, Donovan stopped off in Washington to confer with Republican leaders about what was to be done with Daugherty. Newspapers printed stories that President Calvin Coolidge was about to remove Daugherty and put Donovan in his place, but Daugherty refused to resign his position in the face of the Senate inquiry. To do so, he claimed, would be to admit guilt.
“Daugherty’s determination to stay in the cabinet until a thorough investigation of his department is made by the Senate Committee affects Donovan’s nomination,” reported the Chicago Tribune.
Donovan returned to Buffalo. When on March 28 Daugherty changed his mind and resigned at Coolidge’s insistence, it was not Donovan but Harlan F. Stone, dean of the Columbia University Law School, who took his place. Stone went to Washington to meet with the President on April 9. When he left the White House, he asked a policeman, “Where is the Department of Justice?” Stone followed the officer’s directions to the office on Vermont Avenue, where he set about cleaning up the accumulated mess left by what was one of the most corrupt administrations in American history.
Harlan Stone had followed with pride and approval the career of his prize student, William J. Donovan, and he asked him to come to Washington to take charge of the criminal division of the Department of Justice. Stone explained to Donovan that he wanted him to enforce the laws of the United States on a national level as vigorously as he had enforced them in western New York.
At Sunday dinner in Buffalo, Bill and Ruth Donovan told their children that they were moving to Washington. By then David was 9 and Patricia, 7. David was beginning to wonder if having a famous and dynamic father was an ideal arrangement for a boy. “Gee, Dad,” he said. “Don’t you think you could get a job as a bus driver instead?”
The Donovans moved to Washington, where they bought a handsome house at 1637 30th Street, Northwest, in Georgetown. Within a few days 41-year-old Bill Donovan had his first confrontation with 29-year-old John Edgar Hoover, acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Both men had been born on New Year’s Day. But from the start they decided not to send one another birthday cards.
Under Harry Daugherty, Hoover had done much as he pleased; now he had to report to Donovan. Both Donovan and Hoover were ambitious, and Hoover resented the glamorous war hero’s having authority over him, particularly when Donovan appeared to suspect that Hoover might well have been deeply involved in the skulduggery of the previous administration. Donovan learned that Hoover was tapping the telephones of private citizens, and he told Attorney General Stone. Stone called Hoover into his office and dressed him down.
Even at this early date in his career, J. Edgar Hoover was a law unto himself. He kept every one of his wiretaps in place. He also let it be known that he expected to be appointed director of the FBI by the attorney general, and he was furious when Donovan urged Stone not to give Hoover the job but instead to fire him.
“Hoover responded by making it clear to Stone that there was enough in his files to effectively sink the Republican Party in the upcoming presidential election,” wrote William R. Corson in his book The Armies of Ignorance.
Donovan was disappointed when his onetime professor yielded in the face of Hoover’s threat and appointed him FBI director on December 19, 1924. Donovan felt a great dislike for Hoover, a feeling that Hoover more than reciprocated. The enmity between the two men was to have serious results during World War II, when Hoover, the director of the FBI, continued his vendetta against Donovan, the director of the OSS.
The confrontation with Hoover was scarcely Donovan’s only problem. He was responsible for prosecuting the Alien Property Custodian and other officials of the preceding administration. At Stone’s request he also investigated the conduct of Sen. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana. Wheeler had been charged by Daugherty with practicing law before a government agency while being a public official, with the intent of defrauding the government. Americans believed at the time that Daugherty had concocted the charges with the aid of the FBI to harass Wheeler, whose Senate committee was in turn investigating Daugherty’s conduct in office. On April 8 a federal grand jury at Great Falls, Montana, had indicted Wheeler. Senator Tom Walsh of Montana acted as Wheeler’s counsel. Felix Frankfurter considered the charges ludicrous and told Stone so, but the attorney general did not think it proper simply to drop the case without an effort to determine whether it had any validity. Donovan began his work on the case on September 24 and turned in his report to Stone on December 1. He recommended that Wheeler be prosecuted, and early in 1925 Stone obtained a second indictment from a District of Columbia grand jury.
When the case came to trial in Great Falls, the jury deliberated for ten minutes and acquitted Wheeler on the first ballot. H. L. Mencken wrote in the Baltimore Sun, “After filling the newspapers with fulminations for weeks on end, all the Daugherty gang could produce at Great Falls was a lot of testimony so palpably nonsensical and perjured that the jury laughed at it.” In Washington a judge quashed the second indictment after hearing the legal arguments by Wheeler’s defense.
Donovan and J. Edgar Hoover, who had made the initial investigations, were both blamed for the fiasco, and such powerful senators as Burton K. Wheeler, Tom Walsh, and William Borah held a lasting grudge against Donovan. Felix Frankfurter also felt that Donovan had behaved badly in the matter. For his part, Donovan always insisted that he had pushed the matter simply so that Wheeler would have every opportunity to demonstrate his innocence. “Senator Wheeler always got a fair break from
me, and he knows it,” he said later.
Much of Donovan’s time during his first year at the Department of Justice was devoted to criminal cases. He cracked down on U.S. district attorneys who were lax in enforcing the laws. “He exercised discipline in a very forceful way,” said longtime Donovan associate James Murphy, at the time a law student and later a prominent Washington attorney. “He called a DA from Washington and really tore the man to pieces. Then at the end he was gentle and sympathetic.” Because Donovan had been one of the most successful crime-busting district attorneys in the nation, he knew what he was talking about. One way or another, he demanded results.
At the same time that he sent FBI agents into the field to probe wrongdoing, Donovan himself sometimes took to the field. Once, for example, reports reached him that bootleggers Willie Haar, Mannie Kessler, and George Remus had bribed Warden A. C. Sartain of the Atlanta Penitentiary to let them live in his house instead of in prison cells. Drugs and liquor were reportedly being smuggled into the jail. Donovan took a train to Atlanta. The bootleggers and the warden were enjoying their nightly game of poker above the warden’s garage while another convict, known as Cincinnati, mounted guard at the foot of the stairs. The game was about to break up when a burly man pushed past Cincinnati and leaped up the stairs. To their amazement, the poker players found themselves being placed under arrest by the assistant attorney general of the United States. Donovan interrogated his prisoners, carried out an early-morning inspection of the penitentiary, prepared his case at breakfast, and went before the grand jury that morning. The jury indicted the warden and other officials. Donovan caught the first train to Washington and was there before the Washington newspapers had the story. Warden Sartain was convicted and locked up in his own prison, and Washington had another Bill Donovan yarn to tell.
Donovan Page 21
