Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  Newspaper and magazine reporters sought out Bill Donovan for stories since he could always be counted on for a colorful interview. Mabel Willebrandt might go soberly about the task of enforcing Prohibition, but it was Bill Donovan who boarded the dirigible Los Angeles to fly with Vice Adm. Emory Scott Land and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Robinson to the West Indies to check on rum smugglers. They landed in Haiti and in the Virgin Islands. When they went aboard the battleship USS Colorado, Donovan climbed into a Vought seaplane beside the pilot and hitched a ride as the plane was catapulted into the air. In one interview, he was quoted as saying, “Everyone should learn to take a punch on the nose, to give one, and be in shape to give and take.” On another occasion, he told a reporter, “The fellow who gets used to the soft seat of an automobile is liable to look for the soft side of popularity.”

  Donovan was asked to give advice to youth. “Do your job fearlessly without favor,” he pronounced. “Don’t ask your subordinate to do what you cannot do first. If you can do your task in a friendly way, by all means do it; but if you have to fight, hit first. Fight with your head; don’t just get excited. And always be ready for the next step.”

  Middle-class America had found a champion in Washington. Hugh Fullerton, writing in the Chicago Tribune, said that Donovan “is the sort of human being God planned when he decided to create a man!” Still, J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like Donovan, an increasing number of congressmen didn’t like him, and such intellectuals as Felix Frankfurter didn’t like him either. Politicians began to fear him as a dangerous rival.

  Before he went to Washington, Donovan had been one of the front-running candidates for the Republican nomination for governor of New York. Instead he chose to throw his political weight behind his friend Col. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., at the convention in Rochester. Roosevelt was nominated.

  On October 2, 1924, Donovan led a delegation of Republican officials aboard a special Long Island Railroad train in New York and traveled out to Oyster Bay. At the railroad station, a band played “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here,” while the officials got into 100 autos and moved in a procession to Roosevelt’s Cove Neck home. The massed autos played their headlights on the porch, and then the assembled crowd marched to the house, carrying flares. When Roosevelt stepped out on the porch, there was a great cheer from the thousand people who had gathered on the lawn. Donovan informed Roosevelt that the convention had picked him to campaign against Al Smith, the Democratic candidate. Fireworks were set off, and again there was a loud cheer. Many of the Republicans there that night thought Bill Donovan would have made the best candidate for the governorship. They were even more certain of this when Al Smith won the election, a victory that made him the first Catholic presidential candidate four years later.

  On March 2, 1925, Attorney General Stone resigned to become a Supreme Court justice, and Bill Donovan became the acting attorney general. The Law Enforcement Committee of 1000 urged President Coolidge to appoint Donovan attorney general, but the President instead named John Garibaldi Sargent, a fellow New Englander. If Donovan was disappointed at being passed over, he gave no indication. He cheerfully accepted Coolidge’s decision on March 24 to put him in charge of the antitrust division as assistant to the attorney general. He moved into a flatiron-shaped office and set about enforcing the Sherman and Clayton acts.

  “Government must not rely on its authority,” said Donovan to the business community, “but upon its quality and character. . . . The Department of Justice in its enforcement of the law should be firm, but it should also be fair.”

  It was Donovan’s view that the American businessman was not by nature a criminal. He remarked that business needs “a traffic policeman rather than a detective.” American businessmen, he said, “should not be treated as though they were narcotics peddlers.” He urged that business leaders who were contemplating plans that might result in possible infringements of the antitrust laws come to see him and get his opinion in advance. In this way he managed to head off violations of the law.

  “Donovan was firmly convinced that individual freedom was vitally linked to our system of free enterprise,” commented Allen Dulles, later closely associated with Donovan in the OSS. “He attacked restraints and monopoly with effective enthusiasm. In the Trenton Potteries case, the Supreme Court agreed that price fixing, per se, among dominant competitors was illegal. Brought under legal attack were such diverse industries as oil, sugar, harvesting machinery, motion pictures, water transportation, and labor unions.”

  Robert Choate, Washington correspondent of the Boston Herald, interviewed Donovan in his office and found him wearing a vested suit and a high collar, with his watch fob showing in just the right way.

  He was seated at his desk signing his mail and dictating to a secretary at the same time. He did not look like a trust-buster. He lacked the proverbial austerity of the lawyer. His light blue eyes radiated a warm personality, yet somehow, on entering the room, one was filled with a sense of intense activity.

  He was the least professional, yet the most businesslike of men. There were no formalities about him, no pomposity, none of the great and small pretenses with which men in public life invariably surround themselves as food for their vanities.

  Donovan’s energy and talents reached far beyond the antitrust division, and the saying went around Washington, “Donovan is the Department of Justice, and the Department of Justice is Donovan.” He was given the authority to reorganize the department from top to bottom, and he did so. In 1925 he reduced his division’s budget from $500,000 to $200,000, while at the same time collecting $600,000 in fines. To Washington insiders it seemed that when they approached the Department of Justice with any problem at all they’d be told, “Donovan has charge of that,” or, “You had better see Donovan about that.” They came to know that if they called Main 195, Branch 186, Donovan himself would pick up the phone and they would get action.

  Anne Hard of the New York Herald Tribune watched Donovan argue a case before the Supreme Court. “His large, ingenuous blue eyes, unwinking, the quiet smile which frequently plays over his face, the softness of his voice, are deceptively disarming,” she wrote. “He chooses very simple words. He speaks to the court as one gentleman to another by a fire in a library.”

  The courtroom victories won by Donovan became legendary. By the time of his resignation in 1929 he had pleaded and won more cases before the Supreme Court than any other man in history. One of his most important victories was in the Trenton Potteries case. Although he was opposed by Charles Evans Hughes, later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he persuaded the court to lay down the principle that an agreement on prices by manufacturers controlling an industry was illegal whether or not the prices agreed upon were high or low.

  Donovan also turned out to be an effective spokesman for the Department of Justice at Senate hearings. Probably the most dramatic occasion was Donovan’s confrontation with Sen. Tom Walsh, who still bore him a grudge. Harlan Stone had originally brought antitrust action against the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), in which the Mellon family of Pittsburgh had a large stake. After conferences with Coolidge and Andrew W. Mellon, Donovan announced on January 2, 1926, that the case against ALCOA was insubstantial. However, because Mellon was treasury secretary, the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to investigate the matter.

  When the hearings began on January 8, Senator Walsh attacked Attorney General Sargent. He accused him of inattention to duty, of doing nothing about the case for eight months after he took office. Sharply questioned, Sargent insisted that the case was entirely in Donovan’s hands. Donovan was the second witness, and he stepped into what was described as “an amphitheatre strung with leased telegraph wires and radio aerials” with a jaunty smile.

  “Now, Senator,” remarked Donovan at the outset. “I want this clearly understood, that I assume you and I are trying to analyze this as a couple of lawyers from the standpoint of evidentiary value, and not from the standpoint of any defens
e of the aluminum company.”

  “What a combat!” wrote Anne Hard. “On the one hand that fighting Irishman, Tom Walsh, of Montana, investigating, cross-examining. On the other hand that fighting Irishman of New York, answering, retorting.

  Usually in Washington almost any Democrat can chase almost any Republican by just waving an investigatory carving knife at him. Most Republicans in Washington when it comes to answering and retorting are dumb, driven cattle. Donovan turned on Walsh and gave him rapiers and poniards and battle axes for every carving knife he had.

  This was the best personal battle that any Senatorial investigation in Washington within my memory has exhibited. It was one of the few occasions upon which Walsh was obliged to leave the field un victorious. That result required a man of Donovan’s realistic preparedness plus his delight in the exchange of blows.

  Donovan tied Walsh up in legal knots over the difference between evidence, hearsay, and “double hearsay.” When he differed with the senator, he remarked with a smile, “I do not so understand it.” He pointed out that J. E. P. Dunn, the Department of Justice’s special investigator on the case, had found no evidence against ALCOA. The investigation was still going on, however. Walsh was sputtering with rage as the encounter drew near its end, and he angrily questioned Donovan’s integrity in office. “I have learned the obligations to my country in other places than around this table,” Donovan retorted, realizing that everybody in the room knew that he was one of the most highly decorated Americans in the history of the republic.

  After the hearing had concluded, Donovan remarked, “A man in Washington who does not fear political consequences is a fool.” Yet within a few months he was telling Robert Choate of his philosophy of law enforcement, “Diligence without recklessness. Strike with speed and summarily; don’t be influenced by those with political affiliations.”

  Donovan may have decided that there was no case against ALCOA, but he prosecuted and won more antitrust cases than had any previous head of the antitrust division. He considered long-drawn-out cases a hardship and an expense for both the concerned businesses and the government, so he moved with speed. Of five cases he started in early 1926, four were terminated by July. He paid particular attention to industries concerned with the necessities of life, because he considered that they had the greatest impact on the average American.

  These were good family years for Bill and Ruth Donovan. There were games of squash and tennis, hiking in Rock Creek Park, and boating on the Potomac or on Chesapeake Bay. Donovan found time to cultivate such people as Harlan Stone, whom he provided with occasional tickets for the Army-Navy game or sent such books as the Life of Benjamin Franklin. Stone was pleased with the book, and Donovan and he corresponded about Franklin throughout 1926. When Stone later decided to drive to the West, Donovan suggested an auto route and provided him with pamphlets about Yellowstone Park. Donovan also corresponded with William Howard Taft about points of legal scholarship and invited Taft to be a guest at the Donovan home in Buffalo when Taft attended the American Bar Association meetings there. Taft declined.

  14

  The Parade Passes By

  DURING HIS YEARS in the Department of Justice, Bill Donovan curtailed his fact-finding trips to Europe, but he kept his finger on what was happening there. He took a direct interest in the Paris spy trial of Jules César and Joseph Laperre, and asked Secretary of State Frank Kellogg to obtain for him the official French report on the case. He made friends of foreign diplomats, scholars, and businessmen who came to Washington. Father Kornikowicz of Lublin University in Poland was his house guest when he came to America to arrange for the exchange of books and periodicals. Donovan learned a great deal about conditions in Poland from Kornikowicz. Charles Dewey, financial adviser to the Polish government in Warsaw, also informed him about events in Poland, and Polish Ambassador Jan Ciechanowski was a frequent Sunday afternoon visitor to Donovan’s Georgetown home. The ambassador sipped Donovan’s wine before the living-room fire and answered Donovan’s questions about his country. Donovan was convinced in the late 1920s that Poland would be the first European nation to be torn apart by the next war in Europe.

  Whatever country in Europe or the Far East came under his scrutiny, Donovan had well-placed contacts there. Italian Ambassador Augusto Rossi was a frequent dinner guest. Stanton Griffis, roving U.S. ambassador in Europe, was close to Donovan, and when Griffis returned from Europe, he invariably conferred with Donovan, giving him the latest information and asking his opinions before he reported to the President.

  In the summer of 1927 President Coolidge announced, “I do not choose to run for President in 1928,” and the race was on. Vice-President Charles G. Dawes and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover were the principal candidates. Since Dawes had defeated Hoover by a vote of 682.5 to 234.5 for the nomination for vice-president at the Republican convention of 1924, he was the favorite, but Bill Donovan favored Hoover. They had known one another since meeting in London in 1916 when both were in war relief work. In the spring of 1927, Hoover had been Donovan’s sponsor for the select Cosmos Club in Washington, and in July Hoover, a member of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, had invited Donovan to attend the club’s August encampment in Bohemian Grove north of San Francisco. Later in the summer Hoover was Donovan’s guest at his Buffalo home. Donovan spent the Christmas holidays with his family in Buffalo, and announced on the day after Christmas his support for Herbert Hoover for president.

  By May of 1928, most of the Republican politicians in New York State, led by Charles D. Hilles, GOP national committeeman, favored Dawes. When the party gathered in convention in Kansas City in June, Donovan found himself estranged from the remainder of the New York delegation. The political bosses might dislike Hoover because they felt he would be hard to control, but Donovan admired his integrity and moral approach to politics. Donovan was with Hoover at his headquarters during the political infighting. “I sat across the desk from him from early morning till late at night,” he wrote to Alfred H. Kirchhofer, the Buffalo editor who was Hoover’s press chief, “and with him went through every phase of the activities. I came out of it with a finer conception of his character as well as of his quality of leadership, than I ever had before.”

  When it appeared that Dawes could not win, his supporters tried to persuade Coolidge that he should change his mind and run. When Coolidge would have none of it, they then attempted to get Hoover to at least make a deal over the nomination for vice-president. Donovan, whose friends had been booming him for the vice-presidency, was convinced that an open convention was not only good democracy but was in his own interest. A group of young idealists supported Donovan, but the political bosses who would control a closed convention rejected him as being too unmanageable.

  “He was subjected to terrific pressure to indicate his choice,” wrote Donovan of Hoover. “Perhaps I lent him some aid in refusing to yield and in insisting upon a free and open convention. I believed if he did this, the break would come. He would be in a much stronger position than if he had entered into any deal with anyone. The result justified that opinion.”

  Dawes withdrew, and Hoover was nominated on the first ballot. Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas was picked to be the candidate for vice-president.

  “I think that the great significance of this nomination is something that the newspapers have missed,” concluded Donovan. “It is retributive justice. The same gang that eight years ago emerged from a smoke-filled room victorious, this time had to go to the same kind of a room to surrender.”

  Hoover symbolized the swelling American prosperity and support for Prohibition, which he called the “noble experiment.” Al Smith, the Democratic candidate, espoused repealing the 18th Amendment. Also, he was opposed by most rural American Protestants because he was a Roman Catholic. On July 27, Hoover was given a tumultuous welcome home by his neighbors in Palo Alto, California, and immediately got to work with Bill Donovan’s assistance in writing his acceptance speech. Once the speech was wri
tten, Hoover practiced it before a critical Donovan, who recommended taking this phrase out and adding that one or emphasizing this word or that. Finally with some old Stanford friends, 13 newspapermen, and Hoover’s son Allan, the candidate and his speech writer went on a five-day fishing trip to relax. Donovan and Hoover put the finishing touches on the speech, which Hoover delivered on August 11 before a cheering crowd in the Stanford University football stadium.

  “Given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation,” concluded Hoover.

  During the campaign, Donovan was Hoover’s strategist. “The political fight is on,” he wrote Kirchhofer, “and I think it will be a hard one. You see, Smith, relying on the continued loyalty of the Southern Democrats, slapped them in the face with his ‘wet’ statement. There are many who claim that he will cut into the East.”

  Donovan sent men out to take confidential polls of key voting areas in the East. When influential people came to Washington to see Hoover, Donovan entertained them at his Georgetown home. When New York Republican Catholics threatened to bolt the party to campaign for Smith, Donovan called upon them to stay with Hoover. After all, he pointed out, he himself was a Catholic who was devoted to Hoover’s candidacy.

  Several years before the campaign, Donovan and other prominent Catholics in public life had formed Calvert Associates to publish and distribute accurate information about the Catholic Church. Early in October, when the campaign was at its height, Calvert Associates ran an advertisement in the Commonweal supporting Al Smith. Donovan was angry at what he considered reverse bigotry. “In my view the whole question of religious bigotry extended beyond this immediate campaign, and the only way to meet hysteria was by sanity, patience, and good example,” he wrote to Michael Williams, editor of the Commonweal. “Bigotry is deplorable. To use it for political purposes is reprehensible.”