Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  The years that saw Europe sinking into the crucible of war were good years for Donovan’s law practice. Among his clients were important German concerns, descendants of Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke, and the Viennese Rothschilds. From these people he learned a great deal about what was going on behind the scenes in Hitler’s Reich. After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Rothschilds engaged him to try to win back their holdings in Bohemia, which the Nazis had seized. Donovan went to Germany to argue with the Nazis on behalf of the Rothschilds. He also took advantage of the opportunity to talk to anti-Hitler friends, who then and later continued to hold high positions in Berlin. Donovan already had informants within Hitler’s upper echelons.

  In October 1937, the federal government brought to trial 18 U.S. oil companies, five subsidiaries, three oil trade journals, and 57 top oilmen at Madison, Wisconsin, for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. The defendants were accused of having “combined and conspired beginning in February, 1935, to raise and fix prices of gasoline sold in ten states of the Middle West.”

  Donovan, the nation’s foremost antitrust lawyer, was chosen to head a defense force of 57 attorneys. He rented a big house in Madison’s Shorewood Hills, installed Madge, his stocky English cook, and his Danish butler, and commuted by plane from New York City. The oilmen claimed that they were following Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act directives, and Donovan collected 18 tons of documents in an effort to prove that they were right.

  The proceedings against the oilmen were criminal in nature, which led Donovan to argue: “Since they [the government] have chosen to institute a criminal case, they must be bound by the rules that our Constitution has prescribed in order to protect the defendants when they are accused of crime. Now, an essential element in this case is the question of intent; did these men have a guilty intent in what they did? And it isn’t sufficient alone to show that there was written approval or statutory approval. There is the question of instigation; there is the question of inducement; there is the question of approval.”

  Lawyer Donovan quoted Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes and President Roosevelt to show that they had both approved of the oil companies’ conduct. When Judge Patrick Thomas Stone demanded that he stop quoting the President, Donovan produced a letter from Secretary Ickes to Charles E. Arnott, vice-president of Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, urging that the “companies combine to stabilize prices and authorizing them to do so.”

  The trial lasted until January 1938 before a jury of farmers who were totally unsympathetic to the machinations of big companies. In an effort to keep the jury objective, the book The Life of Emile Zola was banned from their sight because of its courtroom scenes, which were presumed to be inflammatory. John Steuart Curry, artist in residence at the University of Wisconsin, sketched Bill Donovan in court as he “made his voice ring with pathos and indignation” to make the final plea, concluding, “It is unthinkable that these men should be punished for doing the very thing the government asked them to do.”

  Costing $3 million, the trial ended in nominal fines for the defendants, which was considered a victory for the defense.

  Even as the trial ground along, Donovan remained in touch with events in Europe. On May 21, 1937, he journeyed to Germany to watch the German Army try out the new Panther tank and artillery in maneuvers. In 1938 he was in Czechoslovakia to study the Sudetenland defenses then threatened by Hitler; he came away with admiration for the tough Czech Army, its morale and equipment, and its plans to fight off a German attack. At the same time he became convinced that European statesmen did not have the political courage to stand up to Hitler. From Prague Donovan went on through the Balkans, meeting men who were to help him on future missions and observing conditions. He stopped off in Italy to talk to Italian sources about their nation’s growing involvement in the Spanish Civil War and then crossed the western Mediterranean to Spain.

  Donovan accompanied the Fourth Spanish Army in attacks on the Ebro River front. He watched German Panther tanks and Stuka dive-bombers in action against the government forces and saw firsthand what devastation they caused. “I believed Spain to be, ideology aside, a laboratory for the weapons of the next war,” he later said, “and I went there to observe their performance. I met no other American observer.”

  From Spain Donovan traveled to Germany, where the German General Staff had invited him to observe the maneuvers at Nuremberg. He saw how the German Army was putting the lessons learned in Spain to work in the Bavarian exercises, which suggested that if a great war broke out in Europe, Germany planned to fight a war of movement. This clearly outmoded the Maginot Line and placed France in jeopardy.

  When he returned to America, Donovan addressed the Army War College:

  We are facing a new kind of war, not so much in point of principle, because in war the fundamental principles remain the same, but new in respect of machines and weapons. More than that, this is war moving to a new tempo. The speed of attack has no precedent. Out of that speed come certain new characteristics of warfare. One is that which makes for greater decentralization of command. What struck me in observing the German Army was that this totalitarian state, through the necessity of the new war, had gone farther than any other country in decentralizing its command. It placed greater responsibility upon the junior officers and noncommissioned officers. And this requires training. It cannot be done overnight. Responsibility must be guided.

  The second characteristic of the new warfare is more perfect coordination between the air arm and the land arm.

  On the flight home from Europe, Donovan briefed himself on a case that was paramount in his law office and upon his arrival presented his argument before the Supreme Court. Then he called upon Army Chief of Staff Gen. Malin Craig. Donovan reported to Craig on the German and Italian tactics in Spain, and the German Army maneuvers in Bavaria. “The German 88-millimeter cannon was a truly redoubtable weapon,” he said. “It could shoot down Loyalist planes with ease, could fire against ground troops, and at point-blank range could blast huge holes in Russian tanks.”

  Craig expressed a polite interest, and he informed U.S. Army Ordnance of Donovan’s report. Ordnance commented that no such gun as Donovan had described existed or could possibly prove practicable. Donovan also reported to the White House. The political polarization of the totalitarians of the right and the left in Europe and the uncertainty and lack of preparation of the democracies opened the way to further military adventures. Donovan informed Roosevelt that Hitler meant war. There could be no other meaning to the “dress rehearsal” in Spain.

  The President listened to Donovan’s comments and began a reassessment of American policy, but General Craig and his ordnance staff refused to take his accounts of the 88-millimeter gun seriously. When the 88 came up against U.S. soldiers in North Africa four years later, it smashed American armor and slaughtered American soldiers exactly as Donovan had seen it destroying the enemies of fascism in Spain.

  On October 5, 1937, at the dedication of Chicago’s new Outer Drive bridge, Franklin Roosevelt made what has since been known as his Quarantine speech. He warned the American public that what was happening in Spain and in China, where Japan’s aggression continued unabated, was a direct threat to their own country:

  Let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this western hemisphere will not be attacked and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and the arts of civilization. If we are to have a world in which we can breathe freely and live in amity without fear, the peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort to uphold laws and principles on which peace can rest secure.

  War is a contagion, whether it be declared or undeclared. It can engulf states and peoples remote from the original scene of hostilities. We are determined to keep out of war, yet we cannot insure ourselves against the disastrous effects of war and the dangers of involvement. We are adopting such measures as will minimize the risk of involvement, but we cannot ha
ve complete protection in a world of disorder in which confidence and security have broken down.

  Those who listened to the President in the Indian summer day on Chicago’s lakefront felt a dread chill. For the most part they listened in silence. Perhaps the President was wrong; after all, the Germans, the Japanese, and the Italians were civilized people, and they could not be planning Armageddon. In the weeks that followed, scores of important American leaders attacked the President for what they said was a warmongering speech. Some of the men who spoke out against him were members of his own party; most were Republicans who saw an opportunity to even scores with the man who had defeated them so overwhelmingly in two presidential elections and who had so drastically altered the fabric of American life. Three important Republicans spoke out in support of the President. They were Henry Stimson, Frank Knox, and William Donovan.

  17

  Contagion of War

  IN THE LATE SPRING of 1939, Donovan wrote in his journal that “war was imminent” and that “the Germans would attack through the Low Countries.” In June and July he visited the Netherlands and Belgium to learn whether the Dutch and Belgian armies would be able to oppose the German war machine. He studied economic conditions too and also toured France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Everywhere he went he talked to his friends in the various governments and among the opposition parties. He met with professors at universities, industrial leaders, businessmen, labor leaders, and journalists.

  The contagion of war that President Roosevelt had warned about in Chicago was spreading through Europe. In 1938 the Nazi legions extinguished the independence of Austria and in so doing also outflanked the defense line that Donovan had observed in Czechoslovakia along its mountain frontier with Germany. Hitler almost immediately began to agitate for annexation to the Reich of the Sudeten Germans along Czechoslovakia’s borders. Donovan was shocked at the seizure of Austria, but he rationalized that after all the Austrians were a German people and that not much could be done about it. Czechoslovakia was another matter. That nation had virtually been planned as a state at the University of Chicago, and it was a bastion of democracy in Central Europe. When French Premier Edouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain surrendered the Sudetenland to Hitler at Munich on September 29 because Germany was ready to fight and France and Britain were not, Donovan was appalled. It seemed to him that now World War II was not only inevitable, but that it might be lost before it began.

  March 15, 1939, saw the abject surrender of what remained of Czechoslovakia. Within a week Hitler had also taken the Memel district of Lithuania and was demanding that Poland agree to the annexation of Danzig and the cession of a strip of territory across the Polish Corridor to East Prussia. Mussolini invaded Albania on April 7, and Franco’s victory in Spain was complete by midspring. Great Britain and France were at last feverishly arming.

  When Donovan reached London, he studied British rearmament. He met with R. E. Butler of the foreign office, who described him as “an active man, of attractive temperament, who has visited Balbo in Libya, Mussolini in Rome, and has many contacts in Berlin with the Foreign Office and General Staff. He has just flown around Europe and renewed contacts, particularly in Berlin. His main impression is that the German Army, as he put it, is ‘set for a fight’ to achieve their aims at all costs.”

  Donovan warned his London friends that Britain would have “an exciting summer.”

  The year 1939 was a prosperous one for Bill Donovan’s law practice, although he now spent less and less time on it. Both his Georgetown house and his New York duplex on Beekman Place were the settings for lively dinner parties, which included such diplomats as Dwight Morrow and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, political leaders such as Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, and journalists David Lawrence and Vincent Sheean, as well as a miscellany of friends, among them Albert Lasker, Eve Curie, John Golden, Bernard Gimbel, Andrew Meyers, Mrs. Anna Rosenberg, Dorothy Draper, Margaret Sanger, Lois Mattox Miller, Irene Dunne and her husband, and Greta Garbo. Ruth Donovan, quiet but poised, joined her husband at the New York gatherings except when she was in their summer home in Massachusetts. Conversation ranged through the world of theater and books to the situation in Europe. Donovan could always be counted upon for some trenchant remarks about Europe.

  When he was in New York, Donovan frequently lunched or dined at the 21 Club, where he was instantly recognized by the maitre d’ and given a prime table among the hobnobbing celebrities of the time. Albert Lasker remembered him at the 21 Club, “bland of eye, butter-soft in voice, and composed of equal parts of fire, iron, and pink leather.” To some at 21 he was the war hero of World War I, to others the rich Wall Street lawyer or the popular public figure who might one day be the first Catholic president of the United States. To a few he was a man of mystery, whose comings and goings through the world’s trouble spots had not gone unnoted.

  To many of the women whom Donovan entertained at home or met in such places as 21, he proved irresistible.

  “Bill preferred worldly women,” remembered Guy Martin. “Sometimes he’d make two or three engagements that overlapped. He’d cope. ‘Guy, you take Mrs. X to dinner,’ he’d say. ‘I’ll get there.’ He’d show up, and I would chase out. ‘I have to go back to work,’ I’d say.”

  Donovan, fresh from one dalliance, would devote himself to another. He brought the same sleepless energy and stamina to his relations with women that he showed in every other aspect of his life. Among the beautiful women who admired him was Diana Sheean. “She was infatuated with Bill,” said Martin. “She talked to me about him. Bill was a puzzle. He pursued women with avidity, but he backed off emotionally when the relationship promised to become too close or permanent.”

  To Martin, this meant that Donovan was “deeply influenced by Catholic tradition.” To others it simply meant that intriguing as he found attractive women to be, he loved Ruth.

  Patricia Donovan and Mary Grandin were school friends at Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Connecticut. Both were chestnut-haired girls, with similar attractive features and warmth. Both were witty, both rode horseback with grace and verve, and to their classmates it seemed natural that they would be the best of friends. Both had plenty of money, too. Mary’s father was from one of the richest of the Pennsylvania oil families. Patricia often invited Mary home to spend vacations with the Donovans, and Mary soon found herself in love with David. David, who had finished prep school at St. George’s School in Providence, was studying agriculture at Cornell University. Some friends of the Donovan family say that Mary first fell in love with David’s father, whose reputation was well known, but when Bill Donovan made it evident that she was nothing more to him than a lovely young woman, she decided to marry the son. She could then at least be close to the fascinating father.

  Elaborate dinners, luncheons, and teas for Mary Grandin enlivened the late spring of 1939 in Warren, Pennsylvania. In June, David Donovan finished his studies at Cornell, and on June 17, 1939, the couple were married. Patricia Donovan was the maid of honor, and the Reverend Vincent Donovan and the Reverend Pinkney Wroth, rector of Warren’s Trinity Memorial Episcopal Church, officiated. Warren people remember that the Donovan chauffeur drove the Donovan family from New York City.

  The Grandins had a huge tent erected over the backyard of their mansion on Conewango Avenue, and neighborhood children peeked inside to watch the guests at the reception dancing to an orchestra. When David Donovan signed his name on the registry, he gave “farmer” as his occupation, and after a honeymoon trip to Buck Hill Falls in Pennsylvania, and Bermuda, David and Mary made their home at Chapel Hill Farm, Virginia.

  The summer brought war to Europe. On September 1 Hitler and Stalin united to attack Poland, and so the conflict was joined. Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3. With the outbreak of war in Europe, Franklin Roosevelt summoned Congress into special session. He called for the repeal of the arms embargo, and in November Congress enacted legislation per
mitting the Allies to buy war goods in the United States. As 1939 drew to a close, Roosevelt also decided to create a bipartisan cabinet because of the critical situation abroad. He would take in some Republicans, and in early December Washington rumor suggested that Bill Donovan was to replace Secretary of War Harry Woodring.

  “I don’t think it is likely that the President will put a Republican in as a member of his cabinet,” said Stephen T. Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary. Even as Early was denying the President’s intentions, Roosevelt was asking Frank Knox to a meeting at the White House on December 10, the next day. All that afternoon Roosevelt and Knox talked about the situation in Europe and Asia. During the course of the discussion, FDR asked the Chicago publisher and onetime vice-presidential candidate to be secretary of the navy. Knox demurred because he did not want his fellow Republicans to call him a “political Benedict Arnold.” Furthermore, he did not consider the American situation grave enough. When Roosevelt did find it necessary to appoint a Republican to his cabinet, Knox said, he should appoint more than one. He argued that “a strong man be found for the War Department.”

  Roosevelt asked Knox who this should be—perhaps Herbert Hoover, Arthur H. Vandenberg’, Henry Cabot Lodge, Thomas E. Dewey, or Alf Landon.

  “Knox said that Landon was a ‘nice’ fellow but that he was not heavy,” noted Harold Ickes in his diary. “He felt that it would be much better if the President would take Bill Donovan into the cabinet as another Republican.”

  Roosevelt asked Ickes for his views on the subject. “I pointed out two difficulties in the way of this. One, that it would mean another member of the cabinet from New York State, which is already over-represented; and two, that Donovan probably would not be interested in anything except the Attorney-Generalship, with respect to which there was a promise out to Bob Jackson as soon as there was a vacancy.”