On December 15 Knox, having thought the matter over, wrote to the President from Chicago:
I know Bill Donovan very well, and he is a very dear friend. He not only made a magnificent record in the world war, but he has every decoration which the American government can bestow for bravery under fire. Frankly, if your proposal contemplated Donovan for the War Department and myself for the Navy, I think the appointments could be put solely upon the basis of a nonpartisan, nonpolitical measure of putting our national defense departments in such a state of preparedness as to protect the United States against any danger to our security that might come from the war in Europe or in Asia.
“Bill Donovan is also an old friend of mine,” Roosevelt wrote back two weeks later. “We were in law school together—and frankly, I should like to have him in the cabinet, not only for his own ability, but also to repair in a sense the very great injustice done him by President Hoover in the winter of 1929. Here again the question of motive must be considered, and I fear that to put two Republicans in charge of the armed forces might be misunderstood in both parties.”
Roosevelt did not tell Knox so, but he already was contemplating another role for Donovan than that of secretary of war. He would become instead what the paraplegic Roosevelt was to call “my secret legs.” It was Felix Frankfurter who, with the New York lawyer Grenville Clark, suggested that Henry Stimson, who had served in the cabinets of four Republican presidents, would be a good choice for secretary of war, even if he too came from New York.
As the year ended Bill Donovan paid little heed to Knox’s indications that he might become secretary of war. “I’d get down on my hands and knees and scrub the Capitol’s steps if that is what the President asked me to do,” Donovan told a friend, “but I’m not pushing myself forward for any job.”
Ruth and Bill Donovan and their children gathered for the Christmas holidays. This was the last Christmas they were all to spend together.
By January 1940 the law books on the shelves of Bill Donovan’s private office had almost entirely been replaced by books on world affairs. Donovan left the day-to-day law practice to his partners.
In Europe the so-called Phoney War dragged on. The only winter fighting was in Finland. The Russians, having cowed the other Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia into submission, had had their ultimatum to Finland go unanswered. On November 30, 1939, the Russian Air Force commenced hostilities by bombing Helsinki. Russia’s armies attacked Finland, and to the amazement and applause of the western world, the Finns not only fought back but won victory after victory. Repulsed with heavy losses at Lake Ladoga, routed by Finnish ski troops at Salla, and devastated at the battle of Suomus-salmi, the Russians seemed no closer to success than when they first attacked. Military analysts throughout the world gave the Soviet forces low ratings for efficiency and morale. Even when late in January the Russians threw a vast army into action and rolled over the fierce Finns to victory, they lost as many as 500,000 men, killed and wounded. Hitler helped Joseph Stalin arrange a peace on favorable terms to Russia, but he also expressed open contempt for the Soviet war machine. In time he was to act upon this contempt.
Donovan closely followed the events in Europe. He became president of the Paderewski Fund for Polish Relief and worked for Finnish relief as well. He brought to New York 80-year-old Ignace Paderewski, the famous Polish pianist, patriot, and statesman. Paderewski, who headed the Polish government in exile, would lend prestige to the nationwide campaign. Donovan mobilized a committee of distinguished Americans ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to General Robert E. Wood, who was soon to lead the isolationist America First movement. Donovan and his friend Greta Garbo persuaded Leopold Stokowski to conduct a benefit concert for his native Poland. Unfortunately, when Stokowski’s manager learned that the popular clarinetist Benny Goodman was also to be featured on the program, he withdrew the maestro; to appear with a pop musician would lower Stokowski’s dignity. Both former President Hoover and President Roosevelt lent support to the campaign.
Donovan was convinced that the United States should not intervene in the war in Europe. The country must build up its political, economic, and military strength.
“I know too much about war to glory in it,” he said. “But wars are made by politicians who neglect to prepare for it.”
He made speeches and wrote articles opposing the draft, because he claimed it was antiquated. “This system assumes (1) that the country can better afford to lose a youth than an adult; and (2) that a stripling of eighteen is better prepared to defend his country than a vigorous man of forty-five. Both assumptions are false,” he wrote in Reader’s Digest.
Donovan regretted bitterly the loss of so many young men in World War I and the social and economic tragedy it represented. He pointed out that the nation’s falling birthrate and the cessation of immigration at the time were placing a premium on youth. “We must economize on youth in the next war,” he said, “if we are to survive even victory.”
His battlefield observations of the European war machines caused Donovan to state, “I have followed the mechanization of war from Château-Thierry to the present, and have seen less and less emphasis placed on a soldier’s brawn, and more and more on his brain. Instead of marching to war, today’s soldier rides.”
When it came to bravery, he believed that “the courage of youth and of older men strikes a rough balance,” and that in “tight spots under fire I have seen older men become rallying points for young troops on the verge of panic.”
Draft proponents fumed, but when one of the nation’s foremost citizen soldiers spoke out in this fashion, America listened.
After her trip around the world in 1937, Pat Donovan had returned to Wellesley for a year, and then transferred as a junior to George Washington University in Washington, where in the spring of 1940 she was majoring in American thought and civilization. She lived at home in Georgetown, and Bill Donovan spent every evening he could with her, talking, arguing about politics and American history. Western civilization seemed to be bent on self-destruction, but to Donovan and his daughter the great past could only promise a great future. In the long tides of history, Hitler and Mussolini were only aberrations.
In late winter Ruth set out on Irving Johnson’s yacht, Yankee, on a round-the-world trip, and by early April she was at sea between Honolulu and Samoa. On Saturday, April 6, Bill Donovan was in New York City. He was haunted by the recollection that it was exactly 23 years ago to the day that America had declared war on Germany in the World War. Now he wondered how long it would be before America might declare war again. Friends of his in Europe had alerted him to German plans to invade neighboring Denmark and strike at Norway, and even as he moodily ate breakfast at his Beekman Place duplex, he knew that Hitler’s army, navy, and air force were preparing to strike. Donovan felt a curious dread.
Pat Donovan had driven down to Durham, North Carolina, to visit her friend Dorothy Wiprud, daughter of Georgetown neighbors, who was a student at Duke University. She was to drive back to Washington on Monday to resume her classes. An early spring storm swept down on the entire East Coast on Monday morning. Pat put up the top of her convertible to keep off the drenching rain and drove north through North Carolina and Virginia on Route 1. She passed through Richmond. The rain streamed against the windshield and washed the red mud of the Virginia fields down onto the road. Rounding a curve about 30 miles south of Fredericksburg, the car struck a patch of slippery mud. The wheels spun, and the automobile whirled out of control and into a tree. With the impact Pat was hurled from the car and thrown to the ground 14 feet away. A few minutes later a motorist stopped and hurried her to Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg. But Pat never regained consciousness. She died of shock and internal injuries five hours after the accident.
The hospital telephoned both Bill Donovan and his son, David, who was at Chapel Hill Farm. David jumped in a car and sped to his sister’s side. He got there before she died. In New York, Donovan could not ge
t a plane because of the weather and had to take a train. One of his Washington law partners met the train at Washington’s Union Station and told him that his daughter was dead. To Donovan the world seemed a senseless and mean place where a mad dictator ranted and threatened civilization itself and a young girl’s life could be snuffed out. Bill Donovan never recovered from his daughter’s death, although he was to come to feel for David’s wife, Mary, some of the love that he had always given to Pat.
On the day that Pat Donovan died, Germany invaded Denmark, and within an hour Copenhagen capitulated. On the next day, while Bill Donovan was preoccupied with his grief, Germany invaded Norway. Over the next few weeks the British forces that had landed in Norway were routed, and German control of Scandinavia was assured. The British were still enmeshed in Norway when on May 10 the Germans unleashed a devastating blitzkrieg through the Low Countries, just as Donovan had long before predicted they would. The onslaught of Hitler’s mechanized forces on the ill-prepared and poorly led Allied forces resulted in the fall of France. England, her army badly beaten, stood alone, and only the narrow Channel barred the Germans from complete victory.
On June 20, Franklin Roosevelt responded to the European military crisis that darkened the future of the United States by taking two Republicans into his cabinet. Stimson was to be secretary of war, and Knox was to be secretary of the navy in a bipartisan government. Knox immediately phoned Donovan from Chicago and asked him to be under secretary of the navy; Donovan declined and the job went to James Forrestal. It was a post of importance, but Donovan had already made a commitment.
18
Confidential Mission to Britain
FOR YEARS BILL DONOVAN had been acquainted with British Adm. Blinker Hall, and on May 29, 1940, a slightly built Canadian in the service of British Secret Intelligence had arrived in New York with a letter from Hall to Donovan. The Canadian’s name was William Stephenson. Winston Churchill, the new prime minister whom military disaster had brought to office, had given Stephenson a critical mission to the United States. He was to attempt to obtain destroyers, aircraft, and military equipment and supplies to replace those that the British Expeditionary Force had left behind on the beaches of Dunkirk. Stephenson knew that Donovan had been one of the key figures in America’s clandestine intelligence net for a generation. In fact, he may have met Donovan in London as long ago as 1916, when both were young men just beginning to learn their trade. Stephenson got to the point. Could Donovan help him approach the President? Could Donovan influence the President? Realizing that without American support, England would quickly fall and that this would leave America isolated in an increasingly hostile world, Donovan assured Stephenson he would do all he could to help.
As June drew to a close, Donovan went to Philadelphia as part of the New York delegation to the Republican National Convention. The New Yorkers were pledged to support Gov. Thomas Dewey, and Donovan did not join in the raucous chants of “We Want Willkie” that reverberated through the convention hall. Actually, he was not sympathetic toward Dewey’s candidacy but secretly favored Wendell Willkie, who shared his views on aiding the British. On June 28 the GOP grass roots delegates took over the convention from the political professionals and on the sixth ballot nominated Willkie.
Afterward, Donovan met his fellow New York delegate Allen Dulles in the crowded lobby of his hotel. He clapped Dulles on the back. “Let’s go into the bar and talk,” he said.
Allen’s brother, John Foster Dulles, had been an ardent Dewey supporter, but Allen could see much merit in Willkie’s candidacy. In the bar Donovan expressed his satisfaction that now both candidates for the presidency would have the same attitude toward the war in Europe. “We’ll be in it before the end of 1941,” Donovan told Dulles, “and when we are, there are certain preparations which should already have been made. That’s where you come in.”
Dulles had done intelligence work in Europe in World War I, and now Donovan, long before he himself had official status as America’s master spy, considered Dulles a potential lieutenant in an overseas intelligence net that America would surely need before long.
When Frank Knox arrived in Washington on July 5 for his Senate confirmation hearings, Donovan met his train and took him to his Georgetown house, where Knox was to stay throughout the hearings. Donovan explained the British situation and asked Knox to assist him in approaching the President. Democratic Sen. Scott Lucas of Illinois came to lunch, and Donovan and Lucas spent the afternoon drilling Knox for his appearance before the Senate Naval Affairs Committee.
Intelligence from Great Britain was scarcely reassuring. The German Luftwaffe was systematically destroying both military targets and English cities, and the badly outnumbered Royal Air Force seemed unlikely to be able to turn aside the crushing blows. German submarines were sinking ship after ship at sea, and it appeared that Britain must inevitably be cut off from vital war materials and food supplies and starved into submission. From London, U.S. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy sent despairing reports about Britain’s chances for survival. He seemed to welcome Britain’s impending demise and applauded Hitler’s new order with an enthusiasm that appalled most people in Washington.
“Democracy is finished in England,” Kennedy told a reporter from the Boston Globe. He informed the reporter that democracy was nearly dead in the United States too. Kennedy was drawn temperamentally and socially to the coterie of highly placed Englishmen who were defeatist in mood and preferred an accommodation with Hitler to the mounting horror of what seemed to them a losing war.
Kennedy was not the only American advising Roosevelt that the British would not last much longer. U.S. Army Intelligence estimated that the Royal Air Force could survive as an effective fighting force for only a week or two. Even Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, was telling American officials that if Germany won the Battle of Britain, the king and queen would flee to Canada. The British fleet would retreat across the Atlantic to New World bases and carry on the struggle so that America and the British Commonwealth countries would have a last chance to fight for their freedom.
On July 1 Rear Adm. Walter S. Anderson, chief of U.S. Naval Intelligence, had testified before the Senate Naval Affairs Committee and presented such a conflicting picture of events in Europe that he left the senators completely confused. Anderson could only suggest that Knox, once confirmed, either go to England to find out what was really going on or send an observer in his place. This observer must be independent of Kennedy and other defeatist officials. Anderson was a good friend of Bill Donovan, but he did not mention him as the man to undertake this vital mission. Some senators immediately thought of Donovan as the man for the job; others suggested Bernard Baruch or Fiorello La Guardia, the feisty mayor of New York City.
Events in Europe had forced Donovan to realize how important the enactment of draft legislation had become, and in the late spring and early summer of 1940 he made several speeches in favor of the Burke-Wadsworth Selective Service Training bill. He still insisted that middle-aged men must register for the draft too. He testified before the Senate Committee on Military Affairs.
“Ask yourself what is the obligation that a government owes to the men it calls upon to fight its wars?” he said to the senators. “I think it owes him, first, a fair chance for his life, so that, prepared as he is to sacrifice his life, he shall not throw it away uselessly. To give him that fair chance, he must not only be physically conditioned, but he must be trained in the use of those new and complex weapons with which he must fight.”
Even as Donovan testified, a messenger was hurrying to Capitol Hill from the White House. Some weeks before, John Lord O’Brian had urged that Franklin Roosevelt send Donovan to England to clear up the intelligence muddle. That very morning Frank Knox, now confirmed as navy secretary, suggested to the President that he send Donovan without delay. Roosevelt agreed, and when Donovan stepped outside the committee room, he was handed a note from the President summoning him to an urgent meeting at th
e White House.
At the White House Donovan joined the President, Secretary of State Hull, Secretary of the Navy Knox, and Secretary of War Stimson. The usually jovial President was grim-faced. He had summoned not only Donovan but the members of his cabinet with whom he shared the immediate responsibility for America’s reaction to the collapse of France, the nation’s oldest ally, and what promised to be the collapse of Great Britain, the nation’s closest friend. He confessed that the government was in the dark as to exactly what was happening across the Atlantic. If Ambassador Kennedy was to be believed, there was no point in trying to aid Britain to resist the common enemy. But Kennedy was a notoriously unreliable observer, and perhaps Winston Churchill would succeed in infusing new spirit into the British. Would Britain fight on as Churchill was saying? Did Britain have the means to defend itself? What would be the best way to help? Exactly how did the Nazi fifth column operate in Europe, and how could the United States prevent a fifth column from operating within its own borders? These were the questions that Roosevelt and his top cabinet officers raised in the meeting.
It was Knox who asked Donovan if he would make the trip. When Donovan agreed, it was decided that publicly he should claim to be making the trip on private business. This obviously would not appear to be the case to any half-knowledgeable observer; therefore insiders were to be told that an investigation of the Nazi fifth column was the reason for his journey. Secretly, however, he was to explore the entire situation in England. Kennedy was not to be told the true purpose of the mission, because he was considered untrustworthy. The nature of the trip was to be kept from J. Edgar Hoover as well, because with his great capacity for self-serving intrigue he might very easily disrupt things. Above all, a press leak could be serious because it might play into the hands of the isolationists, who already were raising a political storm over any possible American interest in aiding England. Donovan was instructed to call on other cabinet officers before he left to learn any questions that they would like to have answered concerning England.
Donovan Page 28
