Another early COI man was Turner McBaine, a San Francisco lawyer. McBaine was upset about giving up his law practice for government service. “Forget that,” Donovan told him. “You’ll learn more in a couple of years here than if you stayed practicing law.”
McBaine asked what Donovan wanted him to do. “I want you to go out and go up and down Constitution Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue and go into buildings and ask them what they are doing,” said Donovan.
“At the time new agencies were being spawned at the rate of two or three a week by FDR,” said McBaine years later. “I went out and did what he told me to do. The government manual was hopelessly behind. I made a survey of all those organizations. I had a fantastic lesson in bureaucracy. I came back and told him everything.”
McBaine was particularly impressed with one “hard-driving young man, who assured me he was the biggest man in the entire government. He controlled the central purchasing of office supplies, and he could always threaten to cut off the paper supplies from a balky bureaucrat.”
One agency that McBaine overlooked was the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), directed by Nelson Rockefeller. One day an angry Nelson Rockefeller strode into Bill Donovan’s office. The CIAA had an information program that Rockefeller told Donovan was now being superseded by that of the COI. Donovan pointed out that the President certainly knew his own mind and that Rockefeller’s service should be incorporated into the COI. Rockefeller stomped out of the office. He returned in a few days and insisted that he be allowed to keep his information service in Latin America.
“You know, Jimmy was talking to his father,” Donovan said, “and the President told him he believed the whole information set-up ought to be taken over by one office. So, I think there will be a transfer of the Latin American information program from your office to ours. Jimmy will tell you about it.” James Roosevelt’s office was right down the hall.
“I’m not interested in talking to Jimmy.”
Donovan called James Roosevelt into the room anyway to confirm that he had indeed talked to his father about the matter the previous day as the Roosevelt family cruised on the yacht Potomac.
“Did you remind the President of the executive order which he signed creating the CIAA and giving it authority over its own information program?” demanded Rockefeller.
“No, I didn’t mention that,” said Roosevelt.
“Bill, I don’t think it is fair to the President to present this thing to him from only one side, simply getting him to agree to a principle without discussing the problems and the agencies involved. I think we ought to go together to see him and work it out,” said Rockefeller.
“No,” said Donovan. “The President has made a decision and that’s that.”
“All right,” replied Rockefeller. “I want to make it clear that I don’t feel it is in the interest of the President. But if you want to take unilateral action, I want you to know that I will follow the same procedure.”
Rockefeller returned to his own office, telephoned the White House, and learned that the COI had indeed won authority over his information program. He dispatched Anna Rosenberg, a good friend of Roosevelt, to the White House to see the President. Another Rockefeller advocate, John Hay Whitney, also saw the President that day. Whitney’s wife, Betsey, had once been married to James Roosevelt and was still a favorite of the President. FDR had invited the Whitneys to dine with him that night, and Jock Whitney was certain that he would be able to put in a good word for Rockefeller. But when the Whitneys arrived at the White House, they discovered that a smiling William Donovan was also a dinner guest. Somebody had sent the President a gift of wild duck and it had become a trifle tainted from lack of refrigeration. Whitney and Donovan gingerly sampled the fowl, which FDR pronounced to be delicious. Neither Whitney (who would later serve in the OSS in France with valor) nor Donovan could mention the subject that was uppermost in both of their minds.
Perhaps Anna Rosenberg’s intercession was decisive. In any event, the next morning FDR issued an order keeping the CIAA’s information program out of the COI.
The antagonism between Rockefeller and Donovan lasted until Pearl Harbor. Then Rockefeller called on Donovan and shook his hand. “Seems to me, it’s about time to bury the hatchet. We’re on the same side in this war.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Donovan.
The two men became staunch friends.
On July 31 Donovan appointed Dr. James Phinney Baxter III, president of Williams College and distinguished historian, to be the director of R&A. Donovan hired Douglas Miller, author of You Can’t Do Business with Hitler, who had served in the Berlin Embassy from 1928 to 1939, and John Wiley, former minister to Austria, Estonia, and Latvia. He persuaded Calvin Hoover of Duke University to come to Washington, as well as Edwin Earle of Princeton. He brought geographers, historians, economists, and psychologists into what Washingtonians called Donovan’s brain trust.
“Geography,” Donovan remarked to President Roosevelt, “has been neglected in this country’s policy planning. Close study of geography is invaluable in outguessing the enemy. The Nazis make what they call ‘Geopolitics’ a vital arm of military policy. Their Geopolitical Institute is an integral factor in the development of that policy.”
Every day brought new faces to the Apex Building. There was socialite William D. Whitney, picked by Donovan to set up a London office because of his English connections, and there was Colonel G. Edward Buxton, a friend from World War I days whom Donovan made assistant director of COI. “Ned Buxton was Colonel Donovan’s right-hand man,” said Henry Field. “His cool, calm New England horse sense proved an excellent foil for the Irish temperament and impetuousness.”
“Ned,” said Atherton Richards, another early COI man, “was a bulwark of loyalty, who gave Donovan freedom to move around the world, knowing that Buxton would never undercut him.”
Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, recalled how he ended up in the COI. “I had been teaching in Pasadena and had been researching the propaganda techniques in the English Civil War. I had written a paper on what kind of clandestine organization the United States should have if war came. I was driving across country and stopped to admire the Grand Canyon the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union. War seemed imminent. When I reached Washington, I told my cousin Joe Alsop, the columnist, about the paper. ‘Don’t publish it,’ said Alsop. ‘Send it to Bill Donovan.’”
Roosevelt sent his paper to Donovan, who immediately telephoned him.
“Don’t publish this,” he said. “Come and work for me instead.”
Donovan hired Roosevelt in mid-August of 1941, and the new recruit found himself working side by side with Ralph Bunche, a bright young black, in R&A.
James P. Warburg, banker and political writer, turned up at COI and so did Chicago Daily News foreign correspondent Wallace R. Deuel and New York Herald Tribune foreign editor Joseph Barnes. The recruited turned recruiters, and they brought in a constantly growing roster of men and women, including Thomas A. Morgan, president of the Sperry Corporation; Estelle Frankfurter, sister of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; and the Hollywood film director John Ford.
“Write me a memo on how you can be of service to this organization,” Donovan told promising applicants who came to see him, “and if I agree with you, you’re hired.”
David K. E. Bruce, the lawyer-diplomat who would become OSS chief in Europe, watched Donovan assemble the COI with considerable amazement. “All were fish in his net,” Bruce said. “Ornithologists, anthropologists, college professors of every category, safecrackers, paroled convicts, remittance men, professional wrestlers and boxers, circus stars, code experts, military characters, nightclub frequenters, and a miscellany of others, including in the majority ordinary citizens, were jumbled together in what, organizationally, appeared to be chaos.”
Donovan was accused by some of hiring too many rich men and by others of hiring too many Reds. In defense
of the former, he said, “These Wall Street bank and corporation lawyers make wonderful second-story men.” In defense of the latter, when he was told one of his people had been on the “honor roll of the Young Communist League,” he replied, “I don’t know if he’s on the Communist honor roll, but for the job he is doing, he’s on the honor roll of the COI.”
Wrote William R. Corson, “Donovan was more than equal to the challenge of breathing life into the Coordinator of Information’s office. His basic approach, which today stands almost as a classic model in how to create a new government agency, was premised on the need to get the right people for key positions—delegate authority to them, and thereby force positive decisions on their part.”
Donovan had told the President that he was going to give him a young organization, and he did recruit a high proportion of young men and women. All over the world he knew talented young people, and he took them into the COI. One such person was actor Sterling Hayden, who had sailed around the world with Donovan’s son, David. On September 15, Hayden informed Paramount that he was sick of acting and went to Washington to see Bill Donovan. Donovan sent him to Great Britain, where he found himself undergoing commando training with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Colonel Edward G. Young, the Highlanders’ commanding officer, asked him when he arrived at camp, “What have you been doing recently?”
“Well, sir, this is going to sound kind of strange,” Hayden replied, “but a few years ago Colonel Donovan suggested I go out to the West Coast and become an actor.”
“Go on.”
“I guess it had something to do with my being able to use the acting thing as a cover in case we got in the war.”
Hayden trained with the British commandos but unfortunately tore the cartilage in his knee and injured his spine when parachuting from a Sterling bomber. This mishap interrupted his COI career, but in time Donovan dispatched him to Cairo under the assumed name of John Hamilton.
The young men and women of the COI and the OSS believed in Donovan with a fervor that was to lead to great deeds of derring-do and adventure.
“When I went into William Donovan’s intelligence service, it was less than two months old and consisted of approximately one hundred people,” recalled former OSS member Caroline Bland.
In the intervening thirty-three years, I have forgotten details of the tremendous experience that followed, just as I was supposed to do. We were not allowed to keep diaries. I never would have violated the rules and I felt the responsibility of secrecy.
Practically nobody remembers now what a fantastic job Donovan accomplished in creating OSS out of nothing. He gave the United States the first real intelligence service of our history. There was no precedent. There was no time for perfect organization, the job just had to be done, and all the individuals doing it, however successful in previous pursuits, were novices in this. It was very challenging.
OSS was the most wonderful place to be young! We young ones had everything—belief, enthusiasm, opportunity, victory. Life rushed on in excitement and in confidence that we were a special group of colleagues with an important mission for our country.
By the end of August 1941, Donovan and his burgeoning crew moved to the limestone and brick buildings just deserted by the Public Health Service at 25th and E streets. The structures were sequestered behind a wall, which provided security. A visitor walked up a steep driveway from the entrance on 25th Street to be confronted by uniformed guards, their automatics snug in shoulder holsters. The Central Building with its Greek pillars became the Administration Department, and there Donovan had his office.
Most of the animals kept by Public Health researchers in the South Building for experimental purposes stayed on for some months. They coexisted with the eminent professors and scholars that Donovan installed in the building as the nucleus of the Research and Analysis section.
“The question arose,” said Murphy, “of whether we should put the monkeys on the payroll—if there was ever going to be a payroll.”
Some of the monkeys had little chance to make the payroll, as Walt Rostow, later to have a distinguished career in government, was to discover when he arrived at work for the first time. “Out on the steps, on a lovely morning,” he recalls, “were Donovan and Jimmy Roosevelt. Smoke was coming from a chimney. Laboratory monkeys, which had been involved in research on syphilis, were being incinerated.” Rostow was given a very aromatic welcome to the cloak-and-dagger world of the COI.
Nazi propagandists, learning about the circumstances of the world’s newest intelligence organization, lampooned it as “50 professors, 20 monkeys, 10 goats, 12 guinea pigs, and a staff of Jewish scribblers.”
It appeared that the Public Health people would never move their animals out of the top floor of the South Building. Then Donovan himself forced the issue. He complained that an infected monkey had bitten a secretary and neither she nor the other women would enter the building until the animals were moved out. The animals left.
The R&A section soon resembled a Who’s Who of American intellectuals. In time Donovan managed to house most of his 2,000 research analysts in an old apartment house at 23rd and E streets, Northwest, a State Department annex building, but there was a spillover, not only into the South Building but also into some gray frame temporary structures erected behind the old Heurich Brewery at the end of Rock Creek Drive. This entire complex could be addressed at 2430 E Street.
Growth continued although civil service regulations of the time meant that even top experts hired by the COI could be paid only $8,500 a year. Donovan took up the matter with FDR, who ruled that the COI was not subject to civil service regulations and could pay any wage it wished. Salaries went up instantly, and what was more important, salaries were at last being paid.
It did not take the press long to analyze Donovan’s plans for R&A. “What he is aiming at,” wrote Ernest K. Lindley, “is an American counterpart of Prof. Haushofer’s Geopolitical Institute in Berlin. This organization was the source of much of the Nazi grand strategy and of many of the tactical instruments for furthering it, ranging from the concept of German ‘lebensraum’ through the hate campaigns against the Poles.”
Donovan’s R&A staffers worked feverishly in the months before Pearl Harbor. They perused everything from works of scholarship to French railroad timetables. They scrutinized what they called “Aunt Min” photos, snapshots collected from all over America that showed Aunt Min or another family member posing before anything from the railroad station at Munich to a highway viaduct in Sofia. Sometimes it was hard to see around Aunt Min to the valuable piece of intelligence in the picture, but special photo equipment helped to clarify the details.
British Security Coordinator William Stephenson commented that it was “the most brilliant team of analysts in the history of intelligence.” McGeorge Bundy, who was to become president of the Ford Foundation and President John F. Kennedy’s special assistant for national security, remarked, “A special area of powerful professional connection between higher learning and government is the field of area studies. It is a curious fact of academic history that the first great center of area studies in the United States was not located in any university, but in Washington, during the Second World War in the Office of Strategic Services. In very large measure the area study programs developed in American universities in the years after the war were manned, directed, or stimulated by graduates of the OSS—a remarkable institution half cops-and-robbers and half faculty meeting.”
At first, James Phinney Baxter presided over this assortment of historians, political scientists, psychologists, cartographers, economists, and sociologists, who spoke some 40 languages and had been attracted from some 40 universities. Baxter, a highly respected scholar, was a superb leader, and he left his imprint on R&A when ill health forced him to resign. Possibly his greatest contribution was the selection of his successor. One day he telephoned William Langer, the Harvard historian, and persuaded him to drop everything and come to Washington to talk
to Bill Donovan.
From the start Langer was attracted to both Donovan and the job, but he was not certain he could succeed in such a difficult undertaking. A year or so earlier he had suffered a mysterious disability. Langer had always been a gifted public speaker, but suddenly he developed an acute fear of audiences. It was all he could do to address his students at Harvard. One of his responsibilities as chief of R&A would be to brief such high-level officials as the Joint Chiefs of Staff. How could he ever do it?
Langer sat down with Bill Donovan in his office and told him of his problem. It was embarrassing to be a world-famous scholar and to be afraid of speaking to a crowd. Donovan nodded sympathetically. “Bill,” he said, “I don’t believe you have any conception of the severe handicaps most men suffer from, but they still get the job done. I believe you can do it.” Langer had an overwhelming sense of the sympathy that emanated from Donovan, and he accepted the position. His subsequent lectures to top government officials were to prove not only significant but dramatic and exciting.
Donovan and Langer became fast friends, and they often breakfasted together at Donovan’s Georgetown home. They talked about everything imaginable. When Langer remarked that the savants in R&A were feeling frustrated because they were not able to publish the results of their studies, Donovan observed, “You academics are like a bunch of chorus girls. You’ve got a fine pair of legs, and you want to show them.” One Sunday morning during breakfast, Langer mentioned that Thucydides had written “quite a lot about guerrilla warfare.” Donovan was fascinated. He had his chauffeur drive them from bookstore to bookstore looking for one that stocked a paperback copy of Thucydides’ book.
Under Langer, R&A continued its growth, and its chief’s friendship with Donovan helped to wed its research to the more active field work of the COI and its successor, the OSS. In time R&A was called upon not only to do research but also to test information from secret agents in the field, assess its accuracy, and fit it into a jigsaw puzzle made up of geographical, economic, political, and military factors. R&A experts not only prepared reports for the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff but also suggested to the OSS’s Secret Intelligence branch what important gaps in knowledge needed to be plugged.
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