Ruth was ushered to a folding metal chair on the back row of the podium, which held a dozen VIPs. Some five thousand CIA officers, administration officials, and workers in hard hats gathered around for the cornerstone-laying ceremony. An Air Force band played marching music. Eisenhower stood up for a short speech. When Ike finished, he and Allen Dulles placed a copper box inside the large white cornerstone a workman held with a pulley at the building. Among the treasured items inside the metal time capsule were Donovan’s original November 18, 1944, memo to Roosevelt proposing a central intelligence service and FDR’s April 5, 1945, memo after the disastrous Trohan leak directing him to poll the other agencies on his plan. With silver-plated trowels, Eisenhower and Dulles patted over the cornerstone symbolic cement, which was actually a mixture of water, sand, and sugar. (The cornerstone and capsule were removed after the ceremony and anchored permanently a year later when the building was finished.) The Air Force band played the National Anthem, then Ruth was ushered to the staff car for the drive home.
Stonecutters chiseled into the marble wall of the building’s foyer a verse from John 8:32 that Dulles liked: “And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free.” In the decades to come the CIA did not always live up to that biblical ideal. Like its predecessor, the agency has had its share of intelligence failures along with the successes. When Bill Casey, who led the OSS penetrations into Germany, took over the CIA in 1981, he commissioned a bronze statue of Donovan, which was placed in the foyer. Donovan’s grandson, David, who was in his thirties by then, posed for it to help the sculptor get the proportions right.
RUTH REMAINED IN control of the Rumsey family trust money and the farm. She stayed active in community work and the garden clubs of Clarke County. Until she was seventy, she rode with the Blue Ridge Hunt Club chasing foxes. David ran the farm and became a prominent businessman in Clarke County. He eventually remarried, but Ruth continued to live in a wing off the main Chapel Hill house.
Ruth never remarried. She never had a boyfriend. Looking after her grandchildren kept her too busy. She did have men friends. They escorted her to the annual Master of Foxhounds Ball in New York, the white-tie dances for hunt clubs. But they were only friends.
It was somewhat ironic. During Donovan’s lifetime, his quest for adventure, his political ambitions, his determination to build a world-class spy agency, and his infidelities had ruined his marriage and left Ruth to live much of her adult life alone with her children and grandchildren. “Sometimes I wonder how well I really did know the general,” Ruth confessed at one point. But after Donovan’s death, Ruth set his personal failings aside and devoted herself to airbrushing his image and making sure he had his place in history. She conscientiously attended functions of the Veterans of OSS, set up to preserve the memory of the World War II agency and its leader. The group created a William J. Donovan Award and Ruth always showed up for its presentation, even arriving the year Casey received it with a painful broken collarbone she had suffered from a riding accident.
Ruth also hunted for an author to write a complimentary book on Donovan. While he lay in Walter Reed his last year, she and Doering had begun carefully screening potential biographers. They finally commissioned Corey Ford, a writer who had helped Donovan with his last-ditch propaganda campaign to save the OSS in 1945. Ford dutifully produced a biography, which Doering carefully edited. It portrayed Donovan and his agency in glowing terms, as Ruth wanted.
Donovan’s true legacy, and that of his OSS, was far more nuanced. During World War II, he created a large and far-flung intelligence operation while fighting a war at the same time. That alone was not exceptional. So unprepared was the United States for war, most of its military leaders were building their organizations and fighting at the same time. But the Army, Navy, and air force at the start did have tanks, ships, and planes, as well as a small cadre of professional soldiers. Donovan began practically from scratch. The institutional and cultural resistance he faced from the national security establishment of his day was exceptional. Commanders fight among themselves in every war and they did so with no less passion and vindictiveness in World War II. But so foreign were Donovan’s concepts for intelligence and unconventional warfare to the prevailing military and political mind-set, his intramural battles took on an added ferocity. Early on, he was spending as much time fighting his allies as he did the enemy. As a result, it was not until more than a year and a half after America’s entry into the war that the OSS really got into the battle.
The agency Donovan created would send an organizational theorist into convulsions. It became a Rube Goldberg collection of disparate programs, functions, and initiatives whose common denominator sometimes was only that Donovan had dreamed them up. By any measure he was a bad manager. At one time or another during his reign over the OSS, Donovan violated practically every rule taught in business or public administration schools. His own men recognized the organizational failures. In one confidential survey of them after the war, they acknowledged he was a poor administrator, often a “terrible judge of human beings,” as one put it, which led to bungled operations. But practically all of them praised him as a remarkable leader—which he was. Without Donovan’s creativity, his charisma, his intelligence, his open-mindedness, his personal courage, and his vision for the future, an unconventional organization like the OSS would likely not have been organized or sustained throughout the war.
Did the OSS contribute to the war effort? Yes. His operatives earned more than two thousand medals for bravery and suffered relatively few casualties. Was Donovan’s organization key to winning the war? No. Did his shadow operation even shorten the conflict appreciably? Again, no. But that may be setting the bar too high for his agency. Far more powerful forces were at work defeating the Axis: Russian and American women in the 1920s who delivered more male babies for the future fight than German, Italian, and Japanese mothers could hope to produce, American industry and Roosevelt’s mobilization of it for war, vast oceans that made Axis attack of that industrial base impossible, the Merchant Marine force, Army Quartermaster, and Navy Supply Corps that could move more arms and machinery to the front than the Axis could. The atomic bomb. The OSS agent played his part, just as the infantryman on the front line in Europe, the sailor at sea in the Pacific, the sergeant in the motor pool in Detroit, the riveter on the plane assembly line in Los Angeles. Donovan’s vision of covert warfare winning major battles on its own, making conventional operations unnecessary, proved illusory. His heroic guerrilla raids were a bother for Adolf Hitler, not a strategic threat. Shadow warfare was no match for brute force.
Donovan and his men began their work as rank amateurs. “The personnel of OSS, recruited and brought together in haste under the stress of the emergency, tended to be uneven in quality,” his deputy, John Magruder, concluded in a candid after-action report. (Fortunately for Donovan, Germany’s spies proved to be far worse.) But most of the U.S. Army also began World War II as rank amateurs. Donovan’s OSS made horrible mistakes, had disastrous operations. But their mistakes and botched missions were no more or less than for other parts of the American military. As the war progressed they improved as the rest of the Army did. Donovan’s spies gained experience. They produced better intelligence and reams of it, which earned them more plaudits from conventional commanders. The dull work—agents counting vehicles in enemy convoys, experts reading Axis newspapers, economists poring over building records and government reports to select bombing targets—proved to be of far more value than the cloak-and-dagger spying. Donovan recognized that. And all the intelligence the OSS produced never matched the value of the Ultra electronic intercepts in Europe and Magic in the Pacific. Donovan’s men recognized that as well.
Donovan’s other major goal was having his OSS survive after the war. His organization did not, but his ideas did. Even his critics—and they argue over his legacy to this day—concede that his OSS was the Petri dish for the spies who later ran the CIA. Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Wi
lliam Colby, Bill Casey—men who cut their teeth under Donovan—became future directors. The daring, the risk taking, the unconventional thinking, the élan and esprit de corps of the OSS would permeate the new agency. The failings of the OSS would, too—the delusions that covert operations, like magic bullets, could produce spectacular results, that legal or ethical corners could be cut for a higher cause, infected the CIA as well. Donovan, nevertheless, was one of the men who shaped modern warfare. For that, Ruth was justified in making sure he was remembered.
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Fourteen-year-old Will Donovan (top line, third from the right), on the Saint Joseph’s Collegiate Institute football team, was an average student and a scrappy athlete, who fought to control his temper as a boy. Saint Joseph’s Collegiate Institute
The handsome Donovan rose out of the poverty of Buffalo, New York’s Irish First Ward to become one of the city’s prominent lawyers. He was also one of its most eligible bachelors. David G. and Teresa Y. Donovan Collection
Ruth Rumsey was the beautiful daughter of one of Buffalo’s wealthiest businessmen. Although her family at first disapproved of her suitor from First Ward, Ruth was captivated by Donovan and married him in 1914. But she soon found that Donovan would be an absent husband for much of their marriage and he would have affairs with other women. Molly Mugler Collection
Donovan, with young Patricia and David after World War I, was away for long stretches, so much of his children’s upbringing was left to Ruth. Molly Mugler Collection
David, who was far closer to Ruth, shunned the spotlight his father commanded and preferred running the family farm in Virginia. His wife, Mary, was captivated by Donovan’s celebrity status and often filled in as his hostess at parties in Ruth’s absence. Mary, however, also met a tragic end at a relatively young age. Patricia Gilbert Collection
Donovan was closer to his daughter, Patricia, whose outgoing personality was much like his. But she died in an auto accident at age twenty-two, which devastated Donovan. Molly Mugler Collection
Donovan, right, began his military career in 1912, leading Troop I, a National Guard cavalry unit made up of young professionals and businessmen from Buffalo who volunteered for weekend duty and became known as the “Silk Stocking Boys.” Buffalo Cavalry Association
Donovan (left) and Father Francis Duffy, the chaplain of the 165th Regiment (originally the 69th), became as close as brothers during World War I. Donovan thought that Father Duffy was as near a saint as he would ever see. The politically savvy chaplain, who thought Donovan was the bravest man he had ever met, lobbied to have him made commander of the Irish Regiment. National Archives
A French officer pins the Croix de Guerre on Donovan, one of many awards he received for heroism in World War I. It was during the First World War that Donovan earned his nickname “Wild Bill,” given to him by his men because he put them through grueling training for battle. U.S. Army Military History Institute
Donovan, sporting a mustache, posed for this photo in the field during World War I. He eventually won the Medal of Honor for leading his men in the murderous battle at Landres-et-Saint-Georges, while suffering a severe wound to his leg. U.S. Army Military History Institute
Promoted to colonel, Donovan (on the ship returning from Europe) came back to New York a war hero, touted as a possible candidate for governor. Ruth had sent his letters describing the combat to New York newspapers, which were eager to publish them. U.S. Army Military History Institute
Donovan, speaking at a rally, ran for governor of New York in 1932 as a Republican. But he proved to be a lackluster campaigner and was handily defeated in the Democratic sweep that year. Georgetown University Library
Ruth and the children, now in their teens, posed for a campaign photo in 1932. Though she wanted to be the first lady of New York, Ruth did little campaigning for her husband. With Donovan gone so much, Ruth began to carve out a life for herself. Molly Mugler Collection
For much of their marriage, Ruth went on many vacations without her husband, who was always preoccupied with business. But occasionally they traveled overseas together, such as this trip to North Africa and the Middle East, where they toured the pyramids of Egypt. David G. and Teresa Y. Donovan Collection
During an unofficial diplomatic mission for Franklin Roosevelt in the winter of 1940–41, Donovan confers with Yugoslav military officials. Donovan pressured wavering Balkan leaders not to side with Adolf Hitler, warning that FDR did not intend to let Great Britain lose the war. U.S. Army Military History Institute
Donovan huddles with foreign correspondents on his Balkans diplomatic tour in the winter of 1940–41. He made a point of cultivating reporters, whom he found useful as intelligence sources and propagandists during World War II. U.S. Army Military History Institute
The OSS Washington headquarters (currently a U.S. government facility) was located at 25th and E Streets atop Navy Hill in a building the Public Health Service had been using for animal research. Berlin radio mocked it as the home of “50 professors, 10 goats, 12 guinea pigs, a sheep, and a staff of Jewish scribblers.” Author Photo
Donovan, on one of two phones connecting him to the White House and U.S. military leaders, had his office in Room 109 of OSS headquarters. He used 109 as his code number in all secret cable traffic. U.S. Army Military History Institute
William Stephenson, head of British intelligence operations in the United States and Latin America, became a close Donovan friend, helping him set up the OSS and supplying him with intelligence reports and expertise from London’s spy service. U.S. Army Military History Institute, Sam Morse-Brown portrait
Donovan and Franklin Roosevelt had been political enemies in New York in the 1930s, but by 1940 FDR found his Republican rival useful in preparing the country for war against the Axis. A spy buff, Roosevelt approved Donovan’s setting up the Office of Strategic Services but never allowed him to oversee intelligence operations in the military or other government agencies. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
Winston Churchill found Donovan an important ally in his early drive to have the United States join Britain in the war against the Axis. But the two men soured on each other as Donovan’s OSS and British intelligence squabbled over which service controlled secret operations in overseas theaters. They patched things up after the war. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
Donovan fought fierce bureaucratic battles. General George C. Marshall, Army chief of staff (center), at first opposed the OSS but eventually came to see its value and protected it from enemies in the military. General George Patton (left) was a Donovan friend, as was General Henry “Hap” Arnold (right), the chief of the Army Air Forces. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
Donovan inspects a German Tiger tank destroyed at Gela when the Allies landed at Sicily in July 1943. Eager to be close to the action, Donovan went in on all the major Allied landings, which made top generals like Marshall and Donovan’s own OSS officers nervous. With all the intelligence secrets in his head, he would be a valuable prize if captured by the enemy. U.S. Army Military History Institute
Donovan joined 5th Army Commander General Mark Clark in his patrol boat for one of the Italian landings. A controversial World War II commander, Clark found the OSS valuable for his operations. Donovan told aides he thought Clark was vain and superficial. U.S. Army Military History Institute
Donovan confers with his men in X’ian, China, on special operations plans for the OSS. China was one of a few countries in Asia in which the OSS was allowed to operate. But it took more than two years of haggling w
ith Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his intelligence chief before Donovan was able to launch credible guerrilla attacks against the Japanese. U.S. Army Military History Institute
In Washington, whether he was in a civilian suit or his uniform, Donovan was always impeccably tailored. But in the field with his men he appeared “incorrigibly civilian,” as one friend put it, with his uniform “carelessly worn”—as if he wanted to convey the impression that he was an unconventional soldier. Here he sports an unmilitary ascot. U.S. Army Military History Institute
In the four years he commanded the OSS, Donovan spent much of his time in a plane, flying to his far-flung stations overseas. Soon, members of his inner circle began to grumble that he was not spending enough time at his desk in Washington. They tried to stage what became know as the “Palace Revolt” to have him made a broad overseer of the OSS while others ran it. Donovan squelched the move. U.S. Army Military History Institute
Donovan, shown here inspecting an OSS field station in Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), was a charismatic leader revered by his agents in the field. But he had a penchant for swooping into OSS stations abroad and launching covert operations or shaking up personnel assignments, which sometimes left administrative chaos in his wake. National Archives
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