Wild Bill Donovan
by Douglas Waller
He was one of Americas most exciting and secretive generalsthe man Franklin Roosevelt made his top spy in World War II. A mythic figure whose legacy is still intensely debated, Wild Bill Donovan was director of the Office of Strategic Services (the countrys first national intelligence agency) and the father of todays CIA. Donovan introduced the nation to the dark arts of covert warfare on a scale it had never seen before. Now, veteran journalist Douglas Waller has mined government and private archives throughout the United States and England, drawn on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and interviewed scores of Donovans relatives, friends, and associates to produce a riveting biography of one of the most powerful men in modern espionage. William Joseph Donovans life was packed with personal drama. The son of poor Irish Catholic parents, he married into Protestant wealth and fought heroically in World War I, where he earned the nickname Wild Bill fo...