Wild Bill Donovan Read online

  DONOVAN RETURNED to bustling Buffalo, worried that he had rushed through college and law school, that he wasn’t truly educated, not fully prepared for the courtroom. He moved back in with Tim and Anna at the Prospect Avenue house and seemed to them aimless at first. They were uncertain how their son, with all his fancy schooling, would now turn out. He mulled entering politics, an idea that horrified friends and relatives as a perfectly good waste of a fine education. After more than a year of indecision, Bill Donovan (only his parents and siblings still called him Will) finally joined the venerable law firm of Love & Keating on fashionable Ellicott Square in 1909, earning almost $1,800 a year as an associate—a respectable enough salary that guaranteed him the “promise of future success,” as one local newspaper noted. Two years later, Donovan struck out on his own, forming a law partnership with Bradley Goodyear, a Columbia classmate from a prominent Buffalo family. Setting up an office in the Marine Trust Building downtown, they specialized in civil cases, which ranged from defending automobile drivers and their insurance companies in lawsuits (their bread-and-butter work) to settling a dispute (in one case) among neighbors over the death of a dog. Donovan and Goodyear took on associates. Three years later they merged with a firm run by one of Buffalo’s most well-connected lawyers—John Lord O’Brien, who had advised President William Howard Taft and would have the ear of future presidents on intelligence and defense issues.

  Goodyear and O’Brien opened doors for Donovan in Buffalo society and among the exclusive clubs and civic organizations, where more important business contacts were made and lucrative deals were hatched. Donovan was admitted to the Saturn Club on Delaware Avenue and to the Greater Buffalo Club, where the city’s millionaires hung out. He joined the sailing club, organized a tennis and squash club with Goodyear (a magnet for business contacts), bought property with his spare cash, ordered his suits from a tailor in New York City, and began donating to the local Republican committee (required for a businessman on his way up).

  As he moved up in Buffalo society, Donovan did not forget his roots. He paid Timothy’s early bills in setting up his practice in Buffalo after he graduated from Columbia’s medical school and covered Vincent’s education expenses at the Dominican House of Studies. (Vincent, not Will, would be the priest in the family.) But his generosity was not without strings—big brother soon became preachy about how his siblings were so freely spending his dollars. Seminary students who swear oaths of poverty tend “to forget the significance of money,” he wrote to Vincent in one of many nagging letters. “It doesn’t grow on trees.” And “don’t get too self-righteous,” he added in the note. Donovan sent his sister, Loretta, an allowance to attend Immaculata Seminary in Washington, D.C., but he had the seminary’s sisters send him Loretta’s grades and they were “horrible,” he complained: Fs in Latin and geometry, a D in music harmony.

  In the spring of 1912, Donovan began a major diversion. He and a group of young professionals and businessmen, many of them Saturn Club members, organized their own Army National Guard cavalry unit, called Troop I. It started out more as a drill, riding, and camping club for well-to-do city boys, most of whom, like Donovan, had never marched in a line, mounted a horse, or slept outside. They soon became known as the “Silk Stocking Boys”—and even Donovan found his comrades at first to be a provincial collection of military neophytes.

  Drilling every Friday night, the “Business Men’s Troop” (the nickname they preferred instead of the Silk Stocking Boys) was an egalitarian bunch. They wrote bylaws for their organization (officers wore uniforms to drills while enlisted men did not have to) and elected their own leaders. Donovan was made captain of the troop. He took his command seriously, buying dozens of books on military strategy and attending Army classes two nights a week on combat tactics. Despite grousing from the men because they had to buy their own horses and equipment, Troop I soon became a popular Buffalo pastime for adventurous spirits. In four years, it had a hundred cavalrymen in uniform with another thirty-six being trained and a waiting list of more wanting to join.

  AS HIS FORTUNES rose in Buffalo, Donovan also developed a reputation as a man with an eye for the ladies—though in polite company that kind of talk was always whispered. Privately, Donovan thought prostitution served a useful function for young hormone-charged men—although he never bought sex because he didn’t have to. He was considered one of Buffalo’s most eligible bachelors and had young women swooning over him, sometimes married ones. One of them was Eleanor Robson, a glamorous, English-born star of the New York City stage who had met Donovan (three years her junior) when he was a law student at Columbia and found that in addition to being an exciting romantic partner he also had acting talent. After Donovan returned to Buffalo, he continued to make occasional trips to New York for more drama coaching from Eleanor. But tongues started wagging in Buffalo when the private lessons continued after the thirty-year-old actress married August Belmont, a wealthy fifty-seven-year-old widower, in 1910. Between train rides to New York, Donovan in 1914 also met a smart, sophisticated, and fashionable blonde from one of Buffalo’s wealthiest families at the city’s Studio Club, where both were acting in amateur productions.

  Her name was Ruth Rumsey. She was the daughter of Dexter Phelps Rumsey, a multimillionaire who had operated several Buffalo tanneries and leather stores, plowed his profits into real estate, and built a grand mansion on fashionable Delaware Avenue. Ruth, who was born in 1891 when Rumsey was sixty-four, was sent to Rosemary Hall, an exclusive boarding school in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she performed better in field hockey and class plays than in dreary subjects such as Latin and algebra. She was quick-witted, fast to assimilate facts, and not shy about speaking her mind around boyfriends. She spent summers traveling the world—Europe, Asia, the Middle East—and always first class. Back home she hunted foxes in Geneseo, sailed on the Great Lakes, and rode horses as well as any man. And when Dexter Rumsey died in 1906, the estate he left would one day make Ruth a millionaire.

  Ruth’s mother, Susan, who was thirty years younger than her husband and herself a beautiful socialite and political activist on behalf of women’s suffrage, was not pleased with her daughter’s interest in this handsome young lawyer. Susan was an enlightened woman who had opened her home to artists and liberal causes since Dexter died, but Donovan had strikes against him. He was Irish Catholic for starters (even Ruth had a schoolgirl prejudice against Catholics) and he came from First Ward, not Delaware Avenue, despite his respectable bank account. Friends also had passed on to Susan the rumors that he played around—and was continuing to do so while he dated her daughter.

  But Ruth had always been adventurous. Many rich girls of Buffalo found the tough, wild Irish boys of First Ward alluring. And one like Donovan—who had been a college football star, attended a prestigious law school, and was heart-thumping handsome—that kind of man proved irresistible. Ruth quickly fell in love with him and Donovan was smitten with her. During their first dates, “my heart was in my mouth,” he told her later. “I wanted you so much and yet thought you would choose someone of your own class.”

  Ruth heard the rumors about other women in Donovan’s life, about the acting lessons he was taking from an old flame in New York, and she didn’t like them. The Robson affair came to a head one evening at a soirée the All Arts Club of Buffalo organized after Ruth’s and Bill’s engagement had been announced. Eleanor, who was in town visiting friends, performed Robert Browning’s poetic play In a Balcony for guests at Mrs. Hoyt’s new house on Amherst Road. Her leading man for the show was Donovan. Ruth leaned against a wall behind the audience silently steaming with jealousy. A column in the society page later made note of the “gala performance” and the fact that the young lawyer had been on the stage with the famous actress, which sparked more gossip in Buffalo. Afterward, Ruth delivered Donovan an ultimatum: Choose her or the acting lessons. Donovan chose his fiancée.

  Bill and Ruth were married late Wednesday afternoon, July 15, 1914, in the cons
ervatory of the Rumsey mansion. Fewer than a dozen friends and relatives attended the quiet, low-key ceremony—a signal to the rest of social Buffalo that Susan was not completely sold on this union. Donovan, however, soon won over his mother-in-law, who found him to be conscientious and hardworking. By the end of 1914, he was serving as her personal attorney for financial matters. When they returned from their honeymoon Ruth and Bill bought a comfortable home on Cathedral Parkway with money from Ruth’s trust. Susan bought them a car.

  Donovan had definite ideas about marriage. Love was a reason to marry, but also a reason not to, he thought. A man and woman must be compatible in their interests, but there must also be “strong degrees of independence between them,” he told a friend. He thought he and Ruth were compatible and he hoped she would not be the clinging type. Most important, a man must find an unselfish woman, one not interested in dominating him. Donovan had no qualms about using Ruth’s money and social standing to get ahead. A man should not marry a woman because she is wealthy, he believed, but he should not refuse to marry a woman because she has money. A wife is an important asset and wealth does not make her any less important. He also continued to be a flirt. To a law firm colleague about to be married he advised: “Don’t give up your women friends. They’ll tend to improve your manners.”

  THE STATE DEPARTMENT cable reached Donovan toward the end of June 1916, while he was in Berlin. Five months earlier the Rockefeller Foundation had commissioned him to be one of its representatives in Europe convincing two belligerents, Great Britain and Germany, to allow the foundation’s War Relief Commission to ship $1 million worth of food and clothing into famine-plagued Belgium, Serbia, and Poland. The position paid only expenses, but Donovan, who had grown increasingly interested in news stories he read about the European War, jumped at the chance to tour the continent and its battlefields, and, perhaps, scout future overseas clients for his law firm. But now Troop I had been ordered to the Texas border to join General John “Black Jack” Pershing’s expeditionary army hunting revolutionary leader Pancho Villa and his band attacking Americans across the border.

  Donovan took the first ocean steamer he could book in July and sailed back to the United States to join his unit being deployed to McAllen, Texas. Ruth, who had been home alone caring for their firstborn for almost four months, was not happy her husband would be absent months more. The baby had arrived July 7, 1915. Instead of an Irish name, Donovan wanted a biblical one for his son, so they called him David. But Donovan had left when David was just eight months old and Ruth soon became overwhelmed caring for an infant and managing a house, where appliances always seemed to be breaking. Now David had just turned one year old and he had barely seen his father.

  Troop I arrived at McAllen, a border town at the southern tip of Texas just north of the Rio Grande River, toward the end of July 1916. It was miserable duty, with temperatures soaring past 100 degrees during the day and Gulf storms turning their chigger-infested camp into a muddy swamp. Soon promoted to major, Donovan drilled his men relentlessly to toughen them, but they ended up battling the elements more than the Mexicans.

  As fall stretched into winter, lonely Ruth began to suffer bouts of depression in Buffalo, which made her physically ill. Donovan thought she was being a hypochondriac and his response was harsh. In one early October letter he threatened to stop writing her if she did not start sending him cheery love notes. She should take a vacation “and not ‘mope’ around any longer,” he wrote. “You need to be in very good condition when your husband gets there,” he lectured in another note. “You had better make up your mind to get well.”

  Troop I finally returned to Buffalo in March 1917, but Donovan remained with Ruth only long enough to make her pregnant again. His career once more took priority over family. He joined the 69th “Irish” Regiment of New York City to train for the war he was sure the United States would enter in Europe. The regiment, parts of which traced its lineage to the Revolutionary War, had more than three thousand of New York’s finest Irish sons, including the critically acclaimed poet Joyce Kilmer. They wanted Irish American officers to lead them in battle—no one more so than their chaplain, Francis Duffy, a liberal Catholic priest from a Bronx parish who recruited Donovan to head the regiment’s 1st Battalion with visions of him one day commanding the entire 69th. Donovan, who shared that ambition, came to worship the lanky chaplain with the gaunt face, who was devoted to the spiritual welfare of his soldiers.

  In August, the 69th moved to Camp Mills on Long Island to begin training for war. It was redesignated the 165th and became part of the 42nd Division with an up-and-coming regular Army major named Douglas MacArthur as its chief of staff. Donovan, who soon discovered his ragtag group was a long way from being fit for trench warfare, had his men run three miles each morning, then strip to the waist and fight one another barehanded to make them mean. It made him an unpopular but respected commander. “I hate Donovan’s guts but I would go anywhere with him,” said one bruised but loyal soldier.

  On August 13, 1917, Ruth delivered a baby girl, whom they named Patricia. Father Duffy baptized her with water from his canteen and she was officially designated the Daughter of the Regiment. Desperately missing his wife and children, Donovan moved the family to a bungalow outside Camp Mills for his final months there. He was delighted that Ruth seemed to be coming out of her depression.

  Late in October, Donovan’s battalion boarded a troop train for Montreal, where the Tunisian passenger liner awaited to take them to Europe. He did not expect to come back alive. “I am glad so glad that you are happy,” Donovan wrote Ruth in a poignant letter. “Dearest, the knowledge that we are both making sacrifices in a good cause will bring us closer.” His wife’s love “is what keeps me going. I cannot be depressed. I will not be downhearted.”

  Although they did not realize it then, October 1917 was the last time they would be truly man and wife.

  Chapter 2

  The Great War

  Dawn, Monday, October 14, 1918

  IN HIS QUARTERS at the northern French village of Exermont, Donovan cinched his polished Sam Browne belt with its shoulder strap over his tunic. He made a final check of the bright-colored service ribbons over his left breast pocket and the shiny silver oak leaf clusters pinned to his epaulets. The month before, he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel. It was a reward for being one of the best battalion commanders in his division, but it ended up being almost as much a headache when he had to fight higher headquarters’ attempts to move him up to a staff job.

  Officers preparing for battle usually stripped their uniforms of rank insignia to make them less inviting targets for German snipers, but Donovan this morning dressed as if he were marching in a Sunday parade for a pragmatic reason. Half of his 165th Regiment was now made up of nearly raw recruits brought in to replace the dead or wounded and their lack of training appalled Donovan. He decked out in his finest hoping that these young replacements, sure to panic under intense fire, saw him clearly and followed his orders in the fog of battle that would unfold that day.

  Donovan had already been wounded in the leg from shrapnel and nearly blinded by sickening gas in previous rounds of intense combat. He had been awarded the French Croix de Guerre for rescuing under fire comrades buried under tons of earth after German artillery had unleashed heavy minenwerfer mortars on the regiment’s position at Rouge Bouquet in March. (He refused to accept the award until a Jewish sergeant at his side during the attack, but who at first was denied the medal, got his as well.) General Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, had pinned on Donovan’s chest the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second highest decoration, for leading his battalion in a late July assault to drive German infantrymen back near the shallow Ourcq River during the Aisne-Marne campaign northeast of Paris. That battle’s cost to the Irish Regiment had been staggering: 1,571 killed, wounded, or missing—almost half its men. Donovan had lost all of his company commanders, as well as the poet Joyce Kilmer
, who had been serving as his acting adjutant.

  Donovan had been curious about how he would react the first time under heavy fire, but discovered he had “no fear of being able to stand up under it,” he wrote Ruth. Growing “easily accustomed,” as he put it, to Germans shooting at him and he firing back, Donovan had no intention of being a dugout commander. He was thrilled by the danger of combat like “a youngster at Halloween,” he told Ruth.

  Since his battalion had arrived in Europe in November 1917, Donovan had trained his men relentlessly. He was a strict disciplinarian, keeping drinking to a minimum and the village whores away from his enlisted soldiers, and reprimanding junior officers when security was breached or a few dollars were unaccounted for in the battalion’s cash box. He had his platoon leaders memorize six questions they should be prepared to answer anytime he showed up or risk his wrath:

  1. Do I know my particular job here?

  2. Do I know the amount of reserve ammunition I have on hand?

  3. Do I know the use and purpose of each and every signal at this post?

  4. Have I instructed my men in and do they know the place of each in time of attack?

  5. Am I doing my utmost in looking out for the men in my platoon?

  6. Can I conscientiously say that I am giving the best attention to the feet of my men?

  After once running them in full packs on a three-mile obstacle course over walls, under barbed wire, through icy streams, and up and down hills, the men collapsed gasping for air. “What the hell’s the matter with you guys?” demanded Donovan, who had just turned thirty-five and carried the same load. “I haven’t lost my breath.” A trooper in the back who Donovan couldn’t see shouted: “But hell, we aren’t as wild as you are, Bill.” From that day on, “Wild Bill” stuck. Donovan professed annoyance with the nickname because it ran counter to the quiet, intense image he wanted to project. But Ruth knew that deep down he loved it.