Wild Bill Donovan Read online

  He wanted to make money. He wanted to buy a grand house in Buffalo to entertain friends. He wanted to hire a French governess for the children and shop for fine clothes so he could “be a dandy,” he wrote Ruth. He also made clear to her that he wanted a “gladsome bride” when he returned. “I know that your condition is due much to your mental state, but keep thinking that I am coming home, coming full of love and eagerness,” he wrote. He urged her to be fitted for the latest diaphragm device doctors were prescribing (they should have no more children for a while) and buy “lots of fluffy lingerie. You must remember I have been a very righteous old man and it will be your duty to cheer and allure.”

  Donovan admitted he had been “a difficult husband,” as he wrote Ruth in another letter, and he didn’t know “of any other who could handle” him “so expertly” as she had. But he would change, he promised her. From now on he would be totally devoted to her. Nothing would come between them. He promised her a second honeymoon when he returned. “Pick where you would like to go and what you’d like to do.” He would follow.

  Escorted by a noisy flotilla of steamers and tugboats, the Harrisburg transport ship carrying Donovan and the first elements of the regiment docked at Hoboken on April 21, 1919. Ruth and Vincent stood at the pier to greet him. The days that followed were filled with welcoming ceremonies, a regimental parade up Fifth Avenue, and a key to the city from New York’s Mayor John Francis Hylan. Broadway stars, such as opera soprano Lilian Breton and vaudevillian Sophie Tucker, entertained the men at evening banquets. The gaggle of reporters always following Donovan shouted questions: “Colonel, do you know they are all talking about you as a possible candidate for governor?”

  “Governor!” Donovan exclaimed, pretending to be surprised. “Don’t even think about it. I’m a lawyer and my chief aim in life just now is to get back to Buffalo and resume my practice.”

  Ruth rented a room at the Vanderbilt Hotel for the week, but Donovan spent little time there because festivities and the chores of garrisoning his men at nearby Camp Mills consumed practically every minute. As Vincent drove his brother to the camp the evening after the April 28 parade, emotions churning inside Donovan suddenly overwhelmed him. Fewer than half the regiment’s men who had sailed to France returned. “When I think of all the boys I have left behind me who died out of loyalty to me, it’s too much,” he told Vincent. He lowered his head and wept.

  Chapter 3

  The Prosecutor

  THE HIRED CAR, with Donovan and his wife in the back seat and their luggage piled in the trunk, sped along the Tokai-do Highway from Yokohama to Tokyo. Peering out the window, Donovan made mental notes of the activity he saw along the way: convoys of trucks hauling cedar logs from the interior, workers by the hundreds toiling in muddy rice fields wearing only loincloths, small carts on the road drawn by women, even children, delivery wagons attached to rubber-tired bicycles, young Japanese men in kimonos playing baseball in makeshift fields. Their automobile finally pulled up to the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, where the couple checked in for the first stop on their second honeymoon.

  Ruth, who left Patricia and David with her mother, had selected Asia for the trip Donovan had promised her. Donovan was only too happy to follow her. Asia was a burgeoning market for the West; he arranged business meetings along the way to explore opportunities his law firm might lucratively exploit.

  For the next month, Bill and Ruth toured Japan, Korea, and China. Embassy officers in Peking briefed him on China’s vast market awaiting Western business. Like America, Japan had emerged from the World War strengthened. But resentment toward the United States was building “because Japan felt that America was thwarting her in her ambitions in the Pacific,” a U.S. diplomat told him. Hostility toward the United States was particularly intense within her military, warned a Japanese diplomat. Donovan filled notebooks with details.

  When he was not playing intelligence agent, Donovan and Ruth saw the sights and toured museums. They attended elegant dinners at the U.S. embassies in each country, where diplomats made a fuss over Ruth—and slipped Donovan confidential business and political intelligence in private meetings. Then in mid-July, Donovan reneged on the promise he had so fervently made to Ruth in his war letters. He dumped her and took off for Siberia. Roland Morris, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, and General William Graves, the U.S. commander at Vladivostok, had been dispatched to Omsk to size up whether the White Russian forces led by Admiral Aleksandr Vasilyevich Kolchak had any chance of success in their war with Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik army. Exactly how Donovan got on this trip remained a mystery. He claimed that John Lord O’Brien, his law partner and Woodrow Wilson confidant, asked him to go as a secret envoy at Wilson’s behest because the president needed objective intelligence on Kolchak from a trained military man. But Graves had the military training and Donovan, a Republican hostile to Wilson, seemed hardly the ideal secret agent for the Democratic president. Morris claimed Donovan begged to join the mission and he finally relented since Donovan agreed to pay his own way. After two months in typhus-infested Omsk, Donovan concluded that Kolchak’s government was cruelly corrupt but Washington’s only hope for holding Siberia together against the Bolsheviks. He also warned that Japan had designs on the region. (Wilson’s State Department paid little attention to Donovan’s warnings when he later made the rounds in Washington.)

  Ruth sailed back to the United States by herself, a bitter wife. Vincent noticed that she became “a different woman” after the Asia trip and he warned Donovan so. Ruth realized Donovan would not be the husband, or the father, that she had imagined she would have. She resolved to make her own life with her children, knowing that he would be only occasionally in the picture.

  Buffalo was perfect for Donovan’s ambitions. It had become the “Queen City of the Great Lakes,” the eleventh largest in the country with a growing Roman Catholic and Republican population. With Bradley Goodyear, Donovan formed a new law firm whose clients included insurers from the old practice plus railroads and corporations from other parts of the state. Donovan bought a large home on fashionable Perry Street and went in with Ruth’s brother, Dexter, on a summer cottage along the North Shore.

  But Donovan’s main focus, which often left his law partners breathless, was on making his Buffalo firm a national and international powerhouse rivaling the best in New York City. In the spring and summer of 1920, for example, he sailed to Europe as J. P. Morgan & Co.’s counsel to scout out foreign corporations for a Morgan-owned trading consortium and to collect intelligence on the Communist International. Donovan found economic and political turmoil in Germany, but no Comintern threat to the investment giant’s billion-dollar plans.

  His foreign travel regularly making the society pages, Donovan toyed with the idea of moving his family to London for a couple of years so he would be nearer to European business. It would do Ruth good to know the important people he’d met in Europe, to “loosen up a bit,” as he wrote in one letter, and “above all get confidence in yourself and believe in the devotion of your husband.” Ruth already was developing the confidence (she began taking foreign trips by herself, to exotic places like Tibet). It was the devotion of her husband that she wasn’t so sure of. In their first eight years of marriage, Donovan had been home only eighteen uninterrupted months. He also continued to be solicitous and charming to female clients who found him such a good listener. Gossip persisted in Buffalo that Donovan offered more than his ear. Even Vincent began to worry about his brother’s “erring” tendencies, as he once delicately put it.

  AT THE BEGINNING of 1922, Donovan took another detour from corporate law. Senator Wadsworth, by now a close political friend whose campaign coffers Donovan regularly filled with checks, engineered his appointment as United States attorney for Buffalo and western New York. Donovan replaced a prosecutor who had run afoul of the state Anti-Saloon League. Donovan had never been particularly moralistic about alcohol but he now vowed to strictly enforce the Volstead Act. In Buffalo it was a hot
topic. The city’s crime rate had increased. Buffalo was a smuggling haven for rum and heroin runners from Canada. The local Ku Klux Klan, which allied with the Anti-Saloon League, set aside its anti-Catholic bigotry and praised Donovan’s dry stand. On the other side, the Irish and other ethnic groups in Buffalo detested Prohibition and routinely violated it. What’s more, Francis X. Schwab, a brewery owner and the city’s mayor, backed the immigrants and fought the liquor ban. Donovan became a zealous prosecutor. He went after bootleggers, who sent him and his family death threats, he raided a Chinese opium kingpin who was paying off Buffalo cops, cracked down on coal profiteers, prosecuted strikers who had dynamited a rail line, and even had Schwab in court on liquor violation charges.

  Being a U.S. attorney was not a full-time job. Donovan remained a partner in his law firm with Goodyear. In August 1922, state Republican leaders talked him into running for lieutenant governor with incumbent Governor Nathan Miller, but the Democratic ticket headed by Alfred E. Smith easily defeated them. Donovan also continued to roam Europe, taking a three-month Mediterranean excursion with Ruth in early 1923. He made a side trip to inflation-wracked Berlin, where diplomats briefed him on a young extremist named Adolf Hitler who was leading the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in Munich.

  Before he left for Europe, Donovan squeezed into his colonel’s uniform, which he could still do at age forty, to attend a ceremony at his old regiment’s armory in New York City. Father Duffy had not given up his lobbying to have his friend awarded the Medal of Honor and the stars now lined up in Donovan’s favor. As Army chief of staff, Pershing had become more liberal about awarding the medal. Republican Warren Harding was in the White House. Donovan’s patron, Wadsworth, chaired the Senate Military Affairs Committee and had been pestering the War Department to bestow Medals of Honor on members of the regiment. John Weeks, Harding’s war secretary, approved the award—four years after the armistice.

  Some four thousand World War veterans crowded into the armory. When Major General Robert Lee Bullard draped the Medal of Honor around Donovan’s neck they broke into a long and loud cheer. Donovan was now the only man to win the Army’s top three awards in the World War. Even more so, this medal was vindication for the regiment’s humiliation at Landres-et-Saint-Georges. Donovan recognized as much. His face flushed, he pivoted on his heel and called the regiment to attention. He unsnapped the ribbon from his neck and presented the medal to the unit. “It doesn’t belong to me,” he said quietly. “It belongs to the boys who are not here, the boys who are resting under the white crosses in France or in the cemeteries of New York, also to the boys who were lucky enough to come through.” He left the medal with the armory.

  DONOVAN STOOD BY the switchboard outside his U.S. attorney’s office, his shirtsleeves rolled up. It was a muggy Thursday night, August 2, 1923. Federal liquor agents gathered around waiting for him to give the order for the raid. Among the many Buffalo establishments that routinely ignored Prohibition was the prestigious Saturn Club on Delaware Avenue. Its members, the city’s wealthy and powerful, kept their liquor stored in private lockers, taking the bottles out to mix their own drinks in the men’s grill room and bar. Or they hauled up cases of booze from the basement for lavish Roaring Twenties parties. The Saturn Club’s flouting of the law was the worst kept secret in Buffalo. The city’s lower-class griped: Why were federal agents always raiding their saloons while ignoring watering holes for the rich? It put Donovan in an awkward position. He had not given up his membership in the Saturn Club when he became U.S. attorney—though he should have—and he knew the imbibing was going on there. Donovan had warned the club’s leaders he could not ignore the illegal drinking much longer and was finally forced to act when a bootlegger he had hauled before a grand jury testified he was the club’s supplier. The jurors expected Donovan to raid Saturn along with the other saloons the bootlegger listed as customers.

  “Go ahead, boys,” Donovan ordered, signing the search warrant application. “I’ve warned these fellows three times. For all their prestige, they are no better than East Side saloons.”

  Shortly before 11 p.m., as its members had their nightcaps in the grill room, black cars screeched to a stop in front of the Saturn Club and a half dozen liquor agents rushed in, confiscating twelve quarts of whiskey, twenty quarts of gin, several bottles of champagne, and five gallons of cheap grain alcohol. The federal men then launched a second raid at the Buffalo Country Club on Main Street, where they confiscated $5,000 worth of liquor. Donovan also belonged to that club.

  Both clubs eventually plea-bargained a settlement, which resulted in $500 fines for each and no one sent to jail. But a political firestorm erupted, which shocked Donovan. Newspapers carried banner headlines on the raids. Donovan was praised or cursed. Working folks were delighted to see the upper crust served with the same justice. But Donovan became a pariah among the city’s elite. He quickly learned who his real friends were and they weren’t many. Both clubs now received him with stony silence and hostile stares. Goodyear, who was a Saturn member and livid over the raid, pulled out of their law firm, which deeply hurt Donovan. A delegation from the club went to another younger partner, Frank Raichle, and told him he had better leave Donovan’s firm or he would “never get anywhere as a lawyer.” Raichle told them “to go to hell,” and stuck with Donovan. But he was jeered when he entered the club.

  Dexter was furious with his brother-in-law for putting the Rumsey family in this awkward spot. So was Ruth. The whispering campaign—always out there among many who were jealous that Donovan had achieved a social status they didn’t think he deserved—now intensified. Donovan had no right to be holier than thou on liquor considering his womanizing, detractors sniped. “He is just a cheap Irish nobody from the wrong side of the railroad tracks, who only became of some importance when he married a socially prominent woman with lots of money,” sneered one. “He is interested in nothing but chasing women and having a good time.” Ruth heard the talk and it infuriated her. She never fully forgave her husband for the raid.

  Chapter 4

  Politics

  DONOVAN’S POLITICAL CAREER in Buffalo was over after the Saturn Club raid. His law practice there was nearly ruined. He wasn’t run out of town but he might as well have been. His prospects looked dim until Calvin Coolidge came to his rescue a year later. A humorless former Massachusetts governor picked as Harding’s vice president, Coolidge was nevertheless a good government politician who, when he assumed the presidency in 1923 after Harding died, quickly cleaned house of Harding holdovers tainted by the Teapot Dome scandal. Among the men he cashiered: Attorney General Harry Daugherty. At one point, Donovan, whose Saturn raid had made him a celebrity outside Buffalo, was rumored as Coolidge’s choice to replace Daugherty. That sent the politically powerful Klan to battle stations over the prospect of a Roman Catholic being in the cabinet. Coolidge instead made Harlan Stone, Donovan’s mentor from Columbia Law School, his top legal officer and Donovan Stone’s assistant attorney general over the department’s criminal division.

  The aloof New England academic and the Irish glad-hander proved a perfect match. Stone wanted an assistant to crack down on what he believed was growing lawlessness across the country from bootleggers and drug traffickers. Donovan had earned his spurs as a crime-busting prosecutor. A Buffalo newspaper reported that the city’s underworld was as glad to see him go as high society.

  Donovan, who won easy Senate confirmation, bought a stately brick two-story in Georgetown that looked like an English country manor. His starting salary at Justice was only $7,500 a year, and the couple decided to keep their home in Buffalo, to which Donovan planned to return often for his law firm business. Ruth also later bought a sprawling lodge in the upper-class resort village of Nonquitt, Massachusetts. It had nine bedrooms and a wide front porch that offered a perfect view of Buzzards Bay. Nonquitt became her and the children’s refuge from Washington’s oppressive heat each summer. Donovan at first spent many weekends there sailing
and playing tennis but soon tapered off because he found the beach house boring.

  With his usual vigor, Donovan plunged into his new job. He filled his staff with bright young attorneys with strong opinions (he did not want to be surrounded by yes-men) and hired women lawyers, which was rarely done. Any chance he could, he fled Washington to join in liquor raids around the country, one time flying in a Navy dirigible over the Caribbean to track rum runners. Ruth reveled in Washington’s social life and became as politically ambitious for Donovan as he was. Weekends were filled with dinner parties and luncheons at their Georgetown home for economists, authors, poets, entertainers, and assorted cabinet officers like Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover (a regular invitee who became a close friend of Donovan’s). Ruth proved to be a delightful hostess, although more shy and self-effacing than her extrovert husband. Quickly the rakishly handsome Justice man and his classy wife became favorite invitees for media, congressional, and embassy parties.

  No senior official could work in Washington and not make enemies, and it wasn’t long before Donovan began accumulating his share. But although he did not realize it at the time, his most implacable foe in the future would be a somewhat neurotic young attorney who had just taken over the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation.

  John Edgar Hoover could not have been more different from Donovan. He was a bachelor, obsessed with cleanliness, and sensitive about being short. He lived with his mother, was never talented in sports, went to night school to earn his law degree, and got a draft exemption from the Army to serve as a Justice Department clerk. A stylish dresser (one trait he did share with Donovan), Hoover had ascended quickly in the department, showing a flair for hunting down suspects and keeping meticulous files. Daugherty had made him assistant chief of the Bureau of Investigation, a collection largely of political cronies, alcoholics, and incompetent detectives who investigated white-collar crimes and spied on suspected communists or sometimes the department’s political enemies. Hoover convinced the newly arrived Stone, who knew the bureau had an “exceedingly bad odor,” that he was the man to clean it up. Hoover did just that, professionalizing the force. But Stone first kept him on a short leash, making the twenty-nine-year-old lawyer only the acting director and putting Donovan over him to keep watch.