Wild Bill Donovan Read online

  Hoover, who had scoped out Donovan before he even arrived at Justice, considered his new boss an empire-building dilettante, not too skilled in the courtroom, and a poor administrator. Instead of leaving Hoover alone to run his own show, Donovan began meddling in his bureau and overturning decisions with which he disagreed. Donovan considered Hoover an unimaginative civil servant, good on detail but sorely lacking in vision. It was not long before both men began keeping files on each other—Hoover maintained his dossier, filled with dirt and gossip, for the rest of Donovan’s life.

  J. Edgar Hoover soon had Donovan out of his hair, however. Stone moved to the Supreme Court in March 1925 and Coolidge replaced him not with Donovan, as Ruth wanted and many news stories speculated he would do, but rather with John Garibaldi Sargent, a fellow New Englander who turned out to be fairly lazy. As a consolation prize Donovan was made the third highest official at Justice as assistant to the attorney general and head of the antitrust division. Hoover then deftly maneuvered to have his bureau report directly to the attorney general. For long stretches, however, Donovan ended up being the de facto attorney general. Sargent spent more time at his Vermont home than in Washington and the number two man, Solicitor General William Mitchell, was consumed with Supreme Court cases, which left Donovan to run the department. Like his president, Donovan was a free marketer who tried first to cajole corporations to eliminate unfair trade practices instead of taking them to court. Even so, he prosecuted sixty-five major Sherman and Clayton antitrust act cases during the next four years and proved adept with the high-profile ones before the Supreme Court. No one would accuse him of being a legal scholar, but Donovan argued well, almost with boyish enthusiasm, before the High Court, which impressed the justices.

  Donovan quickly became a favorite of the Washington press corps; he delighted reporters with colorful, on-the-record quotes and juicy gossip off the record. Wadsworth and home state newspapers talked him up in 1926 as a New York gubernatorial candidate. (Donovan at first was eager for the GOP nomination but eventually begged off when he did not have the convention votes, which was just as well. Incumbent Al Smith had a lock on reelection.) The New York Times next floated his name as a vice presidential candidate in the 1928 election. Douglas MacArthur, who now commanded the Army’s 3rd Corps in Baltimore and had become a Donovan pen pal, wrote him that his “old friends in the Army” wanted him to be secretary of war.

  Donovan, however, was angling for a much more important cabinet post in the next administration. He had become a key campaign adviser and speechwriter for Herbert Hoover, the Republicans’ presidential nominee. In the summer of 1928, Hoover had pulled Donovan aside in the garden of his Georgetown home and said “of course you’re going to be the attorney general” if he won. But after Hoover trounced Al Smith in the election, he reneged on his promise and put Mitchell, Coolidge’s solicitor general, in charge of Justice. Powerful forces had lined up against Donovan: Southerners who would not stand for a Catholic attorney general, prohibitionists who considered him a closet wet despite his Saturn Club fame, Democratic enemies in the Senate poised to fight his nomination, and J. Edgar Hoover, who had buttonholed the president-elect’s press secretary to bad-mouth him. Herbert Hoover, who became incensed over news stories accusing him of anti-Catholic bias, also claimed he rejected Donovan because he lacked administrative experience. The best he would offer him was governor of the Philippines. Insulted, Donovan considered it political exile and refused the post. Ruth believed her husband’s greatest disappointment ever was being denied the attorney generalship. For as long as he lived, Donovan harbored a grudge against Hoover for double-crossing him.

  DONOVAN RESIGNED FROM the Justice Department in March 1929 and moved to New York City, where, with $100,000 in seed money, he formed a new law firm with his Buffalo partner, Frank Raichle, and staffed it as he had at Justice with energetic young lawyers, many from the Coolidge administration. The stock market crash eight months after he opened shop and the Great Depression that followed drained hundreds of thousands of dollars from his personal portfolio and caused the firm to struggle at first, but Donovan soon found a niche, handling legal details for the many mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies that come with an economic downturn and working the other side of the fence defending trade associations, oil companies, and coal mine owners facing government antitrust suits. Donovan also accumulated Hollywood clients, such as Jane Wyman and Mae West, many of them introduced to him by Vincent, who was ministering to stars in Los Angeles. Within ten years his firm, which eventually moved into two floors of offices at 2 Wall Street, was grossing more than $800,000 annually with over forty associates on the payroll, making its founder a millionaire. Donovan, who hated the drudgery of legal work and concentrated mostly on bringing in business or arguing the big cases that went to the Supreme Court, worked in regal style. A barber came in every morning to shave him and clip his hair, lunch was served to him in one of the city’s exclusive clubs, a tea trolley rolled by his office in the afternoon with Earl Grey, and a chauffeured limousine brought him home at night.

  DONOVAN HAD RUTH meet him at the pier when he returned from Germany in the summer of 1932. He had traveled to Berlin to scout business opportunities but prospects there seemed grim. Germany had been hammered even harder by the worldwide depression and the Nazi Party controlled the largest number of seats in the fractured Reichstag. But Donovan had politics at home on his mind. Rumors circulated in New York political circles that he and Ruth were separated, which could be damaging just now. He wanted her at his side to be framed in the shots photographers were taking of him at the pier. Ruth was more than willing to pose with him. She, too, wanted the prize he now sought.

  As his law practice built up, Donovan had hit the lecture circuit, delivering red-meat speeches before Republican audiences, accusing New York’s governor, Franklin Roosevelt, of being a “crafty” politician who ignored corruption in state government. He caught the eye once more of New York GOP leaders, who approached Donovan about running for governor. This time he was interested. A New York governor was always one of the country’s most powerful political figures outside of Washington. The position had been the launching pad for national campaigns. Roosevelt, who Donovan thought had compiled a lackluster record in Albany, was now running for president. Donovan as well saw it as the best stepping-stone for what he wanted most—to be the nation’s first Roman Catholic president.

  Donovan privately bet that FDR would beat Hoover, who he thought had been politically inept in dealing with the depression. Winning the governorship might be sweet revenge. It would prove he was electable and Hoover was not. Donovan’s Republican allies believed Hoover had calculated as much and warned him of rumors that the president was pressuring the New York party to deny him the nomination.

  If Hoover did in fact lean on the state party, he wasn’t successful. Donovan was nominated by acclamation at an enthusiastic GOP convention in October with New York assemblyman F. Trubee Davison as his running mate. Donovan knew he faced an uphill fight. His opponent was Roosevelt’s liberal lieutenant governor, Herbert Lehman, who was popular in the state and benefited from the anger that depression-weary voters nationwide felt toward the Republican Party. He began barnstorming New York, papering the state with flyers that urged voters to “put a fighting man in the governor’s chair.” Ruth always kept a smile on her face for photographers and hosted an obligatory tea for six hundred Republican women at her mother’s Delaware Avenue mansion. But though she wanted to be New York’s first lady, she spent much of the fall with the children in Nonquitt instead of at her husband’s side.

  Political friends assured Donovan he was a shoe-in. His campaign even composed a victory song—“Wild Bill Donovan, there’s magic in the name,” went one verse. Donovan should have been leery of the optimists. He was “an awful campaigner,” a horrified Davison said after appearing at several events with him. “The minute he’d get up on the platform he’d lose his great charm and his Irish wit,�
� Donovan’s running mate complained. “He just kind of froze up and got to be a statesman and that wasn’t what they were looking for.” His political organization also began hopelessly disorganized. Edward Bernays, a New York public relations consultant brought in to draft a campaign plan, left after a week when he couldn’t pry Donovan away from the horde of county chairmen and party patrons he seemed to always want around him, who were pulling him in every direction. Donovan was “busy being busy,” Bernays said. His idea of running for governor was “having a cavalcade of cars go from place to place” for speeches, but with no thought given to a strategy for winning.

  Donovan nevertheless campaigned nonstop for a month, attacking Lehman as Roosevelt’s “Siamese twin” who would sink state government in debt. Like all good Republicans of his day, Donovan believed low taxes, budget cuts, and the free market would pull the country out of the depression, not Roosevelt’s New Deal. Donovan also began to go after FDR, calling him a Hyde Park “faker” claiming to be for the working man but really a “new kind of red, white and blue dictator” with “delusions of grandeur.” He ridiculed Roosevelt’s claim in one speech that the two had been friends in law school. “I was a youngster earning my way through law school and he never knew me,” Donovan sneered.

  Roosevelt fired back, accusing Donovan of being in bed with New York public utility interests he had represented as a lawyer. FDR also had surrogates rough him up. Eleanor Roosevelt took pot shots at Donovan while stumping for Lehman. James Farley, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, sniped that Donovan “is evidently losing his head” by attacking FDR. Labor unions accused him of “persecuting” their movement when he had prosecuted union agitators as U.S attorney.

  Donovan, exhausted, woke up early Tuesday morning November 8 and with Ruth walked across the street from the Delaware Avenue mansion to a polling station to vote. Party leaders believed that in the closing days of the campaign he had narrowed the gap with Lehman and overtaken him. The evening before he had delivered his final radio address to the state from Buffalo, then paid a visit to First Ward. A huge crowd had gathered on Elk Street to cheer him, many of them friends he had known since boyhood.

  “I am just a First Ward boy who has been nominated for the highest office of the state,” Donovan said, choked up with emotion, his voice hoarse from so many speeches. “I have received some mighty nice receptions, but there has been none that has made me happier than this.”

  Shortly before nine o’clock Tuesday night, Donovan sent a congratulatory cable to Lehman at Tammany Hall. State party leaders blamed the sweep on Hoover, not Donovan. Lehman had soundly beaten him by 18 percentage points, slightly better than Roosevelt’s margin of victory over Hoover in the state. Donovan won upstate but Lehman swamped him in New York City. Even more humiliating for Donovan, he lost Buffalo by more than seventeen thousand votes. The Saturn Club raid had not been forgotten.

  Chapter 5

  Family

  WHEN THEY MOVED to New York, Bill and Ruth had bought a pricey duplex at One Beekman Place overlooking the East River, staffing it with servants and filling it with expensive furniture selected by a professional decorator. Fine china and silver always graced their dinner table. A grand piano in the living room was played for the many parties. Donovan, who always traveled first class, had no more concept of a family budget than he did a business one. Ruth’s money paid for Beekman Place and she began to quarrel with him over the huge amounts he spent. But it was the least of their problems. By the 1930s, their family had begun to go its separate ways, coming together only for holidays, which were more quick drop-bys for Donovan, who was always on the go.

  As a teenager, David was packed off to boarding school at Saint Georges in Newport, Rhode Island, where he was indifferent about his studies and resentful at being separated from his parents. In 1938, Ruth bought the Chapel Hill farm near the town of Berryville, which was part of Virginia’s upper-crust horse country west of Washington. Its Federal-style farmhouse, which sat atop a gently rising hill with a spring running through it and a spectacular view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, had been built in the mid-1820s with native stone quarried from its five-hundred-acre farm. Donovan hired a Washington architect for extensive renovations, which included adding a library, joining outside slave quarters to the main building, and installing a ten-foot-high, walk-in bank vault in the basement, where Ruth could keep jewelry and Donovan could store secret documents. But Ruth bought the farm not for her or her husband, but rather for their son.

  Shy and sensitive like Ruth, David by the time he began college was far closer to his mother than to his father, whom he considered practically a stranger. David was proud of his father but he wanted no part of the high-powered life he led. Instead David wanted to be a simple farmer.

  Though he professed to Ruth that he was just as proud of his son, Donovan was disappointed with him. He had sent him to Harvard hoping he would follow him into the law, but David dropped out after two years (the university politely termed it an “honorable dismissal”) and enrolled in Cornell, where he stayed only a year to learn enough about agriculture so he could start growing wheat and breeding Angus cattle at Chapel Hill.

  Donovan was far closer to Patricia, who had his strong-willed, outgoing personality, and who had always loved sports, the outdoors, and riding horses with her father. As a teenager she attended Rosemary Hall (Ruth’s alma mater) in Connecticut. Later as a young woman, she began filling in for Ruth as hostess for her father’s parties.

  It was while Patricia was attending Wellesley College that she often brought home to Chapel Hill or to the Beekman Place apartment in New York her best friend from Rosemary Hall, Mary Grandin. The daughter of a prominent family in Warren County, Pennsylvania, Mary now went to Mount Holyoke College. She was a smart, beautiful, and vivacious brunette, who spoke fair French, enjoyed English literature and photography, and was a good shot with a rifle. And it didn’t take many visits to the Donovans before she became smitten, as many young women were, with Patricia’s glamorous father—so much so that gossip spread in New York circles and Berryville that she was one of Donovan’s girlfriends. That was not the case. To Donovan, Mary was just Patricia’s best friend—and soon to be his daughter-in-law.

  By the beginning of 1939, Mary had fallen in love with David. They married on June 17 in Warren County. Patricia was the maid of honor and Vincent helped officiate. Afterward, the young couple settled into Chapel Hill with Ruth to run the busy farm. But malicious gossip continued that Donovan had married Mary to his son to continue his affair with her.

  Her hair beginning to turn prematurely gray by the early 1930s, Ruth continued to be treated by Timothy for illnesses and insomnia caused by loneliness. She was only infrequently at her husband’s side during parties and vacationed almost always without him. During a six-month tour of Europe with Patricia in 1930 she received “electric treatments” that doctors there had begun to use for depression cases, but wrote Donovan that “so far” she had felt “no result from it.” The electroshock therapy was not helped by the fact that Donovan wrote her infrequently, which made her sad, and canceled a trip to join them because of business.

  After David’s wedding, Ruth boarded the Yankee, a two-masted, ninety-two-foot schooner home-ported in Gloucester, to sail around the world. She had sailed on the Yankee two years before for the Asian leg of its world voyage and enjoyed the rugged life on board, manning the sails and even cooking in the galley. David had joined her for that voyage before entering Cornell. He worked as a crewman in the boat’s small engine room and discovered he had mechanical aptitude.

  Donovan was delighted with his wife’s independence. “I am proud of what you have done,” he wrote her during her voyage. Striking out on her own, he believed, not only “will bring you great contentment,” it will make the two of them appreciate each other more.

  But the separate lives Donovan was comfortable with came at a price. He was furious when Ruth decided to have a risky hysterectomy
in 1939 without consulting him—although he had no grounds for complaint considering he was not around much to consult. “I had two objections,” he wrote her in an indignant letter. “First that you did not think enough of me to mention it and, second, that you used some rotten judgment and so utterly disregarded consequences with anyone else.”

  Donovan loved Ruth, but he loved his dalliances as well. Among New York society ladies—married and unmarried—Donovan became a darling. He occasionally took their divorce cases, such as Helen Astor’s split from Vincent, always charming the aggrieved wife with his empathy. He became close friends with activist journalist Dorothy Thompson. At the “21” Club he partied with Marion Davies, a film actress and William Randolph Hearst’s mistress. Much of it was innocent. Unlike his chauvinistic colleagues, Donovan liked having women as friends and treated them as equals, which made him all the more attractive to them. Ruth joked with him about the gossip he stirred. But she was sure that he took some of these friendships a step further—which he sometimes did—and it understandably angered her. She confided to her friends about “his girls,” as she derisively put it. She resented the “damned fool” women who threw themselves at Bill. And it was during the late 1930s that her husband pursued his most serious affair.