On June 7, 1944—D-day Plus One—General William J. Donovan, the chief of the Office of Strategic Services, America’s wartime spy agency, landed on Utah Beach in Normandy. His presence in the combat zone had been strictly forbidden by his superiors in Washington, in order to protect the spymaster and his secrets from being captured. Donovan, characteristically, ignored the order. As an infantry officer in the First World War, he had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism under fire. Now, as he waded ashore, Donovan was wearing the sky-blue ribbon of the medal on his uniform jacket.
On Utah Beach, Donovan and his commander of covert operations in Europe, Colonel David K. E. Bruce, a former businessman and Donovan’s sometime squash partner, came under fire from a German fighter plane. Falling on top of Donovan, Bruce inadvertently cut his boss in the throat with the edge of his steel helmet. Donovan “bled profusely,” Bruce recalled at a dinner of O.S.S. vets many years later, but nonetheless “sauntered inland” to the American front lines.
Advancing toward a hedgerow, the two O.S.S. officers suddenly ran into German machine-gun fire. Flattened on the ground, Donovan turned to Bruce and said, “David, we mustn’t be captured. We know too much.” Bruce mechanically answered, “Yes, sir.” Donovan then inquired, “Have you the pill?” Bruce confessed that he was not carrying the death pellet concocted by the O.S.S.’s scientific adviser, Stanley Lovell. “Never mind,” replied Donovan. “I have two of them.” Still lying flat, the general proceeded to empty his pockets. Hotel keys, a passport, currency of several nations, photographs of grandchildren, travel orders—all tumbled out, but no pills. “Never mind,” said Donovan, “we can do without them, but if we get out of here, you must send a message to Gibbs, the Hall Porter at Claridge’s in London, telling him on no account to allow the servants in the hotel to touch some dangerous medicines in my bathroom.”
“This humanitarian disposition having been made,” Bruce recalled, Donovan then whispered to his subordinate, “I must shoot first.” Bruce responded, “Yes, sir, but can we do much against machine guns with our pistols?” Donovan clarified the situation: “Oh, you don’t understand. I mean, if we are about to be captured, I’ll shoot you first. After all, I am your commanding officer.”
As it turned out, Donovan and Bruce made it safely back to Claridge’s a few days later. Bruce went on to a distinguished diplomatic career, serving as ambassador to England and France. When, at the annual dinner of Veterans of the O.S.S., in 1971, Ambassador Bruce recounted this Normandy adventure, no doubt exaggerating slightly for effect, the 500 or so people at the Statler Hilton got a good laugh. There may have been some eye-rolling and rueful smiles as well, as the Old Boys present that night recalled the brave and gallant—and sometimes reckless or nonsensical—missions they had undertaken for the man known as “Wild Bill” Donovan.
The Central Intelligence Agency regards Donovan as its founding father. When Donovan died, on February 8, 1959, the C.I.A. cabled its station chiefs around the world: “The man more responsible than any other for the existence of the Central Intelligence Agency has passed away.” Today, Donovan’s statue stands in the lobby of the C.I.A.’s headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, and some old agency hands still celebrate Donovan’s bravado and élan—“an attitude,” says the C.I.A.’s chief historian, David Robarge, “of do it, try it, derring-do.” Robarge, like many of his contemporaries in the U.S. intelligence community, is at once awed by Donovan and wary of his legacy. Presidents have been tempted from time to time to use the C.I.A. as a secret and “deniable” weapon. The lure of covert action “creates an expectation,” says Robarge, choosing his words carefully, “that cannot always be fulfilled.”
Liberal democracies need secret intelligence services to protect against their enemies, even more so when the enemy is a shadowy web of suicidal terrorists. Donovan and his spiritual heirs relished the fight. There are in the intelligence community today latter-day Donovans who want to take big risks, and damn the consequences. But there are also highly risk-averse bureaucrats who have seen the C.I.A. burned by “flaps” (the old C.I.A. term for blown operations) and by “blowback” from operations that in the long run have done more harm than good (the C.I.A.-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala in 1953 and 1954 are the classic examples). Old-fashioned espionage—known as human intelligence, or humint—can seem glamorous in the movies. In real life, it often produces meager results. Donovan’s legacy has been the willingness of the intelligence community to take chances by staging coups and mounting other daring covert operations. Its history has been one more of failure than success.
William Joseph Donovan may have been larger than life, but he defies easy caricature. He was a poor Irish boy who worshipped the British upper class, a clever trickster who was at the same time gullible, a warm, engaging figure who could be brutally cold, and a great American success story whose life was also marked by folly. His exploits are utterly improbable but by now well documented in declassified wartime records that portray a brave, noble, headlong, gleeful, sometimes outrageous pursuit of action and skullduggery.
Born in 1883, the son of a railroad superintendent in Buffalo, New York, Donovan used his physical magnetism and innate charm to better himself. Having transferred from a small Catholic college in upstate New York, he played quarterback on the Columbia football team and was a classmate of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s at Columbia Law School. He married a blonde horsewoman named Ruth Rumsey, the daughter of the richest man in Buffalo, and became the first Roman Catholic to be offered membership in the city’s elite Saturn Club. Eager for military service, he joined with some society men to form a cavalry troop known as the Silk Stocking Boys, who chased the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa along the Rio Grande. When America entered the European war, in 1917, Donovan won a commission as a major with “the Fighting 69th,” a regiment of poor Irish toughs—self-described “Micks” who worshipped their dashing “Wild Bill.”
It is not clear when Donovan first heard his nickname—possibly as a rambunctious Columbia gridiron star, the name coming secondhand by way of a Detroit Tigers pitcher who threw some wild pitches in the 1909 World Series. But he was definitely “Wild Bill” to his troops after he led them across the Ourcq River in northern France on July 27, 1918. Hemmed in by machine guns on three sides, the Fighting 69th took no prisoners while losing 600 of 1,000 men, including three-quarters of the officers and Donovan’s two aides de camp, the poet Joyce Kilmer and a young Boston Brahmin named Oliver Ames. For his bravery, Donovan won the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest award. Going into battle near the Marne on October 14, he ignored the officers’ custom of covering or stripping off insignia of rank (targets for snipers) and instead sallied forth wearing his medals. “They can’t hit me and they won’t hit you!” he shouted to his men. The next morning he was wounded—struck by a bullet “as if somebody had hit me on the back of the leg with a spiked club,” he recalled. Donovan refused to be evacuated and continued to direct his men until even American tanks were turning back under withering German fire. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in this engagement. The Fighting 69th, or what was left of it, returned home to a ticker-tape parade up Fifth Avenue.
The war over, Donovan practiced law in Buffalo. Flamboyant in all things, he returned to the office one day after a meeting with some rich clients to announce that all the partners’ offices should have baronial fireplaces. “Expense was never a consideration with Bill,” recalled a partner, Frank Raichle. But he soon grew bored in private practice and won an appointment as U.S. attorney, the federal government’s local prosecutor. Prohibition had shut down Buffalo’s working-class bars, so—declaring that the “law is the law”—Donovan ordered a raid on his own posh Saturn Club by federal agents wielding sledge hammers. Damned by Buffalo society as an ungrateful parvenu, Donovan was effectively driven from town, much to the consternation of his upper-crust Wasp wife’s family.
He moved first to Washington, D.C., in 1924, to become assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, then to New York in 1929 to start his own law firm. Ever restless, he ran for governor of New York in 1932, though he turned out to be a surprisingly poor politician, resented by his natural base of Irish voters because he looked and too often acted like the rich Republican he was. He freely spent money, his own and his wife’s, and sometimes failed to pay taxes. He was always on the move—between his Washington mansion in Georgetown (later owned by *The Washington Post’*s Katharine Graham), his duplex on New York’s Beekman Place, his summer home on Cape Cod, and his country home in Virginia horse country. He never stayed anywhere for long. “Bill out, Bed early” is a familiar entry in the diary of his neglected wife, Ruth. “He was like a kestrel in a cage, always seeking to escape,” wrote one of Donovan’s biographers, Anthony Cave Brown.
Increasingly, Donovan was drawn to Europe. In 1939, he met Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, where he observed Nazi Germany’s weapons and warplanes getting a tryout in the Fascist cause. He visited Mussolini in Italy and journeyed through various nations along the periphery of Hitler’s Germany. Ostensibly traveling for business and pleasure, he was in fact gathering intelligence for a secretive private organization known as the Room, a group of international businessmen and lawyers who traded tips on the increasingly ominous developments on the European continent.
At the time, the U.S. government had no formal spy agency. In 1929, the Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, had abolished the highly effective Black Chamber, a code-breaking organization left over from World War I. “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” Stimson famously declared. Colonel Stimson was an honorable-schoolboy type, and his intentions were noble, the product of peacetime idealism and a certain American innocence. British gentlemen were not burdened by such scruples. Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service dated back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in the 16th century. In 1939, with Britain facing a gathering storm and the task of safeguarding an empire, the foreign-intelligence service, known as M.I.6, began looking for ways to lure the Americans to the cause. They spotted a potentially useful ally in Donovan.
The British enlisted the help of a debonair Canadian businessman named William Stephenson. A self-made millionaire and former lightweight-boxing champion, Stephenson had been, like Donovan, a much-decorated World War I hero. He actively courted Donovan’s friendship. The strapping Donovan and diminutive Stephenson eventually became so close that they were known as “Big Bill” and “Little Bill.”
Stephenson was, secretly, a spy for M.I.6, who went by the code name “Intrepid.” At some point Stephenson revealed his double life to Donovan—and implored him to join the fight against the Axis. On July 14, 1940, Donovan flew to London to meet Colonel Stewart Menzies, the chief of M.I.6, known to his fellow spies simply as “C.” Donovan met “C” at M.I.6 headquarters in an old Victorian manse on London’s Broadway, where the porters wore brass buttons engraved with the motto on the royal coat of arms, “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Evil be to him who evil thinks”). British intelligence should “bare their breast” to Donovan, Stephenson had cabled Menzies. Donovan was shown the inner workings of the British war effort and invited to dine with King George VI.
Returning to Washington as the Battle of Britain raged and the fate of England seemed to hang in the balance, Donovan reported to Roosevelt that he believed Britain would survive the German blitz but needed America’s help. That is what F.D.R. wanted to hear, and the president soon put Donovan to work as a lawyer trying to find ways around congressional strictures against selling armaments to Britain. By December, Donovan was back in London, where he met with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who recognized a kindred spirit. Together the two former cavalrymen recited heroic poetry (“And oh! the thundering press of knights,” they declaimed together, “When as their war-cries swell, / May tole from heaven an angel bright, / And rouse a fiend from hell”). New Year’s 1941 found Donovan aboard a Royal Air Force plane, skirting German fighters over France en route to Gibraltar, and dining on a picnic provided by Lord Mountbatten: three bottles of Moselle, a flask of hot turtle soup, fresh lobster, cold pheasant, and Stilton cheese, served by an orderly in a white jacket and white gloves.
After touring the Mediterranean and the Balkans, where he witnessed British commandos waging a desperate secret war, Donovan came home determined that America should join the fight with the same sort of cloak-and-dagger tools. “Hopeless to do anything with Bill,” Ruth wrote forlornly in her diary. “He has the British Empire for breakfast.” Working with a British naval commander named Ian Fleming—later the author of the James Bond saga—Donovan drafted a blueprint for a secret American intelligence service based on the British model. F.D.R. agreed to the idea, appointing Donovan to run an organization called Coordinator of Information, an intentionally innocuous-sounding name. “Little Bill” Stephenson cabled “C” back at M.I.6 headquarters in London: “Donovan accuses me of having intrigued and driven him into the appointment. You can imagine how relieved I am after months of battle and jockeying for position in Washington that our man is in a position of such importance to our efforts.”
In his memoirs, Stephenson suggested that Donovan was in fact a British secret agent, recruited as early as World War I, but Stephenson was not above exaggeration. The official C.I.A. history of the O.S.S., unsurprisingly, rejects the charge. I asked William vanden Heuval, who as a young lawyer had worked closely with Donovan and knew him well, whether he thought Donovan had grown a little too close to Great Britain in 1940–41. Sitting in his Park Avenue office, vanden Heuval, 79, insisted that Donovan may have liked English clothes and manners, but he owed no fealty, secret or otherwise, to the British. “I don’t think he was an Anglophile,” said vanden Heuval. “He was Irish. He was an Irish warlord. He could command loyalty, like Bobby Kennedy,” for whom vanden Heuval also worked. “He wouldn’t ask others to do what he wouldn’t do and they knew it. He lived on the cusp of danger.”
Donovan saw war coming and wanted to fight. He would have preferred to command an infantry division in the U.S. Army, but he was too old to be offered the chance, so he set about creating his own secret force in the form of the C.O.I. Great Britain had a tradition of using the ties of school and social class to forge a bond of trust, a secret brotherhood. “Intelligence is the business of gentlemen,” declared “C.” Donovan likewise believed in the brilliant amateur, the Ivy League athlete who, without a great deal of preparation, could become a secret agent or commando dropped behind enemy lines. He went about recruiting men with pedigrees—Archibald MacLeish, the poet and Librarian of Congress, and a member of Yale’s Skull and Bones; Paul Mellon, of the banking dynasty; two scions of the House of Morgan, Henry and Junius, who used Donovan’s London club memberships for clandestine ops; Alfred du Pont, who went on to direct espionage in France; various swells named Auchincloss, Coolidge, and Vanderbilt; a smattering of exotics, such as a former officer in the Russian imperial army known as Prince (he was not a real one) Serge Obolensky; and a few showbiz types, including Hollywood director John Ford, who made propaganda films. Donovan recruited so many sons and daughters of families in the Social Register that O.S.S., it was said, stood for “Oh So Social.” Many of the recruits had close ties to Britain. Raymond Guest, a polo player who ran clandestine maritime operations, was Churchill’s cousin.
Donovan’s effort to build a global spy network inevitably ran into fierce opposition from existing intelligence organizations in the military and law enforcement. The army’s chief of intelligence, Sherman Miles, declared that a super spy agency would be “calamitous.” The F.B.I.’s J. Edgar Hoover called the creation of a wartime spy agency “Roosevelt’s folly”—and opened a dossier on Donovan’s personal life. (Donovan’s financial woes were duly recorded, along with extramarital affairs.) Hoover tried to forbid Donovan from sending agents into South America, as did Nelson Rockefeller, who was building his own fiefdom as the State Department’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. When Donovan tried to recruit ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein to spy in South America, Rockefeller, who was Kirstein’s social friend, confronted Donovan. According to Rockefeller, Donovan turned “absolutely scarlet” and lied about the overture. “Donovan was an unsavory character,” Rockefeller recalled, “but very smart and tough.”
The attack on Pearl Harbor tipped the balance to Donovan. Roosevelt decided to strengthen Donovan’s hand, giving him millions in unvouchered funds and, in June 1942, renaming the C.O.I. the Office of Strategic Services, with license to wage secret war around the globe. Donovan set up headquarters in a nondescript building, jokingly called “the Kremlin,” on a hillside overlooking the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. (Today the compound serves as the headquarters of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.) The style of the O.S.S. was informal. Rank meant little. The future historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., officially an army corporal, ran spy networks in Europe and did not hesitate to countermand his nominal superiors. The O.S.S. was also freewheeling. “Woe to the officer who turned down a project because, on its face, it seemed ridiculous or at least unusual,” recalled David Bruce. “His imagination was unlimited. Ideas were his plaything. Excitement made him snort like a race horse.” In the early days, no scheme was too madcap. An O.S.S. psychologist decided that Hitler could be demoralized by exposure to vast quantities of pornography. O.S.S. men dutifully set about collecting smut to be dropped near the Reichfuhrer’s headquarters. Before the plan could be executed, an Army Air Force colonel cursed Donovan and swore he would not risk the life of a single airman on such a boondoggle.
The “glorious amateurs”—Yale quarterbacks and the like—whom Donovan recruited were not always well suited to cloak-and-dagger work, but he also brought aboard some very professional spies. The most able would prove to be Allen Dulles, a New York lawyer and member of the Room, who operated out of Bern, Switzerland, during the war. Dulles’s agents included high-ranking officers in the German military (some of them members of “the Black Orchestra,” plotting to kill Hitler) and, improbably, the psychologist Carl Jung (“Agent 488”), who analyzed the psyches of German leaders. Dulles’s spies produced important revelations about the Nazis’ V-1 and V-2 rocket programs. President Roosevelt was so impressed that he had himself patched into Dulles’s nightly radio calls to Donovan.
Eager to court F.D.R., Donovan wanted to build a spectacular War Room with a huge globe, lit from within, to display American operations around the world so that, as Donovan explained, “the tired mind of the president” could easily assimilate information. F.D.R. never gave the go-ahead for Donovan’s command center. The president certainly egged Donovan on in many ways (F.D.R. was a fan of spy novels and a fomenter of creative competition among his lieutenants), but from the outset he was also privately wary of Donovan’s boundless enthusiasm. As early as April 1942, F.D.R. joked to an adviser that he was thinking of putting Donovan “on some nice, quiet, isolated island where he could scrap with some Japs every morning before breakfast … [and] would be out of trouble and entirely happy.”
Roosevelt did not need to banish Donovan from Washington. The O.S.S. chief—given the rank of a two-star general—was forever flying off on secret missions. His men were not always glad to see him. Thinking that H. Stuart Hughes, a young O.S.S. officer in North Africa, spoke good Italian, he ordered Hughes to prepare for a parachute jump into German-occupied Italy. Lacking any parachute training or even much Italian, Hughes asked his O.S.S. superior what he should do. “Disappear till the general leaves,” was the answer. (Hughes went on to become a distinguished historian at Harvard.) Between August 2, 1943, and January 4, 1946, Donovan made 17 trips overseas—spending more time abroad than in Washington. The recurring memory of one aide, Ned Putzell, was of “Donovan, wrapped in an enormous sheepskin greatcoat in the cold of an army transport, working through the night, as they skirted Luftwaffe fighter perimeters.”
Donovan never stopped trying to see action. Donovan’s son, David, had joined the navy and was aboard a landing ship preparing for the invasion of Sicily in November 1943. He was shocked (but perhaps not surprised) to find his father, in full combat gear, asleep on the deck. Elizabeth McIntosh, one of many women of the O.S.S. (another was Julia Child, later famous for her cookbooks), recalls laboring on a Donovan operation on the island of Ceylon, in the Indian Ocean—stuffing propaganda leaflets into condoms to be floated ashore on Japanese-held islands—when General Donovan himself appeared one day. “You couldn’t help but be attracted to him,” McIntosh, now 97, told me. “The way he walked, upright, always straight up.” Though Donovan had grown silver-haired and heavyset (he had a fondness for thick steaks), at the age of 60 he still moved like an athlete, on the balls of his feet.
Donovan’s persona was vividly captured by another subordinate, Walter Lord, later a best-selling author (A Night to Remember, Day of Infamy), who entered the O.S.S. out of Princeton and Yale Law School and ran covert operations from O.S.S. headquarters in London. In a letter to a friend, published in a private memoir, Lord described a visit from Donovan in March 1945:
“Ensconced in his fabulous Claridge’s suite, he spent his days holding court to a host of Colonels, Ambassadors, Movie Directors, and pals from the old days. Like some all-potent Oriental Swami, he would with the wave of a hand dispense justice to all within his orbit, and deliver an unending stream of conflicting policy decisions that brought his subordinates to the verge of collapse. While he pondered the problems of state, he doodled. At night he would read as many as a half dozen books at one sitting, jotting down excerpts that appealed to him. Brilliant, energetic, imaginative, and resourceful, he was unfortunately also selfish, petty, extravagant, and something of a racketeer.”
In November 1944, Donovan sent F.D.R. a top-secret memo proposing the establishment of a permanent worldwide intelligence agency to succeed the wartime O.S.S. (Already, the O.S.S. and the Soviet secret police, the N.K.V.D., were spying on each other.) The report promptly surfaced in the press, beneath lurid headlines charging that Donovan sought to create an “American Gestapo.” At the time, it was widely assumed that the F.B.I.’s Hoover was behind the leak. But a C.I.A. historian later suggested that the leaker was someone close to the president. F.D.R. felt the need to keep Donovan in check. He “loves power for its own sake,” Roosevelt told an associate. “We must find a way to harness the guy, because if we don’t he’ll be doing a lot of things other than what we want him to do.” Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, was even warier. He had read a report assembled by Colonel Richard Park, an army officer who ran the White House map room. According to the C.I.A. history of the O.S.S., the Park Report included “scores—over 120—items accusing O.S.S. or its personnel of incompetence, insecurity, corruption, ‘orgies,’ nepotism, black marketing, and almost anything else one could name.” The report was a vicious act of score-settling by the many bureaucratic rivals of the O.S.S. (General Douglas MacArthur banned O.S.S. officers from even entering his theater of operations in the Pacific.)
In fairness, the O.S.S. had performed valuable service, especially in Europe, by tying up Nazi forces with underground operations. But the most honest postwar scorecard was provided in a confidential C.I.A. oral history by Richard Helms, an O.S.S. veteran who went on to become C.I.A. director in the late 60s and early 70s. “I don’t think it made any difference, or much difference,” Helms, a laconic figure, said of his old wartime outfit. O.S.S. officers “worked their asses off to try to affect the outcome of the war one way or another. There were some successes, but it was not a howling success as an organization.”
Even so, when the C.I.A. emerged out of the rubble of the O.S.S. in the early years of the Cold War, many of its top operators were old O.S.S. hands. Donovan, who had returned to practicing law when the O.S.S. vanished after the war, was excluded from the new intelligence agency. But Donovan’s top O.S.S. spy, Allen Dulles, ran the C.I.A. during its most aggressive period, 1953 to 1961, and William Colby, an O.S.S. veteran who had jumped behind German lines, was director from 1973 to 1976. Ronald Reagan brought in William Casey, who had run spy operations inside Nazi Germany, to revive the demoralized and flagging C.I.A. in 1981.
Throughout its history, the C.I.A. has struggled with a tension bequeathed by Donovan. To fight an evil foe sometimes takes a willingness to go to the dark side—to use bribes and blackmail, disinformation and propaganda, even assassination. The C.I.A.’s operations directorate was known in some quarters as “the Department of Dirty Tricks.” Donovan’s heirs were the spymasters who pushed the edge—and sometimes plunged over it, as Dulles did when he staged the Bay of Pigs invasion, the failed C.I.A.-backed effort to topple Castro in Cuba in 1961. By the 1990s, the C.I.A. had become ultra-cautious. But after 9/11, the ghost of Wild Bill rode again, into Afghanistan in the first giddy days of the War on Terror, and then with mixed and sometimes disturbing results as the C.I.A. fought al-Qaeda with Predator strikes and coercive interrogation at “black sites.”
Donovan’s career in the spy trade was over by 1946—officially, at least. But vanden Heuval, who accompanied Donovan as an aide when the old general was appointed ambassador to Thailand, in 1953, says that his boss often spoke by phone with C.I.A. director Dulles. As ambassador, Donovan was deeply involved in setting up C.I.A. operations in Vietnam and throughout Southeast Asia. Donovan was a particular fan and sponsor of the legendary Edward Lansdale, who ran operations in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Cuba, and was said to be the inspiration for the well-meaning but meddlesome C.I.A. agent in the novel The Ugly American.
In Thailand, Donovan first began to show signs of the dementia that finally put him in the hospital, in 1957. Donovan’s last years were sad. He imagined he saw the Red Army coming over the 59th Street bridge, into Manhattan, and in one memorable last mission, fled the hospital, wandering down the street in his pajamas. In his last days, Donovan received a visitor—the former supreme commander of the Allied invasion, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The president visibly stiffened and stood erect in the presence of a man who had shown such bravery under fire. Donovan was, Eisenhower told a friend, “the last hero.”
There are not many O.S.S. veterans alive today. But Donovan’s former special assistant, Fisher Howe, now 91, still vividly remembers his old boss’s bright blue eyes, soft voice, and gentlemanly manners. Howe’s memories of Donovan are full of reverence, affection, and not a little ambivalence. Howe regarded Donovan as a giant of his age, though a flawed one. “Donovan and F.D.R. were so much alike,” Howe recalled as we spoke one afternoon at the Washington, D.C., retirement home where he now lives. “They were both devious.” Howe paused. “I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. Donovan played people against each other. He would say, ‘I want you to report to me personally.’ But he made you feel loyal to him.”
Donovan, said Howe, was one of those rare men who were truly not afraid to die, and he expected others to be fearless, too. He was always ready for further adventures. On D-day, Donovan told David Bruce that he had arranged to be buried at Arlington Cemetery and asked Bruce if he had done the same. When Bruce said no, Donovan replied, “You should get a plot near mine. Then we could start an underground together.”
