Douglas Waller: "Wild Bill Donovan The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage", February 2011

Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage

By Douglas Waller

This edition: Hardcover, 480 pages. Free Press/Simon & Schuster, February 2011. Hardcover, 480 pages. ISBN-10: 1416567445. ISBN-13: 9781416567448

OutHistory.org would like to know of additional sources referring to William J. Donovan, homosexuals, and homosexuality.

OPEN ENTRY: This entry is open to collaborative creation by anyone with evidence, citations, and analysis to share, so no particular, named creator is responsible for the accuracy and cogency of its content. Please use this entry's Comment section at the bottom of the page to suggest improvements about which you are unsure. Thanks.

Reviews

Conant, Jennet. "Swashbuckling Spymaster: A biography of the head of the Wolrd War II intelligence service, the precuresor of the C.A.A." New York Times Book Review, February 13, 2011, page 14.

Excerpt: “The feuding fiefdoms” of the Army, Navy and State Department had little sympathy for Roosevelt’s new spymaster, but Donovan’s “most implacable foe” was J. Edgar Hoover, the ambitious director of the F.B.I., who resented the brash interloper’s meddling in his bureau, and who regarded him from the outset as a threat to his power. The central villain of “Wild Bill Donovan,” Hoover was a bachelor who still lived at home with his mother, obsessed over cleanliness and was sensitive about his height. Add to this that he was untalented at sports, earned his law degree at night school and got a draft exemption from the Army, and it’s easy to see why he felt competitive with the macho Donovan.

As the two rival intelligence chiefs aggressively expanded their empires, their run-ins grew more frequent. Waller, the author of several books on the military, writes that “it was not long before both men began keeping files on each other.” Hoover was particularly incensed that Donovan was close to William Stephenson, Churchill’s leading spy in the United States, who had long been an irritant to Hoover. He maintained a dossier filled with dirt about Donovan’s unseemly ties to British intelligence as well as his flagrant womanizing, while the O.S.S. chief accumulated reports that the F.B.I. director was homosexual.

Additional References

Gentry, Curt. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Page 295: Donovan "ordered a highly secretive investigation into the rumors of Hoover's and Tolson's alleged homosexuality, the first of a humber of such inquieries, which continued long after the OSS became the CIA."

Gerassi, John. The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice, and Folly in an American City. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Pp. xviii + 328. [References to Big Bill Donovan and his role in the Boise witchhunt?]

Johnson, David Alan. Betrayal: The True Story of J. Edgar Hoover and the Nazi Saboteurs Captured During World War II. Hippocrene Books. Hardcover ISBN10: 0781811732. ISBN13: 9780781811736. Pages: 208. Publication Date: 12/2007.

Page 177. Hoover kept filed on Donovan. "(Donovan also kept a file on Hoover and his alleged homosexuality.)"

Category:William J. Donovan <comments />