Book of the week: Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage by Douglas Waller

Among Donovan's more harebrained schemes was the attempt to make Hitler's moustache fall off and his voice “go soprano” by injecting female hormones into his vegetables. 

(Free Press, $30)

William J. Donovan, who created the nation’s first unified intelligence agency, was an “authentic American hero,” said Joseph C. Goulden in The Washington Times. A decorated World War I veteran whose taste for danger earned him the nickname “Wild Bill,” he was nevertheless an unlikely choice to build what became Franklin Roosevelt’s Office of Strategic Services. Though he’d become a successful Wall Street lawyer, the lowborn Irish Catholic was also a staunch New York Republican who railed publicly against Roosevelt’s blue-blooded “delusions of grandeur” before the war in Europe made the two men allies. In a book that must now be considered the “defining” work on Donovan, Douglas Waller doesn’t omit his subject’s flaws. More striking, though, are the “enormous energies” Donovan demonstrated in almost single-handedly building the cadre of 10,000 “analysts, covert operators,” and “saboteurs” who helped secure the Allied victory.

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