his political influence. He had declined, and taken some effort to see that the job went to J. Edgar Hoover, then a young Justice Department lawyer. When the FBI was established in 1935, Hoover—again with Donovan’s support—was named its first director.
By the time Donovan returned to public service, shortly before the war, as the $1.00-per-annum Coordinator of Information, the predecessor organization to the OSS, Hoover had become a highly respected fixture in Washington, very nearly above criticism.
The FBI was without question the most efficient law-enforcement agency the nation had ever known, and the credit was clearly Hoover’s.
And when the idea of a superagency to sit atop all the other governmental intelligence agencies came up, Hoover perhaps naturally presumed that it would fall under the FBI. He was bitterly disappointed when that role was given to the Office of the Coordinator of Information, and his old friend and mentor Bill Donovan was named as its head.
Hoover was a skilled political infighter with many friends on Capitol Hill and within Roosevelt’s inner circle. He did not simply roll over and play dead. He got President Roosevelt to agree that the FBI should retain its intelligence and counterintelligence roles, not only within the United States but in Latin and South America as well. And he got Roosevelt to keep Bill Donovan’s agents in South America under his own control by claiming the right to “coordinate” all their activities. Clearly, he could not coordinate their activities unless they made frequent and detailed reports of their activities to the FBI.
Donovan, because he acknowledged the battle as lost, or perhaps because Latin and South America were low in his priorities, gave Hoover his way. Not completely, of course, but he paid lip service to the notion that Hoover had been given North and South America as his area of operations.
Hoover saw Donovan for what he was: a highly competent man with a sense of morality and patriotism that was close to his own—and a good friend. But he also saw Donovan as someone who was challenging his (the FBI’s) authority in all things concerned with espionage. And this was especially galling because Donovan had the same access to the President’s ear that Hoover did. Despite their sharp political and ideological differences, Donovan and Roosevelt had been friends since they had been students at the Columbia School of Law.
And, with consummate skill, Roosevelt played games with them—Hoover and Donovan—sometimes pitting one against the other, and other times assuring one that the other regarded him as the greatest patriot and most efficient employee on the government payroll.
And both Hoover and Donovan understood that the most dangerous thing that could happen to either was to force Roosevelt to choose between them. As confident of their own ability and their own influence with Roosevelt as they each were, neither was assured that the other would ever be asked for his resignation.
Tonight, with nothing specific on the agenda, they exchanged tidbits. Hoover told Donovan and Douglass what his agents had uncovered in Latin and South America. Donovan heard nothing he thought was very important. Much of what Hoover told him, he had heard before.
Hoover, only half joking, said that he was on the edge of doubling his security force at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the refining of uranium was getting under way in a top-secret plant. He would use half the force, he said, to keep the Germans from finding out what was going on, and the other half to keep the scientists—fifty percent of whom, he said, were “pinkos”—from passing what they knew and were learning to the Soviets. There was no question in his mind, Hoover said, that the scientist in charge, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was as left of center as Vladimir Lenin.
“And it’s delicate, you know, Bill, with the Boss,” Hoover said. “If he has one flaw in his political judgment, it has to do with the Russians. He thinks Joe Stalin is sort of the Russian senator from Georgia. And that he can buy him off with a dam or a highway.”
Donovan laughed.
“You think there’s a genuine danger of somebody actually spilling the beans to the Russians?” he asked.
“Not so long as I’m in charge of security,” Hoover said. “Instead of, for example, Henry Wallace.”
He said it with a smile, but Donovan understood that Hoover regarded the Vice President and several of the people around him as bona fide threats to the one great secret of the war: that the United States was engaged in building a