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Great Lives Lecture- Wild Bill Donovan
January 16 @ 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Wild Bill Donovan
The Synergy Periodontics and Implants Lecture
He was one of America’s most exciting and secretive generals—the man Franklin Roosevelt made his top spy in World War II. A mythic figure whose legacy is still intensely debated, “Wild Bill” Donovan during World War II was director of the Office of Strategic Services (the country’s first national intelligence agency) and the father of today’s CIA. Donovan introduced the nation to the dark arts of covert warfare on a scale it had never seen before. Veteran journalist Douglas Waller mined government and private archives throughout the United States and England, drew on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and interviewed scores of Donovan relatives, friends and associates to produce a riveting biography of one of the most powerful men in modern espionage.
William Joseph Donovan’s life was packed with personal drama. The son of a poor Irish Catholic family, he married into Protestant wealth and fought heroically in World War I, where he earned the nickname “Wild Bill” for his intense leadership and the Medal of Honor for his heroism. After the war he made millions as a Republican lawyer on Wall Street until FDR, a Democrat, tapped him to be his strategic intelligence chief. A charismatic leader, Donovan was revered by his secret agents. Yet at times he was reckless–risking his life unnecessarily in war zones, engaging in extramarital affairs that became fodder for his political enemies–and he endured heartbreaking tragedy when family members died at young ages.
“Wild Bill” Donovan reads like an action-packed spy thriller, with stories of daring young men and women in his OSS sneaking behind enemy lines for sabotage, breaking into Washington embassies to steal secrets, plotting to topple Adolf Hitler, and suffering brutal torture or death when they were captured by the Gestapo. It is also a tale of political intrigue, of infighting at the highest levels of government, of powerful men pitted against one another. Donovan fought enemies at home as much as the Axis abroad. Generals in the Pentagon plotted against him. J. Edgar Hoover had FBI agents dig up dirt on him. Donovan stole secrets from the Soviets before the dawn of the Cold War and had intense battles with Winston Churchill and British spy chiefs over foreign turf. Separating fact from fiction, Waller investigates the successes and sometimes the spectacular failures of Donovan’s intelligence career. It makes for a gripping and revealing portrait of this most controversial spymaster.
Speaker: Douglas Waller
Douglas Waller is a veteran correspondent, author and lecturer. In almost two decades as a Washington journalist, he covered the Pentagon, Congress, the State Department, the White House and the CIA. From 1994 to 2007, Waller served in TIME Magazine’s Washington Bureau, first as a correspondent and then as a senior correspondent. At TIME, Waller covered foreign affairs extensively as a diplomatic correspondent, traveling throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East as well as in the Persian Gulf region. He has reported extensively in the past on Middle East peace negotiations and the wars in Iraq. He came to TIME in 1994 from Newsweek, where he reported on major military conflicts from the Gulf War to Somalia to Haiti. Before joining Newsweek in 1988, he served as a legislative assistant on the staffs of Senator William Proxmire and then-Representative Edward J. Markey.
Waller has authored eight books. His last book, published by Simon & Schuster in 2019, was the critically acclaimed Lincoln’s Spies: Their Secret War to Save a Nation. His previous critically acclaimed biography,Disciples: The World War II Missions of the CIA Directors Who Fought for Wild Bill Donovan, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2015. In 2011, Free Press published Waller’s biography, Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, which became a New York Times bestseller, a Washington Post Best Book for 2011, and a Wall Street Journal Notable Book for 2011.
Waller’s other books include the national bestseller, The Commandos: The Inside Story of America’s Secret Soldiers, which was published by Simon & Schuster in 1994, and Air Warriors: The Inside Story of the Making of a Navy Pilot, which was published by Simon & Schuster in 1998. His sixth book, BIG RED: The Three-Month Voyage of A Trident Nuclear Submarine, was also a national bestseller published by HarperCollins in 2001. In 2004 HarperCollins also published Waller’s critically acclaimed biography, A Question of Loyalty: Gen. Billy Mitchell and the Court-Martial that Gripped the Nation, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, a New York Sun Best Book of the Year, and a Booklist Editors’ Choice of the Year.
