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Start giftingWild Bill Donovan
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 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. Now, veteran journalist Douglas Waller has mined government documents and private archives throughout the United States and England, drawn on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and interviewed scores of Donovan's relatives, friends, and associates to produce a riveting biography of one of the most powerful men in modern espionage.
The son of poor Irish Catholic parents, William Joseph Donovan married into Protestant wealth and fought heroically in World War I, where he earned the nickname "Wild Bill" for his intense leadership. After the war he made millions as a lawyer on Wall Street until FDR 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 and engaging in extramarital affairs that became fodder for his political enemies.
Wild Bill Donovan reads like an action-packed spy thriller, with stories of daring young men and women in Donovan's 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. Deftly separating fact from fiction, Waller investigates the successes and the occasional spectacular failures of Donovan's intelligence career, making for a gripping and revealing portrait of this most controversial spymaster.
Douglas Waller is a former correspondent for Newsweek and Time who has reported on the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, and Congress. He served for eight years on the staffs of Representative Edward Markey and Senator William Proxmire and is the author of the bestsellers The Commandos: The Inside Story of America's Secret Soldiers and Big Red: The Three Months Voyage of a Trident Nuclear Submarine. He lives in Annandale, Virginia, with his wife.
Johnny Heller, a Golden Voice Lifetime Achievement Award winner, has recorded over 800 audiobooks spanning every genre. He is a four-time Audie Award winner; an AudioFile Best Voice, Booklist Editor's Choice List, and Publishers Weekly Listen Up Award winner; and the winner of over thirty Earphones Awards. His national and international audiobook coaching workshops are called "game changing" by attendees. AudioFile magazine named him one of the top fifty voices of the twentieth century.