{"id":1951,"date":"2014-12-11T02:47:58","date_gmt":"2014-12-11T02:47:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-282pinsker\/?p=1951"},"modified":"2014-12-11T18:32:51","modified_gmt":"2014-12-11T18:32:51","slug":"wild-attempts-at-espionage-wild-bill-donovan-and-the-o-s-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-282pinsker\/2014\/12\/11\/wild-attempts-at-espionage-wild-bill-donovan-and-the-o-s-s\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Attempts at Espionage: Wild Bill Donovan and the O.S.S."},"content":{"rendered":"

Which diplomatic leaders have been the most significant in US history?\u00a0 I think it is incredibly difficult to judge the significance of a diplomat.\u00a0 Diplomatic leaders are called upon in times of crisis and so one must take into account the seriousness of the situation a diplomat is dealing with and the effectiveness of his or her diplomacy in diffusing that situation.\u00a0 Creating a top ten list of the most successful American diplomatic leaders (1 being the most significant to 10 being the tenth least significant) is challenging due to the nearly three and a half centuries of US diplomacy and the changing historical contexts over the years.\u00a0 My objective in this post is actually to discuss a very insignificant US diplomatic leader, which I will get to in a short while.\u00a0 In the meantime, I\u2019ll provide a short list of a few significant diplomats who found success in their diplomacy.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \u00a0Benjamin Franklin.\u00a0 How could I not include Ben Franklin, father of electricity? During the American Revolution Franklin served as a US ambassador to France.\u00a0 During these years he balanced diplomatic relations with Britain and France, convincing the French to fight alongside the Americans while negotiating peace treaties with Britain.<\/li>\n
  2. William Seward.\u00a0 The American Civil War represented an incredibly significant threat to the existence of the United States.\u00a0 Seward\u2019s ability to keep Britain and France from recognizing the Confederacy as an autonomous state helped ensure Union victory and the existence of the United States as we know it.<\/li>\n
  3. Ronald Reagan.\u00a0 Diplomacy with any government representing a different ideology is always difficult.\u00a0 US diplomacy with the Soviet Union is as difficult as it came.\u00a0 Reagan found success in being flexible and being willing to compromise during his relations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    One of the least significant US diplomatic leaders in US history is William Donovan.<\/p>\n

    On July 11th<\/sup>, 1941 before the US entered the war, FDR appointed William Donovan as head of the newly created post Coordinator of Information.\u00a0 The purpose of the C.O.I. was incredibly vague, giving Donovan the freedom to organize and run his intelligence agency as he pleased.\u00a0 Donovan was a successful lawyer from Buffalo whose outlandish and unpredictable fighting style during the First World War earned him the nickname \u201cWild Bill\u201d and a Medal of Honor.\u00a0 He ran against FDR for lieutenant governor of New York on the Republican ticket and lost.\u00a0 But FDR recognized Donovan\u2019s ingenuity and fighting spirit and thought he would be a valuable member of his cabinet.<\/p>\n

    The Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor on December 7th<\/sup>, 1941 marked a very real and significant threat to the United States.\u00a0 The attacks shifted the American mood from isolationism to interventionism. And so in 1942, FDR transformed the C.O.I. into the Office of Strategic Services placing it under the jurisdiction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.\u00a0 With Donovan at the helm, nothing was off limits, from assassinating foreign leaders and engaging in ridiculous kinds of propaganda to conducting absurd covert operations like injecting Hitler\u2019s food with female hormones so that Hitler would lose his mustache and masculine voice.\u00a0 Donovan tried to win the war in a Hollywood style \u2013 single-handedly \u2013 and that was the kind of diplomacy that suited his style but the efforts of the O.S.S. with a few exceptions, amounted to little in the grand scheme of things.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    There are a number of reasons for Donovan and the O.S.S.\u2019s insignificance during World War II.\u00a0 Donovan\u2019s personality is one reason.\u00a0 His fearlessness and recklessness were not traits best suited for a leader of an intelligence gathering agency.\u00a0 Before the creation of the O.S.S. American intelligence agencies were scattered throughout branches of the army and federal government.\u00a0 The US\u2019s inexperience at having a centralized intelligence agency and FDR\u2019s willingness to let Donovan run his own show is another reason.\u00a0 On that same point, Donovan and the Allies\u2019 enemies, the Nazis, Fascists, and Russians had been conducting espionage and cover warfare for decades.\u00a0 They were able to handle the bulk of what the O.S.S. threw at them. \u00a0Wild Bill Donovan faced a significant task in being put in charge of the O.S.S. but unlike Ben Franklin, William Seward, and Ronald Reagan, he was unsuccessful in his duties as a diplomat.<\/p>\n

    Donovan never fulfilled his dream of heading a domestic centralized intelligence agency after the war.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s best he never did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Which diplomatic leaders have been the most significant in US history?\u00a0 I think it is incredibly difficult to judge the significance of a diplomat.\u00a0 Diplomatic leaders are called upon in times of crisis and so one must take into account the seriousness of the situation a diplomat is dealing with and the effectiveness of his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1746,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-282pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-282pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-282pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-282pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1746"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-282pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-282pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-282pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-282pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-282pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}