William J “Wild Bill” Donovan was born January 1, 1883 to a working-class family in Buffalo, New York. He rose to be a highly-decorated Army officer, accomplished lawyer, and founder of the first centralized intelligence agency in the United States, the OSS. After the war he became the United States’ ambassador to Thailand.
He rose to become the most influential single person in the history of American intelligence and Special Operations.
How do you sum up the life of such a man? This is my blog, not a biography of Wild Bill Donovan, but some summation of his life must be given. He deserves that much.
Wild Bill attended Niagara University then transferred to Columbia where he received both his B.A. and his J.D. (Juris Doctor). He practiced law in Buffalo, formed and led a cavalry troop that was involved in operations on the Mexican border, was sent to Berlin where he negotiated food deliveries with the German government, served in WWI where he won the Congressional Medal of Honor and Distinguished Service Cross, became involved in politics, served as deputy US Attorney General, traveled the world, formed the OSS, served as the ambassador to Thailand, and, finally, died in 1959. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery with his wife, daughter, son, and grandson.
I had to visit him. I needed to commune with the man that I so admire. The type of man that they don’t make anymore.
It took me some doing to find him. He is buried in Section 2, which, for those of you who haven’t been there, is maybe the most confusing sections in the cemetery, in grave 4874-A. I had to consult pictures of his grave that I found on Google to find him using the background to match my understanding of where I was in the cemetery. He is buried just down the hill from Arlington House, right near one of the trolley stops, in fact.
I stood there for a long time.
I am a history nerd. I had studied this man. I felt like I knew him. Maybe that he and I would have been friends.
I owed this man a lot. My profession wouldn’t have even existed if it wasn’t for him. In fact, I have often felt like I had more in common with him and with the men of the OSS than I had with my own contemporaries. It is to him, and them, that I look for inspiration. That is not a jab at my contemporaries, or those in my direct military linage, there have been countless outstanding people who are more than worthy of being looked up to, but I tend to look back further, to our very beginnings and to the men that made those beginnings and built the legacy that the rest of us tried, and more often than not, succeeded, to live up to.
It says a very great deal about him that, in a national cemetery, he is buried with his family. He isn’t buried under the large monuments that some of his contemporaries are buried under, just the simple, standard white headstone. The only thing setting his apart from others is that, because of his Medal of Honor, his headstone’s carvings are also highlighted.
On the gravestone already was an OSS challenge coin. I left a REFactor Tactical PVC patch representation of the Jedburgh jump wings and a little prayer for the soul of a man who, I hope, appreciated my visit.
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