DONOVAN OF O.S.S.

By Corey Ford'21ad. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970. 366 pp. $8.50.

The late Corey Ford, for seventeen years a resident of Hanover and an officially adopted member of the Class of 1921, is chiefly known as a humorist and parodist. He was also, however, a cloak-and-dagger buff; this posthumously published biography of William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan is his last venture in this field.

The book is written with admiration and affection for its remarkable subject. For one who, like the reviewer, spent the war years in the equally remarkable Office of Strategic Services, it can be read with a certain old-campaigner nostalgia. The deeds of derring-do are there, the many anecdotes of American espionage by free-wheeling amateurs, the bizarre cast of characters, from Arthur J. Goldberg to Jumping Joe Savoldi.

It is not, and does not purport to be, a complete history of O.S.S.; that would be a major, and worthwhile, undertaking. But even as an informal account the book is troubling, in the perspective of 1970, by what it fails to do, or even to consider. In a real sense O.S.S. was the parent of C.I.A. What is one to say of this inheritance? Like C.I.A., O.S.S. combined both intelligence-gathering and operational activities (sabotage, etc.), distinctly different functions, though often employing the same types of persons and material resources. What are the consequences of such an amalgamation? In my own judgment they are very serious, but I found little effort to wrestle with this or similar issues. At the end I had the uncomfortable sensation that the parodist in Corey Ford had, unconsciously, won out. Such phrases as "Unknown to Tojo's war-lords, American cryptographers had . . ." or "his blue eyes might grow cold when he was angered" seem from a now lost past and faintly comic.

Mr. Roberts is Professor of History at Dartmouth.