High Strategist

When President Roosevelt gave sleek, greying Colonel William Joseph ("Wild Bill") Donovan, commander of New York's "Fighting 69th" Regiment in World War I, a new job, all kinds of hush-hush rumors about it floated around Washington: that Colonel Donovan was setting up a superspy bureau filled with blonde Mata Haris and burnoosed Arab leaders, that he was starting a U.S. version of Dr. Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, that he had been gently tucked away on a shelf, under an imposing title. Actually, his job was exactly what Franklin Roosevelt said it was: Coordinator of Information for the President.

The post is at once bigger and less big than most rumormongers hinted. Less big, because Colonel Donovan has no military rank (he insisted on taking over as a civilian), no command of the agents who hand him information. Bigger, because Colonel Donovan reports directly to the President, will have a look at every scrap of war information collected by Army & Navy Intelligence, the State Department, FBI, U.S. trade commissioners, food agents throughout the world.

Colonel Donovan will sort these reports, translate them into a coherent plan of attack against any & all enemies of the U.S. His province will include military and economic warfare, war against the enemy's morale. His office is, in his view, a board of high strategy for total war.

As his first assistants last week Wild Bill Donovan chose moose-tall Playwright Robert Emmet Sherwood (who also has the President's ear, sometimes works on speeches for the White House) and FORTUNE'S Surveyor Elmo Burns Roper Jr. (see p. 15). Bob Sherwood will have charge of morale warfare--i.e., such campaigns as Britain's "V for Victory" drive in Nazi-occupied territory. Elmo Roper will take care of all kinds of background research.

So quietly did Colonel Donovan take over these duties last week that even his mail could not find him. Wayne Coy, one of Franklin Roosevelt's special assistants with "a passion for anonymity"--and at present, as executive secretary of OEM, the President's No. 1 trouble shooter--gave up a suite of offices in the State Department Building so that Wild Bill Donovan could move in. Then a mail carrier turned up at the entrance desk with a registered letter for Colonel Donovan. "Donovan?" said the watchman. "I don't know of any Donovan." The letter went back to the post office.

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