Robert J. Donovan, 90; Helped Transform Times

Robert J. Donovan, the best-selling author and reporter who helped establish the Los Angeles Times as a major force in Washington journalism, died Friday. He was 90. Donovan, a resident of St. Petersburg, Fla., died in a hospital there of complications from a stroke he suffered Aug. 2, family members said.

Donovan’s career followed the arc of American newspaper journalism in the 20th century. He began in the heady days of crime stories dictated on deadline and extra editions hawked on city streets. But he evolved into an elegant observer of Cold War politics and a biographer of modern presidents, packing his stories with insights and analysis and with solid information from the highest levels of government.

“He was a man of unusual grace, both professional and personal, he wrote uncommonly well under the pressure of deadlines and there was a lovely, almost poetic quality to his work that stamped him as being different,” wrote David Halberstam in his 1979 book on media giants, “The Powers That Be.” “In a profession of hard-driving arrivistes, Bob Donovan was, and this was rare in the profession, liked as well as respected.”

He came to Washington in 1947 as a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, covering Harry S. Truman’s 1948 whistle-stop campaign and the historic meeting on Wake Island between Truman and Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

By 1963, Otis Chandler, then publisher of the Los Angeles Times, had lured him from the Herald Tribune to become Washington bureau chief of The Times in hopes that he would add prestige and muscle to Chandler’s efforts to make The Times a first-class newspaper with a national reputation.

Donovan conveyed to his reporters a sense of mission and to his sources a sense of competitiveness. He attracted a cadre of top-notch journalists in Washington. Soon, he turned the small, relatively unknown Times’ bureau into a well-respected operation.

“He was a wonderful writer, but his leadership in transforming the Washington bureau of The Times was really extraordinary,” said Edwin O. Guthman, a former national editor of The Times who worked with Donovan and is now a journalism professor at USC.

As Halberstam wrote, the Washington bureau “was not known in Washington journalistic circles as the Los Angeles Times Bureau, it was Bob Donovan’s Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau.”

Chandler on Friday recalled Donovan as “one of the best.”

“Bob Donovan was a superb individual, a great reporter and a great writer,” Chandler said. “He played a major part in rebuilding The Times and putting The Times on the map.”

Although deprived of a college education by the Depression, Donovan was an avid reader with a great sense of history and a great ear for language. Among the 13 books he wrote were several bestsellers, including “PT 109: John F. Kennedy in World War II,” about Kennedy’s experience as a naval officer who survived the sinking of his patrol boat during a battle in the Pacific.

The book was published in 1961 and translated into 23 languages. “PT 109,” which was later made into a film starring Cliff Robertson, became a leading symbol for the Kennedy administration.

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White House Access

Donovan later recalled that when he first approached Kennedy about doing the book, the president told him, “Bob, don’t do this. You’ll be flogging a dead horse. Nobody wants to read that war stuff.” But Donovan thought it would have wide appeal and help him gain access to the Kennedy White House. And it did.

“Bob Donovan was respected and revered as one of the great Washington journalists of his time,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said Friday in a statement. “He was also a brilliant researcher and writer. When his book ‘PT 109’ was first published in 1961, I still remember how amazed and awed President Kennedy was by all the new information that Bob had uncovered about those extraordinary days in the Solomon Islands, and that my brother had never known. Bob’s book became a family treasure and he became a family friend, and we’ll never forget him.”

Earlier in his career, Donovan had gained extraordinary access to the Eisenhower White House. Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, was so impressed by Donovan’s first book, “The Assassins,” that he recruited him to write a book about Ike’s first term and gave him access to Cabinet minutes, memos, correspondence and other papers the president had refused to let Congress see.

Donovan took a leave from the New York Herald Tribune to write “Eisenhower: The Inside Story,” and was assigned a second-floor White House office where he was furnished top-secret documents loaded onto carts. The book was a bestseller and was serialized by many newspapers, including The Times. But some critics called it a campaign book for Ike’s second term.

For all Donovan’s White House access, the Eisenhower book didn’t keep the reporter from writing newspaper articles that infuriated the president. One was an exclusive story about how the president’s once close relationship with Chief Justice Earl Warren had ruptured over Warren’s liberal Supreme Court decisions on controversial cases and Eisenhower’s failure to take a strong stand on school desegregation.

Eisenhower denounced Donovan’s story as “irresponsible reporting,” but Donovan retorted that he had based the article on “sources unimpeachable both as to their character and as to their knowledge of the facts.”

Reporters who worked for Donovan idolized him and were amazed at the speed and clarity with which he wrote articles under deadline pressure. His nurturing of sources often resulted in behind-the-scenes exclusives that frequently rankled government officials.

Once when he filed a story for The Times in 1969 on the first withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam before President Nixon announced the withdrawal, Nixon cursed and railed at Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, a frequent Donovan source, and ordered a probe of the leak. Nothing came of the investigation, and Kissinger continued to be a valuable source for Donovan.

In 1970, Donovan’s career at The Times took a strange turn after Chandler promoted him to associate editor and persuaded him to join the staff in L.A., ostensibly to become the newspaper’s next editor.

According to an account in “The Life and Times of Los Angeles,” a history of the newspaper by Marshall Berges, a former Times editor, Chandler offered to let Donovan sit at then-Times editor Nick Williams’ side for a year and take over when Williams retired. Donovan declined at first, saying he was honored and flattered but considered himself essentially a reporter who knew a lot of officials in Washington but had no feel for Los Angeles.

Donovan finally bowed to Chandler’s entreaties, however, and moved west. But before the year was out, Chandler decided that Donovan was not the best candidate to succeed Williams after all. Instead, Chandler chose William F. Thomas, the Times’ highly respected metropolitan editor, who remained editor for 18 years until he retired in 1989.

Donovan returned as associate editor to the Washington bureau, where he wrote special features until he retired seven years later. He continued to write books and magazine articles well into his 80s. Donovan’s last piece for The Times, written in November 1999 when he was 87, was a remembrance of Kennedy’s assassination.

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., on Aug. 21, 1912, Donovan wanted to become a doctor after he graduated from high school, but, as he often said, he was “flat broke and couldn’t afford college.” Instead, he eventually found work as a $6-a-week copy boy working six nights a week at the Buffalo Courier Express. Four years later, according to Richard Kluger in his book “The Paper,” the New York Herald Tribune hired him after he “finally wore down” the city editor with repeated applications.

After World War II broke out, Donovan was drafted and served in the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division in Europe, rising to the rank of sergeant. He took part in several combat missions, including the Battle of the Bulge, and earned several decorations. He also served briefly in Paris with Stars and Stripes, the armed services newspaper, before returning after the war to civilian life and the Herald Tribune.

At the Herald Tribune, he covered City Hall and the United Nations, then was assigned to Washington in 1947.

Among his many books were a two-volume history of the Truman administration: “Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1945-48,” published in 1977; and “Tumultuous Years: the Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1949-53,” published in 1982. He also wrote “Nemesis: Truman and Johnson in the Coils of War in Asia,” published in 1984.

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Mentor to Many

Donovan, who always made time to counsel younger reporters, also served briefly as a journalism professor at Princeton University. He was a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a senior fellow of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. He was a member of the Gridiron Club and the Army-Navy Club and a past president of the White House Correspondents Assn.

Survivors include his wife, Gerry Van der Heuvel; three children: Patricia Donovan, Amy Donovan and Peter Donovan, all of Washington, D.C.; two stepchildren: Claudia Van der Heuvel of Amherst, Mass., and Heidi Van der Heuvel of Ottawa, Kan.; and six grandchildren.

Instead of flowers, the family requests that memorial donations go to the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, 500 W. U.S. Highway 24, Independence, MO 64050.

Plans are being made for a memorial service in Washington, D.C.