[1] Donovan attended Lafayette High School in Buffalo, New York, where he was captain of the Hocke Herald Tribune after the war and served as a foreign correspondent and Washington, D.C., bureau chief.
Donovan began writing books on the Washington political scene while still a reporter and continued that after retirement.
He liked to joke that he was the only professor at Princeton never to have attended a single day of college in his life.
Donovan's works include The Assassins (1955), Eisenhower: The Inside Story (1956), PT-109: John F. Kennedy in World War II (1961), Six Days in June.
Israel's Fight for Survival (1967), The Future of the Republican Party (1976), Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945-48 (1977), Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1949-53 (1982), Nemesis: Truman and Johnson in the Coils of War in Asia (1984), The Second Victory: The Marshall Plan and the Postwar Revival of Europe (1987), Confidential Secretary: Ann Whitman's Twenty Years with Eisenhower and Rockefeller (1988), Unsilent Revolution: Television News and American Public Life, 1948-1991 (1992, with Ray Scherer), and Boxing the Kangaroo: A Reporter's Memoir (2000).