Elyse Graham writes: “In July 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed William Donovan, to start up a new intelligence agency, as it was growing more evident that the US might not be able to keep itself free of the war in Europe. His great innovation was a branch called Research and Analysis, in which analysts trained among library stacks read everything they could, from novels to newspapers to trash, and turned what they read into intelligence insights. US intelligence quickly discovered that libraries didn’t have the most basic information that the country needed in this crisis.”