◆ SpookStack

HE‘ arrest *, iT of public service. . .He should resign on this note of high triumph and a ae ed yqnot come his way again. ° MrsHoover has sat too long at {Qthe head of an _ organisation 1 Which many ordinary citizens SAN FRANCISCO. attorney Melvin Belli is one of the top trial lawyers in the United States. He defended Jack .Ruby during the early stages of Ruby’s trial for - *- -the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. nn h | depart. Such a chance may. and lawyers believe is a threat ~ 1219 ‘the precious American free- . doms, unless it and its leader -ere carefully controlled. ’ A mystifying failure to. och (except about once a decade) anything that could justify the F.B.1.’s vast cost and afluence scems to be ons of i409 tureau’s two mriest cons traditions. ‘ -Tne other, cf course, is its “fepetiuonstsed hero-worship of ee Seok the director Had Robert Kennedy been ; Lelected President he would have dismissed Mr. Hoover. Senator i 2McCarthy, too, has pledged that - ; Zhe would. Governor Rockefeller. . might. 14 But {t is doubtful whether two lof the Hoover legend. i swilly old Washington hands like Humphrey and Nixon would be +680 rash. President Johnson, who 17 +7 Claims to be one of Mr. Hoover's few close friends,.«¢zsonally +S extended his career (and salary | got £12,600 a eat) past the ' compulsory re ’ q toe ‘] , Prayers 12 YERS for Mr. Hoover's 3 -Yetirement have, for a 4 generation, been offered in low voices along the corridors Sof power, ."° . Popular fare on the subject of Mr. Hoover is ‘a masterfully j orchestrated stream of propa- Sanda and statistics that has Preserved almost without ement age of ‘and: return’ to... tiie? United. States‘o James Earl Ray, the F.B.1.’s’ latest: Public’: Enemy No. 1, offers Mr. J. Edgar Hoover the op-:: portunity for a memorable. and. fong- overdue act: change -the portrait he painted of himself in the bad old days. His style is pure, Bonnie and Clyde, born in the:times when: § his boys (G-men was the melo- dramatic tag) would stake out. a the “baddies” and wait for the boss to arrive, in his camel-hair coat and slouch hat,: for- the.. F ritual slaughter. Had Ray, had the misfortune to be appre- hended in’ the. United., States, +. there might have been one of those ghastly and scandalous scenes that are so much a part He could have deen Gespztched in the kind of merciless slaughter that gave the F.B.I. John Dillinger asapatron saint. : Dillinger, a bank robber of the 1930s (and not to any- one’s certain knowledge a. killer) was finally cornered _after a series of hideout fias- . cos by Mr. Hoover's men and informally executed in a Chi- cago street. His; death mask ‘~ still “greets” callers’: to’ the - Director’s office.’ 2 AE : '. time secretly created one while ' . Mandarin. Prout of all relation to reality typifies the self- advertisement Mr.’ Hoover has used to reach the pinnacle of power from which -he now looks down; an unassailable mandarin .. of civil service. However, he prefers to re-- main in seclusion, knowing that the image is more powerful than the reality, Besides, there. are too many wrinkles to show. Hoover was born on New Year’s Day, 1895. He became . head of the bureau in 1924, the year Lenin died. ~ EMGLOSUR = £ 7 EYES: Dark HEIGHT: 6ft. AGES 73. Ce erp PS SESE Since it was his obsessive belief then that he and his men were saving ‘america from com: munism—even as it is today when the Communist Party of the United States is cemented . together only by the subsidies of F.B.I, infiltrators—he prob- i tably took Lenin’s death as a. suitable omen. The F.B.I. had been created 16 }6 years before. After Congress specifically refused to au- torise a special detective force for the Department of Justice, the Attorney-General of the * “~ Congress was in recess. A Narre et story, inflated . President Théodore Roosevelt persuaded the lawmakers to ac cept this fait accompli, despite protestatic eb leyen me ged Are jobs tht fap rita . onthe 42 provin ce wettr or these aA slav was the most glamorous. Its first chief embraced it as a! suitable “menace” as fervent-'' ly as Mr. Hoover later hound- — ed communism. During this period, the F. BL had a virtual licence to pry into co HAIR: Black—greying << WEIGHT: 1801b... armed as he was. ee BO stuffed. Ats private Jives, and it files to overflowing. During the first World War the worst fears of the bureau's opponents were realised when it led vigilante-raids on suspected draft dodgers.. Some! . 60,000 Americans were dragged off the streets by armed men ‘and -de- tained without a. Shred of legai authority. >" Bee Mp ae .2 Not until 1919 was Hoover associated with the Bureau of " Investigation. He became,-‘at _.the impressively early age’.of 24, head of the General Intel- ‘ ligence Division of the Justice ‘Department: Lot Nee Only ‘two years earlier he’ fi ~ joine the department. asa £504-a-year clerk with a- brand: new law degree,: “hs was or someone ceil: His father nking ‘Public. serv- aap p p of a a Washingtonians. . There were two children. ‘ole- er than John Edgar, all. devqut Presbyterians and dutiful schoi- ars. Master Hoover ‘himself taught at Sunday school, some- times proudly attired: in the