The once ruddy face was puffy and pale. The brushed-back, gray-brown hair was straight and thin--not the wiry dark curls of a few year ago. He walked stiffly, although his figure was trim and erect. Behind his glasses, his dark brown eyes looked fixed, and he seemed to be daydreaming. At the age of 77, the legendary G-man--in his 48th year as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation--the most enduring and perhaps, if there is such a thing as a cumulative total, the most powerful official in the long span of the American Government--looked deceptively like any other old gentlemen in the hotel lobby. In one of his rare reflections on mortality a few years ago, Mr. Hoover told a reporter, "The greatest enemy is time." Time's advances against this seemingly indestructible official had become obvious. But then, Mr. Hoover was always more human than he or the myth admitted. Mr. Hoover's power was a compound of performance and politics, publicity and personality. At the base of it all, however, was an extraordinary record of innovation and modernization in law enforcement--most of it in the first decade or so of his tenure. The centralized fingerprint file (the print total passed the 200-million mark this year) at the Identification Division (1925) and the crime laboratory (1932) are landmarks in the gradual application of science to police work. The National Police Academy (1935) has trained the leadership elite of local forces throughout the country. Mr. Hoover's recruitment of lawyers and accountants, although they now make up only 32 percent of the special agent corps, set a world standard of professionalism. The National Crime Information Center enables 4,000 local law enforcement agencies to enter records and get questions answered on a network of 35 computer systems, with its headquarters at the F.B.I. office here. From the start, Mr. Hoover got results. His bureau rounded up the gangsters in the nineteen- thirties. It made the once epidemic crime of kidnapping a rarity ("virtually extinct," as the director's friends like to say). It arrested German saboteurs within days after their submarines landed them on the Atlantic Coast. And, in one of its most sensational coups, the F.B.I. seized the slayers of Mrs. Viola Gregg Liuzzo only hours after the civil rights worker's shotgun death in Alabama in 1965. The F.B.I does not catch everybody, and it is sometimes many months before any of its "most wanted" suspects are arrested. But Mr. Hoover executed enough seemingly miraculous swoops to make any specific criticism perilous. Mr. Hoover always understood the subtle currents of power among officials in Washington better than anyone know him. Not a New Dealer at heart, he had nonetheless dazzled President Franklin D. Roosevelt with his celebrated success against kidnappers. He Got Results Roosevelt liked him; he slapped the F.B.I. director's back and laughed when Mr. Hoover confessed that an agent had been caught in the act of illegal wiretapping, and he was amused at the bureau's temerity in putting a spy on Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's counselor, in London. Roosevelt's assignment of counter-espionage duties to the F.B.I. as war loomed in 1936 expanded the bureau's size and heightened Mr. Hoover's prestige. But, when the Republicans won the White House again in 1952, Mr. Hoover's loyalty swung immediately to the new team. The more awesome Mr. Hoover's power grew, the more plainly he would state, for the record, that there was nothing "political" about it, that the F.B.I was simply a "fact-finding agency" that "never makes recommendations or draws conclusions." The most pointed such declaration, coming in the furor about Harry Dexter White in 1953, was, paradoxically, one of Mr. Hoover's most political acts. In a speech in Chicago, Herbert Brownell, President Eisenhower's Attorney General, said that Mr. White, who had served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Roosevelt, was named in 1946 as the United States executive director of the International Monetary Fund even though President Truman had been told that Mr. White was a Soviet spy. Mr. Truman, in retirement, replied that the F.B.I. had contributed to the judgment that it would be safer to keep Mr. White in office, under observation, that to dismiss him. Rushing before Senate investigators, Mr. Hoover did not question the "conclusion" that Mr. White was a spy--although the F.B.I's evidence had not been enough to persuade a grand jury to indict Mr. White before he died in 1948. As for Mr. White's promotion to the International Monetary Fund, Mr. Hoover stated emphatically that, while he knew of Mr. Truman's reasoning, he had not been in on the decision nor had he approved it. At a time when the Republican party chairman was promising to make Communism in government the central issue of the 1954 Congressional campaign, Mr. Hoover's eager testimony was taken by some to be a boldly partisan move. House Speaker Sam Rayburn was one of many Democrats who never forgave Mr. Hoover and encouraged speculation that a Democratic President would find a new F.B.I. director. But Mr. Hoover's reappointment was virtually the first decision John F. Kennedy announced on the day after his election to the Presidency in 1960. Despite its acrimonious endings the Hoover-Kennedy relationship started out cordially, based apparently on Mr. Hoover's long acquaintance with the President's father, the late Joseph P. Kennedy. Robert Kennedy had urged the President-elect to retain Mr. Hoover; and when John Kennedy weighed assignments for his brother, Mr. Hoover urged him to follow his instinct and make Robert the Attorney General. Later Robert Kennedy and Mr. Hoover fought a long tug-of-war over the assignment of agents to civil rights and organized crime cases. Mr. Hoover was not used to having an immediate boss who could block his access to the White House. He was annoyed when the Attorney General installed a "hot line" between their Justice Department offices, and was even more annoyed when Robert Kennedy had the F.B.I. phone moved from the desk of Helen Gandy, Mr. Hoover's long- time secretary, to the director's desk. Robert Kennedy never forgave Mr. Hoover for the cold telephone call that brought the first word of his brother's assassination. Mr. Hoover's voice, Robert Kennedy told William Manchester, the author, was "not quite as excited as if he were reporting the fact that he had found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University." Later, according to William W. Turner, a former agent who wrote an unflattering book on "Hoover's F.B.I.," Robert Kennedy called back on the hot line. "Hoover was in his office with several aides," Mr. Turner wrote, "when it rang. . .and rang. . .and rang. When it stopped ringing, the director snapped to an aide, 'Now get that phone back on Miss Gandy's desk.'" Although Robert Kennedy remained Attorney General until the summer of 1964, he and Mr. Hoover never spoke again after the President's assassination. Until Representative Hale Boggs of Louisiana, the House majority leader, criticized Mr. Hoover in the House last spring as a "feudal baron" and a wire-tapper, the F.B.I. director had been sacrosanct in Congress' deference. The case of former Senator Edward V. Long, a Missouri Democrat who denounced government wiretapping and was quickly undone by Life magazine's disclosure, leaked from the F.B.I., that he was splitting legal fees with a teamster lawyer in St. Louis, is often cited as an example of the director's tactics. Mr. Hoover insisted that he did not tap the phones or "bug" the offices of Congressmen, and Mr. Boggs failed notably to prove the contrary. But Mr. Hoover always had other ways to keep critics in line anyway. The late Senator Kenneth D. McKellar, a Tennessee Democrat and chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, harassed Mr. Hoover from time to time in the nineteen-thirties, and in the spring of 1936 drew the blushing testimony that the director of the F.B.I. had never made an arrest. Less than a month later, as if by magic, Mr. Hoover led a raid in New Orleans that captured Alvin (Kreepy) Karpis, a star of the Ma Barker mob. By his own account, Mr. Hoover rushed up to the un-suspecting Karpis as he sat in a car, threatened him with a gun, then snapped out the order to other agents: "Put the cuffs on him, boys." In his recently published memoirs, Karpis contends that Mr. Hoover "hid until I was safely covered by many guns. He waited until he was told the coast was clear. Then he came out to reap the glory." Karpis's account is obviously suspect, and about 35 years too late to undo Senator McKellar's embarrassment. When Senator McKellar tried to cut $225,000 out of the F.B.I. budget that year, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan denounced him, according to one report of the Senate debate, "as a miser whose parsimony would cause the threat of kidnapping to hang once more over every cradle in America." Mr. Hoover's full budget request was then passed by a resounding voice vote. Since that time, the Senate has never questioned the F.B.I. budget as reported by the House. And in the House, the veteran chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that theoretically reviews the bureau's spending, Representative John J. Rooney, Democrat of Brooklyn, said that "I have never cut [Mr. Hoover's] budget and I never expect to." As some of the men closest to him volunteer, Mr. Hoover's primary genius might well have been publicity. He had some famous fights with other police agencies--notably after the capture of Bruno Hauptmann, the Lindbergh kidnapper, in 1933--to secure public credit for his bureau, but Mr. Hoover was no ordinary headline grabber. The real foundations of his legend are built on more solid stuff than press relations; certainly his image was never dependent on the goodwill of newspapermen, to whom Mr. Hoover was normally inaccessible Mr. Hoover never held a news conference. The closest thing to a mouthpiece in the press was not a political pundit or a crime reporter but the late Walter Winchell, the Broadway gossip columnist, who traveled with an F.B.I. escort and carried an item about "G-man Hoover" almost every day. The making of the Hoover folk hero, in which Mr. Winchell played a large part, was undertaken purposefully in the early thirties--long after the director's quiet administrative mastery had established him securely. Speakeasies were the fashion. Gangsterism ravaged the land, capturing headlines, and in a sense, the public fancy. For Mr. Hoover, the last straw was the Kansas City massacre of June 17, 1933, in which Charles (Pretty Boy) Floyd and his gang killed five men, including an F.B.I. agent and three local policemen. "If there is going to be publicity," the director raged, "let it be on the side of law and order." Looking about for a symbol, Mr. Hoover found himself, and proceeded to orchestrate a dazzling range of movies, books, radio dramas and comic strips. Mr. Hoover understood pop culture and its evolution. He promoted "junior G-man" clubs for boys, and sold two and a half million copies of "Masters of Deceit," a book on Communism. His "ten most wanted" list made a lot of seedy drifters into headline material. In the age of television, he shrewdly reserved the right to select the actor (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) who would represent the F.B.I. in millions of living rooms in a popular television series. The late Senator George Norris of Nebraska called Mr. Hoover "the greatest hound for publicity on the American continent." Even Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, who had appointed the F.B.I. director in 1924, observed critically that "one of the great secrets of Scotland Yard has been that its movements are never advertised." Popularity Was High But Mr. Hoover, once committed to a public fight on crime, played the role with all his fierce energy. He unquestionably made a brilliant success of it. Even after political pot-shots at the director became fashionable in recent years, a Gallup Pol for Newsweek magazine last spring showed that 80 per cent of those who had any opinion about Mr. Hoover rated his performance "good" or "excellent." Any general accounting of the F.B.I director's power must also take not of the fact that his personality, as well as his office, has always inspired fear. Francis Biddle, President Roosevelt's Attorney General in the early nineteen-forties, sensed that, behind Mr. Hoover's "absolute self- control" was "a temper that might show great violence if he did not hold it on leash, subject to the domination of a will that is the master of his temperament." There were hints of that temper in his passionate criticisms--favorite phrases such as "mental halitosis," and the "jellyfish" tag he put on former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. And Mr. Hover had a hair-trigger sensitivity to criticism. When the Warren commission was investigating President Kennedy's assassination and said that the F.B.I. had not shared its intelligence fully with the Secret Service, Mr. Hoover lashed out at what he called "a classic example of Monday morning quarterbacking," a charge that gravely displeased President Johnson. And when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that Southern blacks could not turn to their local F.B.I. offices with any assurance of sympathy or zeal for civil rights, Mr. Hoover called Dr. King "the most notorious liar in the country." Later, Mr. Hoover had his staff invite newsmen to hear the taped record of F.B.I. bugs in Dr. King's hotel rooms as evidence that "moral degenerates," as Mr. Hoover put it, were leading the civil rights movement. This was a rare extension of Mr. Hoover's lifelong practice of entertaining Attorneys General and Presidents with spicy details about the secret lives of famous people. Critics within the F.B.I were crushed summarily, and men who were thought to have been good friends of the director reveal deeper levels of hostility in casual conversations. "I'm afraid of him," said a former aide who would seem to have been secure in a new and completely different public career. "I can't imagine what he'd do to me, but I'd rather not mess with him." John Edgar Hoover was born in Washington on New Year's Day in 1895, the youngest of three children of Dickerson N. Hoover, an easy-going Federal official, and the former Annie M. Scheitlin, the granddaughter of Switzerland's first Consul General in America. The Hoovers' stucco house on Steward Square has been torn down, but Mr. Hoover's birthplace is memorialized in a stained glass window of the Presbyterian church that stands on the site of the house. Mrs. Hoover, who has been described as "old-world strict," instilled in her son an intense discipline and stern sensitivity to moral issues. By all accounts, she was the dominant influence on his character. As a boy, he was known as "Speed"--a reference, apparently, to his agile mind, rattling speech and efficiency as a grocery delivery boy in the Capitol Hill section of Washington. Admirers have compared his physique to Babe Ruth's--heavy torso, spindly legs--and indeed, his flattened nose was the result of a hard-hit baseball. But Mr. Hoover was never an athlete. Remembering a day in 1909 when the football coach at Central High School rejected the puny volunteer brought twinges ever after. In his disappointment, young Hoover turned all the more intensely to the school's military drill team, of which he became captain, and to public speaking. According to one biographer, he never had a regular girl friend in high school; friends teased him, wrote Mildred H. Comfort, "and accused him of being in love with Company A," an institutional attachment fore-shadowing his marriage to the F.B.I. As a debater, young Hoover argued "The Fallacies of Women Suffrage" with gusto and competitive success. He was valedictorian of his class and was described in the school yearbook as "a gentleman of dauntless courage and stainless honor." In his high school days, he also was a choir boy and Sunday school instructor. Lessons on Indexing Although the University of Virginia offered him a liberal arts scholarship, Mr. Hoover feared that his living expenses would be a burden on his father. Instead, he took a $30-month clerk's job at the Library of Congress (he would apply indexing lessons to law enforcement later), and enrolled at George Washington University, where he was able to win his law degree in three years. With a master's degree in 1917, Mr. Hoover passed the bar and moved into a $1,200-a-year job at the Department of Justice--his only employer over a stretch that exceeded 55 years. From the start, according to Jack Alexander's 1937 profile of Mr. Hoover in The New Yorker, he stood out from the other young lawyers around him. "He dressed better than most, a bit on the dandyish side," Mr. Alexander wrote. "He had an exceptional capacity for detail work, and he handled small chores with enthusiasm and thoroughness. He constantly sought new responsibilities to shoulder, and welcomed chances to work overtime. When he was in conference with an official of his department, his manner was that of a young man who confidently expected to rise." Mr. Hoover's first assignment in "counter-radical activities" left a profound mark. This was at the end of President Wilson's second term, the era of the "Red raids" under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Evidently caught up in the official agitation about bombs and Bolshevism, Mr. Hoover took charge of assembling a card file on 450,000 "radicals," and built his first informer network--a controversial tool of police work that he used with dramatic results later against the Communist party and the Ku Klux Klan. Many years later, Mr. Hoover said he had always "deplored" the hysterical dragnet arrests of thousands of innocent aliens in 1919 and 1920, but the record is also clear that, as the head of the new General Intelligence Division at the Justice Department, he was responsible for planning the raids, if not their execution. A still darker era followed under President Harding. Within the Justice Department, according to Alpheus T. Mason, the historian, the Bureau of Investigation "had become a private secret service for corrupt forces within the Government." Mr. Hoover nearly quit in disgust. When Harlan Fiske Stone became Attorney General under President Coolidge in 1924, he determined to rebuild the bureau after the image of Scotland Yard and sought, as his director, a man experienced in police work but free of the "more usual police tradition that it takes a crook to catch a crook and that lawlessness and brutality are more to be relied upon than skill and special training." Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, an untainted holdover from the Harding Administration, recommended J. Edgar (no relation) as "a lawyer of uncommon ability and character." Attorney General stone, who held the appointive power, offered him the job. But Mr. Hoover, who was then only 29 years old, did not leap at what was unmistakably the chance of a lifetime. With confidence and cunning that were very much in character, he said he would accept the assignment only if appointments to the bureau were divorced entirely from outside politics and if he would have sole control over merit promotions. Mr. Stone replied that he would not allow Hoover to take the job under any other conditions. And thus in 1924 the modern bureau-- renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935 --was born. Organizing Principle From the start, Mr. Hoover's personal grip on all the important strings was the organizing principle at the bureau. It had everything to do with discipline and morale; Mr. Hoover made Siberia assignments and the compassionate transfers. It had a lot to do with the agency's efficiency and its incomparable record of probity. Under the Hoover inspection system, there were no secrets and no independent power centers in the F.B.I. In recent years, the system also seemed to have inhibited the bureau from taking worthwhile risks. "The first rule," according to one former agent was: "Do not embarrass the director." The insulation from outside politics meant free play for Hoover politics. The 15,000 F.B.I. employees had neither the Civil Service nor a union to inhibit the director's whims. He shaped the bureau in his own Victorian image, and changed in the process himself. Personal affairs were strictly regulated at the bureau. Women were not allowed to smoke on the job. No one got a coffee break. A clerk was once dismissed for playing with a yo-yo in the halls. In a case that went to court in 1967, a 26-year-old clerk was dismissed for keeping a girl friend in his apartment overnight. Agents have been reprimanded for reading Playboy magazine and transferred for being over-weight. Mr. Hoover wore custom-made, Brooks Brothers shirts and suits, and he ordered his agents to dress carefully, like young businessmen. The unofficial uniform for an agent includes a white shirt, dark suit, snap-brim hat and a handkerchief in the jacket pocket. One-man rule also bred sycophancy. Flattery worked wonders around Mr. Hoover, according to an inside student of the director's office. "Let's say you're an agent," he said. "Go in there and tell him he looks better than ever, that you are inspired by his leadership, that he's saving America and you hope he lives forever. As soon as you leave there will be a memo from the director saying, 'This man has executive ability.' A lot of agents have caught on." Agents admittedly quaked at the thought of the director's disapproval, expressed typically in the bright blue ink of Mr. Hoover's stub pen in the margins of their memorandums. His language was vehement (This is asinine!"); the filling of all four borders around a typewritten sheet was known as a "four-bagger." Once, it was said, when an assistant's memorandum so filled the page that Mr. Hoover barely had room for a comment, he wrote. "Watch the borders," and his puzzled but obedient aides dispatched agents to patrol the Canadian and Mexican borders for a week. Friends and detractors all agree that the system has mirrored and fed a colossal ego. In the office, for instance, Mr. Hoover never circulated; people came to him. He sat amid flags behind a raised, polished mahogany desk at the end of a 35-foot office. Visitors, if they sat, sank into deep leather chairs and inevitably looked up to the throned director. A day in the life of J. Edgar Hoover testified to his unflagging energy and to the power of habit. The few changes in his routine were forced on him; His friend Clyde Tolson, the F.B.I.'s associate director, was not well enough to walk the last few blocks to the office in recent days, so their morning strolls along Constitution Avenue were abandoned. The old Harvey's Restaurant was razed so Mr. Hoover and Mr. Tolson had lunch instead at the Mayflower Hotel next door on Connecticut Avenue. Old patterns persisted. The chauffeur picked up Mr. Hoover and then Mr. Tolson, about 9 o'clock every morning, and delivered them to the office about 9:30. At the end the director was still the complete master of the bureau's huge flow of paper work. He did little sleuthing himself, but he kept abreast of the F.B.I's major cases. Certain categories of business were handled by Mr. Hoover alone, including high-level personnel decisions, liaison in other than routine matters with Congress, the Attorney General and the White House, and anything that brought unfavorable publicity on the bureau. He left for lunch at 11:30 A.M., returned by 12:45 P.M. and usually took work home with him when he left for the day at 4:30. There were things he did not do anymore. He outlived the Stork Club in New York where he long enjoyed cafe society's attention and the friendship of Sherman Billingsley, the owner. He no longer tended the azaleas around his house. He had to give up his favorite angel food cake and chocolate cream pie to keep his weight down. Once an avid walker, he said that "conditions in this city," presumably a reference to the crime rate, kept him out of Rock Creek Park, formerly a favorite stamping ground near his house. Some Continuities Still, the continuities in his life were as noticeable as the changes: the Jack Daniel's whiskey before dinner; the Miami vacation during the last two weeks of December and the July break and physical checkup in La Jolla, Calif., the passion for horse racing; and above all, the friendship with Mr. Tolson, a fellow bachelor with whom Mr. Hoover had lunch and dinner six days a week since the late nineteen-twenties. Mr. Tolson, who always stayed a respectful step behind Mr. Hoover in their famous walks together, lagged severely after two strokes and open-heart surgery. But the friendship was a s fast as ever, and through a special personnel device that Mr. Hoover engineered to get around Mr. Tolson's physical disability, Mr. Tolson remains the bureau's second-ranking officer. Together they frequented the racetracks around Washington, as well as Gulfstream in Miami and Delmar in La Jolla. Mr. Hoover, who applied the same analytical imagination to the racing charts that he once used on kidnapping rings, was still bothered by touts who recognized him and wanted to tip him on a sure thing. But he bet only $2 on each race and would leave in disgust if his losses went over $10. Friends say it was Mr. Tolson, not Mr. Hoover, who sent junior F.B.I. agents around to the $50 and $100 windows with heavy side bets. Mr. Hoover's humor usually ran to heavy-handed practical jokes. The late Julius Lulley, the restaurateur who always kept a special table set for Mr. Hoover and Mr. Tolson at Harvey's, once found his Maryland farm dotted with F.B.I. "wanted" posters bearing Mr. Lulley's picture. Years ago, when Guy Hottel, a Hoover bodyguard and friend, got married, the F.B.I. director found out, where Mr. Hottel was going on his honeymoon and conspired with the Virginia State Police to have the newlyweds picked up and held overnight on a fake charge. Mr. Hoover was not always quick to appreciate other people's jokes. In his saloon-going days in New York, it was said that he avoided Toots Shor's restaurant because of the insults that were Mr. Shor's trademark. However, there always was a droll undercurrent in many of Mr. Hoover's utterances--as in the W. C. Fields-like defense of racetracks as an outlet for people's emotions, "which if they weren't at the track, they might use for less laudable escapades." And Mr. Hoover recently took to public kidding about himself--the clearest sign of his rejuvenation under President Nixon and Attorney General John N. Mitchell. Why Did He Stay? At a party for Mr. Mitchell's wife Martha last summer, Mr. Hoover brought the house down with an impromptu speech. Referring to a recent Life magazine cover that featured a marble bust of his bulldog face and the headline, "Emperor of the F.B.I," Mr. Hoover apologized to those who did not recognize him in a tuxedo. "We emperors have our problems," he said. "My Roman toga was not returned from the cleaners." Perhaps the most widely asked question about Mr. Hoover recently was why he stayed on the job, but that, too, had been around a while. Even in the nineteen-thirties his long tenure was considered remarkable. During the forties, a former aide recalls, "every year he'd ask for a computation of his retirement and there'd be a rumor that the old boy was stepping down." The inside gossip in the fifties was that Mr. Hoover had approved plans for the construction of his retirement villa at La Jolla. After John Kennedy reappointed Mr. Hoover in 1960, it was thought he would bow out around the mandatory retirement age of 70, which would have come on New Year's Day, 1965. But as early as May 1964, President Johnson waived the retirement law. The next obvious milestone was his 75th Birthday in January, 1971, but that passed without incident, like all the rest. Some people say that Mr. Hoover wanted to see the completion of the new $102-million F.B.I. building on Pennsylvania Avenue--sometime in 1974. Mr. Hoover says he will stay on the job as long as his physical condition permitted. But why? "I've always been against retiring a man by age," he said. "The longer a man is with us, the more valuable he becomes." The men around Mr. Hoover pointed to his egotism--a sense of his own indispensability--and to the lack of family and interests that consoled other men in retirement. "For him the bureau is everything," said a friend.