(This is the second part of a two-part analysis of the papers and speeches presented at a two-day conference on the Federal Bureau of Investigation sponsored by the Committee for Public Justice and the Woodrow Wilson School of Government. Part One appeared in Friday's Crimson. The persons quoted were participants in the conference.)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has become an important fixture in the American psyche. Young white boys dream of growing up to be one of the Bureau's strong-jawed, clean-shaven Special Agents; car thieves and kidnappers fear its relentless pursuit; leftists and antiwar organizers wonder if Agents are tapping their telephones, reading their mail, infiltrating their meetings. Business, labor, and political leaders all fear and depend on the Bureau's wide information-gathering and dissemination powers.

The FBI's penetration of the national economic and political life was not the result of an accident. Almost all of the features of the FBI's growth--its political role as the domestic intelligence agency of the American government, its economic role as an important aid to the corporate structures which control the nation's marketplace, its social role as a compelling role-model for the traditional American boy-have come about as the result of conscious decisions by J. Edgar Hoover and his superiors in government.

The growth of the Bureau's image is a classic example. Hoover did not win the nation's heart by his silent devotion to duty; rather, he consciously carved out his niche by means of a concentrated campaign of public relations. Most observers of the FBI trace the beginning of the campaign to the Kansas City Massacre of 1933--a cold blooded-shoot-out in which Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd and a group of hoolums attempted to free one of their cohorts who was being taken to prison. Although the plan failed. FBI Special Agents and a local police chief died in the gun battle, which took place in broad daylight in front of the Kansas City Railroad depot.

Hoover was shocked by the flagrant lawlessness of the attack. Criminals like John Dillinger, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Ma Barker, and Alvin "Old Creepy" Karpis had captured the public imagination; movies and newspaper accounts portrayed them as misguided but romantic outlaws fighting the system which had caused the Depression. Hoover must have felt that an entire generation of American children was threatened by the growth of this myth, and he determined to offer an alternative model: the FBI director and his corps of brave Special Agents.

Hoover hired a famous Washington newsman--Henry Suydam of the old Brooklyn Eagle--to teach him the skills of public relations and image-making. Within a year he had learned them so well that he was able to dismiss his flack, and carry the Bureau's public relations himself. He has done so with great success ever since.

He began publishing monthly articles in major magazines detailing the success of the FBI against the most famous criminals of the day, with titles such as "Buzzard in Disguise," and "the Meanest Man I Ever Knew," to drive home the point that criminals were not admirable figures. He also began allowing magazine and book writers to enter the Bureau and produce highly favorable articles about himself and the enemies. He wrote introductions for books with titles such as Ten Thousand Public Enemies and Our FBI: An Inside Story.

G. Man (starring the former criminal hero, James Cagny) and You Can't Get Away With It educated the screen audience about the omniscience and implacability of the Bureau and its Director. War on Crime, a comic strip drawn by a close personal friend of Hoover's, drew on FBI files for its plots. A highly successful radio series, The FBI--In Peace and War, captivated a nationwide listening audience. Thousands of children sent in boxtops for Junior G-Man badges and pictures of Hoover.

The campaing was a bananza for the entertainment industry, the newspapers, and the FBI. FBI pictures were guaranteed a wide audience; Pictures of Hoover eating a 'G-Man Sandwich' at Toots Shor's were great filler for the Saturday editions; the FBI became a cultural ideal.

The blitz has kept up. The House on 92nd St. and Walk East on Beacon--both featuring dozens of Special Agents on loan from the Bureau as actors--explained the FBI's role in capturing Nazi saboteurs and the Rosenbergs. I Was a Communist for the FBI and a short-lived television series. I Led Three Lives, glorified the special agent and his most vital tool, the political informer.

The culmination of this selling campaign of course, is the highly successful ABC television series. "The FBI," now in its seventh season. The FBI collaborated in producing the series with a precise calculation of what it could accomplish for the Bureau, and it maintains particularly strict controls over the series. It gave permission for the show--which a number of studios had been seeking since television began--at a time when criticism of the FBI was rising, from citizens who suggested that the Bureau had been derelict in protecting President Kennedy and providing protection to civil rights workers in the South.

Cartha DeLoach, assistant director of the Bureau, explained that the decision had been made because "we thought it was time to clarify what the Bureau does. We can't protect people--like civil rights workers, for example."

The FBI retains veto power over all casting, a Special Agent takes part in all the series's script conferences and is permanently assigned to supervise the shooting, and the final scripts are sent to Washington for approval. Hoover watches the show faithfully, and he told a Congressional subcommittee that he felt, the show was useful in maintaining the Buerau's image. When Sen. John Pastore (D-R.I.) began an inquiry into the effects of violence on television. Hoover called producer Quinn Martin, and the violence on "The FBI" dipped: "We have made an adjustment," Martin said later, "and I don't think it's hurt us any. Our ratings have gone up."

Beyond maintaining an image for the great mass of the American people, the Bureau has a specific profile which it projects toward its target groups: those seeking radical social change. The documents stolen from the FBI resident agency in Media, Pa., and later released to the public by the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI make clear the way in which the FBI uses its identity to intimidate radicals. In a memo from FBI headquarters, agents were urged to increase the numbers of interviews they conducted with radicals, not for investigative purposes, but because it would "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

The social control and phone tapping image projection used against radical groups is the mission of the vast political intelligence apparatus of the FBI. Hoover began gathering political intelligence after an order in 1936 by Franklin D. Roosevelt charging him to prepare for war by amassing information on groups likely to commit sabotage in the event of war. John Elliff termed this order the "Magna Carta of domestic intelligence." Hoover has operated on its authority ever since.