Again, the FBI Gets Its Man

Judge William Webster, a Republican, takes on the bureau

During a legal conference in London last summer, Attorney General Griffin Bell and Federal Circuit Judge William Webster of St. Louis got to talking about the FBI. What would his answer have been, Bell wondered, had Webster been asked to head the bureau instead of Alabama Federal Judge Frank Johnson? "I don't know," replied Webster. "I have never thought of myself in that role."

Last week Webster, 53, was thinking about it. Seven weeks after Johnson withdrew his candidacy for health reasons, Webster was asked by President Carter to become the third director in the FBI's 43 year history, and he accepted. Explaining why he would give up his judgeship for the bureau's top post, he said: "I'm an old Navyman. I heard the bosun's pipe and the words 'Now hear this.' "

Webster was chosen from an original list of 117 prospects that was narrowed down to two after Bell consulted with lawyers, judges and law-enforcement officials. He and the other finalist, Federal Judge Frank McGarr of Chicago, met with Carter last week. Bell noted that both are Republicans; the Administration has been under heavy fire lately for partisanship in its appointments of federal judges and prosecutors. Bell suggested that Carter's decision might have turned on a simple affinity of temperament. "McGarr is a trial lawyer and has a more dominant personality," said the Attorney General. "Webster is given to being a quiet person."

To assume the directorship, Webster must first be confirmed by the Senate, but there appears to be little doubt about that. Scarcely a negative word was uttered about Webster after his nomination, and the only possible problem might be his membership in St. Louis' Veiled Prophet Society and the Noonday Club, two exclusive groups that have no black members. Bell noted that he had studied Webster's court decisions and found him to be a "moderate person" who "reasons well."

Those familiar with his work in the Eighth Circuit agree. One liberal St. Louis lawyer claims that Webster tends to uphold the rights of police more readily than those of defendants, but concedes that he is a "better than average" judge. Other civil rights advocates describe him as fair, and conservatives are pleased by the fact that he has let a number of criminal convictions stand despite alleged minor mistakes in trials.

While his integrity is unquestioned, the test for Webster will be how well he can--with limited administrative experience--run an agency with 19,000 employees, a $500 million annual budget and a lot of problems. Dominated by cliques and thoroughly demoralized, the FBI has suffered one severe blow after another to its public image since the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972.

There were damaging revelations of Hoover's petty corruption and personal wars against political dissenters and black leaders. L. Patrick Gray, the acting director, politicized the agency by bending to pressure from the Nixon White House to impede the Watergate investigations. Outgoing Director Clarence Kelley, who is due to retire by Feb. 15, has been unable to wrest full control from the remaining members of Hoover's inner circle. Within the past five years, moreover, it has been disclosed that a number of the FBI's 8,400 agents have been involved in illegal entries and mail opening. One agent, John Kearney, was indicted last April in New York for illegal surveillance of the radical underground Weatherman group, and Bell has yet to decide whether there will be further indictments pending a report from a ten-man Justice Department team on past FBI malpractices.

The man tapped to lead the bureau to brighter days has an exemplary record. After two hitches in the Navy (top rank: lieutenant) and degrees from Amherst College and Washington University School of Law, Webster entered private practice. Richard Nixon appointed him as a U.S. district court judge in 1971 and to the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1973. When Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas retired in 1975, Webster was one of the first eleven people recommended to the American Bar Association as a possible replacement.

Webster is a Christian Scientist who neither drinks nor smokes and stays in shape by playing tennis regularly. He and Wife Drusilla weekend at the family's 265-acre farm in Callaway County, Mo., 90 miles west of St. Louis, where Webster rides horses and breeds Black Angus cattle. The parents of a college-age son and two daughters, the Websters have few qualms about moving East--even though, as Mrs. Webster says with a laugh, "we'll be one of the few in Washington not from Georgia."

When Griffin Bell announced William Webster's appointment to the FBI post, he noted proudly that it had been made "without regard to political party." One motivation for the remark: both he and President Carter had become embroiled in a controversy over their desire to sack a Republican, David Marston, as U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia.

Marston, who has convicted some top Democratic officials, including Pennsylvania Speaker of the House Herbert Fineman, was summoned to Bell's office the day after Webster's nomination. When he emerged, Marston said the Attorney General had told him that "the decision to fire me was final, and would not be reconsidered." Carter admitted the previous week that he had asked Bell to "expedite" the ouster of Marston after receiving a phone call from Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman Joshua Eilberg. Carter presumably did not know that Eilberg was under investigation by Marston's office for financial irregularities in a Philadelphia hospital's construction program.

Bell offered the outgoing prosecutor a three-month extension, but Marston declined. Said he: "I've been crippled by the events of the past few weeks. I don't want to be a lame duck."

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