To not a few observers in Washington the Justice Department's Federal Bureau of Investigation—the "G-man" organization—has long seemed to possess a charmed life, particularly when its growth, national popularity and immunity from criticism were compared with those of other bureaux and agencies which have become prominent since the beginning of the New Deal.
But in the last few weeks the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, have come under a concentrated drumfire of criticism from half a dozen directions. There is obviously no con-carted plan in the attack, but the effect is much as if there were.
A number of newspapers and newspaper columnists began to attack Mr. Hoover as a "night-club fly cop," a seeker of personal publicity, and a potential secret police operator of the OGPU or Gestapo type. Then the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee offered a resolution to investigate governmental "wire tapping"; there was intimation that the FBI was one of the agencies engaged in this practice—an intimation which Mr. Hoover denied with some qualifications,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.