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An insider's view of the FBI and criminal justice By Edwin Guthman The FBI without tears, some laughs and Emetratlng but balanced report on J. Edgar oover's last two decades as FBI director. That's Inside Hoover't FBI newly published book written by Neil J. Welch, who was special agent In charge of the FBI's Philadelphia office for three momentous years and David W. Marston, who was US.

attorney here during most of that time. Welch's career was about as unusual as any agent who ever served in the FBI, except Hoover himself. He made his mark as a lawman of exceptional skill, ingenuity and courage in bank robberies, kidnappings, the lynching of three civil rights workers in Mississippi and in his single-handed capture in Buffalo of a hostage-holding psychopathic killer the man who fatally stabbed Kitty Genovese on a New York City street in 1964 while 38 neighbors heard her screams for help but neither came to her aid nor called police. But it was as a special agent in charge of field offices in Buffalo, Detroit and Philadelphia that Welch became the field agents'' hero the man who outwitted Hoover's rigid rules and not only survived, but demonstrated that the FBI was overly preoccupied with minor crime to better its statistics; that it needed to concentrate on only FBI man recommended to be director by a civilian search committee that Presi- -dent Carter formed and then ignored. But Welch's final chapter is worth mentioning.

In it Welch argues forcefully that what the nation needs is a national strategy for fighting organized crime. His key recommendations are: Creation of a National Criminal Justice Council composed of federal and state authorities on crime, headed possibly by the" vice president. Its mission would be to set priorities and involve federal agencies, state and local police and prosecutors in implementing a crime-fighting master plan. Permit lesser federal offenses such as auto theft, forgery of Social Security checks or even routine bank robberies that are clogging the federal courts to be prosecuted in state courts. In major federal prosecutions of organized crime, use the British system of retaining highly experienced attorneys to present the government's case.

Welch argues that in important prosecutions federal prosecutors often are outgunned by more experienced and better-paid defense lawyers. Extend existing laws that allow confiscation of the proceeds of a criminal enterprise to assess convicted major offenders with the expenses of investigation and prosecution and impose treble damages. "I am convinced that by radically restructuring our methods we can cripple organ ers, some objectively researched and some either totally uncritical or overly critical. Welch tells it as it was during his 30-year career. He gives Hoover the credit he is due for single-handedly transforming the FBI from an inept, corrupt agency into a model of efficiency, dedication and skill.

And, at the same time, he accurately describes how work in the field was hamstrung by a faceless bureacracy in FBI headquarters in Washington and an aging Hoover, increasingly remote from his men. Hoover and Welch had much in common. Hoover, the able administrator and consummate manipulator of power in Washington; Welch, the able administrator and consummate maneuverer through and around the FBI's bureaucratic minefield. Both were highly professional lawmen, inspirational leaders who demanded results. A key difference was in where they worked Hoover at headquarters; Welch in the field.

The book is largely an account of Welch's daring career from the time he entered the FBI in 1951 as a young lawyer out of Omaha to his retirement in 1980 as an assistant director in charge of the New York office. So readers will be intrigued by all Welch did. He was the only field-office head who refused to allow his men to participate in the FBI's counterintelligence (COINTEL-PRO) program to disrupt civil rights and anti-Vietnam war groups, and he was the ized crime and corruption without major new expenditure." Welsh writes. "The FBI bureaucracy does not need a battle plan, but the public interest demands one, and the crime fighters in the front trenches deserve one." Welsh recognizes that central direction of the crime-fighting agencies has the inherent risk of developing into a serious threat to individual rights, and after asking himself whether there is more danger in efficiency than in crime, responds: 'The real threat to freedom is in our present system. Organized crime is a fundamental threat to democracy not because it is crime we denft really feel-endangered by office football-pool betting, even though it is technically a crime but because it is organized "The combination of organized crime and official corruption has created an atmosphere in which pervasive criminal conduct is openly accepted.

It is not an enemy which might be accidentally defeated without any plan." The federal law 'enforcement agencies have made considerable progress in the last 25 years in coordinating their efforts against organized crime. Welch's extended plan for pooling resources and focusing that effort would not get far without a president who was fully committed to its success, but Welch has advanced an interesting, provocative idea. Neil J. Welch sophisticated, high-profit lawlessness that is having a major adverse impact on society La Cosa Nostra, political corruption and white collar crime. Of all the books written about the FBI and Hoover, the Welch-Marston account stands apart.

Some of those books were written by agents who left the FBI and concentrated on Hoover's foibles. Others were by outsid On the other end Facenda's friends weren't all acquaintances 3lnqimtr Op-ed Sunday, Sept 30, 1984 7-C W. -A fi v. Pi "The Marines in the color guard were all big strapping, handsome men," John Facenda said, recalling the day. "The flag fluttered in the autumn breeze.

I had such a deep feeling of pride that when the colors passed, I wept. "I didn't know why I wept. I was puzzled. So I asked Popa. 'Why did I cry, Popa?" I asked.

"Popa was touched. 'It is something you do not understand now, my he said, 'But someday you will, someday you John Facenda loved to talk about "Popa." He remembered walking across the then new Benjamin Franklin Bridge with his father on July 4th, 1926. "1 was so proud that my father had helped build the bridge and I told him so," John Facenda said. I said, 'someday, I'm going to build bridges like John Facenda never made the boyish bravado stand up. He never built a bridge, not the sort of bridges that his father built.

Yet, with his great warmth and charm and matchless talent as a mass communicator, John Facenda, the last of the class anchors, built many a bridge of friendship, trust and credibility into many a home across the Delaware Valley. I suppose that's why Ron Simmins, the Inquirer paperhandler who never ever met John Facenda, was so positive that he knew him. By Tom Fox Inquirer Editorial Board He was the last of the class anchors. Those who followed were mere pretenders. He was The Original, the one-of-a-kind original who shaped the mold and set the tone and style that those who followed could never hope to master.

John Facenda was a rare, rare mix of human chemistry. For more than 20 years he was a big part of Philadelphia life. I knew people who could never go to bed at night until they heard what John Facenda had to say on the late news. He was the late news. When he left Channel 10 more than 11 years ago, a great deal of soul and dignity went with him.

Television news was never the same after John Facenda left the beat. It will never be the Barrymore is gone. John Facenda died the other day. He was 72 last August, 72 and ravaged by incurable cancer, dying by the inch in the same hospital where his dear wife lay fighting for her life. From the bed where he lay dying, he expressed concern for his wife.

He worried about her, worried terribly. It was a tragic final curtain for a man who had lived in the glamorous glare of television. John Facenda died alone. Shortly before 9 o'clock the other morning, a nurse checked on him and found him dead, vanished into the great John Facenda turned up in one of the pews and the faithful were beside themselves, but John loved every minute of it. He nodded and smiled in that marvelous regal manner that was so much a parf of his charm.

It was my privilege to know John Facenda, to feel his warmth and charm close up. The man was uppercase class. He had the majestic bearing of a king, the diction of an elocution teacher, the soul of a poet. He loved his father, an immigrant from Italy who came to Philadelphia from Portsmouth, to work on the construction of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. "Popa," John Facenda said, "came in 1922.

Mama stayed in Portsmouth with the 13 children. But we all came for the dedication of the bridge on July 4th, 1926, the Sesquicentennial Year. We arrived at the old Broad Street Station. "I ran out onto the sidewalk. I was awed by the tall buildings.

Then I looked down and found a penny on the sidewalk one of those old copper and lead pennies, one of the old, old ones about the size of a quarter. "It was a good omen, I suppose, because Philadelphia certainly has been good to John Facenda." John Facenda carried the penny around as a luck charm for years, but when it began to wear away, he put it in a little jewelry box. "It's one of my mists of eternity. He just slipped away, pretty much the way his famous face faded from the television screen at the end of his newscasts. His death had an incredible impact on people in this town.

I mentioned that he died to Ron Simmins, a paper-handler at The Inquirer, and he stopped dead in his tracks, a sudden sadness overtaking him. "I knew John Facenda," Ron Simmins said, simply. "You knew him?" I asked. "Sure," Ron Simmins said. "I never ever met him, but I still knew him.

He came to my house every night, ever since I was a kid." John Facenda would have loved the moment. That was his great strength. He got through to people. He got deep down in their hearts and souls. I never knew anyone else in television with that kind of chemistry.

I knew John Facenda. His son lives around the corner from me in Lans-downe. I remember the night one of John Facenda's grandsons was confirmed at St. Philomena's, my parish church. John Facenda favorite things," he said.

The sentimental side of John Facenda never came across on the television screen, but the man was a notorious weeper. Why, he wept when he saluted the flag. "I'm a sucker for patriotism," he once told me. He told a story about a day in his childhood in Portsmouth, a story about a Navy Day parade, about blaring trumpets, rolling drums, flapping flags and tears rolling down his pink cheeks. Mrs.

Roosevelt's centennial Beside the great man was a great woman duced a general burst of laughter which FDR joined with a gusto far beyond the call of husbandly deference. I never saw FDR again, but learned more about their relationship while breakfasting alone with Mrs. Roosevelt during my White House weekend. In a conversation we had about her husband, she related an episode that struck me as a classic commentary on marriage. While preparing to retire one evening, she was joined by the President, who wanted her opinion about a policy matter that could seriously affect British-American relations.

Although they debated the issue late into the night, they were still in sharp disagreement when they parted. The next day, when the British ambassador and his wife came to tea, House visits as Mrs. Roosevelt's guest, including a long weekend in 1944, but it was at that first supper encounter that I was to gain some unexpected insights into the nature of my hostess' rapport with her husband. Apart from the shock of hearing the President talking uninhibitedly about private as well as public matters in the presence of me, a perfect stranger, the greatest surprise was hearing Mrs. Roosevelt rebutting her husband whenever she felt that he had to be set straight.

When, for example, he was assuring us that his anti-isolationist policy was slowly but surely gaining acceptance throughout the nation, Mrs. Roosevelt was quick to interrupt him with "Not in Seattle!" a city she had recently visited. Having prejudged her personality by her rather innocuous newspaper column, "My Day" an anti-New Deal wag dubbed it "My Daze" I was unprepared for this spirited aspect of her. which asserted itself throughout the meal. It reached its apex during desert while the President was ruminating about "the prospering economic situation" in France, which he attributed to the confidence of the French in their future.

He could not understand why the Americans lacked such confidence; they seemed to "be afraid of something In the somber pause that ensued, Mrs. Roosevelt rose from the table to end the supper, and addressing herself to FDR with a mischievous smile, said: "Darling, I know what they're afraid of. They're afraid of you." The precision of her remark pro By Jerre Mangione Forty-five years ago at the White House, on a Sunday evening in May, I sat next to Eleanor Roosevelt's good ear around a supper table that included Franklin D. Roosevelt, his secretary, Marguerite LeHand, and three old friends of the Roosevelts' who were visiting for the weekend. I was the only outsider.

It was an awesome occasion for me but not for any of the other guests. As if responding to the President's astonishing vitality, from the moment he took his place at the head of the table there was a general hubbub of conversation that smacked of a family free-for-all with everyone competing for attention, except when FDR with his dominating voice chose to engage in a monologue. There were to be other White The gap Soviets, U.S. have bad image By Andy Rooney All of us hope something good comes out of President Reagan's meeting with Andrei A. Gromyko.

If the difference of opinion between the United States and the Soviet Union was a domestic labor dispute, someone would have called in a federal mediator years ago for binding arbitration. The situation is ridiculous. Between us, we are wasting half the world's wealth and squandering much of its natural resources producing weapons that don't do anything good for anyone. The premise both Americans and Soviets ought to accept is that neither of us wants a war. On our side, we don't have to concede that Soviet leaders are nice people or even that they wouldn't like to take over a larger portion of the world.

All we have to admit, to deal with them sensibly, is that they don't want war, either. The Soviets are obsessively secretive, suspicious and conniving but then we've got a few national character flaws, too. Nonreligious Soviet leaders behave like religious fanatics. Their saviour is socialism and anyone who denies it is excommunicated. Kremlin officials are so certain they're making the right decisions for their people that they don't let the people in on their decisions.

Soviet citizens are fed a diet of self-serving baloney. The government-controlled press issues claims and charges so ridiculous that the rest of the world laughs at them. One sad result of such inept Soviet propaganda is that although about 25 percent of it has some basis in fact, the rest is so blatantly untrue that no one believes any of it. If we're going to make some kind of peace with the Soviets, we've got to admit we do some wrong things. For instance, we have our own propaganda machinev and it may work better than the Soviets'.

Americans are propagandized on every side to believe that the Soviet Union is the enemy and that we are about to go to war with that country. In our novels, movies and television shows, the Soviet Union is evil. This is bound to get to us. Our children grow up thinking they know who the enemy is just as Soviet children do. We're spending $280 billion this year on weapons and while we now call our War Department the Defense Department, for internal goodwill, it's getting ready to fight a war with the Soviets and the Soviets know it.

It would make anyone jumpy. The unfortunate fact is that the prospects of war are good for business. Almost all our major manufacturers get in on a piece of the Pentagon action. The companies that make our toasters, our farm equipment, our cars, our airliners, our television sets and even our sewing machines, all depend, for a large part of their profits, on selling war goods to the government. Businessmen may not like war but they love the prospects of one.

There's nothing better for the economy than this prospect of war. In addition to the commercial incentive to promote the prospects of war, we have several hundred thousand career military officers. While all but the George Pattons among them are genuine in their desire for peace, there is still a hard core of professional warriors for whom war is the final test of skill in their chosen profession. If we really don't want a war, neither country is being very smart about it. (Andy Rooney is a syndicated newspaper columnist.) Playboy philosophy Why the 'macho men' go for Reagan Mrs.

Roosevelt was pouring when she overheard the ambassador and the President discussing the same issue. Suddenly, to her astonishment, she realized that FDR was repeating, almost verbatim, her side of the question as his own. "I almost dropped the tea kettle," said Mrs. Roosevelt. My delight with the story encouraged her to tell me of another, this one set in Hyde Park where they had gone for a few days of rest.

On a Sunday afternoon FDR announced he had promised to make a brief appearance at an Oxford Movement rally taking place nearby. He had taken it for granted she would accompany him and was miffed that she had "wickedly decided" to have no part of the rally. He drove away alone in a grumpy state, but his mood was far worse when he returned some two hours later. "He was fit to be tied," said Mrs. Roosevelt.

Eventually his sense of humor became restored and he explained that everything had gone well until he was ready to leave. Despite his repeated efforts, the car would not start. When a rally leader stepped forward to offer the assistance of his group, he gratefully accepted it, thinking that one of them was a mechanic. He was mistaken. At the leader's signal, the men and the women around the car fell on their knees and began praying for divine intervention.

When they were through, the President was asked to try the starter again. This time, to his disgust, the engine responded immediately. On his way back to Hyde Park, FDR realized that the carburetor must have become flooded and required a few moments of inaction the time taken up by the prayer to allow the excess fuel to evaporate. But at the time of the "miracle," he felt foolish, he told his wife, and resentful that prayer should be used for so trivial a purpose. With that Alice-in-Wonderland brand of logic peculiar to marital life, FDR concluded his report by asserting that had she accompanied him nothing of the kind would have happened.

These are, of course, miniscule footnotes in the Roosevelt saga but for me they are also epiphanies of a sort in the life of a remarkable human couple that reigned in the White House for more years than any other American president and first lady. (Jerre Mangione's 10 published books include "An Ethnic at Large: A Memoir of the Thirties and Forties" and "The Dream and the Deal," a history the WPA Federal Writers' Project. October 11 marks Mrs. Roosevelt's centennial birthday.) protect women at the same time. It is a very fatherly, traditional role that many men would like to emulate and many women, incidentally, find comforting.

Once again Reagan's instincts have not failed him. He's tapped into a deep, cultural resentment a furious counterattack by both the bewildered and the resentful. To many men, feminism threatens a loss of liberty and privilege, a demand to share burdens and obligations that don't sound like a lot of fun. It's no surprise, either, that the young have enlisted in this rebellion. They hear about the sex discrimination, but are neither old enough to remember it nor advanced enough in the work place to see it happening.

Besides, they think they have their own troubles. You may wonder if any of this represents a repudiation of feminism or a revival of masculinity. It may be a distinction without a difference yet another example of the culture balking at profound changes. It's ironic that the man who personifies change, Mondale, is derided as a wimp and the man who personifies soothing tradition is extolled as bold, but that's the way it is. Ronald Reagan has his cake and gets to eat it, too.

Is it any wonder men admire him. That's the Playboy philosophy in a nutshell. (Richard Cohen's column originates at the Washington Post.) chomping Mondale might be the one who played football and was in the Army (Reagan did both in the mov-ies), but Reagan has the demeanor of a man who takes his masculinity seriously and his feminism with a grain of salt. All this strikes a chord in those men who are fed up with feminism especially with the parody of it that gets shouted at them in slogans. They're tired of being called to ac- count for saying "girl" instead of "woman," tired of being told they should look at a woman and see a person tired of biting their tongue, being told to behave and made to feel guilty.

It's no coincidence that "feeling good" patriotism and "feeling good" masculinity are both enjoying a boom. They reject guilt for being either fortunate or privileged and celebrate sheer luck the happenstance of being a man or an American. For many men Reagan has come to the rescue. Not only is he at ease with his masculinity manly but not macho but he has the right "enemies: organized feminists. Contrast that with Mondale, the pal of the women's organizations, whose selection of Geraldine Ferraro many thought was dictated by their nagging.

Reagan, for instance, good-naturedly dismisses the feminist criticisms coming from his daughter, Maureen, by virtually saying, "Ain't By Richard Cohen WASHINGTON The other night, I saw a car bristling with anti-Mondale bumper stickers. "Fritz Buster," one of them said. "Mondale Eats Quiche," said another, and the rest were along the same theme. Walter F. Mondale, this bumper was screaming, was a wimp, lie would let the Soviets kick sand in our face.

The issue of manliness pervades this campaign and has turned it nasty. Mondale is derided, treated with contempt heckled, booed, vilified and all but dismissed as a sissy. It hardly matters that he has muscled up: He supports the Grenada invasion, would "quarantine" Nicaragua and clings to the middle of the road like an animal frozen in a car's headlights. The voters respond by saying in polls that they agree with him on the issues and then floor the accelerator for the kill. Why? There are perfectly good pocketbook explanations but none that folly explains Ronald Reagan's 30-point bulge among white males.

My guess is that Reagan personifies a resurgent masculinity coupled with growing anti-feminism an urge among many men to tell the women's movement to drop dead. He represents male liberation, an escape from the insufferable seriousness and obligation that feminism seems to represent. Reagan articulates that in his manner a man who goes his own way. The cigar- she cute." Mondale, on the other hand, would treat such criticism with suffocating solemnity and probably call a meeting. But there is something else about Reagan.

By virtue of his size, demeanor and age, he's a true father figure. A daddy dispenses and protects. That's precisely Reagan's posture toward women and why he infuriates so many of them. He opposes the ERA, which would incorporate women's rights in the Constitution. Instead, he will dispense those rights and, of course,.