Most Wanted Story

To U.S. newspaper readers, the FBI is such a familiar story that J. Edgar Hoover has supplanted the vacuum cleaner as a household word for efficiency. Nevertheless, newspapers across the nation last week were breathlessly running--or preparing to run--serials on the FBI as if it were the most wanted story and the biggest since Grace Kelly took Monaco. Papers across the U.S. plugged an Associated Press series that started this week. The United Press had its own series on the FBI and the Chicago Tribune Press Service a third.

The reason for the G-man boom is The FBI Story (Random House; $4.95), by Pulitzer Prizewinner Don Whitehead, a 20-year A.P. veteran now Washington bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune. No mere puff job, Whitehead's book is a searching, definitive history and, though done with FBI cooperation, takes a well-balanced view of the bureau. To the surprise of Author Whitehead, Random House and newspaper editors, the book turned out to be a runaway bestseller, sold 150,000 copies in five weeks (initial print order: 35,000); last week the publishers planned to print another 75,000 copies.

On the Bandwagon. First news agency to climb on the FBI bandwagon was Whitehead's old boss, the A.P., which bought serial rights to the book in November. A.P.'s version was offered on an exclusive basis to the first member newspaper in any territory that asked for it. When the book became a sellout, publishers who had been beaten to the A.P. series went to work to find another one. United Press assigned staffers to put together a six-part series, with a preface by Hoover, on the FBI's top cases, from Al Capone to Brink's. The only major wire service that ignored the story was Hearst's International News Service. When the Philadelphia Bulletin signed up for the A.P. series, the rival Philadelphia Inquirer turned out its own six-part saga, sold it to several other papers, including Hearst's New York Journal-American and Los Angeles Examiner.

The most saturated city was Chicago, where the Daily News snapped up the A.P. series. The Sun-Times countered with the U.P. series. The Tribune hastily put together its own nine-part FBI story, beat the A.P.'s release date on using material from Whitehead's book. Though the Tribune claimed FBI cooperation, the series drew heavily on Whitehead's book for the first three installments, then turned to rewriting FBI stories in the Trib's morgue.

Competing Sagas. Though Whitehead and the A.P. complained to the Trib, Managing Editor Don Maxwell brushed them off, snapped: "We've covered the FBI as much as anyone. After all, most of the stories in the book were in our morgue, too." While editors scrapped, J. Edgar Hoover happily churned out "exclusive" quotes and prefaces for competing sagas, and let each editor boast that the FBI had "opened its files" wide.

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