Edgar Hoover

WASHINGTON -- They came from as far away as Germany and as nearby as Silver Spring. But at the corner of 9th and E streets, visitors to the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building all found disappointment at their final destination yesterday.The attraction that brought them there -- the popular public tour of the FBI's headquarters -- has been halted indefinitely, after recent unspecified threats against the agency's facilities in Washington.By yesterday, news of the tour cancellations, which began Friday, had clearly not reached everyone in the nation's capital.

Americans are accepting "a barrage of distortion" of historical fact by quick-buck artists in television, movies, tabloid magazines and newspapers, a former top FBI official said yesterday.Former FBI Deputy Director Cartha "Deke" DeLoach told the Baltimore Rotary Club that "everybody from Elvis Presley to anybody's grandmother" has been blamed for assassinating President John F. Kennedy, despite evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.The weeks leading up to the 30th anniversary of the JFK shooting produced a spate of films, books and shows rehashing events or purporting to present new facts, but few squared with the reality, Mr. DeLoach said.

"Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer," by Edward Jay Epstein. Random House. 432 pages. $30.Few have understood the transforming power of public relations as well as Armand Hammer.When Hammer published an autobiography in 1987 - his third - there wasn't room on the back cover for all the endorsements: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, George Bush, Menachem Begin, Linus Pauling, Walter Cronkite.They had bought the image Hammer's press releases had shaped over six decades: openhearted humanitarian, savvy art collector, brilliant capitalist.

IT'S OBVIOUS THAT history is dead. Especially in America, where we now have the collective attention span of Kathie Lee Gifford and often behave as if "the past" was that long-ago period when there were no clickers and people actually had to get up off the couch to change channels.Today, history means Before Starbucks. Talk about roughing it! The proof is all around us: Kids no longer have mythic heroes out of the past. Instead, they have "favorite people" and they are almost invariably wealthy celebrities or famous athletes, usually all dumber than a doorpost but incredibly rich, which is truly the only thing that counts.

It was a guess, nothing more. But history professor Jon Wiener, a specialist on the Cold War, thought he'd give it a shot. A long-time Marx Brothers fan, Wiener figured he'd check to see if the FBI had kept a file on Groucho Marx.Imagine, Groucho under government scrutiny as a possible subversive. Could happen. After all, Groucho did wisecrack his way through life, sneering at things sacred. It was Groucho who said: "These are my principles. If you don't like them I have others."Perhaps such a fellow would arouse J. Edgar Hoover's suspicion.

Public Enemies *** 1/2 ( 3 1/2 STARS ) Public Enemies provides a welcome shock to the system. This tough-minded, visually electric movie about Depression bank robber John Dillinger ( Johnny Depp) takes audiences into the center of the action in its opening minutes. It keeps them there as it expands into a bristling chronicle of a country in flux. Depp goes all the way with the role of a wry, wily Midwesterner. He really nails this character - the scion of an age of speed who says he wants "everything" and wants it "right now."

When I heard that Richard Berry, the man who wrote "Louie Louie," had died, I saidWell, I can't tell you, in a family newspaper, what I said. But it was not a happy remark. It was the remark of a person who realizes he'll never get to thank somebody for something.I remember the day I first heard "Louie Louie." I was outside my house, playing basketball with my friends on a "court" that featured a backboard nailed to a tree next to a geologically challenging surface of dirt and random rocks, which meant that whenever anybody dribbled the ball, it would ricochet off into the woods and down the hill, which meant that our games mostly consisted of arguing about who would go get it.So we spent a lot of our basketball time listening to a transistor radio perched on a tree stump, tuned to WABC in New York City.

BOSTON -- My love of ''Black Nativity'' comes from more than being a stage dad for my two participating sons. The easy reason is that this stage version of Jesus' birth, currently running at Tremont Temple in Boston, is plain good. It has run here for 27 years. When it made its debut 35 years ago on Broadway, critics hailed it for its ''wild, pounding rapture'' and its ''uninhibited spirits and unlimited lung power.''The main reason is that ''Black Nativity'' itself is a miracle. It was written by Langston Hughes, a great poet who had little or no faith in traditional religion.

WASHINGTON -- I enjoyed President Bush's good-natured comedy act at this year's White House Correspondents Association dinner as much as everyone else did, up to a point. We laughed as Bush impersonator Steve Bridges joined the real president on stage to reveal what the inner Mr. Bush was supposedly thinking. Sample: "How come I can't have dinner with the 36 percent of the people who like me?" It was funny, yet I could not help but wince at the sharp contrast between his jovial rapport with the crowd of journalists and Hollywood stars and the war of words and legal actions that his administration has been waging against press freedoms.

In an ironic scene well into "Citizen Cohn" -- an unsettling new movie premiering on HBO tonight -- an actor portraying Cardinal Spellman says, "Evil exists, it's all around us."He is speaking of Communists. Yet ironically, evil incarnate sits right beside him at a restaurant table, stealing morsels of food from his plate.And, boy! What evil lurks in the character of controversial, Commie-hunting, unrepentant-to-the-end lawyer Roy Cohn, as worked up by actor James Woods.No hint of a shade of gray tempers this creepy portrait of the chief counsel to the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy.