Edgar Hoover

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.

Paul Coates pondered each question I asked him, taking half a minute or so before he answered. His answers were measured, articulate and intelligent. Just the Coates I remembered from the days when he was the captain of the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party. This month Coates was in Oakland, Calif., celebrating the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. It was the latest of several gatherings that reunited former members of the organization that Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded.

Public Enemies provides a welcome shock to the system. This tough-minded, visually electric movie about Great 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. Without ever telling viewers what to think or how to feel, it raises more questions about the corruption of crime and crime fighting than any expose or thesis. And if it sometimes registers too coolly, by the end it rouses more bruised feelings than any four-hankie weepie.

Maryland officials are working behind the scenes to lure the FBI's headquarters to the state from its longtime home base in downtown Washington as the agency seeks an updated building to carry out its expanded counterterrorism and cyber crime missions. If successful, the effort would land nearly 12,000 jobs and a 2.1 million square-foot office complex in Prince George's County, making it one of the largest economic development coups in years. Its impact would rival the immense footprint in the state of the Social Security Administration, which has its headquarters in Woodlawn.

1922: Reader's Digest appears1922: Mussolini forms fascist govt.1923: Time magazine appears1924: J. Edgar Hoover heads FBI

At Canaan's Edge By Taylor Branch One of the greatest of American stories has found its great chronicler in Baltimore's Taylor Branch. Beginning with Parting the Waters in 1988, followed 10 years later by Pillar of Fire, and closing now with At Canaan's Edge, Branch has given the short life of Martin Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent revolution he led the epic treatment they deserve. The three books of Branch's trilogy are lyrical and dramatic, social history as much as biography, woven from the ever more complex strands of King's movement, with portraits of figures like Lyndon Johnson, Bob Moses, J. Edgar Hoover and Diane Nash as compelling as that of his central character.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon details the tumult of American society and the changes in Beatle John Lennon from 1966 to 1976, when he roamed beyond his current and then former bandmates and settled in New York City with his second wife, performance artist Yoko Ono. As Lennon and Ono channeled their artistic energies into social protest, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI began monitoring them. At the behest of the Nixon administration and conservatives like Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the government served them deportation orders in 1972, on the grounds that four years before Lennon had pleaded guilty to a British drug charge of possessing marijuana.

There are 875,000 on the terrorist watch list ("U.S. launches internal review," May 1). Unbelievable! This speaks out against the effectiveness of our immigration screening system and homeland security apparatus. Do I feel unsafe as I travel about my country? You bet I do, and it is a heavy topic of conversation. What are we to do about this? Just wait for the next 9/11 or Boston calamity? Even the dummies who voted in the past election are getting scared. However, we can all rest assured that Washington has the answer.

Clarence M. Kelley,85, who succeeded J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI and steered the agency through the turmoil of the post-Watergate period, died Tuesday in Kansas City, Mo. He had battled minor strokes and emphysema in recent years.Sidney Simon,80, a sculptor whose works grace fountains at the World Wide Plaza in New York City and the Graham Building in Philadelphia, died of congestive heart failure Monday in Boston.Peter A. Carruthers,61, a physicist who helped Arizona contend in the late 1980s for a controversial atom smasher, died Sunday in Tucson from liver disease.

Andre Lwoff, 92, a pioneer in the field of molecular biology and a winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine, died Friday in Paris. He shared his Nobel with two French colleagues, Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod, for the discovery that the genetic material of a virus can be assimilated by bacteria and passed on to succeeding generations. He had discovered earlier that genetic material can exist outside the cell's nucleus.William Daniel Murray, 85, who was elevated to the federal bench in 1949, died Monday in Butte, Mont.