The Nation: Chief Clarence Kelley: A Dick Tracy for the FBI

In 1961 the Kansas City, Mo., police department was badly shaken by a scandal that involved its chief and two of his high-ranking officers. To put the department back together again, the state hired FBI Agent Clarence M. Kelley. He quickly restored morale, re-established public confidence and made the department into one of the most innovative in the U.S. Now President Nixon is calling Kelley, 61, to perform a similar service for the FBI, which has been badly compromised by the Watergate scandal and fractured by internal strife since the death of Director J. Edgar Hoover 13 months ago.

Kelley’s three-decade record as a law enforcement officer has few blemishes, and his chances of confirmation as Hoover’s successor by the Senate seem good. Some agents at FBI headquarters would have preferred that the new director come from within their present ranks and are skeptical about Kelley’s ability to be independent of the White House. But his nomination pleases other senior FBI agents in the field offices. They still consider him one of their own—one, moreover, who was tainted by neither the in-house feuding during the late Hoover years nor by the controversy over Nixon’s first choice for the job, L. Patrick Gray. Kelley has a reputation for being independent of politics—though associates consider him somewhat conservative. In an interview with TIME Correspondent Ken Huff, he declared: “I have not bowed at any time to pressure, and I will not bow to pressure in the future.”

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A Rotarian and former Sunday school teacher, the silver-haired native of Kansas City occasionally gardens but has few interests outside of his work, his wife Ruby, two grown children and two grandchildren. Those who work with him say he is affable, even-tempered and taciturn. In high school he was nicknamed “Chief” because his slightly stooped frame (6 ft., 200 lbs.) resembled a cigar-store Indian silhouette. Now, behind his back, subordinates call him Dick Tracy because of his fondness for technological gadgetry (such as Kansas City’s computerized information system and helicopter patrol, which he instituted) and his square-jawed resemblance to the comic-strip cop.

The son of an electrical engineer, Kelley obtained his law degree from the University of Kansas City in 1940 and immediately joined the FBI. By the time he resigned in 1961, he had served in ten different cities and risen to special agent in charge of the FBI office in Memphis. Last year he supervised security for both the Democratic and Republican conventions in Miami Beach. As police chief, Kelley won the support of every group except Kansas City’s black minority.

They still blame him for the deaths of six blacks during two days of rioting in 1968. In a statement, Freedom, Inc., a local civil rights group, charges: “His unyielding position on law and order contributed fuel to the fiery 1968 riots instead of quenching them.” Kelley disagrees, saying that his hard-nosed approach kept them from being worse than they were. Black residents also complain that only about 100 of the city’s 1,300 police officers are black. Kelley, however, insists that the reason is not bigotry, but that few black applicants meet the department’s standards. There were only seven blacks on the force when he took over.

Kelley admits that his department has used such surveillance methods as observing protest demonstrations, recording the automobile licenses of people who attend activist meetings, and maintaining dossiers on militants —whether or not they were suspected of crimes. On occasion, his men have posed as newsmen to obtain demonstrators’ names; but he said it was done without his approval, and he ordered the practice stopped. He wins good marks from Arthur A. Benson II, a local lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, for being “amenable to suggestions and not irritated by criticism.”

That came through plainly in his interview with Huff, which covered a wide range of topics, even though Kelley declined to discuss his views on law-enforcement policies in advance of the Senate hearings on his confirmation.

A sampler:

ON WHETHER THE U.S. IS “DECLINING”: I do not think of myself as a soothsayer or great student of history, so I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about that. But I hope that we can all maintain the capability of reasoning together. With that, there won’t be any such problem [as a decline].

ON YOUNG PEOPLE: I have not condemned youth by any means. I have not said that the world is going to pieces. I have been encouraged by many fine things that they have done, and I am not going to be a forecaster of doom by any means.

ON BEING A MIDWESTERNER: I am not in any sense of the word cosmopolitan, but I’ve been around. I have a pretty good overall feeling about what the [national law enforcement] situation is. I think the goals of most chiefs of police, including those in the big Eastern cities, are about the same. We’re all trying to do the best we can with what we have.

ON RELATIONS WITH HIS STAFF: I try to stimulate discussion. Do I encourage it? Absolutely. Do I encourage opposite views? No. The expression of those views is fine. We’ll talk them over. ON FBI MORALE: Some agents feel that they have been buffeted about and don’t stand as tall as they used to. A few shots have been taken at them. But it’s still a fine organization, and I intend to reinstill in the agents a sense of the importance that they have for the country.

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