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William H. Webster, the only person ever to lead both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, switching from lawman to spymaster while the bureau was investigating high crimes at the White House and the C.I.A., died on Friday in Warrenton, Va. He was 101. A family spokesman, Jim McGrath, confirmed the death, at a care center, but did not specify a cause.
Mr. Webster was born two months before J. Edgar Hoover took command of the F.B.I. in 1924. Hoover, who governed the bureau for almost half a century, was not yet six years in his grave when Mr. Webster was sworn in as the F.B.I.’s third director on Feb. 23, 1978, a time when Hoover’s long shadow still darkened Washington.
Senate hearings had exposed the bureau’s Cold War history of warrantless wiretaps and burglaries and laid bare its vendettas against the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The F.B.I., America’s leading law enforcement agency, was widely seen as lawless and malicious. Six weeks after Mr. Webster took office, a federal grand jury, citing a “conspiracy to injure and oppress citizens” with illegal break-ins against the friends and families of far-left fugitives, indicted L. Patrick Gray III, the former acting F.B.I. director; Edward S. Miller, the former F.B.I. intelligence chief; and Mark Felt, the former deputy director who was later revealed as Deep Throat, The Washington Post’s secret Watergate source. (Mr. Gray’s indictment was later dropped by the Justice Department. Mr. Miller and Mr. Felt were fined and later pardoned by President Ronald Reagan.)
President Jimmy Carter chose Mr. Webster — a federal judge, a moderate Republican and a Christian Scientist — in large part because he projected probity and integrity, qualities that matched the president’s self-image. At his swearing-in, Mr. Webster vowed to “do the work that the American people expect of us in the way that the Constitution demands of us.”