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Newseum exhibit celebrates FBI's centennial

Submitted by SHNS on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 18:44

WASHINGTON -- Evidence -- Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's wooden cabin, a replica of the D.C. snipers' car and heiress-turned-bank robber Patty Hearst's rifle.Most museum exhibits contain what curators call artifacts, but the new exhibit at the Newseum is full of evidence borrowed from the FBI.The bureau is celebrating its centennial this year, and the exhibit portrays the sometimes cooperative and often combative relationship between law enforcement and the news media.The exhibit, which opened last month at the museum of news, features some of the biggest cases and evidence from the FBI's first 100 years. It includes gangster John Dillinger's death mask and the electric chair used to execute Bruno Hauptmann, the man convicted in the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby.As tourists enter the exhibit, they'll also see a life-size wax statue of the FBI's most famous director, J. Edgar Hoover, and his desk. The statue has human hair that the Newseum staff has to clean with shampoo.The exhibit will be on view until June 2009. It's the first major temporary exhibit in the short history of the Newseum, which operated in Arlington, Va., from 1997 through early 2002. It closed for several years during construction of the new, $450 million interactive museum on Pennsylvania Avenue near the U.S. Capitol. The Newseum reopened in April.The FBI approached the Newseum about including the exhibit as part of its celebration and also because the FBI building shut down tours of its headquarters after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.Charles Overby, the Newseum's chief executive officer, was more than willing to help out."After six years of the FBI tour being closed, now we're reopening for the public these terrific FBI exhibits," Overby said. "... Because we're new and pretty nimble with our ability to turn things around pretty quickly, we were happy to do it, with the proviso that it could be independent."Newseum staff worked with more than 40 FBI agents to collect evidence from offices around the country. The exhibit features approximately 200 items drawn from FBI evidence vaults and the collections of other museums, reporters, law-enforcement professionals and other individuals."We decided that it was a pretty cool idea to do an exhibit about kind of the uneasy relationship that exists between the press and the FBI," Newseum Executive Director Joe Urschel said. "To look at some of these great stories over the history of the FBI and see how they were affected both positively and negatively by the press."The exhibit features the desk used at the 1942 military trial of Nazi saboteurs, a homemade wood-and-metal gun created by Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, and the FBI's handwritten ledger of its most-wanted criminals from 1950s to 1991."I don't recall that there was anything we wanted that we didn't actually get. The FBI went (to) extraordinary lengths," Urschel said. Its representatives "even found Kaczynski's homemade gun that we didn't know they had."The exhibit is located in the Newseum's new ABC News Changing Exhibits gallery. Tickets to the Newseum are $20 for adults. It is on Pennsylvania Avenue near the National Gallery of Art. The closest Metro subway stop is Navy Memorial-Archives on the Green and Yellow lines.For more information, visit http://www.newseum.org/(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)