Courts: U.S. Marshals' 175th

The television image of the U.S. marshal is still the tall, lean figure of Wyatt Earp tossing hot lead in Dodge City.

In the real world the civil rights revolution has changed everything. Though he cannot ride a horse, rarely packs his .38 pistol and admits to raising petunias, broken-nosed ("I got it in the amatoors") Chief U.S. Marshal James Joseph Patrick McShane, 55, has out-Earped Earp while leading his 821 men to war in Birmingham, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa and Oxford. Never before has the nation's senior law-enforcement agency — just 175 years old — looked less like a refuge for...

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