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Shortly after taking over as United States attorney in San Francisco in 1998, former colleagues recalled, Mr. Mueller asked all the supervisors in the office to step down. He promptly sent a Justice Department-wide email announcing that "the following positions are now open" -- and listing every major prosecution job in Northern California.

Many in the office found it brusque and off-putting. But Mr. Mueller told colleagues that he had learned a management style decades earlier as a Marine platoon commander: You cannot make people do things that they are incapable of doing. So rather than prodding employees, he preferred to move quickly to assemble the best possible team, even if his method was disruptive.

As special counsel, Mr. Mueller has recruited talented prosecutors from across the country, stocking the office both with trusted longtime colleagues and younger prosecutors with sterling résumés. "If you have an opportunity to work with him and learn from him, you do it," said Melinda Haag, a former United States attorney in Los Angeles who once served as Mr. Mueller's chief white-collar prosecutor.

Mr. Mueller was not the obvious choice to lead the San Francisco office during the Clinton administration. Those jobs usually go to politically connected lawyers, and Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, had formed a selection committee to recommend candidates.

Mr. Mueller was tied to the wrong party, having served as a top Justice Department appointee of George Bush. But the San Francisco office was adrift, and career prosecutors at the Justice Department in Washington recommended Mr. Mueller for the job. And though Ms. Boxer had an eye for liberal nominees who diversified the work force, the chairwoman of her committee, Cristina C. Arguedas, had known and respected Mr. Mueller when he was a young prosecutor and she was a public defender.

"It was quite ironic, me going to Barbara Boxer saying, 'You have to give this plum appointment to this straight white guy who's also a rock-ribbed Republican,'" Ms. Arguedas recalled.

Judge Patel said she also quietly recommended Mr. Mueller to top Justice Department officials. "I'm a Democrat. He's a Republican," Judge Patel said. "But he's a different kind of Republican, the kind we remember."

Had Mr. Mueller entertained political ambitions, Republicans could hardly have dreamed up a better pedigree: Robert Swan Mueller III, the son of a DuPont executive and the grandson of a railroad magnate, whose birth was announced in the New York Times society pages. A product of New England prep school and Princeton, he was a lacrosse and hockey star who volunteered for the Marines and earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in Vietnam. He married shortly before enlisting; he and his wife, Ann, a schoolteacher, have two daughters.

But Mr. Mueller never flirted with elected office. After law school at the University of Virginia -- one of a few prestigious schools that did not look down on his Vietnam service, he would later say -- he began angling for jobs as a prosecutor.

"I wanted to do public service," he told his law school alumni magazine in a rare interview. "Every day you go to work because you want to; there is always something interesting and exciting. And you do it for somebody else, not just for the salary."

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