Gray, L(ouis) Patrick, III

(b. 18 July 1916 in St. Louis, Missouri; d. 6 July 2005 in Atlantic Beach, Florida), lawyer, military captain, assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, civil servant in the Nixon administration, and acting Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director who resigned upon the revelation of his involvement in the Watergate scandal.

Gray was the oldest son of L. Patrick Gray, Jr., a railway official, and was raised and initially educated in Missouri. After completing high school, he spent a few years at Rice University, in Houston, Texas. His sense of civic duty emerged early, as he proceeded to accept a scholarship at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Upon graduating in 1940 with a BS, he received a commission as a line officer, ultimately serving in World War II. His first command was at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and after completing submarine school in 1942, he successfully participated in five combat patrols against the Japanese in the Pacific Theater. During his time as the executive officer of the USS Caiman, he met Beatrice Castle Kirk DeGarmo, a widow of a former classmate lost in action. The two married, and Gray adopted his wife’s two sons; the family soon grew with the births of two additional sons.

At the end of his first tour in World War II, Gray’s excellence was recognized, as the U.S. Navy sent him to study law at George Washington University. There, he excelled further and became a member of the Law Review. He graduated in 1949, earning a JD with honors, and was elected to the Order of the Coif, a national legal honor society. He was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar soon thereafter and later to the Connecticut Bar Association. With his combination of sound legal and military training and experience, Gray was subsequently admitted to practice law in the U.S. Military Court of Appeals, the U.S. Court of Appeals, the U.S. Court of Claims (now the U.S. Court of Federal Claims), and the U.S. Supreme Court. During his time in Washington, D.C., Gray would meet and become friends with the future president Richard M. Nixon.

Gray sustained his military service through duty as a flag secretary and force legal officer, as part of the navy’s Pacific submarine force, before serving as the commander of the USS Tiru during the Korean War. He was given the opportunity to attend the Armed Forces Staff College, in Virginia, afterward returning to sea duty in 1955 as the executive officer of the USS Fulton, based in New London, Connecticut, where he and his family established their home. Gray served as the commander of Submarine Division 101 and in other offices before being selected for duty as military assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Gray retired from the military as a captain in 1960 to join the staff of Vice President Nixon, then the Republican nominee for president. After Nixon was defeated by John F. Kennedy, Gray returned with his family to New London, Connecticut, to resume practicing law. After Nixon gained the presidency in 1969, Gray returned to public service, first as executive assistant to the secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, for which he was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal, then as a member of the president’s cabinet committee on desegregation.

Gray was appointed assistant attorney general in the Civil Division of the Department of Justice in 1970, and then was unanimously nominated as deputy attorney general by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1972. When FBI director J. Edgar Hoover died that year, President Nixon filled the vacancy created by appointing Gray as acting director of the FBI, one month before burglars broke into the Watergate complex, in Washington, D.C., which was serving as the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. In his new capacity, Gray endeavored to modernize an agency that was commonly believed to be out of touch with society. Although he met with substantial resistance as an FBI outsider, Gray addressed diversity issues by overseeing the hiring of more women and minorities.

Once the FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in was initiated, Gray followed certain dubious instructions given by the White House counsel John Dean, as he believed himself legally obligated to do. He was forced to resign in April 1973 after admitting during congressional confirmation hearings that he passed files from the FBI investigation to Dean and that he destroyed papers from the White House safe of E. Howard Hunt, a former Central Intelligence Agency employee who had helped organize the Watergate break-in. In 1978 Gray was indicted for ordering break-ins without warrants, but the charges were later dropped; he was never actually indicted for any Watergate-related crimes. Following his retirement from government service, he resumed practicing law in Groton and New London, Connecticut. In 2005, at the age of eighty-eight, Gray died from complications of pancreatic cancer in his home in Atlantic Beach, Florida.

Having remained silent about his role in Watergate for thirty-two years, Gray surfaced a month before his death to express shock and disbelief over the revelation that his former deputy director at the FBI, W. Mark Felt, was indeed “Deep Throat,” the person who leaked Watergate information to the Washington Post. Although Nixon had suspected Felt and had ordered Gray to fire him five times, Gray had believed in the innocence of his deputy and had refused. Gray’s loyalty to the Nixon administration, his honesty under interrogation by the Senate, his forced departure from the FBI, and his indictment on crimes unrelated to Watergate left him battling until his death to clear his name from accusations of cronyism and obstruction as well as from speculation that he was Deep Throat. He was forced to sell his home, insurance policies, and shares of stock to pay legal fees. While the toll on his life was great, he emerged with his legal career intact and spent his later days providing legal assistance to those in Connecticut linked to the U.S. Navy.

Lawrence Lader addresses Gray’s indictment in Power on the Left: American Radical Movements since 1946 (1979). In In Search of Deep Throat: The Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time (2001), Leonard Garment notes the role of the FBI under Gray in the Watergate investigation. Obituaries are in the New York Times (7 July 2005) and the Guardian (9 July 2005).

Ann E. Pharr