L. Patrick Gray, 88; Led FBI Under Nixon

L. Patrick Gray III, the acting director of the FBI during the Watergate crisis who surfaced publicly last month for the first time in three decades to decry the revelation that his top assistant was the Deep Throat character who leaked information about the scandal, died Wednesday.

The 88-year-old Gray died shortly after midnight at his home in Atlantic Beach, Fla., of complications from cancer of the pancreas.

A former Navy submariner and lawyer who later met Richard M. Nixon and eventually found himself at the helm of the federal law enforcement agency, Gray was sharply denounced by critics who believed that he tried to deep-six the Watergate scandal by keeping the Nixon White House apprised of the FBI’s investigation.

Gray, who served as acting FBI director for one year until he was forced to step down in April 1973, maintained that he in fact refused to cooperate with the White House. He also said that had W. Mark Felt, his top deputy at the FBI, not become the Washington Post’s Deep Throat source, the FBI investigation into Watergate would have resulted in Nixon’s impeachment.

Instead, the president resigned under political pressure on Capitol Hill generated in part by the stories fueled by Deep Throat’s revelations to the Post.

“The FBI investigation itself was heading down that track and ... proceeding at max speed and I think, yes, he would have been impeached,” Gray said recently on the ABC Sunday program, “This Week.” The June 26 interview was his first in 32 years.

Gray also said he rued ever becoming involved with Nixon after meeting him at a Washington cocktail party in 1947.

“I made the gravest mistake of my 88 years in making that decision” to work for Nixon, Gray said. “I was so hurt and so angry that this man had not only junked his own presidency but junked the career of so many other people, many of whom had to go to jail.”

Gray was never indicted in the Watergate scandal, although a dozen of Nixon’s top lieutenants were charged, jailed or forced out. Yet because he was a longtime associate of the president, allegations of cronyism and obstruction continued to dog him after he left public service.

His son, Edward Emmet Gray of Lyme, N.H., said Wednesday that his father never fretted over how history would record his conduct during Watergate. But, he said, he grew increasingly bitter about Nixon.

“He really, really hated him,” the son said. “He hated what he did to the presidency. My father was one of the true great patriots and he was just beside himself with what Nixon did.”

Over the years, Edward Gray said, his father would occasionally receive a book or a note, once even a phone call, from Nixon, but he would never respond. “Tell that ... I will not talk to him,” Edward Gray recalled his father saying when Nixon phoned him at the family home in Connecticut.

Louis Patrick Gray III was born in St. Louis, the son of a railway inspector. He was accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy, but his family could not afford to send him to Annapolis, Md., so he hitchhiked and worked on a freighter to get there. At the academy, he played lacrosse and football and was a boxer. He graduated in 1940 and served in World War II as a Navy submariner in the Pacific.

He later got a degree from George Washington University Law School, and in 1960 became an aide in then-Vice President Nixon’s unsuccessful campaign for the White House. Eight years later, when Nixon did win the presidency, Gray was appointed an executive assistant in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He later served the administration as a special consultant on school busing and in 1970 was confirmed as an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department.

When longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, Gray was named by Nixon to replace him as acting director. Gray’s stern looks and harsh exterior seemed outwardly to make him a natural successor to the gruff Hoover.

But Gray, in his short tenure, began to open up the FBI to diversity, hiring more women and minorities over the objections of many of Hoover’s entrenched senior staff. One of those was Felt, who expected to get the top FBI job and did not enjoy working for Gray.

But it was Watergate that eventually led to Gray’s departure.

As the Nixon staff and the president hunkered down over more and more revelations of misdeeds, allegations also arose that Gray had been placed in the FBI to watch over the investigation there and to keep Nixon and the White House informed of the FBI’s progress so they could subvert the investigation.

At one point, the pressure was so intense on Gray that, when he testified in the Senate Watergate hearings several months after he resigned, he characterized it this way:

“In the service of my country” as a submariner, “I withstood hours and hours of depth-charging, shelling, bombing. But I never expected to run into a Watergate in the service of a president of the United States. And I ran into a buzz-saw, obviously.”

At the center of the case against him were allegations that he personally destroyed secret files about the scandal entrusted to him by top White House aides.

Gray, in his interview last month, said that although the files did come from the Nixon administration, they had nothing to do with Watergate and instead were papers pertaining to Vietnam and, separately, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). He was instructed by the White House to ensure that the papers “must not see the light of day.”

For a while he locked the files in his office safe at FBI headquarters. Later he took them home and burned them along with trash left over from Christmas in a 55-gallon drum in the back of the house, according to his son.

Gray believed that he was being set up by the White House. He theorized that Nixon officials hoped that he would leak the documents in an act that would embarrass him and force him to resign.

During a hearing that was held to confirm his permanent appointment to Hoover’s post, Gray angered Nixon’s advisors by disclosing that he had handed over FBI files to the Nixon White House at its request. That disclosure provoked Nixon domestic policy advisor John D. Ehrlichman to utter his famous phrase: “Let him twist slowly, slowly in the wind.”

Although he steered clear of Watergate, five years later Gray was indicted for authorizing illegal break-ins to gather information against the Weather Underground, as was Felt. The charges against Gray were dismissed. Felt was convicted and later pardoned.

For years after Watergate, many speculated in Washington that Gray was Post reporter Bob Woodward’s secret source on the Watergate story -- until this Memorial Day weekend when Felt admitted that he was Deep Throat.

“This was a tremendous surprise to me,” Gray said on “This Week.” He added, “I could not have been more shocked and more disappointed in a man whom I had trusted.”

In addition to his son Edward, survivors include his wife, Beatrice Kirk Gray; three other sons, Alan Kirk Gray of City Island, N.Y.; Patrick Erwin Gray, of Alpharetta, Ga.; and Stephen Douglas Gray of Grantham, N.H. Funeral services will be private.