Gray’s confirmation hearings reveal White House ties to Segretti

L. Patrick Gray’s confirmation hearings exposed a documented link between the White House and Donald Segretti’s political operations, while widening scrutiny of how the FBI had handled the Watergate investigation. What began as a question of whether Gray should become the permanent director became a test of competing accounts: Gray disclosed John Dean’s access to investigative files, and a record of Herbert Kalmbach’s interview showed that Segretti had been paid for undercover work on Dwight Chapin’s instructions.

Background and stakes

Gray was already acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation when Richard Nixon announced that he would nominate him as J. Edgar Hoover’s permanent successor. The decision puzzled reporters and administration officials alike. Confirmation hearings were likely to examine the FBI’s Watergate investigation, and several insiders said there had been a major dispute within Nixon’s inner circle. John Ehrlichman was said to have strongly opposed the nomination, but Nixon had rejected his advice. The administration offered no indication that it expected the hearings to clarify the investigation’s record.

The hearing’s importance had grown out of reporting on a secret campaign fund and the money trail behind political espionage. A check for $25,000, payable to Kenneth Dahlberg, had been deposited with four Mexican checks, bringing the total deposit to $114,000; a subsequent withdrawal took out $25,000, with the remaining $89,000 withdrawn separately. The Washington Post later reported that funds for the Watergate espionage operation were controlled by principal assistants to John Mitchell and held in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. The account contained more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects, G. Gordon Liddy had received money from it, and records related to it had been destroyed.

Former treasurer Hugh Sloan had described a chain of authorization that made the fund more than a pool of unexplained cash. Beginning in 1971, he said, he would telephone Mitchell at the Justice Department, and Mitchell would tell him to distribute money. Mitchell initially authorized expenditures alone; later that authority passed to others, including Jeb Magruder. Sloan said he had left because he suspected matters were worse than they appeared, but his lawyers had advised him against speaking publicly. The recurring instruction to keep the organization together helped explain why reporters had to build their account from guarded employees, fragments, and documents rather than a single full disclosure.

The hearings and the disclosures

Before the hearings began, Tom Hart, an aide to Senator Robert Byrd, had assembled a card index of published Watergate stories and a binder listing their contradictions and unanswered questions. The questions circulated among selected Judiciary Committee members. Hart said that Gray would remain on the witness stand until the contradictions were answered and supported by evidence from the FBI’s files; even a favorable committee recommendation would not prevent Byrd from opposing the nomination on the Senate floor if the questions remained unresolved.

The hearings opened on February 28. Gray described the FBI investigation as an intensive effort, then volunteered that he had turned its files over to Dean and could not guarantee that Dean had not shown them to Segretti. The disclosure startled the senators. Woodward, who had argued for months that Dean’s receipt of the files deserved a story, saw Gray’s testimony give the issue immediate force. Gray’s account also changed the hearing’s focus: in the reporters’ estimation, it was becoming an inquiry into Dean as well as Gray.

Scrutiny of the files produced a second, more specific line of concern. Dean had obtained material from E. Howard Hunt’s safe after the Watergate break-in and waited at least seven days before turning it over to the FBI. Two of Hunt’s notebooks were absent from Dean’s inventory; prosecutors said they first learned of them on October 11, when Hunt sought the return of belongings left at his office. Hunt’s lawyer indicated that the notebooks were valuable enough that someone might have wanted them to disappear. On March 2, Nixon announced that he would claim executive privilege against any demand that Dean testify at Gray’s hearings, making the dispute over access to evidence part of the confirmation battle.

The decisive documentary disclosure came through Hart’s office. Reporters collecting documents Gray had supplied in response to the senators’ earlier questions found an interview with Kalmbach. It recorded that, in August or September 1971, Chapin had told Kalmbach that Segretti was leaving military service and might be useful to the Republican Party. Kalmbach had acknowledged paying Segretti for undercover activities on Chapin’s instructions. The record tied a White House aide to the recruitment and a campaign lawyer to the payments, transforming a suspected connection into evidence presented in the course of the hearings.

Public impact and political consequences

The Washington Post’s report juxtaposed repeated White House denials with the document’s account. Its headline and oversized photographs of Chapin, Kalmbach, and Segretti gave the story an unintended visual severity: their placement and captions resembled a set of police mug shots. The effect went unnoticed in the initial excitement at the paper, but administration officials later told the reporters that the presentation had generated exceptional hostility toward The Washington Post. Ben Bradlee, elated by the disclosure, moved through the newsroom celebrating Gray as having rescued the free press.

The story’s importance went beyond the immediate embarrassment to the administration. Gray’s testimony and the Kalmbach interview weakened the claim that the White House was unconnected to undercover political work, and the document helped establish the credibility of the newspaper’s earlier investigation. For months, campaign employees had been reluctant to speak. Some trembled or broke into tears during Bernstein’s evening visits; The Bookkeeper said that employees had lied to the grand jury and that she and others had received promotions amid concern about what they might know. Those accounts did not themselves identify every lie or participant, but they gave the documented connection a larger setting of silence, pressure, and incomplete disclosure.

For the next two weeks, Gray’s testimony repeatedly exposed shortcomings in his supervision of the FBI investigation. On March 22, he said Dean had probably lied to the FBI about whether he knew Hunt had an office in the White House. The White House denied Gray’s charge, and Dean demanded a correction. The hearing thus continued to produce sharply opposed public accounts even after the Segretti connection had become a matter of documentary record.

What the disclosures established

The evidence from the hearings supported a specific chain: Chapin told Kalmbach that Segretti could be useful to the Republican Party, and Kalmbach paid Segretti for undercover activities at Chapin’s instruction. It did not, by itself, establish every participant’s knowledge of each operation or resolve the wider question of who authorized all political espionage. The distinction mattered: the interview was direct evidence of a recruitment and payment link, while the broader structure of responsibility still had to be reconstructed from fund records, testimony, and later disclosures.

Subsequent reporting strengthened that wider account. Magruder later told federal prosecutors that Mitchell and Dean had approved and helped plan the Watergate bugging operation, and that they later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted conspirators. Deep Throat later told Woodward that Dean and Ehrlichman had described Hunt’s files as politically dangerous and wanted them kept from public view; Gray, according to that account, eventually put them in a burn bag. These later revelations should not be confused with what the confirmation hearing document proved. They show instead how the hearing’s disclosures opened onto a continuing investigation of the money, the operations, and the handling of evidence.

The hearing’s defining reversal was institutional as well as political. A nomination intended to make Gray’s acting leadership permanent placed his conduct of the Watergate inquiry under congressional examination. Gray’s own statements, followed by the Kalmbach interview record, made the hearing a route by which the investigation’s files and the newspaper’s accumulated leads could be tested in public. The confirmation process did not settle the full case, but it made the White House–Segretti connection harder to dismiss as an unsupported accusation.