L. Patrick Gray

L. Patrick Gray was the acting FBI director whose nomination to lead the bureau permanently turned into a congressional examination of the Watergate investigation. His testimony and the records he provided helped connect White House aides to Donald Segretti’s undercover political work; his handling of investigative files also became part of the dispute over whether evidence had been withheld or destroyed.

Identity and Nomination

In February, the White House announced that Gray’s name would be submitted to the Senate as J. Edgar Hoover’s permanent successor. Gray was already serving as acting director, but confirming him risked making the Watergate investigation itself a subject of congressional scrutiny. The reporters found no clear explanation for the choice: officials they questioned seemed as puzzled as they were, and no one suggested that Gray had been nominated because of his ability or because the administration wanted the hearings to clarify the Watergate record.

Accounts of the decision pointed instead to a struggle inside Richard Nixon’s innermost circle. John Ehrlichman was said to have opposed the nomination vehemently, but Nixon rejected his counsel. The choice thus placed Gray, already responsible for the FBI’s Watergate inquiry, before senators who were preparing to ask what the bureau had done and what information had passed beyond it.

Testimony and the Segretti Connection

The hearings opened on February 28. Chewing throat lozenges, Gray described the FBI inquiry as a “massive special,” a “full-court press,” and an investigation with “no holds barred.” Then, without being asked, he disclosed that he had turned the investigative files over to John Dean and could not guarantee that Dean had not shown them to Donald Segretti. The disclosure startled the senators and shifted the hearings toward Dean as well as Gray.

A document Gray supplied to the senators gave the inquiry a more direct connection to the political operation. In an interview recorded in the material, Herbert Kalmbach said Dwight Chapin had contacted him in August or September 1971 about Segretti, who was about to leave military service and might be useful to the Republican Party. Kalmbach acknowledged paying Segretti for undercover activities on Chapin’s instructions. When the reporters obtained the document, Gray had, in one consequential step, weakened the White House’s claim of innocence and helped substantiate the Washington Post’s reporting.

The resulting story was presented under the headline “FBI Chief Says/Nixon’s Aides/Paid Segretti,” alongside large photographs of Chapin, Kalmbach, and Segretti. The arrangement made the photographs resemble mug shots, an effect the newsroom had not noticed in the rush to publish but that officials in the administration criticized. The reporting’s underlying importance, however, did not depend on its layout: Gray’s own material supported the connection between a White House aide, a campaign lawyer, and Segretti’s paid political work.

The Files and the Cover-Up

Gray’s transfer of the FBI files to Dean raised a separate question about access to evidence. The records concerned the Watergate investigation, and Gray could not assure the senators that Dean had not exposed them to Segretti. The uncertainty mattered because Dean was not merely a recipient of investigative material: he would later become a central figure in accounts of the cover-up. Gray’s testimony therefore placed the bureau’s files inside the same chain of relationships that the investigation was trying to reconstruct.

Another account, relayed to Bob Woodward by Deep Throat, described Gray’s handling of files connected with E. Howard Hunt. Deep Throat said that on June 28, in a meeting with Ehrlichman and Dean, Gray had been told that the files were “political dynamite,” should “never see the light of day,” and could do more damage than the Watergate bugging. Ehrlichman, according to the account, had earlier urged Dean to take them across the river and put them in it. Gray reportedly kept the files for about a week and then said he had put them in a burn bag in his office. Deep Throat’s account distinguished between an explicit order and Gray’s understanding: Gray said he had not been directly told to destroy the files, but understood what Dean and Ehrlichman wanted.

The account sharpened the significance of Gray’s earlier appearance before the Senate. His public presentation of an uncompromising FBI investigation stood beside questions about files reaching Dean and a separate, secondhand report that Hunt-related records had been placed in a burn bag. The contrast made the director’s treatment of records—not simply the bureau’s investigative claims—a central part of the Watergate story.

Narrative Role and Significance

Gray’s role in the investigation was consequential less as a source of a settled explanation than as a point where records, testimony, and political responsibility converged. His nomination opened a route for senators to examine the FBI inquiry; his unsolicited statement about Dean and Segretti widened that inquiry; and the Kalmbach interview he supplied furnished documentary support for a connection the administration had denied.

At the same time, the accounts of Gray’s file handling complicated any simple picture of the FBI as an observer standing outside the cover-up. The evidence presented in the book does not erase the distinction between Gray’s direct testimony, the documents he provided, and Deep Throat’s report of what Gray had said about the burn bag. Together, however, those episodes show how the investigation’s course could turn on a director’s disclosures—and on what happened to records after they reached the people under investigation.