L. Patrick Gray III

L. Patrick Gray III was the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during a decisive phase of the Watergate investigation. In the book, his role is defined by a widening gap between the Bureau’s public claims of an exhaustive inquiry and the treatment of sensitive evidence: he ordered officials to guard against leaks to the press, turned investigative files over to John Dean, and later destroyed documents from E. Howard Hunt’s White House safe after understanding that senior officials wanted them kept from public view. His appearances make the handling of evidence—not simply its existence—a central measure of institutional accountability.

Acting Director Under Pressure

Gray’s authority reached into the Bureau’s response to the reporting. After stories about the secret campaign fund and the roles of Bart Porter and Jeb Magruder caused trouble inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Gray personally called the head of its Washington field office. He ordered the field office to make sure that The Washington Post was not getting information from agents there. The intervention placed the bureau’s director inside the effort to identify a possible source of disclosures, even as reporters were investigating whether the Watergate inquiry itself had been properly pursued.

An agent later told Carl Bernstein that some people believed the reporters had access to FBI Form 302 interview reports. The forms were written by agents immediately after witness interviews, but Bernstein understood their limitations: they were raw, unevaluated accounts that could contain hearsay, suspicion, or personal grievances as well as facts. The agent’s indirect confirmation that the Bureau had received information similar to the reporters’ did not independently establish the underlying allegations. This distinction matters to Gray’s story: pressure over the flow of information and the reliability of information were separate problems, and neither could be settled by the mere existence of an FBI record.

Files Passed to John Dean

At his February 28 hearings, Gray described the Watergate investigation as a “massive special,” a “full-court press,” with “no holds barred.” Without being asked, he also volunteered 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 astonished the senators. It shifted attention from Gray’s assurances about the investigation’s scope to the chain of custody for its files and the access White House officials had been given to them. The hearings, initially focused on Gray, began to turn into hearings about Dean as well.

The transfer acquired greater significance in light of what reporters learned about Hunt’s property. Dean had taken possession of the contents of Hunt’s safe after the Watergate break-in and waited at least seven days before turning them over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Two notebooks were not listed in Dean’s inventory; prosecutors said they first learned of the notebooks when Hunt sought the return of belongings left at his office. Hunt’s attorney said they contained names and addresses that might lead to other people involved in the conspiracy. The record thus raised distinct questions about who had held potentially important material, what had been inventoried, and when investigators learned of it; Gray’s hearing testimony made his own part in transferring files to Dean an unavoidable part of that inquiry.

Destruction of Hunt’s Documents

A later disclosure described a more consequential episode involving documents from Hunt’s safe. The destroyed material consisted of two folders. One contained fabricated State Department cables intended to implicate President John F. Kennedy in the 1963 assassination of South Vietnam’s president; the other held a dossier of information Hunt had collected on Senator Edward M. Kennedy. These were not merely stray administrative papers: their contents connected the safe’s files to politically explosive operations beyond the break-in itself.

According to Deep Throat, Gray attended a June 28 meeting with John Ehrlichman and Dean where the files were described as “political dynamite” that should “never see the light of day.” Deep Throat also reported that Ehrlichman had earlier suggested that Dean dispose of them in the river. Gray kept the files for about a week and then, by his account, put them into a burn bag in his office. He said he had not been explicitly told to destroy them, but understood clearly what Dean and Ehrlichman wanted. That qualification preserves an important distinction: the account does not describe an unambiguous order to Gray, but it does portray him as recognizing the intended outcome and acting in a way that brought about the files’ destruction.

Wiretap Records and Institutional Consequences

The investigation’s scope expanded as evidence emerged that the government had used wiretaps in its search for news leaks. Acting FBI director William D. Ruckelshaus disclosed that Daniel Ellsberg had been overheard at least once on the home telephone of Morton Halperin, a former member of Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff. The logs were initially missing. Ruckelshaus later announced that 17 wiretaps had been ordered in 1969–71, covering 13 government officials and four reporters; the logs had been found in Ehrlichman’s White House office safe. The disclosure established that the administration had used wiretaps in leak investigations and had failed to disclose all relevant information to Ellsberg’s defense attorneys. Gray was not the official making these announcements, but the revelations followed his period as acting director and deepened the questions surrounding the Bureau’s custody and handling of investigative material.

The political crisis continued to intensify. After Archibald Cox subpoenaed nine presidential tape recordings, Richard Nixon fired the special prosecutor; Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, Ruckelshaus, resigned. Nixon later surrendered seven tapes, while his lawyers said that two had never existed. In that unsettled aftermath, Deep Throat told Bob Woodward that one or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures, a claim the White House press secretary denied. The episode places Gray’s earlier conduct within a broader pattern of disputes over records, disclosure, and the credibility of official assurances, without making him responsible for actions that the evidence attributes to other officials.

The Meaning of Gray’s Record

Gray’s significance in the narrative lies less in a single public defense than in the sequence of decisions and disclosures attached to his office. He tried to prevent agents from becoming sources for newspaper reporting; he acknowledged that investigative files had gone to Dean, a White House counsel; and, in the account of the Hunt documents, he destroyed material after inferring the wishes of senior officials. Each episode concerns a different stage in the life of evidence—its creation, circulation, access, and eventual disappearance.

The book also distinguishes proof from implication. A raw interview report does not verify its allegations; a file transfer does not by itself establish what a recipient did with the material; and Gray’s account of the burn bag stops short of an explicit destruction order. Yet the circumstances give those distinctions weight rather than making them a reason to dismiss the record. Gray’s testimony and the account of the destroyed files show how the investigation’s credibility depended not only on what officials said about its breadth, but on whether evidence could be traced, preserved, and examined without political interference.