L. Patrick Gray confirmation hearings

The L. Patrick Gray confirmation hearings transformed the proposed appointment of an acting FBI director into a consequential public inquiry into Watergate. Gray’s testimony disclosed that investigative files had passed to White House Counsel John Dean and that Gray could not rule out their having reached Donald Segretti; documents supplied during the hearings then showed that a presidential aide had arranged payments to Segretti for undercover political work. The proceedings made the conduct of the FBI investigation, and the credibility of White House denials, central questions in the confirmation process.

Nomination and the unresolved investigation

In February, the White House announced that Gray’s name would be submitted to the Senate as J. Edgar Hoover’s permanent successor. The choice puzzled the reporters: Gray was already acting FBI director, and confirmation hearings could invite senators to investigate the bureau’s handling of Watergate. Officials appeared similarly uncertain about the decision. Some described a major struggle inside Richard Nixon’s innermost circle, with John Ehrlichman reportedly opposing the nomination, but no one offered ability or a desire to clarify the Watergate record as its rationale.

The political stakes had been accumulating through reporting that traced the break-in to a larger campaign operation. A $25,000 cashier’s check payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg had been deposited with four Mexican checks, producing a $114,000 deposit; Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000 four days later. The Washington Post reported that funds for Watergate espionage were controlled by principal assistants to former campaign manager 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 for sensitive political projects, and records relating to it had been destroyed. Treasurer Hugh Sloan’s resignation, the paper reported, followed his suspicions about Watergate. These disclosures had made the question larger than who entered Democratic headquarters: the investigation was confronting a financing and authorization system whose participants and records were not yet fully known.

The hearings also opened against a contested political backdrop. Tom Hart, an aide to Senator Robert Byrd, had assembled newspaper and magazine accounts into a binder of contradictions and unanswered questions. The questions circulated among selected Judiciary Committee members, and Hart said they would remain unresolved until answered and supported by FBI Watergate files. Byrd, a member of the committee and the Senate Democratic whip, was prepared to oppose Gray on the Senate floor if the contradictions were not cleared up, even if the committee recommended confirmation. The hearing was therefore not simply a review of Gray’s qualifications: the nominee’s answers and the bureau’s files had become tests of whether the Senate could get an account of the investigation.

Gray’s disclosures at the hearing

When the hearings opened on February 28, Gray described the FBI inquiry as a “massive special,” a “full-court press,” with “no holds barred.” He then volunteered information that senators had not asked him to provide: he had turned the Watergate investigative files over to Dean and could not guarantee that Dean had not shown them to Segretti. The revelation linked the FBI’s own records to a White House official and a political operative. Senators were astonished; what had been a confirmation proceeding was now also an inquiry into who had possessed the investigation’s contents and what had happened to them.

Gray offered to make the FBI’s Watergate files available to the senators, but his account did not reassure them. The impression left by his testimony was that the bureau’s acting director had functioned as a subordinate to Dean, who was more than twenty years younger. The hearing’s center of gravity shifted accordingly: it was becoming, in effect, an examination of Dean’s role as well as Gray’s. The testimony also made an earlier issue harder to dismiss. Dean had received the contents of E. Howard Hunt’s safe after the break-in, but had waited at least seven days before turning them over to the FBI; his inventory did not list two of Hunt’s notebooks. Prosecutors had learned of the notebooks only after Hunt sought the return of belongings left at his office. Gray later told senators he was “unalterably convinced” that Dean had withheld nothing, while the White House asserted that Dean had turned over everything. The confident assurances did not close the questions opened by Gray’s first disclosure.

The Segretti document and the White House denials

A document Gray supplied in response to earlier questions proved more damaging still. Headed “Interview with Herbert W. Kalmbach,” it recorded that Kalmbach had been contacted by Dwight Chapin in August or September 1971. Chapin said that Segretti was about to leave military service and might be of use to the Republican Party. Kalmbach’s interview also recorded that he had paid Segretti for undercover activities on Chapin’s instructions. The document supplied a concrete route from a White House aide to a paid political operative, replacing a disputed general suspicion with evidence of recruitment and payment.

The record aligned with Segretti’s own eventual account to prosecutors: Chapin had hired him, Gordon Strachan had discussed the work with him, and Kalmbach had paid him. Segretti said the first approach came from Chapin, not from him. The confirmation document did not by itself establish every senior official’s knowledge of every operation, but it contradicted the basic claim that the White House was unconnected to the undercover activity. Gray had, in the reporters’ account, undermined that claim in a single disclosure and helped establish the credibility of The Washington Post’s reporting.

The response to the story revealed how sharply its publication altered the contest over credibility. Newspapers, broadcasters, and radio and television stations called The Washington Post seeking comment on its “vindication.” The article juxtaposed months of White House denials with the document and used a three-column headline stating that the FBI chief said Nixon’s aides paid Segretti. Photographs of Chapin, Kalmbach, and Segretti, with captions running beside them, gave the page an unintended mug-shot effect. The presentation went largely unnoticed at the paper amid the excitement, but administration officials told the reporters that it had generated exceptional hostility toward The Washington Post. At the paper, Ben Bradlee celebrated Gray as having rescued the free press. The hearings had turned a document in the FBI’s files into both evidence about the political operation and a public test of the newspaper’s earlier reporting.

Mounting consequences and later disclosures

For the next two weeks, Gray’s testimony continued to expose serious failures in his supervision of the FBI investigation, which the reporters described as ineptitude, if not criminal negligence. His candor made the hearings a continuing source of damaging information rather than a single dramatic exchange. The prospect that the nomination had been advanced to contain a crisis also seemed more plausible to the reporters as Gray’s statements deepened it, although the evidence presented did not establish why Nixon had chosen him.

On March 22, Gray testified that Dean had “probably” lied when he told the FBI on June 22 that he did not know whether Hunt had an office in the White House. The White House issued an “unequivocally” worded denial, and Dean demanded a correction. The opposed statements left the public record more divided, not less: Gray was challenging Dean’s earlier account, while the White House challenged Gray’s charge. As subsequent reporting developed, a source told Bob Woodward that on June 28 Ehrlichman and Dean had described the files as “political dynamite” and said they should “never see the light of day”; Gray, according to that account, kept them for about a week and then put them in a burn bag. The source said Gray had not been explicitly ordered to destroy them but understood what Dean and Ehrlichman wanted. That later account gave the hearings’ disclosures about Dean’s access to the files a graver context, connecting the disputed handling of investigative records to an alleged effort to keep them from public view.

The hearings’ importance lay in the chain of evidence they brought into public view. Gray’s account connected FBI files to Dean; the Kalmbach interview connected Chapin to Segretti’s paid work; the committee’s questions tested those disclosures against a record of contradictions; and Gray’s subsequent testimony further unsettled the White House’s explanations. Confirmation hearings became an arena in which the investigation itself was investigated, and in which official assurances could be measured against documents, prior statements, and the handling of the files.