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c h a p t e r t e n Gray Self-Destructs March–May 1973 The job of the reporter is [to convey] the best obtainable version of the truth . . . that is what reporting is all about. —Carl Bernstein 129 On the morning of the first day of Pat Gray’s confirmation hearings , President Nixon asked John Dean how he thought the nominee would fare. “I think Pat is tough,” Dean replied. “He’s very comfortable in all of the decisions he has made, and I think he’ll be good.” But then Dean spoke, almost wistfully, about how different things might have been if Hoover was still alive—and that got the president going again. “The Bureau is leaking like a sieve, and Gray denies it,” Nixon complained. “Just says it’s not coming from the Bureau. Just who in the hell is it coming from? How in the hell could it be coming from anybody else?” He voiced his fears that should Gray win confirmation, he would insist on keeping Felt on—and “that would worry the hell out of me.”1 Gray’s first day before the Senate Judiciary Committee went smoothly, but from there things went rapidly downhill. Just as he had tried to oblige the White House earlier, now he sought to please the Senate. He proposed to open the entire Watergate investigative file to the committee’s chairman, ranking member, and their respective counsels and to make knowledgeable field agents available to answer any questions. Such openness was unheard of and rankled not only the Hooverites in the Bureau but anyone inside the FBI who prized its independence. It was another example of either Gray’s refreshing candor or his shocking naïveté. Back in January, Felt had confidently told Woodward that Gray would “probably not” let the Senate see the FBI’s basic reports on Watergate, presumably because they would be too embarrassing. The opposite was true, of course; thus Gray’s offer caught his detractors by surprise, but only momentarily. Chief among them was Senator Robert Byrd (D–West chapter ten 130 Virginia). Even when Gray’s nomination was just a rumor, Byrd had issued a statement vigorously opposing it—it would be a “premature” move, he said—and now he was open about his intention to bottle it up until the separate Watergate hearings were over. Gray was “the bone of contention, the source of division” within the Bureau, Byrd claimed. The FBI had become a “political arm of the administration” under Gray, and its investigation of Watergate “was aimed only at the actual events . . . and avoided any attempt toward tying together the leads concerning where the plot originated.” When D. W. Bowers, the FBI’s congressional liaison, met with Byrd to find out why he was so dead-set against Gray, the senator replied that Sandy Smith’s “Tattletale Gray” article had told him everything he needed to know. Byrd didn’t tell Bowers that he was also getting anti-Gray ammunition from contacts inside the Bureau.2 Following Byrd’s remarks, Gray received a letter from E. Howard Hunt, who was awaiting sentencing. Hunt offered to make the “thoroughness and savagery of the FBI’s Watergate investigation” a matter of public record in light of Byrd’s allegations. From my own experience I am able fully and freely to testify that the Bureau left no grain of sand unturned in its investigation. My late wife and children were interrogated, blackmailed, threatened, and harassed by special agents. . . . My relatives, friends and acquaintances, however remote, were interviewed exhaustively and embarrassingly by FBI personnel across the country. Threats and intimidation were not the least of the investigative tools employed by [agents] under your direction.3 For the other senators whose minds were not yet made up, Gray’s confirmation hearings were nonetheless the first opportunity they had had to interrogate a member of the administration about Watergate, and they intended to make the most of the occasion. Blissfully unaware of the cover-up, Gray saw no reason to hide anything about the involvement of the White House in the FBI’s probe. He would argue that in the absence of information to the contrary, he could not indulge in the presumption that a president of the United States or his legal counsel were engaged in illegal acts. He had assumed regularity and that everyone was acting in accordance with the law. Up to this point John Dean had scarcely been mentioned...

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