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c h a p t e r t h r e e Felt’s Private cointelpro June 1972 Someone in the FBI is talking about the details of the investigation. —L. Patrick Gray’s June 23 note to himself 25 There did not appear to be much Felt could do about Pat Gray’s appointment initially. Felt’s best, if not his only, recourse seemed to be to ingratiate himself with the acting director and hope that he would stumble—perhaps with a little strategic push. Meanwhile, it would be best if Gray believed that Felt was fully behind him and had an attitude of “complete cooperation.” If Gray lost the president’s confidence, as Felt hoped, it nonetheless might help to have Gray’s strong endorsement when it came time to name a replacement.1 Felt did not hesitate to implement this strategy. Gray gave an impromptu , twenty-minute talk during his first full day in office to the Bureau ’s top hierarchy, the so-called Executive Conference—a gathering of all the barons who ran the FBI like a series of feudal fiefdoms. These were men still reeling from Hoover’s death and in shock over the abrupt imposition of an outsider. Afterwards Gray met with Nixon in the Oval Office and proudly told the president that Felt had called him right after to say it had been a “hell of a session” and that the acting director had done a “magnificent job.” Some FBI officials had been talking seriously about resigning in protest, according to Felt, but after the meeting the consensus was, “With this kind of guy, we can serve.” Of course, “[these same executives] may be some of the fellows that you want to go,” Felt had added, probably with John P. Mohr and Alex Rosen in mind. As Gray conveyed this anecdote to the president, Nixon nodded his head affirmatively : A “house cleaning” was long overdue at the FBI. But “it should not come now,” he told Gray, “because we can’t have any flaps about that.”2 Gray regarded Felt as his unswerving ally from that day on: an indispensable , pragmatic lieutenant, lined up on his side against the Hoover men on the Executive Conference who would never accept an outsider chapter three 26 or new ways. Gray would entrust Felt with running the Bureau’s day-today operations and became so at ease with his “executive officer” that he gave Felt the keys to the director’s office so that he could come and go as he pleased. All the while, Felt would project quite another image to high-level Bureau personnel, presenting himself as the FBI’s defender against the unwelcome Gray. A rare picture of the Executives Conference that appeared in the New York Times on May 12, 1972—just ten days after Hoover’s death—spoke volumes. The assembled assistant directors clearly resented being props in the public relations campaign Pat Gray was already mounting to smooth his path to the permanent appointment.3 The Watergate break-in altered Felt’s initial calculus. He immediately recognized that the crime posed a real dilemma for Gray. If the acting director pressed the investigation, he risked alienating those with the power to decide whether to nominate him for the permanent directorship. But if he tried to curtail the probe, or showed any signs of being politically influenced, he would almost certainly fail to win confirmation from what was sure to still be a Democrat-dominated Senate. Gray was between the proverbial rock and a hard place.4 Felt could have hung back, taking comfort in the notion that someone of Gray’s inexperience was not likely to navigate such a difficult situation successfully. Gray was bound to do something wrong, and then the directorship would (presumably) fall to Felt. The problem with being patient, of course, was that Felt had tried that tack once, to no avail. Achieving the right position under Hoover at exactly the right time had not produced the desired result. And simply hanging back left open the possibility, however slight, that Gray just might thread the needle and satisfy both the White House and Senate Democrats. The latter might decide that Gray was as good as anyone the president might put forward, and perhaps better than most. Felt was apparently unwilling to take that risk. Instead, he decided to treat the break-in as an unusually good opportunity to school the president in an important fact: that...

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