I just found the story that
L. Patrick Gray died today.
For those of you who have been asleep during the last few weeks of "Deep Throat" mania, Gray was named to replace J. Edgar Hoover as acting director of the FBI following Hoover's death, just in time for Watergate.
There was lots of speculation and accusations (mostly by the right wing) that W. Mark Felt leaked info on the Watergate crimes because of bitterness about being passed over for the office. (If Felt had read the FBI Promotion Manual, he would have known that FBI heads are chosen alphabetically by their first initial, so it should have been obvious that W. Mark Felt would have been trumped by L. Patrick Gray in succeeding J. Edgar Hoover.)
L. Patrick Gray III, the former acting director of the F.B.I., whose misplaced trust in Richard M. Nixon and early missteps in handling the Watergate investigation made him a lasting victim of a scandal he ultimately helped to expose, died today at his home in Atlantic Beach, Fla. He was 88.
The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his family said.
More after the fold...
In his Senate confirmation hearings in 1973, Mr. Gray volunteered what amounted to the most dramatic public indication to that point that the president's men were covering up the Watergate break-in, when he disclosed that he had supplied the F.B.I.'s files on the investigation to the White House counsel, John W. Dean 3d, from the outset of the inquiry.
That revelation rocked Washington and spurred Senate investigators to dig deeper. It also led Nixon's aide John D. Ehrlichman to propose, in one of the era's most famous phrases, letting Mr. Gray "twist slowly, slowly in the wind" until he resigned a few weeks later. He endured his fate in stoic silence for more than 30 years, in which he was often portrayed as a feckless footnote to the greatest political scandal of the age.
But last month, after his old deputy, W. Mark Felt, acknowledged that he had been "Deep Throat," The Washington Post's secret Watergate source, Mr. Gray at last spoke out about his profound betrayal and bitterness when he began to realize that the president he sought to serve so loyally was corrupt - feelings compounded by the belated realization that his own No. 2 man did not trust him to pursue the case, and was undermining him.
"I made the gravest mistake of my 88 years," in going to work for Nixon, Mr. Gray told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, adding that he never again spoke to Nixon after Watergate and repeatedly returned books the former president sent him in later life. "I put the rudder in the wrong direction."
Mr. Gray was a paradox, a Navy submarine commander and punctilious private lawyer. His adherence to the chain of command was so ingrained that he briefly held up the F.B.I.'s inquiry into the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972 after the White House concocted what turned out to be a bogus warning that pursuing the investigation could compromise C.I.A. activities in Mexico.
On orders from the White House, he also destroyed forged documents from the White House safe of one of the Watergate conspirators , E. Howard Hunt, that had been created for use as Republican dirty tricks against the Kennedys.
Read the rest here at the NY Times.