ONE day last week L. Patrick Gray III, the embattled acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was summoned to the White House to discuss the status of President Nixon's controversial move to make him the permanent successor to the late J. Edgar Hoover. After the meeting, Gray returned to FBI headquarters and dispatched a Teletype message to his top officials throughout the nation. Marked "Personal and Confidential," it read in part:
"Regardless of the outcome of the confirmation hearings, the FBI will continue to be one of the great institutions in our democracy. It is not now and will never be subject to political influence. I know this because I know the men and women of the FBI. I know their spirit, their temperament, their dedication and their professionalism." The message ended on an intriguing note: "Directors and acting directors may come and go, but only you can guarantee the viability of the FBI as a great institution."
That may—or may not—have been a subtle signal from Gray that he was giving up hope of winning his confirmation battle with the U.S. Senate. His nomination looked hopelessly blocked in a divided Judiciary Committee precisely because many Senators believed that, despite Gray's wire, he has permitted the FBI to be improperly influenced by base political considerations during his ten-month temporary tenure.
A former Navy captain who has demonstrated a career-long obsession with loyalty to his superiors—as a submarine officer, a Pentagon naval aide and in second-level posts in the Nixon Administration—Gray was selected by Nixon as acting director because of, above all else, that subservience. And it is his devotion to Nixon that has created the nomination controversy and has thrust the President and the Senate toward another classic collision over their respective powers. Nixon may well be forced to abandon the nomination, or he may persuade Gray to withdraw—something that anyone who respects the chain of command as Gray does would obligingly do.
Crossroads. Whether or not Gray gives up, far more is at stake than the fate of one man. At issue is the FBI's well-deserved reputation for disregarding political considerations in its dogged pursuit of the facts upon which evenhanded justice must be based. On a more fundamental level, the struggle raises difficult questions about the role of a national police force in a democracy and just who should be entrusted with policing the police. The FBI after J. Edgar Hoover is at a crossroads, and the national interest is clear: a balance must be found between a police power that is largely unchecked and one that swings prejudicially with each political shift in the White House.
The nomination fight has not been waged in such principled terms. It has become mixed in what is rapidly becoming the Nixon Administration's most persistent pain: the break-in and bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington last June. Directed and financed by officials of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, this operation has been adjudged by courts to be a clear-cut crime. After two weeks of hearings on the Gray nomination, most Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee contend the testimony indicates that Gray, out of