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It did not take Gray long to demonstrate his feelings about landing on Nixon's team. Gray gave a remarkable speech to the officials he supervised at HEW. "Each one of us is here because Richard Nixon was elected to the high office of President of the United States," he said. "Obviously, we are a chosen few, an elite group. We must be dedicated and devoted to the concept that our Republican President will be a great President and that he will be reelected. Above all other qualities of character that we hold near and dear, we must have deep, abiding, sincere loyalty to our President and to our Secretary."
Loyalty to a President is, of course, desirable in a department official, although Gray's zeal sounds extreme. It is not at all appropriate, however, in a police official whose agency prides itself on arriving objectively at facts. A political police force is obviously anathema to a democracy. It may well have been asking far too much to expect Gray to abandon such deeply held attitudes after he was shifted to the FBI.
When Gray left HEW in January 1970, the paperwork at HEW bogged down, and Finch developed a reputation as an inept administrator. Gray became an Assistant Attorney General, mainly at the urging of Mardian, a right-wing ideologue who had also worked with him at HEW. Gray impressed his superiors, Mitchell and Kleindienst, while heading the Justice Department's Civil Division. When Mitchell moved over to Nixon's re-election committee and Kleindienst became Attorney General, Gray was designated Deputy Attorney General.
Well-organized, methodical and a habitual notetaker at every policy discussion, Gray has been essentially a follower and a kind of supersecretary rather than a leader. He has also been an adroit backstage operator. When the Kleindienst nomination ran into controversy over allegations that International Telephone & Telegraph Corp. had been given favorable treatment by the Justice Department in the out-of-court settlement of several antitrust cases, Gray worked with the FBI in exploring the matter. Ironically, he had the duty of advising Kleindienst on how to handle questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee—a task that Gray himself is now painfully performing.
Heaven. As acting director of the FBI, Gray was at first well received by field agents. He sent out a flurry of directives loosening some of Hoover's harsh restrictions on their conduct. He said that he had "no hangups on white shirts," and permitted more colorful attire and allowed agents to wear longer hair. He dropped some of the Monday-morning second-guessing from Washington. Agents could for the first time keep Government cars at home overnight instead of having to drive to a central garage after a long day. They could even drink coffee at their desks. With all those reforms, however trivial, said one veteran, "the agents thought they had died and gone to heaven."
Soon many agents became disillusioned. Much of each week he was away from Washington, where decisions were either being delayed or handled by assistants. Some officials there began calling him "Two-Day Gray." Gray was out making speeches to help Nixon get reelected. Concerned that he might become a hijack