Funny how the sweep of decades can pulse through a ruined life, and be punctuated so poetically at the end. L. Patrick Gray III, Who Led the F.B.I. During Watergate, died yesterday.
Just one month after the exposure of Deep Throat. Just a short time after he broke his years of quiet margin-writing. He was a war hero. His feet were made of clay. Funny how time washes.
In the ABC interview this year, Mr. Gray said he had had to cash in all his insurance policies, sell his house in Stonington, Conn., and liquidate his stock portfolio to pay his legal bills. He returned to a quiet law practice as Louis P. Gray.
He made no public statements, but meticulously annotated books and memoirs about the era, haunted by what he called in the ABC interview “the days and nights of revisiting this particular episode in our history.”
His family now plans to publish a book intended to correct public misimpressions that he was somehow complicit in Watergate.
“At no time did I feel I was dealing with individuals who were trying to sweep me into the very conspiracy that I was charged with investigating,” Mr. Gray testified to the Senate Watergate committee in August 1973. “That’s a madman’s horror.”
“In the service of my country,” he added, “I withstood hours and hours of depth charging, shelling, bombing, but I never expected to run into a Watergate in the service of a president of the United States. And I ran into a buzz saw, obviously.”