US promoter of political interests

By Jurek Martin

©Mark Meyer//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

If there is a profession synonymous in the public eye with all that is wrong in Washington today, it is that of lobbying, also known as the K Street mafia after the road where many of the best-heeled have offices.

Its practitioners work behind closed doors, draft laws for congressmen to propose, wander at will throughout government and generally ensure that their clients’ oxen are never gored, whatever the public interest may be. President Barack Obama came to office promising to curb their influence and even imposed a ban on their serving in government, but then quietly dropped it.

But he was much more than the smoothest gun for hire. His singular achievement was to combine in one house traditional public relations, hence the “first flack” honorific, and lobbying. This he did first at Hill+Knowlton, the established PR shop, for 20 years from 1961, then at his own Gray and Company for five years, and finally, until he retired to Florida in the early 1990s, as chairman of H+K after it bought his firm.It is hard to define exactly who a lobbyist is these days. Officially, about 12,000 are registered with the government as such, down a bit from five years ago because of a straitened economy, but the actual number is probably more than triple that. Many do not bother to register as lobbyists under rules tightened by the past two administrations; Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives, described himself as a “historian” when on the books of Fannie Mae, the mortgage facilitator. Tom Daschle, once Democratic Senate leader, is merely a “political adviser” to many of those for whom he works.

But for more than 30 years, from Dwight Eisenhower to George H W Bush, lobbying in the nation’s capital was embodied in one perfect persona. Bob Gray, who has died at the age of 92, was even known as “the first flack”, after his work on Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 presidential campaign. He was silver-haired, socially ubiquitous – wearing out, he said, two dinner jackets a year – and his offices were in the appropriately named Power House in fashionable Georgetown, which is where the movers and shakers held soirées at which the real business of government was done. To his critics, Robert Keith Gray, born in Hastings, Nebraska, on September 2 1921 and with a bachelor’s degree from Carleton College in Minnesota and a Harvard MBA to his name, was all about the “Selling of Access and Influence in Washington”, to borrow from the subtitle of a 1992 book that so upset him he sued its author for defamation, though unsuccessfully.

His approach was nothing if not professional. Lobbying, he once recalled, used to be all about “the three Bs – booze, blondes and bribes”. But, to him, it was “a deep, challenging intellectual business. The challenge is to have the best argument and take that argument to the right place. And if I don’t have the most compelling argument, [even] my best friend in Congress will vote against me.”

Politically he was a life-long Republican, though a moderate by today’s standards, and it certainly helped his access that his party held the presidency for all but 12 of the 30-plus years he practised his trade – though Congress was mostly in Democratic hands.

But his client list was eclectic. It included big tobacco and big oil but also the Teamsters Union, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Church of Scientology and several charities. He represented Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the Haitian dictator, and the anti-Castro Cuban American Foundation, as well as the governments of Canada, Morocco and then Marxist Angola (though he said he turned down Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya).

The key to his success was that he knew so many of the Washington power players personally. He cut his political teeth as Ike’s appointments secretary and was in the Oval Office in November 1957, laying out the daily schedule when he noticed the president was slurring his responses. This later became known as “the secret stroke”, one of several attacks Eisenhower was to suffer in his second term, which Gray, the soul of discretion, helped keep under wraps.

He was well known in the Nixon White House too, frequently escorting about town Rose Mary Woods, the president’s secretary responsible, inadvertently or otherwise, for the 18-minute gap in the most incriminating of the Watergate tape recordings. He later sprang to the defence of Nancy Reagan when she came under fire for the cost of her designer wardrobe.

But Gray, who leaves behind his partner Efrain Machado, mostly plied his trade out of the spotlight, a visible man-about-town but unseen when doing what he did best.