L. Patrick Gray III

L. Patrick Gray III (1916–2005) was an American lawyer and government official who served as interim director of the FBI after the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972. He attended Rice Institute and later won a scholarship to the U.S. Naval Academy, eventually serving on five submarine combat patrols in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, the Navy sent him to George Washington University Law School in Washington, where he first met Richard Nixon, then a freshman congressman from California. During the Korean War, Gray served as a submarine skipper, and he worked in various Navy commands throughout the 1950s, retiring in 1960 to work as a staff member for Nixon, then the vice president and the Republican nominee for president. After Nixon's defeat that fall, Gray began practicing law in New London, Connecticut. Upon Nixon's election to the presidency in 1968, Gray became executive assistant to the secretary of health, education, and welfare. Nixon later made him assistant attorney general in charge of the civil division and nominated him to be deputy attorney general, before appointing him to the FBI job in May