Lord of the lies; how Hill and Knowlton's Robert Gray pulls Washington's strings.

AuthorTrento, Susan B.
PositionWashington, D.C. public relations consultant

This article is adapted from The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Access and Influence in Washington, recently published by St. Martin 's Press.

In the old days, when Robert Gray was a staffer in the Eisenhower White House and had visitors in his office, he'd have his secretary interrupt him from time to time with fake telephone calls from the President. Back then, the occasional deception helped the Nebraska native wire his White House career. Three decades later, the tricks were the same but the stakes a fittie higher. This time around, deception helped Bob Gray set the American agenda.

"A reporter would walk in, and he would instruct his executive assistant to come in and announce there was a call from the White House," a former Gray and Company executive recalls. "Totally fabricated. They would come in and they would say, 'Mr. Gray, Mr. Meese is on the phone,' and he would pick up a dead fine, carry on a conversation of four or five short, rapid sentences as though he was in constant communication and hang up. And then, of course, the reporter, dazzled, would report that a White House phone call came in."

Access: The illusion of it has long been the energy source of Washington's unelected power elite--the lobbyists, PR sorcerers, and counselors who work their quiet magic on the nation's laws in back rooms the general public doesn't even know exist. And no one has nurtured that illusion better or longer than Bob Gray, one of Washington's most powerful, and most respected, influence peddlers. For 30 years, at his own firm and at Hill and Knowlton, he's set a standard--not a particularly high one for what Washington lobbying can get away with.

Of course, Gray would probably relate his story as a Horatio Alger tale: A boy from Hastings, Nebraska, comes to Washington, works hard, and makes it to the top. When he started in the world of public relations in 1961, he had no expertise in either government or substantive policymaking. But he did have a talent for making people believe he was well-connected, and in the power-crazed world of Washington, he found an audience not only eager to believe he was a player, but willing to pay him handsomely to prove it.

In relatively short order, his illusion became reality: Gray did favors for people; he thrived on the party circuit; he was a perfect host and perfect guest. He cultivated Washington society wives, raised money for the Republican party, and took care of the politically powerful. Soon enough, Gray did know almost everyone in town who mattered. And he knew exactly how to profit from that knowledge: Take all comers, regardless of who they are. Whether the client was Haiti's "Baby Doc" Duvalier or the Church of Scientology, the only criterion was that the client paid--and paid well.

Gray's professional life is a study of how, if it's done fight, pulling strings for profit can come to look an awful lot like status. But it's not, unfortunately, the story of one man. In part because of Gray's success, the brand of insider politics he fine-tuned has become an entrenched and unhappy part of our legislative process. And any understanding of how we got here must take into account the career of Robert Keith Gray.

In 1961, the year he parlayed his White House experience into a power position in public relations, Gray went as respectable as Washington could get. As vice president and director of the D.C. office of Hill and Knowlton, Gray had signed on to perhaps the most conservative firm in the field.

Founder John Hill saw himself and his employees as public relations counselors, much like lawyers. Instead of simply taking instructions from his clients and putting out press releases, he genuinely tried to advise them. If a company was getting bad publicity because of bad policy, Hill would advise that the policy be revised. He would routinely turu down clients if he felt they wanted "to shade the truth," explained George Worden, a Hill and Knowlton official. "He was a very moral man."

Robert Gray, on the other hand, didn't pay particular attention to ethical considerations. He wanted to be a player. And his first step was to create the illusion that he had already achieved that goal. One of his initial requirements was a limousine, not just for convenient transportation, but to enhance his image. His second, third, and fourth requirements: parties-- going to the right ones, sometimes three a night, and hosting some of the more memorable events in the tedium of Washington night life.

In 1966, for instance, he gave a party at his home in suburban Virginia for the Saudi Arabian ambassador and his wife. "Visitors to the hillside home ... were greeted by what appeared to be Arabs in full Arabic costume," reported the Omaha World-Herald. "[It] turued out they were mannequins .... But the ambassador, unlike the fixtures in their tarbooshes and other Arabian regalia, was wearing a conservative blue suit."

More important than the tableaux was the guest list. And on that count, Gray was cleverer than the average social climber. He found out who mattered in Washington, and then he called their wives. Mamie Eisenhower was just one of his grande dames. "He plays his social life smooth," former Nebraska Senator Carl Curtis says. "We've been to a lot of his parties and it would be filled with women old enough to be his grandmother. Wealthy [women]--he was the favorite escort of the oldest women." But they weren't just old. They were connected.

More contacts inevitably led to more clients. Before long, Gray provided services to accounts that included the American Petroleum Institute, Procter and Gamble, and the National Association of Broadcasters...

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