Lord of the Lies
Trento, Susan B.
Lord of the Lies How Hill and Knowlton’s Robea Gray pulls Washington’s strings. by Susan B. Trento In the old days, when Robert Gray was a staffer in the Eisenhower White House and had...
...One of the reasons the Haitian people were so poor, of course, was the systematic pillaging of resources by the government Gray and Company represented...
...Then Bob showed it to him, and Jackie went bananas...
...It was associated with American University, another Gray client...
...Gray and Company turned the fine into a celebration-a media event...
...But while business was thriving, it was also changing...
...With its towering but long-dormant smoke stack, Gray’s new quarters were imposing...
...A promi- entry for the- master of illusion...
...But by 1984, “Washington Spotlight” was a big success: There were 656 subscribers to the “Gray and Company Network,” and another 1,476 stations in the Mutual Broadcasting System and National Public Radio Network that received the program by satellite each month...
...For example, Gray had known Caspar Weinberger for years, and it just happened that Weinberger’s son needed a job...
...Of course not...
...He found out who mattered in Washington, and then he called their wives...
...office of Hill and Knowlton, Gray had signed on to perhaps the most conservative firm in the field...
...Another questionable client was the government of Haiti during the reign of the murderous “Baby Doc” Duvalier...
...He plays his social life smooth,” former Nebraska Senator Carl Curtis says...
...It doesn’t matter how long you talk.’ ” Another Gray and Company vice president remembered a client who was billed for expenses associated with a party to which he was not even invited...
...he thrived on the party ircuit...
...Meese was the only one of Reagan’s three top aides who was impressed by Gray...
...How much reality remains...
...And on that count, Gray was cleverer than the average social climber...
...In part lecause of Gray’s success, the rand of insider politics he he-tuned has become an enrenched and unhappy part If our legislative process...
...ind any understanding of .ow we got here must Ike into account the cazer of Robert Keith Gray...
...You’d see hours pop up any time a client had money,” Carter Clews, a Gray and Company senior vice president explained...
...He convinced millionaire William Moss to create the William Moss Institute, a philanthropic foundation to poll Americans about their concerns for the future...
...Attorney Rudolph Guliani, who accepted a huge, oversized check as if he had just won the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes...
...If a company was getting bad publicity because of bad policy, Hill would advise that the policy be revised...
...Gray had pioneered a number of innovative PR techniques, such as “video news releases...
...Need a favor from Henry Kissinger...
...Gray had learned early on that Washingi:on is a two-party town, and, in order to prosper, he had to create the appearance of access to both Republicans and Democrats...
...James...
...One of his initial requirements was a limousine, not just for convenient transportation, but to enhance his image...
...More important than the tableaux was the guest list...
...He didn’t see it...
...Another Gray catch was the Teamsters Union...
...he hired them...
...he was a perfect host and perfect guest...
...And he knew exactly how to profit from hat knowledge: Take all comers, re;ardless of who they are...
...Before long, Gray provided services to accounts that included the American Petroleum Institute, Procter and Gamble, and the National Association of Broadcasters...
...A former Gray and Company executive gives an answer that goes to the heart of why Americans around the country have become so distrustful of Washington...
...Gray, Mr Meese is on the phone,’ and he would pick UI a dead line, carry on a conversation of four o five short, rapid sentences as though he was iI constant communication and hang up...
...The Canada account ended with great public embarrassment...
...Gray brings up the real reason for the call: Mr...
...He would routinely turn down clients if he felt they wanted “to shade the truth,” explained George WorWhen Gray started his own firm, he revived a trick from his old dowagercultivating days...
...Later, when the senator held hearings in Seattle, Hill and Knowlton helped provide witnesses, prepared testimony, and handled the press...
...For 30 years, at his own firm and at Hill and Know1 ton, he’s set a standard-not a particularly higl one-for what Washington lobbying can ge away with...
...Call nent Washington hostess with many highly placed friends, she regularly counts Mr...
...And to complete his power base, Gray revived a trick from his old dowager-cultivating days...
...During the first 20 months after Demery assumed his HUD position, Food for Africa raised $546,000, more than half of which came from companies and individuals who had interests in HUD housing programs...
...It] was really a sexy place...
...As more and more top executives left, morale dipped to an all-time low...
...Washington power is a volatile thing, and Gray made his smartest move by looking ahead...
...Back in 1985, Lantos and Illinois Rep...
...And the illusion of power is certain to continue...
...El Paso hired Hill and Knowlton to drum up support for legislation that would allow El Paso to buy out its competitor, Pacific Northwest Pipeline Company...
...She maintained that even Gray’s practice of taking clients’ children to the circus each year, for which the company got credit in the press, was eventually charged back to the clients...
...El Paso’s earlier attempts to do so had been blocked by a Supreme Court decision on the grounds that it would have meant higher costs for consumer...
...Get me Jim Baker,” Mr...
...Founder John Hill saw himself and his employees More contacts inevitably led to more clients...
...As vice president and director of the D.C...
...The illusion of power wa.s also reflected in the names of those who occupied the offices...
...The White House had recruited lobbyists to help with controversial appointees needing Senate confirmation...
...Visitors to the hillside home . . . were greeted by what appeared to be Arabs in full Arabic costume,” reported the Omaha World-Herald...
...Buying influence was easy, and sometimes it was cheap...
...One especially embarrassing incident involved the government of Morocco...
...Joan Braden’s contacts, for instance, gave Gray and Company one of its most prestigious accounts-the government of Canada...
...An( then, of course, the reporter, dazzled, would re port that a White House phone call came in...
...In 1989, HUD investigators were looking into contributions made to a charity called Food for Africa by consultants and housing developers with whom Thomas T. Demery, the assistant secretary for housing, routinely worked...
...A year later his company, Marc Rich & Co., AG, pleaded guilty to 38 counts of tax evasion and paid a $150 million fine...
...The very organizations designed to protect America from an abusive system had become part of the system, and Gray was predictably in the middle of it...
...Instead of simply taking instructions from his clients and putting out press releases, he genuinely tried to advise them...
...James Baker came from a rich, socially prominent family and had headed Gerald Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign...
...had done so many times before...
...Of course, keeping influence was sometimes trickier than getting it...
...he had one of his clients create a job for Lrsula...
...At no time did either the network or the station disclose that Morocco was a Gray client that was paying the firm a minimum of $360,000 to improve its image in the United States, or that Morocco had paid Gray and Company to produce the piece...
...he hired them...
...Gray and Company sent The New York Times a press release that misspelled the ambassador’s name, the name of the reporter, and the name of the ambassador’s guest at the luncheon the press release was promoting...
...I was there when she was hired and I remember the terms of the agreement and it was clear...
...Bob,” he says, “how’re you doing...
...Get a wife A few more legislative coups like that one, and Bob Gray was king of the Hill...
...retary interrupt him from time to time wit1 fake telephone calls from the President...
...Khashoggi was notorious for using us and not paying us,” a senior Gray and Company employee said...
...Most of Gray’s international accounts were rightwing governments tied closely to the intelligence community or businessmen with the same connections...
...Everybody who could fancy the slightest reason for piling on, piled on,” Joan Braden said in her memoir, Just Enough Rope...
...Still, as public relations counselors, much like lawyers...
...The Hill and Knowlton switchboard forwarded calls to the foundation...
...Why were six people from the press department attending a conference in Ottawa...
...He did not need any Washington introductions, either politically or socially...
...The urge to make the big bucks, combined with fiascos like Morocco’s, impelled Gray to sell his firm in 1986...
...Gray knew an opportunity when he saw it...
...Once the account was secured, it was turned over to young, low-paid account executives, who saw it as a fat cow ready to be milked dry...
...Riding this success, Gray decided to try the same idea on television...
...We’ve been to a lot of his parties and it would be filled with women old enough to be his grandmother...
...We want to help you anytime we can...
...In the fall of 1991, with Gray’s contract due to expire, many expected him to retire...
...A private nonprofit organization, the foundation was dedicated to publicizing human rights abuses around the world...
...Domestically, one of the more notorious reputations Gray tried to sanitize was that of American fugitive Marc Rich...
...See sidebar, page 16...
...A billionaire, Rich fled to Switzerland in 1983 to avoid a 65-count criminal indictment...
...Gray worked hard at maintaining the relationship...
...The Gray rationalization would have been dazzling if it weren’t so appalling...
...Tom Lantos, whose government operations subcommittee had oversight of HUD programs, began hearings into influence-peddling at HUD in the spring of 1990...
...Ironically, it did not have to look much farther than its landlord’s clients to find governments with poor human rights records-Haiti, Turkey, Indonesia, South Korea, Morocco, and China are some of the world’s most egregious human rights abusers...
...Soon the program was being broadcast bi-weekly...
...There was Nancy Thurmond, wife of Senator Strom Thurmond, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee...
...gifts for clients was secretly included in their bills the following month...
...You know that...
...In the nine months prior to that, Food for Africa had raised $34,000...
...Eventually, it ended in embarrassment after The Washington Post revealed that CNN was running videos made for clients of Gray and Company as news stories...
...Ed Meese was a natural point of Joan Braden,” The New York Times wrote...
...As his Ursula Meese-style access-mongering began to work, Gray gravitated toward big contracts with clients a lot more questionable than the government of Canada...
...In 1980, he left Hill and Knowlton and set out on his own...
...the only criterion Gray seemed to have in selecting his clients was the size of their wallets...
...Access: The illusion of it has long been tht energy source of Washington’s unelected pow er elite-the lobbyists, PI2 sorcerers, and coun selors who work their quiet magic on the na tion’s laws in back room the general public doesn’t even know exist...
...But even friends in the right places can do only so much to offset a string of bad publicity...
...His gray and silver stationery read simply: “The Power House, Washington, D.C...
...She said wine bought as Christma...
...Of course, Gray would probably relate hi, story as a Horatio Alger tale: A boy from Hast ings, Nebraska, comes to Washington, work hard, and makes it to the top...
...California Rep...
...Adonis Hoffman, a self-described liberal, was one of the executives who worked on the account: “The Haitian people were suffering...
...Kissinger among her dinner guests...
...But he did have a talent for makng people believe he was well-connected, and in he power-crazed world of Washington, he found .n audience not only eager to believe he was a ilayer, but willing to pay him handsomely to prove t. In relatively short order, his illusion became realiy: Gray did favors for people...
...Martin’s Press n the world of public relations in 1961, he had LO expertise in either government or substantive iolicymaking...
...Because Bob was sort of the image of respectability and elegance and grace, and represented polite Washington society...
...Remarkably, Lantos announced at the hearing that the subcommittee was not going to investigate the relationship between Food for Africa and HUD contractors, a key portion of the inspector general’s report that had started the HUD investigation in the first place...
...it contacted newspaper editors with volumes of canned materials, and many of those edii.ors wrote supporting editorials...
...By now, it was harder to tell...
...Mamie Eisenhower was just one of his grande dames...
...Meese’s wife Ursula, The Woshington Post wrote, “has worn borrowed evening clothes to fancy dinners because the family finances are tight...
...Jackie Presser, a former car thief and one of a long line of corrupt Teamster officials, saw in Gray not just an effective lobbyist but a man who could confer social and political acceptability...
...he booms...
...It became almost a self-fulfilling kind of myth...
...Had he finally taken one too many controversial clients, been implicated in one too many scandals...
...Members of Congress worked in tandem with lobbyists to generate “grassroots” support for pet issues...
...And when Nixon won, Gray became the big gun of Republican lobtlyists...
...The company’s PR packages began appearing on CNN as news stories: In March 1985, it sent by satellite “an exclusive interview” with King Hassan 11, the autoccstic ruler of Morocco...
...Influencepeddling abuses were starting to surface, and Americans literally began to pay for them...
...Presst id ig it at ion Still, Gray’s business could survive, in part because, as the eighties progressed, the illusion-machine was on full power...
...They woulc come in and they would say, ‘Mr...
...The deal was announced with great fanfare by New York’s then-U.S...
...They put it next to the picture of Eugene McCarthy...
...How did he use his power...
...But it’s not, unfortunatey, the story of one man...
...In typical Gray style, he located his new offices, not on Capitol Hill, as many of the labor unions had done 20 years earlier, nor on K Street, in Washington’s business and le the canal in fashionable Georgetown...
...Michael Deaver, a slulled PR man himself, could see right through Gray’s carefully crafted illusion of power and access...
...Hill and Knowlton went to work on Warren Magnuson of Washington state, chairman of the Senate committee considering the legidation...
...He culti.ated Washington society wives, raised money for the Reiublican party, and took care of the politically powerful...
...Clientitis The obvious impetus to take on clients like Hassan was the huge fees Gray could collect...
...There is no answer to the question of was it real or was it just hype to protect [Gray’s] own veneer...
...The idea was to get television networks and local radio and television stations to air these advertisements as their own news stories...
...At the time, the king was being criticized for signing a treaty with Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi...
...We were thought to be real because we were thought to have the influence and the access and the power and the understanding of how the system worked...
...But the story is it didn’t matter...
...Yet perhaps the most crucial wife in Gray’s roster didn’t work for him at all-but Ursula Meese’s husband would be one of his biggest catches...
...Gray and Company had started with a radio show called “Washington Spotlight...
...We were working for the people in this hemisphere who have the lowest standard of living, who are entrenched in the deepest poverty...
...There was Washington socialite Joan Braden...
...Other clients included the People’s Republic of China-after the Tiananmen Square massacre...
...Totally fabricated...
...Gray calls to his secretary . . . Mr...
...By 1967 he’d .ioined a 50-member committee to elect his friend, Richard Nixon, lo the White House...
...Gray’s timing, as usual, was impeccable...
...Baker...
...Was he ready to call it quits...
...2,000 a month, and when Gray’s clients needed something from the Pentagon, Gray and Company went right to the top...
...When Gray courted the media, he left nothing to chance, hiring personal aides or special assistants whose primary responsibilities were to get him favorable publicity...
...Gray then recommended Ursula Meese for director of the institute at $,40,000 a year, thereby increasing the Meese family income by about 66 percent...
...Gray paid $750,000 for the 19th-century building, a former power plant that once provided the energy for Washington’s old street car system...
...Illusion...
...When The New York Times wrote about Gray in 1982, he carefully orchestrated the interview as he His hair is silver-gray, his suits are impeccably tailored, and he is always in a hurry...
...In Washington, he held a 50th birthday party for Presser at The Palm restaurant, known for the caricatures of famous people on its walls...
...The] Power House was just a unique setting at the time...
...By the time El Paso got its way, it had paid Hill and Knowlton hundreds of thousands of dollars, a pittance compared to the cost of the $360 million buyout that the PR firm had made possible...
...A reporter would walk in, and he would in struct his executive assistant to come in an( announce there was a call from the Whitt House,” a former Gray and Company execu tive recalls...
...and the Selling of Access and Influence in Washington, recently pub lished by St...
...It supplied background materials to state and local officials, as well as sample letters to send to Congress...
...He was just the type of person with whom Gray could ingratiate himself, and he had the kind of influence with Reagan that would make Gray’s time and effort worthwhile...
...But they weren’t just old...
...Just before Demery was scheduled to testify, he hired Hill and Knowlton to advise him on how best to make his case to the news media and Congress...
...Gray represented Adnan Khashoggi, the “selfemployed” Saudi Arabian businessman who was involved with Iran-contra...
...Hill and Knowlton returned Gray to its board of directors and made him chairman of its policy committee...
...den, a Hill and Knowlton official...
...He was a very moral man...
...Canada canceled the contract, and Joan Braden quit...
...And no one has nur tured that illusion better or longer than Bo1 Gray, one of Washington’s most powerful, and most respected, influence peddlers...
...It didn’t matter to people here and it didn’t matter to the clients and it didn’t matter to the media, because everybody was playing the game...
...CNN and Channel 5 in Washington ran the story as if it were their their own...
...In true Gray fashion, he cut a sweetheart deal: In June 1986, JWT Group, Inc...
...The merger agreement created an entirely new division of Hill and Knowlton called Hill and Knowlton Public Affairs Worldwide and put Gray in charge as its chairman...
...Whether he client was Haiti’s “Baby )oc” Duvalier or the Church of Icientology, the only criterion vlas that the client paid-and laid well...
...This time around deception helped Bob Gray set the America1 agenda...
...He wanted to be a player...
...Braden won the account through her friendship with Canada’s then-Ambassador Allan Gotlieb...
...Only this time, he didn’t escort the wives-of to parties...
...BacE then, the occasional deception helped the Ne braska native wire his White House career Three decades later, the tricks were the samt but the stakes a little higher...
...Wealthy [women]-he was the favorite escort of the oldest women...
...And the more money a client had, the more pressure there was internally to gouge him...
...loon enough, Gray did know vlho mattered...
...Ursula Meese was hired only because she was married to the attorney general,” a senior Gray and Company executive said...
...In reality, though, it was pocket change for Rich, who was charged with gouging the American taxpayers for as much as Charles Keating had with his savings and loan boondoggles...
...When he started This article is adapted from The Power House: Robert Keith Gra...
...John Porter had founded the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, and in 1988 Lantos had asked Gray to donate office space at Washington Harbour, one of the most expensive addresses in town, for the foundation...
...And his first step was to create the illusion that he had already achieved that goal...
...Gray can get just about anyone in town on the telephone, maybe even the President now and then...
...During these programs, the radio stations did not disclose that they were produced by Gray and Company or that Gray had been paid by clients to do them...
...And then there was Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a client the company may never recover from...
...The stars brought in clients from the Kennedy Center to Montgomery Ward...
...After all, he would be 70 years old...
...The fine was publicized as one of the largest in American history...
...But Meese was new to Washington, had come with little money, and was vulnerable to offers of introductions to the “right” people, and to overtures of kindness and friendship during his times of trouble...
...At Gray’s behest, Moran performed a service that typified the Gray touch: “I arranged to get Jackie’s picture put up at The Palm...
...That was the odd couple...
...They couldn’t have picked a better place...
...The get-itwhileyou-can attitude of the Reagan years brought a steady stream of clients to the door of the Power House...
...But the ambassador, unlike the fixtures in their tarbooshes and other Arabian regalia, was wearing a conservative blue suit...
...agreed to buy Gray and Company and make it a part of its subsidiary, Hill and Knowlton...
...In a standup outside the palace, a Gray correspondent warned viewers that the West should not react harshly to the treaty and that any criticism of Morocco should be “tempered with the acknowledgement” of the country’s strategic impormnce to the United States...
...A mention in The New York Times and The Washington Post style sections could work wonders...
...Gray’s professional life is a tudy of how, if it’s done right, lulling strings for profit can ome to look an awful lot like tatus...
...Not all of Gray’s efforts went so smoothly...
...Gray paid Caspar Jr...
...Gray and Company “was a company without a moral rudder,” said Sheila Tate, a former Hill and Knowlton employee and later Nancy Reagan’s press secretary, discussing the firm’s controversial clientele...
...Just now, he is talking to Mr...
...Only this time, he didn’t escort the wives of the powerful to parties...
...Clip files on Gray are filled with stories like this: A few phone calls, and Gray had ensured that his White House calls would get returned...
...by Susan B. Trento 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 sec...
...said Pate Felts, a Gray and Company senior vice president...
...In the wake of so much bad publicity, staffers began abandoning the firm for greener, and possibly cleaner, pastures...
...The PR firm drafted a dummy, fill-in-the-blank resolution and distributed it to chambers of commerce in Magnuson’s home state...
...From a staff of 250 during the Persian Gulf war, the office now had 90 people...
...I just had a telephone call with Jim Baker on minimum profits...
...In 1966, for instance, he gave a party at his home in suburban Virginia for the Saudi Arabian ambassador and his wife...
...Then Mr...
...This was the dawn of the Reagan era, and his was the perfect setting for carrying out the carefully crafted illusion of power, access, wealth, and influence, from the arched 25-foot windows to the blown-up photos of the Reagan inaugural...
...It] turned out they were mannequins...
...Gray matter But Gray’s charm by the end of the eighties was wearing thin...
...He thought that was the greatest thing,” Moran remembered...
...We arranged for the table, and then we waited to see if Jackie picked it up...
...The regular appearance of well-known Gray and Company stars at social and political functions and the drum beat in the press contributed to the firm’s image as the most talented and well-connected in town...
...The biggest blow came in April 1991, when four top Hill and Knowlton executives publicly and abruptly left to start a competing firm, Capitoline...
...The cozy relationships among the lobbyists, Congress, and the executive branch became publicly evident in one scandal after another...
...Bob Gray signed on for another three years...
...The more people gave us credit for doing things, the more influential and effective we became...
...The Times ran a story saying that Canada’s publicists could not even spell the names correctly...
...They were connected...
...There was Noreen Fuller, the first wife of Vice President Bush’s former Chief of Staff Craig Fuller...
...I remember [one executive] pointed out that no phone call takes less than an hour...
...The anything-goes Reagan era was over, and compounding Gray’s poor judgment in clients was a growing public distrust of lobbying...
...Reagan’s minimum profits tax . . . He hangs up the phone and telephones Robert B. Peabody, president of the American Iron and Steel Institute, one of his clients...
...His second, third, and fourth requirements: partiesgoing to the right ones, sometimes three a night, and hosting some of the more memorable events in the tedium of Washington night life...
...Gray] was friends with the Reagans and all that, but he did not have a lot of contact with them,” said Larry Speakes, Reagan’s deputy press secretary in the early eighties...
...Baby Doc was using this devastatingly poor country’s meager resources to pay, among other things, Washington’s most expensive PR and lobbying firm to improve his image...
...How are you doing...
...High social visibility was encouraged, especially among top-tier people like Frank Mankiewicz, Alejandro Orfila, and Braden...
...But Canada also illustrated a problem with Gray’s star system, as the big names often had no experience in PR...
...Robert Gray, on the other hand, didn’t pay particular attention to ethical considerations...
...Why not...
...You know why...
...Keeping the wives of the powerful happy was smart business...
...Consider one client who went away happy, El Paso Natural Gas...
...Gray signed on the Church of Scientology, and later Time magazine ran a highly critical cover story titled, “ScientologyThe Cult of Greed...
...Always keep that in mind,’ he said, ‘once you pick up that phone, that’s an hour...
...Not that they knew anything about lobbying, but they contributed to the illusion of access...
...Rows of offices now sat empty, and Hill and Knowlton alumni could only laugh when they recalled the fights over who got the offices along the Potomac River...
...The Meeses’ financial difficulties were no secret...
...He lured Gary Hymel, who for years had worked as a top aide to House Speaker Tip O’Neill, and he snagged Bette Anderson, a former high-ranking Carter administration Treasury Department official...
...And he accepted Jackie,” said Mark Moran, a Gray and Company official...
...He also signed a contract with the Catholic Church, agreeing to help change public attitudes towards abortion, a move that prompted severe public criticism as well as internal bickering at the firm...
...Jackie just worshiped the ground Bob walked on...
...Still, his connections were strong enough to keep his clients out of trouble...
...In 1961, the year he larlayed his White House xperience into a power osition in public relaions, Gray went as re- ..” pectable as Washington could get...
Vol. 24 • September 1992 • No. 9
