Top lobbyist Bob Gray died last month at 92, survived by his partner of 20 years, Efrain Machado of Miami, and now Charles Francis -- former employee, archive activist, president of the Mattachine Society of Washington DC, and Theban spouse -- has made available this on-the-record interview he did with Gray in 2012. The many pivotal moments they discuss include Gray's work in the Eisenhower White House and the Goldwater campaign.
CF: You were appointed to the exact same job as Arthur Vandenberg, Jr. three years after his firing at the hands of Hoover. How did you miss his fate, fired for “health reasons”?
RKG: It took six weeks to get a clearance. I remember how relieved I was when the Naval Department said, “you got your security clearance. I tried to act as nonchalant as I could, even though my heart was pounding. I was still trying to make myself straight, dating women. If I had been in any way sexually active, I would have been outed. I was an open book, working twenty-hour days. That was fulfilling enough for me.
CF: What was it like to be gay in 1956 at the White House?
RKG: You cannot conceive what it was like. Eisenhower was a fair guy, but the law was the law.
CF: But what about J. Edgar Hoover?
RKG: There would be no reason anyone would know my story. I knew I was different, and I knew what I’d do if I were going to be accused. I told myself, “I’ll march right over to J. Edgar Hoover and tell him all about it. Of course, I didn’t know he was a homosexual then.”
...
CF: So how did the gay issue play-out in later years, after you had left Eisenhower?
RKG: I remember the Campaign of 1964 when I was working for Barry Goldwater. LBJ’s closest staff aid Walter Jenkins was arrested at the YMCA and was hospitalized as having had a breakdown. They beat the story to death. The media couldn’t leave it alone; it was incessant. Finally, Johnson had enough, saying “we Democrats are too decent for this….we knew it was a sickness.”
Read the full transcript here. Gray tried unsuccessfully to sue the author of The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Access and Influence in Washington.
A good novel about delusional closeted gay Conservatives in DC in the 1950s is Tom Mallon's Fellow Travelers
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