Lobbyist Bob Gray: Pitchman of the Power House

How top Lobbyist Bob Gray makes friends and sells influence

There was a time when lobbyists were discreet, working their deals behind closed doors. But Robert Keith Gray is a new breed of lobbyist, preferring to enter by the front door and stay in the limelight.

The dapper, polished Gray, 62, is the founder and president of Gray & Co., an 86-member lobbying and public relations firm located in a lavishly decorated former generating plant in Georgetown immodestly named the Power House. His office is decorated with photographs of him shaking hands with every President since Dwight Eisenhower. "With appreciation and warmest friendship," says a photo inscription from Ronald Reagan, whose Inauguration ceremonies Gray helped arrange. By day he likes to be seen with his pals in high places, including CIA Director William Casey, Senator Paul Laxalt and most of the Cabinet. By night, if his friends have to work, Bachelor Gray squires their wives to so many Washington parties that he claims he wears out two tuxedos a year.

Gray cultivates his connections by hiring people on the basis of whom they know. "I only want the stars," he says. It is a policy that gets him publicity, not always welcome. Four months ago, Gray hired Alejandro Orfila, the Secretary-General of the Organization of American States and former Argentine Ambassador to the U.S., at $25,000 a month. At the time Orfila, who is an accomplished Washington socializer, was still working for the O.A.S. and collecting his $88,000-a-year salary. He continued working as both a diplomat and a member of Gray & Co. until his resignation from the O.A.S. on March 31. Last winter, a black limousine with diplomatic plates that read "OAS 8" was often seen idling outside the Power House, while Orfila worked within. Although Orfila insists that he did no lobbying while he was on both payrolls and that he was moonlighting from the O.A.S. on accumulated leave time, the O.A.S. this month rebuked him and began an investigation of his nine years in office. A few days later, Gray was back in the news for getting Ursula Meese a job running a small foundation. The wife of embattled Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese, she has maintained that she took the $40,000-a-year job as executive director of the foundation at American University in early 1982 because her family needed the money. She still has the post.

For all his intimate connections, however, Gray is not just a political fixer. The rules of lobbying have changed since the days when the legendary Thomas ("Tommy the Cork") Corcoran could pick up the phone and deliver the goods for a client. As federal regulations have grown ever stricter in the past 15 years, the number of registered lobbyists has quadrupled. There are now about 6,500, or just over twelve for every member of Congress. But while this growing cacophony of special-interest groups is fighting to be heard, lobbying has become more open, thanks to the full-disclosure demands of the post-Watergate era.