Former F.B.I. Director L. Patrick Gray died recently at the age of 88. His star-crossed career is a warning to those of us who effortlessly point the finger of disapproval at public servants, a reminder that ethics isn't easy, and that the best of us can find ourselves in murky situations where the distinction between right and wrong has all but disappeared.

The Ethics Scoreboard is obligated to emphasize this periodically, because it often assigns a label of ethical or unethical to difficult decisions made under pressure or based on conflicting considerations. Our evaluation is often formulated with the benefit of hindsight, and always with the wonderful knowledge that our opinion, if mistaken, can be changed or disavowed. Doing a thing is always harder and riskier than judging the virtue of the act or the manner in which it was done. It is important to evaluate the ethical nature of conduct so that others in similar circumstances may have an easier task finding an ethical solution to a difficult problem. It is also important to try to judge the act, and not the actor. Good people can behave unethically, and do. Often.

L. Patrick Gray's ethical dilemma was about how to value loyalty in comparison to other ethical considerations. One cannot over-estimate the difficulty of this calculation when the loyalty in question involves the President of the United States, and that was Gray's fate. He was appointed by Richard Nixon as the new Director of the F.B.I. in the middle of the Watergate investigations, and Gray, a former military man, presumed that his Commander-in-Chief was devoted to enforcing the law, not impeding it. When Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman directed him to destroy documents that had been forged by Watergate burglar Howard Hunt as a political "dirty trick" to discredit the Kennedys, Gray complied. For many, this error in judgement was enough to tar him with the tag "Watergate conspirator," although the incident had nothing to do with Watergate. It also forced him to resign in 1973.

But well before that, Gray had actually helped widen the cracks in the conspiracy when he told the Senate during his confirmation hearings that as Acting Director of the FBI he had been directed, per instructions from White House Counsel John Dean, to share the results of the agency's Watergate investigation with the White House. Gray had complied, after checking with the F.B.I.'s legal staff. It was another mistake, but contrary to popular legend, the F.B.I. under Gray was not helping Nixon to bury Watergate. It continued to dig, and ultimately uncovered the evidence that was to send, if not all the President's men, a goodly percentage of them, to jail.

Gray believed in the President who had appointed him, and ruefully admitted later that he was slow to connect the dots that would have shown that it was not just the President's staff, but the President himself, who was corrupt. Partially as a result of Gray's stubborn loyalty to Nixon, Gray's chief deputy Mark Felt chose to discard his own loyalty to Gray, and leak information (as "Deep Throat") about the conspiracy to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. Felt's betrayal stung Gray terribly, as did those who said, upon Felt's recent unmasking, that "Deep Throat" "had no choice but to leak to the press," since his superior was in Nixon's pocket. Gray went to his grave swearing that he had been fully prepared to take his investigation wherever it led, even if it was the Oval office.

There is really no reason to doubt it. Still, Gray's face was on the dust jacket of the original All the President's Men, a conflicted but honest figure amidst faces of the indicted and imprisoned. Time Magazine, in an especially nasty parting shot, even managed to publish a dark and sinister photo of Gray with his obituary.

L. Patrick Gray paid an exorbitant price for adhering to the virtue of loyalty too long. He was an ethical and honorable man placed by circumstances, chance and history in a position where it was all but impossible to appear as either. What happened to him could happen to anyone, and not one of us can say with certainty that we would fare any better than he did.

Doing the right thing is hard. Sometimes, as the career of L.Patrick Gray shows, it can be almost impossible.