C. Boyden Gray, Lawyer for the Republican Establishment, Dies at 80

C. Boyden Gray, who personified the conservative legal establishment as a lawyer involved in judicial appointments, policy, diplomacy or fund-raising for every Republican president since Ronald Reagan, died on Sunday at his home in the Georgetown section of Washington. He was 80.

The cause was heart failure, his daughter, Eliza Gray, said.

Mr. Gray reached his highest government position as White House counsel under President George H.W. Bush. He became such a trusted adviser that he was said to be able to stroll into the Oval Office whenever he liked, and he was a frequent subject of palace-intrigue news coverage about the Bush cabinet.

Yet Mr. Gray’s influence stretched beyond any one job. Unlike other Washington conservatives of his generation, he kept in line with ideological shifts in the direction of the Republican Party.

In the Reagan administration, Mr. Gray, as counsel to Mr. Bush when he was vice president, managed an effort to undo federal regulations deemed to be burdensome.

In recent years he did legal work for Donald J. Trump after the 2020 election and, reflecting right-wing concerns over the reach of the federal bureaucracy, donated $3 million to fund an institute at the conservative law school of George Mason University in Virginia — the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.

In 2012, a brief list of “some of the most establishment Republicans around” in The New York Times included figures like the billionaire donor David Koch, the former House majority leader Dick Armey and Mr. Gray. At his death, he was on the board of the Federalist Society, the group dedicated to spreading conservative jurists throughout the federal bench.

From the 1980s to the ’90s, as Mr. Bush’s longest-serving senior aide, Mr. Gray was sometimes accused of being a dilettante and a reckless policy freelancer, particularly in an ill-fated effort to change government regulations around affirmative action. But he could also claim credit for a number of conservative victories.

He promoted the careers of promising young conservative lawyers — including the two-time attorney general William P. Barr and the future Supreme Court justices John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — and he facilitated the appointments of the two men Mr. Bush put on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas and David H. Souter.

Mr. Gray led the team of Bush advisers who selected Judge Thomas as a candidate to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall upon his retirement in 1991. When Anita Hill accused Judge Thomas of sexual harassment as her supervisor at work, Mr. Gray took charge of the administration’s response by picking apart Ms. Hill’s case, even if that meant attacking her character, The Times reported that year.

Judge Thomas was confirmed by a narrow 52-48 vote in the Senate. Judge Souter’s appointment, in 1990, was less eventful, with the Senate voting to confirm him 90-9.

During the presidency of George W. Bush and in consultation with his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, Mr. Gray formed the Committee for Justice, which seeks to support conservative judicial nominees. He and the liberal civil rights lawyer Ralph G. Neas came to be seen as dueling “commanding generals” in a series of Supreme Court confirmation fights.

In 2005, when President Bush decided to appoint Judge Roberts as the next chief justice, Mr. Rove made sure that one of the first people to know was Mr. Gray.

The next year, Mr. Gray was named U.S. ambassador to the European Union. Amid the strains of the Iraq War, he worked on agreements seeking to open European markets to American goods.

In 2015, Mr. Gray, long considered a loyalist of the Bush family and a notable host on the Washington social scene, held a $1,000-a-person fund-raiser for the presidential campaign of George W. Bush’s brother Jeb Bush.

Three years later, Mr. Gray hosted a dinner for wealthy donors to President Trump, who had ridiculed Jeb Bush during the primaries leading up to the 2016 election. In December 2020, after Mr. Trump was defeated in his bid for re-election, Mr. Gray was recruited to be part of a Trump legal team.

In his public statements, Mr. Gray maintained the politesse of a traditional stalwart of the Grand Old Party. In April, he told The Times that he supported the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason, named after the conservative Supreme Court justice, because it “adds to the debate” as an alternative to more liberal law schools.

Clayland Boyden Gray, who went by Boyden and, to close friends, C.B., was born on Feb. 6, 1943, in Winston-Salem, N.C., to Gordon and Jane Boyden (Craige) Gray. His father was a national security adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and president of the University of North Carolina.

Gordon Gray and Mr. Bush’s father, Senator Prescott Bush, were golf buddies. Their sons played tennis together in what became known as Mr. Bush’s “tennis cabinet.”

Gordon Gray’s father, Bowman, had earned a fortune as president and chairman of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. To comply with ethics requirements as counsel to President Bush, Boyden resigned as chairman of his family’s communications firm, Summit Communications Group, which The Times reported to be worth $500 million in 1989.

Boyden’s mother died in his boyhood. His father then married Nancy Maguire, who was a homemaker. He grew up in Winston-Salem and Washington.

Mr. Gray studied history at Harvard College, graduated in 1964 and served in the Marine Corps Reserve. He graduated at the head of his class from the University of North Carolina’s law school in 1968.

He then clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren, a standard-bearer of liberalism, and considered himself a Democrat until the late 1970s. By then he was a corporate lawyer at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, a prominent Washington firm. He said he became a Republican because he opposed the economic policies of President Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Gray married Carol Taylor in 1984, and they divorced a few years later. In addition to their daughter, Eliza, he is survived by two brothers, Bernard and Gordon, and two grandchildren.

Mr. Gray often gave the impression of being aloof or professorial. At 6-foot-6, he loomed above his peers; the Times columnist Maureen Dowd once described him as “bending like a parenthesis.” A penchant for playing bridge with octogenarians earned him a spot on a list of Washington’s “worst bachelors.”

Yet his gentility also worked in his favor. Early in his political career, in 1983, a government official, quoted anonymously, accounted for Mr. Gray’s success in an interview with The Times, saying: “Boyden Gray learned a long time ago that to get ahead in Washington, you’ve got to give your boss credit for the good news and take the blame for what doesn’t work. And he’s learned that lesson well.”