During his tenure as governor, Ray served as chair of the National Governors Association from 1975 to 1976; led to the passage of the Iowa Burials Protection Act of 1976, which was the first legislative act in the United States that specifically protected American Indian remains;[1] and accepted thousands of refugees into Iowa.

[2] In his later years, Ray served as acting mayor of Des Moines from May 1997 to November 1997 and was interim president of Drake University in 1998.

Later in 1946, with the permission of his parents, he joined the United States Army and spent two years in Japan as part of the first wave of relief troops after World War II.

Arthur Neu, who served as State Senator and as Ray's lieutenant governor from 1973 to 1979, noted in an interview: "School funding was one of the most important pieces of legislation we worked on.

Ray also signed into law bipartisan legislation that supported collective bargaining for public employees and removed sales taxes from groceries and prescription drugs.

[11][12] One of the defining moments in Ray's governorship was in April 1972, when as Commander in Chief of the Iowa National Guard, he ordered the grounding of more than a thousand vehicles and ninety planes, until the federal government paid for the damages to the McCarville and Tjernagel families, whose houses had been destroyed by crashing Air Force planes in 1968.

The bottle bill, which received opposition from labor unions and aluminium manufacturers but support from the Sierra Club, the Farm Bureau and the Boy Scouts of America, required Iowans to pay a 5-cent deposit on containers in order to encourage the practice of recycling and the reduction of litter on the roads of the state.

[17] Ray's tenure in office was notable for his humanitarianism on behalf of Southeast Asian Tai Dam refugees.

Ray wrote letters to President Jimmy Carter and other governors asking them to support greater admissions of boat people.

[19] Opinion polls from the period demonstrated Ray's refugee resettlement and relief efforts were very controversial.

[20] In the early 1970s, Maria Pearson was appalled that the skeletal remains of Native Americans were treated differently from those of caucasians.