An Oft-Blurred Line

Gaunt and visibly fatigued, Connecticut Democrat Thomas Dodd rose to defend himself last week before the Senate's Select Committee on Stand ards and Conduct. It was more than a year since Washington Columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson had first accused Dodd, 59, of financial irregularities, and he seemed several years older in appearance. "I have read and heard that I betrayed my trust, that I betrayed my oath, and I tell you it has been a hard thing," said the Senator, his voice cracking occasionally. "The best thing for me has been my conscience. My conscience is clear."

In an inquiry that had as much to do with the Senate's own muddy ground rules on ethics as it had with Dodd's alleged misconduct, little else, certainly, has been clear. And cloudiest of all, perhaps, has been Dodd's own judgment.

Superdog. At the outset of the week-long hearing, the Senator conceded a surprising number of potentially injurious facts. In a 162-page stipulation to the committee, he described four different "testimonials" held in his honor between 1961 and 1965--one of them a marathon "Dodd Day" that included a high-priced breakfast, lunch, cocktail party and dinner. The testimonials netted over $170,000, and Dodd admitted that $28,500 of the money went to pay off federal tax debts, tens of thousands more to repay personal loans, nearly $9,500 for improvements on his house in North Stonington, Conn. Smaller sums from the testimonial funds paid for trips to the West Indies and London, lunch tabs at the Senate dining room, liquor bills, Army-Navy football tickets, the rental of a limousine, even a Washington-New London plane trip for his dog.

The Senate committee, composed of three Democrats and three Republicans under the chairmanship of Mississippi Democrat John Stennis, was chiefly concerned with one crucial point. Was the money Dodd's to spend as he saw fit, or was it raised as campaign contributions and therefore unusable for any other purpose? If Dodd's supporters merely meant to present him with gifts, then the money was his--tax-free. If, on the other hand, they were led to believe that they were contributing to his campaign chest, then the Senator's diversion of the funds could put him in deep trouble--not only with his Senate colleagues but with the Internal Revenue Service --for failing to report the personally used funds as taxable income.

Complete Debacle. Dodd argued that his supporters understood "about my financial situation," which, he said, had been precarious since he first ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1956. "I got in the hole in '56, and I never was able to get out, and some of these things had to be paid off," he said. His 1958 campaign manager, Paul V. McNamara, concurred sadly that Dodd could not "keep his head above water. His financial affairs were a complete debacle." In 1961, for example, despite an income of $88,031, plus $56,110 from testimonials, he ended the year $149,-461 in debt.

At the 1963 Dodd Day festivities in Connecticut, then Vice President Lyndon Johnson was to be the star attrac tion. Former Dodd Aide James Boyd, one of the four ex-staffers who ran sacked the Senator's records and fed copies to Columnist Pearson, testified that a Johnson aide named Ivan Sinclair had demanded a letter stating the purposes of Dodd Day. Boyd wrote the letter, he said, but does not remember if he sent it. Earlier this month, Sinclair signed an affidavit for the Stennis committee; its last sentence said that the "purpose of Dodd Day was to raise funds for Senator Dodd's forthcoming 1964 campaign." Then, on the stand Sinclair repudiated the affidavit as so much "nitpicking semantics," contended that he had no certain knowledge that the funds were meant for the campaign rather than for Dodd's personal use.

Also at issue was a total of $10,150 donated to Dodd by officers of the International Latex Corp. Three witnesses, including Boyd, testified that former Latex Vice President Irving Ferman hoped to promote an ambassadorship for Board Chairman A. N. Spanel through Dodd.

Double Billing. Dodd and his lawyer, New Yorker John F. Sonnett, aimed their bitterest attacks at the Senator's onetime bookkeeper, Michael V. O'Hare, one of the four who had scoured the files. O'Hare swore that on five occasions, acting under the Senator's instructions, he had "double billed" the cost of airline tickets, getting reimbursement both from the Senate and from the organization that had invited Dodd to appear. He also told of allowing Dodd to "borrow" $6,000 from one of the Senator's testimonial ac counts to clear up back income taxes and of converting funds from one of the accounts to money orders to pay for liquor, lunches and country-club bills.

O'Hare's testimony about the "borrowed" money raised a particularly delicate question. As Kentucky's Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper asked at the hearing, if Dodd had really understood the money in the testimonial accounts to be his as a gift--and not a political contribution--why had he carefully avoided writing personal checks against it? Attacking O'Hare's testimony, Sonnett implied that he was a forger, brought in Handwriting Expert Charles Appel, who had testified in the Lindbergh kidnaping case, to show that a number of checks drawn on the ac count had not been signed by Dodd. The Senator himself, otherwise apathetic, was roused to his only really angry outburst of the week by his former bookkeeper. "Mr. O'Hare is a liar," he snapped. "It's as simple as that. He's a liar."

Personal-Political. No one else was likely to call any aspect of the Dodd investigation simple. Although Stennis conducted the inquiry punctiliously, the committee's recommendations--which are not due for "some weeks, at least" --were very much in doubt. On an ascending scale of severity, the recommendation could be for exoneration, rebuke, censure or expulsion. Few if any observers anticipate the most severe punishment.

Dodd himself occasionally seemed genuinely confused about the difference between his personal and his political expenses. As he put it to his colleagues in the Senate on the final day: "Just about everything I've done from 1956 to this hour has been intertwined with politics. I rarely remember a time when I had anything in these years that I would say was purely a personal matter." In fact, he added, "when I say personal, I should say personal-political. It is pretty hard for me to distinguish between them."

For a man whose life is politics, the line must sometimes be easily blurred. The question is whether it was blurred just a little too often in the case of Tom Dodd--and if so, what penalty he must pay for his faulty vision.

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