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.