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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.