Catastrophe - Dick Morris [73]
Downe was a high-profile player on the New York political and social scene. In the early 1980s, he frequently hosted political fund-raisers and cocktail parties for prominent Democratic politicians at his sumptuous apartment on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street in New York City. The duplex apartment on Central Park, graced with modern art and antique furniture, was a regular setting for his political soirees. Several times a month, he would invite people from his wide circle of friends to meet rising political stars. In 1986, he married the automobile heiress Charlotte Ford, the elder daughter of Henry Ford II. He and his wife then lived in twin apartments in New York City and separate mansions at the beach in Southampton. The one place they never seemed to spend much time in was Washington, D.C.
Finally, after Downe’s criminal convictions made him radioactive on any joint public documents with Dodd, a business associate and close friend of Downe, who received millions in federal contracts—stepped up and went in with him on a house in Ireland for Dodd.
With a little help from his friends, Dodd got a free ride for years. Then he turned around and made a profit on it, selling the D.C. property and buying out the Ireland estate.
Why would he do this? Because he could. Wasn’t he entitled? After all, he was a congressman and then a U.S. senator. And since he’d worked full-time in the real world for less than two years before he was elected to the House, he hadn’t had much time to build a suitable nest egg to buy a place of his own. So what’s a congressman to do? Live in a rented apartment in Washington? Not Chris Dodd! Instead he knocked on the door of rich friends—twice in Washington and once in Ireland. Rich friends who might have had some interest in what Congress or the federal government do. And who were only too happy to help the needy senator.
Given the private pain and sorrow and the public humiliation that Chris Dodd and his family must have endured during his father’s scandal, it’s astonishing to realize how soon after his own election Dodd brazenly accepted the financial help of a former crony of his father to pay for a house in D.C. for himself. The ordeal Dodd’s father went through wasn’t just a minor embarrassment, it was historic: only five other members of the Senate had ever been censured. After sixteen months, the Senate committee investigating the elder Dodd unanimously recommended censure, saying that his conduct was “contrary to good morals, derogates from the public trust expected of a Senator, and tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.”277
The charges were serious. The committee report accused Thomas Dodd of:
Accepting $8,000 ($53,905 in 2009 dollars) in cash from the International Latex Corporation, in violation of the prohibition on corporate contributions
Double billing the Senate and private groups for travel expenses for thirteen trips
Accepting the free use of three cars paid for by a constituent for almost two years
Diverting $116,083 ($782,183.62 in 2009 dollars) in campaign funds raised at testimonial dinners to his personal use between 1961 and 1965, including $50,000 used to renovate a summer home278
According to the renowned columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who first publicly exposed the broad range of Thomas Dodd’s unethical conduct, the Senate also ignored or failed to follow up on other credible evidence of wrongdoing, including his “backdoor law practice, payroll padding, payroll maneuvering, favors to gift-bearing lobbyists, [and] accepting free automobiles and airplane travel from those doing business with the government.”279 Pearson and Anderson’s sources were two employees and two former employees of Dodd, who secretly copied four thousand documents from Dodd’s office and provided them to Pearson and Anderson.
For example, according to the journalists, a former employee of Latex International had told them that the former head of