Catastrophe - Dick Morris [76]
“We were friends. I was single at the time. He was single at the time,” Dodd said. “It would have been expensive for me to do it on my own. It wasn’t the only reason, but [I asked] him if he wanted to kind of go in on it with me.” Downe, who had made a fortune in publishing before amassing a vast collection of American art, agreed to cover half the down payment, half the monthly condo fees and half the $128,000 mortgage on the condominium, records released by Dodd show.287 [emphasis added]
Once more Dodd was living off other people’s money. Why? Because “it would have been expensive to do it on my own.”288
QUESTION: What do most people do when they can’t afford to buy a house? When it would be expensive to do it on their own?
ANSWER: They don’t buy it. They suck it up and find a place they can afford.
Unless they’re a senator, in which case they get other people to pay for it.
Dodd apparently turned to the right person for his handout. According to the New York Times, “Mr. Downe doled out loans and gifts almost willy-nilly, sometimes getting himself into binds…. Friends confirm that Mr. Downe did spray around a lot of his own money. Almost anyone with a hard-luck case would get a loan, not always repaying it.”289
It seems that Downe was made for Dodd! He didn’t deny his influential friend’s request to pick up half the tab for his D.C. home. Dodd now claims that he and Downe had an agreement that allowed Downe to use the apartment in D.C. whenever he was in Washington. Dodd mentioned that they were both divorced at the time, suggesting that they liked to go out together. But anyone who has ever known Downe or seen him in his own setting, would seriously doubt that Downe would have ever wanted to crash at Dodd’s apartment. The penthouse at the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons would have been more his style. And Downe’s carefree bachelor days with Dodd hardly overlapped the purchase of the apartment. Downe married Charlotte Ford just four months later. With their twin apartments on Sutton Place in Manhattan and their twin mansions in Southampton, the Downe-Fords didn’t need Dodd’s hospitality. And given his Democratic politics and involvement in the New York City art world and social and philanthropic scene, the Reagan-Bush Washington of the late 1980s probably wasn’t high on Downe’s travel list. So Dodd would have had the run of the apartment.
What’s truly amazing is that Dodd seems not to have seen any problem with such an unorthodox arrangement—a U.S. senator living off a successful businessman who had serious financial interests that were regulated by the federal government. Downe was a wealthy entrepreneur who, in 1985, began to sit on the boards of both the investment banking firm Bear Sterns and the Kidde Corporation. Dodd has been a recipient of big bucks from Bear Sterns, receiving more than $350,000 since 1989.290 In the summer of 1992, Downe pled guilty to federal charges stemming from insider trading based on the confidential information that he had access to as a director. He was accused of regularly passing along information he learned in board meetings to a large number of family and friends, who also traded on his advice.
Dodd claims he “contacted” the Senate Ethics Committee before he made the deal with Downe and was told that he did not have to disclose it. That is correct—again, by Senate rules, Dodd had no obligation to disclose the details of his personal residence—but that’s not the same as saying that the Ethics Committee affirmatively approved the Dodd-Downe deal. (That would be hard to imagine, even for that useless, self-serving body.) And Dodd certainly knew himself that this was not an appropriate deal to make. Regardless of whether the exact language of the rules required him to disclose the transaction, he should have done so. His partner in the property was not a spouse or relative but a well-connected businessman. He should have disclosed it. Even Chris Dodd could figure that out. (By the way, did Dodd also contact the House Ethics Committee before he made