On the Right

One wonders why the Senate committee took so long in coming to its conclusions on the Dodd case. Read the entire report, and you will find nothing there you did not already know, nothing that was not fully and freely admitted by Senator Dodd all along the line. There is, to be sure, the notation that Senator Dodd and his larcenous bookkeeper disagreed on one particular, and yes there is the paragraph, almost entirely unnoticed, to the effect that others of the charges leveled against Senator Dodd were found to be insubstantial. All those dreary columns by Mr. Drew Pearson about General Klein, and the West German government and silverware and carpets and Persian rugs and whatnot were apparently investigated and found to be as phony as the rantings of the village gossip, whence they had after all emanated. The committee then proceeded to hang Senator Dodd—and one should be very clear about this—because the literature inviting citizens of Connecticut to testimonial dinners did not specify that the proceeds of those dinners would be made available to Senator Dodd to spend as he saw fit. This is the gravamen of the report. The two other charges are frivolous: seven incidents of double billing over a period of seven years, and without a scintilla of evidence that that double billing was ordered by Dodd, indeed that he so much as knew of its existence. And the improvident use by Senator Dodd of an old friend’s extra automobile, as if that were something with which to catch the conscience of the king. It is those political funds he used for his own account that did it, and the Senate, before voting censure, is certainly entitled to a more reasoned account of the committee’s moral biography. Are we to understand that the crucial consideration was that the Dodd people failed to print on the tickets or on the programs: “The subscribers to this function understand that the proceeds are available to Senator Thomas Dodd to use as he sees fit, whether to pay newspapers and television stations to carry his message to his constituents, or to pay his golf club to carry dry martinis to his constituents, or to pay his contractor to fix the leak on the roof to keep the rain from falling on the constituents’ Washington representative’s head.”

Senator Dodd’s staff had no difficulty at all in coming up with hundreds of affidavits from people who attended his dinners, testifying that they had no objection whatever to any use Senator Dodd made of the dinners’ proceeds. It is in the nature of most testimonial dinners that you do not rub into the nose of the beneficiary the mendicancy of his presence there. How far should full disclosure go? Would it have been proper, in introducing Vice President Humphrey at the fourth Dodd affair, to say: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States. He had better be good, because we had to pay seventy-five hundred clams over to the Democratic National Committee to get him here’? If there are laws that prescribe full disclosure at such ambiguous benefits as Senator Dodd attended, let them be cited. If there are no such laws, let them be written. But why in the meantime hang Dodd? Why? Because of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., if you want a political answer. In order to make an effort of sorts to prove that justice is impartial, summary and integrated. The clamor was incessant: Powell and Dodd, Powell and Dodd, Powell and Dodd—they became as inseparably linked in the public mind as Abbott and Costello. Add to the difficulty Senator Dodd’s wholly ineffective defense strategy. It was no doubt dictated by the tradition of a lawyer’s respect for the court. It was wholly and disastrously ineffective. There remains the debate in the Senate, at which Senator Dodd will have a final opportunity to raise points in his own defense. Whatever happens there, there remains also the question of what to do about the four sneakthieves who decided, after being caught by the Senator playing musical beds, that their love of country required them to bed down with Drew Pearson. Already they are being apotheosized, e.g., by the New York Times, which in the fatuity of the year remarks that the sneakthieves “deserve approbation” because after all they “acted in no hope of private gain” (neither did Lee Harvey Oswald). There is going to be a lot of bitterness in the air over this one, and I for one announce the beginning of a long period of bitterness against the phony moralizers who conspired against a brave and simple man of distinguished public record, and against the tribunal which found him guilty by bill of attainder.

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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One wonders why the Senate committee took so long in coming to its conclusions on the Dodd case. Read the entire report, and you will find nothing there you did not already know, nothing that was not fully and freely admitted by Senator Dodd all along the line. There is, to be sure, the notation that Senator Dodd and his larcenous bookkeeper disagreed on one particular, and yes there is the paragraph, almost entirely unnoticed, to the effect that others of the charges leveled against Senator Dodd were found to be insubstantial. All those dreary columns by Mr. Drew Pearson about General Klein, and the West German government and silverware and carpets and Persian rugs and whatnot were apparently investigated and found to be as phony as the rantings of the village gossip, whence they had after all emanated. The committee then proceeded to hang Senator Dodd—and one should be very clear about this—because the literature inviting citizens of Connecticut to testimonial dinners did not specify that the proceeds of those dinners would be made available to Senator Dodd to spend as he saw fit. This is the gravamen of the report. The two other charges are frivolous: seven incidents of double billing over a period of seven years, and without a scintilla of evidence that that double billing was ordered by Dodd, indeed that he so much as knew of its existence. And the improvident use by Senator Dodd of an old friend’s extra automobile, as if that were something with which to catch the conscience of the king. It is those political funds he used for his own account that did it, and the Senate, before voting censure, is certainly entitled to a more reasoned account of the committee’s moral biography. Are we to understand that the crucial consideration was that the Dodd people failed to print on the tickets or on the programs: “The subscribers to this function understand that the proceeds are available to Senator Thomas Dodd to use as he sees fit, whether to pay newspapers and television stations to carry his message to his constituents, or to pay his golf club to carry dry martinis to his constituents, or to pay his contractor to fix the leak on the roof to keep the rain from falling on the constituents’ Washington representative’s head.”

Senator Dodd’s staff had no difficulty at all in coming up with hundreds of affidavits from people who attended his dinners, testifying that they had no objection whatever to any use Senator Dodd made of the dinners’ proceeds. It is in the nature of most testimonial dinners that you do not rub into the nose of the beneficiary the mendicancy of his presence there. How far should full disclosure go? Would it have been proper, in introducing Vice President Humphrey at the fourth Dodd affair, to say: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States. He had better be good, because we had to pay seventy-five hundred clams over to the Democratic National Committee to get him here’? If there are laws that prescribe full disclosure at such ambiguous benefits as Senator Dodd attended, let them be cited. If there are no such laws, let them be written. But why in the meantime hang Dodd? Why? Because of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., if you want a political answer. In order to make an effort of sorts to prove that justice is impartial, summary and integrated. The clamor was incessant: Powell and Dodd, Powell and Dodd, Powell and Dodd—they became as inseparably linked in the public mind as Abbott and Costello. Add to the difficulty Senator Dodd’s wholly ineffective defense strategy. It was no doubt dictated by the tradition of a lawyer’s respect for the court. It was wholly and disastrously ineffective. There remains the debate in the Senate, at which Senator Dodd will have a final opportunity to raise points in his own defense. Whatever happens there, there remains also the question of what to do about the four sneakthieves who decided, after being caught by the Senator playing musical beds, that their love of country required them to bed down with Drew Pearson. Already they are being apotheosized, e.g., by the New York Times, which in the fatuity of the year remarks that the sneakthieves “deserve approbation” because after all they “acted in no hope of private gain” (neither did Lee Harvey Oswald). There is going to be a lot of bitterness in the air over this one, and I for one announce the beginning of a long period of bitterness against the phony moralizers who conspired against a brave and simple man of distinguished public record, and against the tribunal which found him guilty by bill of attainder.