The Ins and Outs of Politics

The ins, of course, are incumbents; the outs are everyone else.

How difficult is it for the outs to get in? The short answer is – nearly impossible.

Campaign finance reform was supposed to make it easier for the outs to break into the magic political circle. This has not happened, partly because of the influence of Super PACs.

A PAC is a Political Action Committee; a Super PAC is a very large and wealthy PAC operating outside the precincts of political parties.

McCain-Feingold – and its equivalent in the U.S. House, Shays-Meehan – more or less illegalized large “soft money” contributions to political parties. The U.S. Supreme Court, reviewing the campaign finance bill, determined that a legislative directive outlawing “soft money” contributions to PACs not directly connected to political parties was an unconstitutional prohibition that violated the First Amendment. The court’s ruling opened a Pandora’s Box that now allows outliers, persons and groups not formally attached to parties, to raise and spend unlimited sums of money to advocate for or against political candidates.
In an interview with Ameriborn News, former U.S. Representative Chris Shays was asked by interviewer John Doyle to dilate on the relationship between Shays-Meehan and Super PACS:

“Doyle: I’m realty short on my time, but I can’t resist just asking you this, and I tried to cage you into it before: After Citizens United, there are a great many people in the United States who say to both parties, I think, that are just rolling in money, and the corrosive effect it’s having on our campaigns, whether it’s the presidential campaign.. now it’s the Obama fund raising machine with its Super PACs and, of course, the wealthy people supporting various Republican candidates… ah, Shays-Meehan, one of the early…

“Shays: That’s campaign finance reform. Let me give you the quick version. The quick version is: In 1906 the Tillman Act said corporations could not contribute to campaigns. The Taft Hartley Act in [19]47 said unions can’t contribute to campaigns, and you got FEC, the federal Elections Commission, to bypass the laws by creating the concept of soft educational money, which was just a front to bring both the corporations and the unions back in. So, John McCain in the Senate and I in the House looked to enforce the [19]06 laws: no corporate money, no union dues money. We had already limited what individuals could contribute to campaigns. And John McCain said if it’s constitutional, we’ll call it McCain-Feingold and, if it’s unconstitutional, it’s called Shays-Meehan. And then, they [the Supreme Court] revisited one part and said you couldn’t limit what corporations could contribute to campaigns. And they’re just [describing] the marketplace in a way that I think is really destructive. But you know what? I’ve fought that battle. I’ve come to the conclusion if the Federal Elections Commission isn’t going to be with you, however you write the law, they’re going to twist it, and it will be a wasted effort. And I kind of feel like -- You know what? – our country is going bankrupt; we have no energy independence; our infrastructure is falling apart; we haven’t reformed the tax code; we haven’t gotten rid of the red tape. Those are where I’m putting my focus.”

The evolution of the Tillman Act is instructive. Following the 1904 presidential election, charges were made that Republican President Teddy Roosevelt had accepted campaign contributions from corporations, a great personal embarrassment. Once in office, Mr. Roosevelt proposed that all contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law. Mr. Roosevelt, one of the more accomplished demagogues of the Gilded Age -- just ask Mark Twain – during his independent run for the presidency on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912, would make it a point to denounce the malefactors of great wealth who once generously had invested in his winning 1904 campaign.

South Carolina Senator Benjamin Tillman obliged Mr. Roosevelt by sponsoring a bill that became known as the Tillman Act. The bill passed the Senate in June of 1906, causing the New York Times to burst into song. One “great financial authority who is a Republican,” the Times reported,“gave assurance that 'he and all the financial men with whom I have talked have welcomed this legislation with very much the same emotions with which a serf would hail his liberation from a tyrannous autocrat.’”

The Tillman Act, said the Times, “will not bring about the millennium, but will lessen a very mean and sordid practice of blackmail... the great number of corporations that have suffered extortion through weakness and cowardice will have their backbones stiffened, and parties will be put to it to fill their coffers by really voluntary contributions."

The end result of McCain-Feingold-Shays-Meehan is not a happy one. The bill ultimately removed from political parties large and politically decisive contributions and placed them in the hands of extra-party financers who are able, by investing in individual politicians, to determine political winners and losers. And Super PAC operators are no less autocratic or tyrannous than the malefactors of great wealth once denounced by the first progressive; they are simply less visible and more irresponsible.

Newton Reinvented

In the good old days, before the advent of campaign finance reform, a stretch in prison was no bar to election. Mayor Michael Curley of Boston, a colorful mob-connected figure in Massachusetts politics who made good on his campaign pledge to get the washerwomen of the city off their knees, ran the city from prison. Mr. Curley later rigged out all the washerwomen of Boston with long handled mops.

It may well be the case that a stretch in jail was the booster that rocketed Mr. Curley into a long and eventful career in politics.

Mr. Curley received news that he had been elected to Boston’s Board of Alderman in 1904 while cooling his heels in prison on a fraud conviction: He had fraudulently taken a civil service exam for two men applying for postmen in his district, and the stint in prison helped to burnish his reputation among the poor Irish of Boston as someone who was willing to go to the mat for those in need. During his career in politics, both as Boston Mayor and a U.S. Senator serving in the Congress from 1943 ton 1947, it was not uncommon for the city’s poor and unemployed Irish to line up outside his house in the mornings to speak with him about getting a job or to get a handout of a few dollars to see them through the week.

Running for the Congress against blue-blooded Tom Eliot, the son of a Unitarian minister, grandson of Harvard president Charles Eliot and a former New Deal attorney of sterling reputation backed by Franklin Roosevelt, Mr. Curley anchored his campaign in unvarnished appeals to ethnic, class and religious bigotry, shaking the communist spook stick against the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Yankee Eliot: “There is more Americanism in one half of Jim Curley's ass than in that pink body of Tom Eliot." Having won a spot in Congress, Mr. Curley proceeded to compile a voting record in support of the Roosevelt administration that was the envy of New Deal pinkoes everywhere.

Mr. Curley’s long political career ended in 1951 when he suffered an erosion of electoral support. Following his death, two statues honoring Mr. Curley appeared in Faneuil Hall; a bar called “The Purple Shamrock,” one of the mayor’s symbols, popped out of the ground nearby; his house, known during his time as “the house with the shamrock shutters,” became an historical site; and he was immortalized in the film “the Last Hurrah” as the protagonist, Frank Skeffington. Disappointed with the film, Mr. Curley, a shameless self-promoter but always the best guardian of his own reputation, initially threatened to bring legal action against Edwin O’Connor, the author of the novel, but on reflection thought better of it, telling Mr. O’Connor that he most enjoyed “the part where I die.”

Somewhere in Bridgeport, where the old-guard Democratic Party structure still lives and breathes, there may in the future be a spot for a couple of Ernie Newton statues.

An ex-felon and ex-State Senator from Bridgeport, Mr. Newtonsurprised Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo when he won the endorsement of the Democratic nominating convention for the 23rd State Senate District, which comprises 75 percent of Bridgeport and a bit of Stratford.

"I have to say I am surprised," Ms. DiNardo said, adding when asked by a reporter if she would discourage voters from returningMr. Newton to the General Assembly, “I think that's up to that district to make that decision, not me."

Governor Dannel Malloy, known for having in the past actively participated in the campaigns of Democrats formally nominated by his party, appeared to be consulting a similar script.

When queried by Hartford Courant reporter Jon Lender, Mr. Malloy characterized the race in Bridgeport as “local issue, first and foremost.” He urged voters in Bridgeport to “take into consideration all of the abilities of the people that they have to choose from. It looks like there may three names on the ballot. And so I think the people of Bridgeport have a decision to make. I have to say to you that I’ve long been an advocate of a second-chance society. As a prosecutor, as a governor, as a mayor I’ve advocated for second chances. But ultimately in the political arena that’s a decision for the public to make… I think the public has a balancing act. They have to decide whether … the person has paid a sufficient price, whether they’ve expressed sufficient remorse, whether they have the skill set necessary to do the job. … That’s why we have elections, and I would urge all the voters to vote.”

Mr. Newton offered a much abbreviated concision of the governor’s remarks: "The governor said, `It's the people's decision.’”

Mr. Newton launched into a defense of his record in office, minus the four years he passed in prison for having solicited a $5,000, one of three felonies he was convicted of in 2005: "Felons are people too. They can't say anything about my record in the House or Senate. It was impeccable. If people truly are forgiving, you judge a man on his work ... I paid my debt to society. I ought to be a free man to do whatever it is I want to do with my life."

He told a reporter, “Listen, I still got friends in Hartford.” His Democratic comrades in the legislature “know the (legislative) process. I'm a team player. I know how to get things done." Surely, fellow Democrats in the General Assembly and the governor’s office understand the important role Bridgeport had played in statewide elections. After all, Mr. Newton stressed, the city helped Mr. Malloy, the former mayor of Stamford, win a slim victory in 2010.

"The governor needs to get re-elected, and he's going to need my help to do it," said Mr. Newton, according to a CTPost report.

Apparently, the governor, the titular head of the Democratic Party in Connecticut, and Ms. DiNardo, the nominal head of the party, have for the moment taken a hand’s off approach to what may well be Mr. Newton’s “Last Hurrah.” Maybe they saw the movie.

Campaign Hooey

During the Abe Lincoln canvass, candidates for the presidency were much interested in bonding emotionally with the working class.

They were even more interested in displaying their military badges and ribbons. At one point, Lincoln became so put-off by the imposture that he openly ridiculed, as only Lincoln could do, the grand military hustle of the Democrats. Lincoln’s own military service in the Black Hawk War, three enlistments of about 30 days each, was refreshingly free of heroism. Following the hostilities, Lincoln’s horse was stolen. He and his companion, George Harrison, were compelled to walk and canoe back to New Salem.

Lincoln, of course, was born in a log cabin, though he managed to ease his way into a comfortable middle class berth as a fairly prosperous lawyer.

George Washington -- net worth: $525 million, a cool, half billion in in today’s mostly worthless currency – rates as America’s most wealthy president. Next in line is President Thomas Jefferson, net worth $212 million; followed by Teddy Roosevelt, net worth $125 million; followed by Andy Jackson, the father of the Modern Democratic Party, at a net worth of $119 million; followed by James Madison, net worth $101 million; followed by Lyndon Johnson, net worth $98 million; followed by Herbert Hoover, net worth $75 million; followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, net worth $60 million; followed by Bill Clinton, net worth $38 million; with John Kennedy bringing up the rear as the 10^th most wealthy U.S. President. Mr. Kennedy did not inherit his daddy’s wealth; most of his income and property came to him through a family trust shared with his siblings. Among the top ten wealthiest Presidents, there are but two Republicans in the bunch, and none of this great wealth, much of it held by Democrats who married well, was a bar to the presidency.

If the Father of the Country ever felt the need to put himself forward to electors as a chip off the old middle class block, he manfully resisted the temptation. Jefferson thought of himself as an enlightenment aristocrat; ditto Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution. FRD’s wealth came to him through marriage and inheritance, and when he ran into difficulties with creditors, his mommy bailed him out. For the notable Democratic presidents listed above, great wealth was no bar to public service.

Here in Connecticut, the state’s all Democratic congressional delegation is studded with multimillionaires. Like Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal married well; his wife’s father owns the Empire State building in New York, among other properties. Though U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro often points to her humble roots, she also is a multi-millionaire, and U.S. Representative Jim Himes made his millions on Wall Street not Main Street.

Military service remains for some politicians a springboard into politics. When Mr. Blumenthal sought to inflate his military record during his many campaigns as attorney general, he backed into a truth grinder, and it was discovered that, unlike the more modest Lincoln, Mr. Blumenthal had forseveral years been stealing valor from servicemen who had fought in Vietnam.

His opponent in the race for the U.S. Senate, Linda McMahon, financed her previous campaign from her private fortune. Mrs. McMahon’s great wealth did not come to her through marriage. She and her husband, both bankrupted at one point, earned their riches though enterprise and hustle. And though she never claimed to have been born in a log cabin, Mrs. McMahon’s hardscrabble trajectory does not resemble that of the one percenters who ascended to the presidency. Of course, the differences between Mrs. McMahon and Mr. Lincoln are too apparent not to have been noticed by Connecticut’s vigilant media: One was the CEO of a wrestling empire and the other was a politically astute lawyer from Sangamon County in Illinois well known in the frontier towns for his wrestling prowess.

Claims of modest birth still play well on the stump, even among millionaires operating outside the shadow of the largely mythical log cabin. A military record helps. The anti-authoritarianism lying at the center of libertarianism still tugs at the heart strings, as does an American as apple pie anti-clericalism, which lies at the center of the war on Catholicism being waged by Planned Parenthood and Connecticut’s Democratic congressional delegation, 100 percent of whom have received from the abortion provider a rating of 100 percent on votes important to Planned Parenthood’s money prospects.

Most political claims are gilded hooey, sometimes honeyed hooey, but always entertaining. It’s best during national and state campaigns to take the advice of Mark Twain and swallow the campaign braggadocio with “a ton of salt,” and then, when slipping into the slough of despond, reach for Henry Mencken: “A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in… A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

Out With The Old In With The New

The New Year has finally arrived, and with it old things have or soon will be put away.


Among them are former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, now comfortably ensconced in Hollywood as the chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America and, within the year, U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, once a Democrat and now an Independent. It may be worth mentioning that Mr. Dodd’s last vow in leaving office is that he would not – no, never – become a lobbyist.

This sweeping out of the old is what is called in politics a “sea change.” Some things, of course, will not change. Connecticut will remain a blue state even if by some stroke of Divine Providence a Republican is able to wrest Mr. Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat from progressive or liberal Democrats. Connecticut’s congressional delegation has for a long while been the private preserve of the Democratic Party and presently is home to three millionaires: U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal and U.S. Reps Rosa Delauro and Jim Himes, who made his money on Wall Street.


Mr. Dodd waited until his lobbyist job opened before becoming a millionaire. If Connecticut’s Democratic millionaire office holders were to be transported back in time to 1942, during the reign of progressive war president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they would be paying in taxes more than 100 percent of their salaries.


Before World War II, fewer than 5 percent of Americans paid income taxes. From 1940 to 1942, personal exemptions were drastically lowered and the number of Americans paying income taxes jumped tenfold, from $4 million to 39 million. The year 1942 introduced the first mass tax in U.S. history and was also the first year of withholding taxes at the source. Congress passed the first income tax law in 1913-14. The tax was made retro-active so that dollars could be immediately extracted from millionaires, but to ease the pain of payments the 1913 tax was payable in 1914, a lapse in payment that lasted thirty years. FDR’s much broader tax subjected some taxpayers to double taxation in 1943. The Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 forced some millionaires to pay double taxation and eliminated the lapse. Result: For each of the war years, 1944-1945, those earning $1 million per year owed $1,006,750 in taxes. When Democratic U.S. Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana was asked how some people could pay more in taxes than they earned, he replied coolly, “I submit that the [rich] taxpayer is likely to have accumulated sufficient assets with which to make the necessary income payments.” Even at confiscatory rates, Mr. Roosevelt was convinced that millionaires were not paying their “fair share” in taxes, according to a luminous article in The American Spectator written by Burton Folsom and Anita Folsom, the authors of "FDR Goes To War."

The New Year has finally arrived, and with it old things have or soon will be put away.

Among them are former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, now comfortably ensconced in Hollywood as the chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America and, within the year, U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, once a Democrat and now an Independent. It may be worth mentioning that Mr. Dodd’s last vow in leaving office is that he would not – no, never – become a lobbyist.

This sweeping out of the old is what is called in politics a “sea change.” Some things, of course, will not change. Connecticut will remain a blue state even if by some stroke of Divine Providence a Republican is able to wrest Mr. Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat from progressive or liberal Democrats. Connecticut’s congressional delegation has for a long while been the private preserve of the Democratic Party and home to three millionaires: U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal and U.S. Reps Rosa Delauro and Jim Himes, who made his money on Wall Street.

Mr. Dodd waited until his lobbyist job opened before becoming a millionaire. If Connecticut’s Democratic millionaire office holders were to be transported back in time to 1942, during the reign of progressive war president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they would be paying in taxes more than 100 percent of their salaries.

Before World War II, fewer than 5 percent of Americans paid income taxes. From 1940 to 1942, personal exemptions were drastically lowered and the number of Americans paying income taxes jumped tenfold, from $4 million to 39 million. The year 1942 introduced the first mass tax in U.S. history and was also the first year of withholding taxes at the source. Congress passed the first income tax law in 1913-14. The tax was made retro-active so that dollars could be immediately extracted from millionaires, but to ease the pain of payments the 1913 tax was payable in 1914, a lapse in payment that lasted thirty years. FDR’s much broader tax subjected some taxpayers to double taxation in 1943. The Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 forced some millionaires to pay double taxation and eliminated the lapse. Result: For each of the war years, 1944-1945, those earning $1 million per year owed $1,006,750 in taxes. When Democratic U.S. Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana was asked how some people could pay more in taxes than they earned, he replied coolly, “I submit that the [rich] taxpayer is likely to have accumulated sufficient assets with which to make the necessary income payments.” Even at confiscatory rates, Mr. Roosevelt was convinced that millionaires were not paying their “fair share” in taxes, according to a luminous article in The American Spectator written by Burton Folsom and Anita Folsom, the authors of "FDR Goes To War."

It is a safe bet that none of the members of Connecticut’s bluer than blue progressive congressional delegation would admit to being quite as progressive as FDR. Millionaires Mr. Blumenthal, Mrs. DeLauro and Mr. Himes, asked to contribute their “fair share” in taxes as “fair” and “share” were understood during FDR’s presidency, very likely would resist the imposition.

At the turn of this year, Connecticut’s media was full of swan songs in a minor key as Mr. Lieberman sought an exit door that would not bang him too fiercely on the rear. So off message was Mr. Lieberman with progressives and peace-at-any-price Democrats that it must have seemed to them the life-long Democrat was on the verge of bolting his party.

In foreign policy matters, Mr. Lieberman is what used to be called a “Scoop Jackson” Democrat, nearly the last of a dying breed. Mr. Lieberman disagreed sharply with Democratic candidate for president Barack Obama’s views on foreign policy, and his hawkish ways did not endear him to those in his party who, along with Mr. Obama, vigorously resisted what they regarded as President George Bush’s war in Iraq. When Mr. Lieberman backed then Republican Party presidential contender John McCain over Mr. Obama, he crossed a bridge too far. A political neophyte, Ned Lamont, challenged Mr. Blumenthal in a party primary, defeated Mr. Lieberman and was in turn defeated in the general election after Mr. Blumenthal had re-entered the lists as an Independent.

A liberal in domestic policy and a “Scoop Jackson” Democrat in foreign policy, Mr. Lieberman’s leave taking will mark, for good or ill, the end of an era.

Teddy And Barack

In a campaign stump speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the site of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous 1910 “new nationalism” speech, President Barack Obama threw a few flowers in the direction of the “roughrider,” the father of the modern progressive movement. And then the president bestowed on the Bull Moose president the ultimate compliment: He compared himself – slyly, indirectly – to Teddy.

Mark Twain, who thought Roosevelt a shameless fraud, was not so kind. Here is Twain erupting in a letter to the New York Times, written in 1908:

“Astronomers assure us that the attraction of gravitation on the surface of the sun is twenty-eight times as powerful as is the force at the earth's surface, and that the object which weights 217 pounds elsewhere would weight 6,000 pounds there.

“For seven years this country has lain smothering under a burden like that, the incubus representing, in the person of President Roosevelt, the difference between 217 pounds and 6,000. Thanks be we got rid of this disastrous burden day before yesterday, at last. Forever? Probably not. Probably for only a brief breathing spell, wherein, under Mr. Taft, we may hope to get back some of our health - four years. We may expect to have Mr. Roosevelt sitting on us again, with his twenty-eight times the weight of any other Presidential burden that a hostile Providence could impose upon us for our sins.

“Our people have adored this showy charlatan as perhaps no impostor of his brood has been adored since the Golden Calf, so it is to be expected that the Nation will want him back again after he is done hunting other wild animals heroically in Africa, with the safeguard and advertising equipment of a park of artillery and a brass band.”

In another piece on the bank panic of November 1907, Mr. Twain noted that the nation had been saved at the last moment by the millionaires Mr. Roosevelt had been excoriating in his campaign stump speeches:

"Last week a prodigious and universal crash was impending and but for one thing would have happened; the millionaire 'bandits' whom the president is so fond of abusing in order to get the applause of the gallery, stepped in and stayed the desolation. Mr. Roosevelt promptly claimed the credit of it, and there is much evidence that this inebriated nation thinks he is entitled to it.”

The Senator From Central Casting: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Thomas Dodd

The Senator from Central Casting

The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Thomas Dodd

By David E. Koskoff

Publisher: New American Political Press

Price: $29.95/hardcover

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” E. M. Forster

Lacking such scruples, it was the other way around for the close associates of Senator Thomas Dodd, the subject of David Koskoff’s book, appropriately titled, perhaps with a wink in the direction of Mr. Dodd’s son, Chris Dodd, “The Senator from Central Casting: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Thomas J. Dodd.”

There are some important differences between father and son. When Dodd the younger retired from the US Senate, he was almost immediately scooped up by Hollywood as the chief lobbyist for Tinseltown. After Dodd the elder had been censured by the senate for having used public funds for his personal benefit, in addition to having accepted from both the government and private organizations money for the same travel expenses, he withdrew as a candidate at the Democratic nominating convention and ran for re-election as an independent. In a three way race between Mr. Dodd, anti-Vietnam war candidate Joe Duffey and pro-Vietnam War Republican convention nominee Lowell Weicker, the senator’s career came to an abrupt and, as some think, tragic end. Seven months after Mr. Weicker arose from Mr. Dodd’s ashes, the senator was dead of a heart attack at the age of 64.

Mr. Koskoff, the author of three well received books – Joseph Kennedy: A Life and Times, The Mellons: The Chronicle of America’s Richest Family, and The Diamond World – “became engrossed in the relationship among Dodd, Boyd and O’Hare, three extraordinarily bright, complex men whom Shakespeare would have woven into a great tragic play,” after he had read Michael O’Hare’s obituary. The principal plot line of the tragedy also spurred him to write the book: “Dodd became a caricature of “The Senator” with stirring orations, a caricature of the highly important Senator well aware of his own importance, and finally a caricature of a Senator ethically compromised on a dozen fronts. He was the Senator from Central Casting.”

The Senator from Central Casting is a straight narrative that carries Tom Dodd through his various permutations: as a young lawyer, finding a place with his mentor, Homer Cummings, Franklin Roosevelt’s first attorney general, during the golden age of American bank robbery in the mid 1930s; as chief assistant to Justice Robert Jackson during the Nuremberg Trials, a vehicle used by Mr. Dodd to enter first the House of Representatives and later the U.S. Senate; as a fervent anti-communist seeking office in the U.S. Senate; and as a senator whose principal weakness, a chronic inability to manage his own personal finances, led inevitably to his downfall. In Mr. Koskoff’s account, Mr. Dodd is a man of large imagination, not unfriendly to liquor, whose means never really were sufficient to secure the future he imagined for his wife and several children.

Much more than an anti-communist who lived, as the Chinese say, in interesting times, Mr. Dodd was a fervent anti-totalitarian who recognized much earlier than most of his contemporaries the vital connection between the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini on the one hand and the communism of Josef Stalin on the other, best described by Mussolini in his paean to the state: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Mr. Dodd, who kept his distance from state Democratic Party entanglements, though he was able to play the game with the best of them, was not shy of striking attitudes, and his self estimation, never running on low, did not play well with the opposition. Susceptible to flattery, Mr. Dodd was most comfortable among those who aspersed him with compliments; he was combative by nature with others. Interestingly, but perhaps not unexpectedly, son Christopher was in many ways the obverse of his father -- and rather more determined than most to fetch his dad’s reputation from the rubble.

The Conspiracy

Mr. Dodd was brought down by his office staff working hand in glove with two respectable muckrakers: Drew Pearson and Mr. Pearson’s junior partner Jack Anderson, both prominent journalists of the day. Mr. Anderson was proficient at rooting up and exploiting dissatisfactions between politicians and their staff. His technique was described in his New York Times obituary: “He quietly cultivated dissatisfied and idealistic lower level government workers, convincing them that the public’s right to information trumped the bosses’ personal interests. His stock in trade was secret documents he persuaded sources to leak.”

On June 11, 1965, Anderson struck gold.

Initially, Mr. O’Hare, the keeper of accounts in Mr. Dodd’s office, was to purloin relevant documents and turn them over to Mr. Anderson, who then would fashion the data into bullets for his and Mr. Pearson’s column, the “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” But Mr. O’Hare’s morals intruded. At the last minute, Mr. O’Hare begged off, pleading that he thought it wrong to remove data from the office. Into this breach leapt James Boyd, later the author of “Above the Law: The Rise and Fall of Senator Thomas J. Dodd,” and Mrs. Marjorie Carpenter, with whom Mr. Boyd, the father of four children, was having an affair. Of the two lovebirds who later married, Mrs. Carpenter was said to be the more idealistic.

Much before Watergate, Mrs. Carpenter and Mr. Boyd, “who engineered and orchestrated the downfall of Thomas J. Dodd,” both of whom had been fired by Mr. Dodd, broke into their former workplace late at night and, over several nights, stole off with “some 7,000 pages of documents,” column fodder for Mr. Pearson and Mr. Anderson. “The odds on them completing their trespass without detection would seem to have been slim,” Mr. Koskoff writes, “but they never aroused suspicion. The account of their covert operation in Above the Law is as captivating as a thriller by Eric Ambler or Fredrick Forsyte.”

Mr. O’Hare, at first hanging back, later joined the conspiracy, his weakening “ties of loyalty” having been snapped by the firing of his girlfriend, Terry Golden. Mr. Dodd, who appears to have grown impatient with the raging hormones of his staff in the age of Woodstock, fired Ms. Golden because he perceived that Mr. O’Hare’s girl friend was too close to Mrs. Carpenter and Mr. Boyd.

It was a fire too many:

“The weekend following the dismissal of Terry Golden, O’Hare the bookkeeper snuck the full set of the Senator’s financial records for the preceding fire years out of the office. There were checkbook records, campaign finance returns, income tax filings – the works. According to Drew Pearson, there were tears in O’Hare’s eyes as he proceeded. He told Pearson: ‘I’ve been protecting this information with my life. Now I’m giving it for publication for the world to read’”

The “works” Mr. O’Hare delivered to Mr. Pearson and Mr. Anderson was the stuff of which Senate censures – and possibly prosecutions for tax fraud – are made.

The Aftermath

Every tip of the iceberg is attached to a broad bottom, treacherously expanding below the waters surface and out of sight. Mr. Koskoff, a lawyer himself, has a lawyer’s eye for the telling detail.

An incident that occurred at the time of President John Kennedy’s assassination, described in some detail in The Case Against Congress, a book written by Mr. Pearson and Mr. Anderson, is essential, Mr. Koskoff writes, “to understanding the downfall of Thomas J. Dodd, because it had a tremendous effect upon his most important aides and was important in turning them against him.”

When Mr. Kennedy was assassinated, Dodd was “having lunch at Franks, a downtown restaurant frequented by the political crowd, with Bill Curry, a local political powerhouse, who was also probably Dodd’s closest Connecticut crony other than Sullivan.” Ed Sullivan, “a former beer-truck driver with a graduate degree in street smarts,” Mr. Koskof writes, was Mr. Dodd’s opportunity spotter, “the only person Dodd ever trusted with the full picture of his financial operations.”

In his cups at the time, Mr. Dodd commandeered a plane from United Aircraft Corporation and met his staff at the airport in Washington, where he was told that Florida Senator George Smathers had just arrived wearing a black armband.

“Smathers,” Mr. Dodd said, “was a friend of the old administration. I am a friend of the new [Johnson] administration.” Watching at his Georgetown residence on television the tributes being paid to Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Dodd offered his assessment of the Kennedy administration: “I’ll say of John Kennedy what I said of Pope John the day he died. It will take us fifty years to undo the damage he did to us in three years.”

Comments such as these were to Mr. Dodd’s staff so many trip wires that undermined affections. “Alcohol abuse,” Mr. Koskof writes, “must be at least part of the explanation for the stark and tragic contrast between the respected, highly competent and disciplined prosecutor, who had directed the most important trial in the history of the world, and the tragic figure considered in the rest of this book.”

Mr. Koskoff’s lawyerly account of Mr. Dodd’s censure in the Senate is well told. Charged with two counts – obtaining and using public campaign and testimonial funds for his personal benefit; and accepting reimbursements for travel expenses from both the senate and private organizations – Mr. Dodd was censured by a 92 to 5 tally on the lesser count of using public funds for his private purposes. He was exonerated on the more troublesome count of double billing by a vote of 51 to 45. In 1969, the Nixon Justice Department announced there would be no tax prosecution.

Mr. Dodd’s resurrection began soon after the senator’s death in 1971, culminating in an archival mausoleum, the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut. The archival material at UConn, Mr. Koskoff notes “has been sanitized by removal of those materials obviously related to Dodd’s downfall.” George Washington University, however, has 13 boxes that includes the several thousand sheets taken by Boyd and his associates that has been “expurgated from the official Dodd archive at UConn.”

A freedom of Information official at the FBI has told Koskoff that his longstanding FOI request for its files on Mr. Dodd, still awaiting processing, is likely to be finalized “in a year or two.” The Ethics Committee files on Mr. Dodd will be open to the public in 2017, and Mr. Koskoff has generously offered to share with UConn the FBI’s carton of documents when they materialize.

The Senator from Central Casting will be available in bookstores after May 1

Governor Malloy On Connecticut’s Economic Doldrums

Gov. Dannel Malloy appeared recently at the editorial offices of the New London Day, where he unburdened himself cautiously on matters involving taxing and spending:

“’We have people who for political reasons are inserting uncertainty into the bond market, and we’re seeing the bond market reflect that,’ Malloy said. He went on to criticize some of [New Jersey Gov. Chris] Christie’s other recent exhortations to fellow Republicans to hang tough against established interests and to eliminate tenure for schoolteachers.

“’Hopefully I take a slightly more intellectual approach to this discussion than Governor Christie has demonstrated,’ Malloy said, adding that his counterpart ‘certainly understands the nuts and bolts portion of it.’

“’There are proven economic theories about sustaining economic growth, and we ignore those theories that have proven themselves at our own peril,’ Malloy said.

“’We’re going to see large-scale additional unemployment caused by governmental entities: local government and state government primarily, and perhaps the federal government,” he said. “Can you tell me what the impact of that is going to be on the recovery?’

One of the proven economic theories about sustaining economic growth is this: When expenditures outpace receipts and you still think you do not have to cut back spending, you are kissing the lipstick on a pig. An unsustainable national debt of $14 trillion, massive governmental regulation and excessive governmental borrowing introduce uncertainty into both bond and stock markets. The value of state bonds is secured by the economic wellbeing of the state. If California is bankrupt, its bonds will be correspondingly valueless because few would be willing to buy such bonds.

Moody lowered Connecticut’s general obligation bonds more than two years ago from stable to negative because the state used deficit bonds to resolve a budget shortfall.

“Connecticut,” Moody said in a report issued in 2009, “used one-time solutions to close slightly over half of the (biennial budget’s) shortfall … these solutions create future structural budget gaps and leave the state with significantly reduced flexibility to address additional fiscal pressures that may arise due to a delayed and/or weaker than expected recovery from the worst economic recession since the depression.”

A political writer from Rhode Island crowed after citing the report, “Break out the champagne! Another state has done worse than us in the budgeting department!

Connecticut is now running a deficit of some $3.5 billion or more for each of the next three years; the state has borrowed money to pay for budget deficits rather than capital improvements, and it has raided pension funds to pay for state debt. No “intellectual approach” – what ever that means -- will change the facts on the ground. If the state of Connecticut were to borrow less and spend less, if its pension liabilities were offset by suitable pension payments, its bond rating would be more secure.

An alternative solution, from Moody’s vantage point, is to pay debts and pension liabilities from tax increases. But recent national elections have suggested to some intellectually wide awake Democrats that this is a route leading to political unemployment, and so they have been cautious of late in proposing tax increases. It is always possible that Connecticut Democrats are more courageous than Democrats in other states. Here in the “Tax-Me State”, Democrats survived an election in which the U.S. House reverted to Republicans, many state legislatures fell to the GOP and many gubernatorial state houses also were captured by Republicans.

One would like to hear from Mr. Malloy what impact he thinks tax increases would have on Connecticut’s business environment now that Mr. Christie of New Jersey and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York have pledged not to raise taxes. Those pledges may seem to some in Connecticut a little too close for comfort. Over the long haul, the impact of spending cuts – provided they are permanent -- will be salutary. When government shrinks, personal wealth, one of the more important drivers of the economy, increases, which is good for the economy. Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, appears to share this intellectual approach with the less intellectual Mr. Christie, possibly because he does not wish New York businesses to migrate to New Jersey, a possibility that does not disturb the snoring of caucus leaders in Connecticut’s General Assembly.

Mr. Malloy, during his appearance at the Day’s editorial office, also ventured some views on history:

“The current economic plight is ‘not unlike 1935, ‘36,’ Malloy said, referring to the years when the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt had seen some success but also heard calls to roll back its most aggressive economic interventions against the Great Depression.

“’Do you pull back from a level of investment that has shown some ability to get the economy moving?’ Malloy said. ‘Do you pull back now or do you pull back over a period of time? The Republicans in Washington want to pull back now. What I would argue is you need a better thought-out withdrawal from that market, which we’re not going to get.’

“But Malloy also expressed sympathy with the intentions of politicians such as Christie, who say their goal has been to shrink the size of state government and improve its efficiency. Those same goals, which were central talking points of Malloy’s campaign, have many in Hartford anticipating a clash between Democratic leadership in the legislature and the new governor, who seems more prepared to make cuts.

“An ultimate reduction in the size of government is, ‘over the long haul ... probably a good thing,’ Malloy said, but he returned to his concern about driving unemployment. ‘Over the short run, all of that at once is a very dangerous thing.’

None of the terms used by Mr. Malloy are qualified. How much time is a “long haul”? How much time is a “short haul”? No one but local anarchists are proposing that government in the state of Connecticut should be reduced a modest 25 percent “all at once.” But Mr. Malloy should at the very least be able to tell editorial page editors what percentage of state government should be reduced to insure solvency “over the long haul” and whether the reductions will be permanent or temporary.

And at this point, only a few weeks before his budget will be written in stone and presented to a rubber stamping Democratic majority in the legislature, Mr. Malloy should be able to disclose what percentage of tax increases to reductions in spending he thinks will stabilize Connecticut’s bonds and reverse a flow of jobs from Connecticut to other states in which state debts are lower, bond rating is more secure and taxes are less punishing.

That kind of information, elicited by editorial writers and demanding reporters across the state, will greatly sooth the minds and hearts of taxpayers, those who receive government services, bond rating agencies and any stray intellectuals who have not already found employment in the Malloy administration.