Aide Accused Senator of Financial Misdeeds

Michael V. O'Hare, 73, an aide to U.S. Sen. Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut whose accusations of financial improprieties against his boss led the Senate to censure Dodd in 1967, died March 15 at the University of North Carolina Hospitals in Chapel Hill of complications from a stroke. He lived in Chapel Hill and had been a Washington area resident for 45 years.

Mr. O'Hare, who began working for Dodd in 1961, was one of four staffers who copied more than 4,000 documents from Dodd's files and provided them to syndicated columnists Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson.

The files purportedly showed that Dodd, a Democrat, was doing political favors for a registered foreign agent and that he double-billed seven airline tickets and used $116,083 in political donations to pay personal expenses, including back taxes.

The accusations immediately caused a media firestorm. It was the first case to go before the newly created Senate Ethics Committee, and Dodd was the first U.S. senator to be censured for personal financial misconduct.

Mr. O'Hare went on to work as a financial officer for Big Brothers of the National Capital Area, the Overseas Development Council, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the malaria program of the Naval Medical Research Center. But he was devastated by the initial attack against him during the Dodd uproar.

Dodd blamed the scandal on Mr. O'Hare's "sloppy bookkeeping" and in a speech on the Senate floor called him "a liar and a forger and a thief." Newspaper articles described Mr. O'Hare and his former co-workers as turncoats, and in the Senate coffee shop, Dodd's son Jeremy poked him in the chest and said, "When this thing is over I'm going to follow you to your [deleted] grave," according to a front-page account in The Washington Post in 1966.

"We believed we were witness to grave misconduct in office," Mr. O'Hare told Time magazine at the time. "I played an extremely delicate role on the Senator's staff for over six months, because I believed that this disclosure of Sen. Dodd's activities was in the public interest."

After the case was over, Mr. O'Hare went to Ireland for a time, said his second wife, Kathleen Hurt O'Hare. "It was the seminal experience in his life," she said. "To be dragged through the mud like that was horrifying."

James P. Boyd, a former Dodd chief of staff who also leaked the papers and wrote a book about the scandal, said yesterday that Mr. O'Hare took the most abuse.

"He was always very calm, kind of unflappable, never mean or anything," Boyd said. "He suffered a lot, because he had the financial details more than anyone else. When all was said and done, this thing had to rise and fall on that."

Boyd's book, "Above the Law" (1968), was a cover story and serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. It went a long way toward restoring the staffers' reputations, he said.

Michael Vincent O'Hare was born Jan. 25, 1936, in Jersey City and served in the Marine Corps from 1953 to 1956. After being discharged, he enrolled at Catholic University. He put himself through college working for Dodd and holding several other jobs, Boyd said.

Dodd held his Senate seat until 1970, when he lost a reelection bid. He died in 1971. Mr. O'Hare returned to Washington and worked briefly as a recruiter for Southern Railway. In 1969 he joined Big Brothers, where he worked for two years.

From 1972 to 1982, Mr. O'Hare was comptroller of the Overseas Development Council. He then joined the Carnegie Endowment as director of finance and administration, a job he held until 1998. While there, he was also secretary to the board and coordinated the national intern program. He helped establish the Carnegie Moscow Center in 1993.

In his most recent job, Mr. O'Hare was the executive administrator of the Naval Medical Research Center's malaria program in Silver Spring. He retired in 2004.

He was a member of Our Lady Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Arlington County and volunteered with the United Way.

His marriage to Pauline O'Hare ended in divorce.

In addition to his wife of 13 years, survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Kate O'Hare Giovanello of San Francisco; two children from his second marriage, Owen and Margaret O'Hare, both of Chapel Hill.; a sister; and three brothers.