Weekly Standard Scrapbook: Dodd's Father ... The Real Story
There was a front-page snapshot of toddler Christopher Dodd (now senator from Connecticut and Democratic candidate for president) sitting in the lap of his father, who is reading him a story in front of a fireplace. His father, of course, was the late Senator Thomas J. Dodd. Inside there's an artsy photo of today's Senator Dodd standing among some trees on the Capitol grounds (you can see the dome in the background).
The story is full of touching details. How, for example, the senator's sister stumbled on a sheaf of letters the elder Dodd, then a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, had written to his wife, now collected in a new book (Letters from Nuremberg: My Father's Narrative of a Quest for Justice) edited by Christopher Dodd. How the elder Dodd's censure by the Senate in 1967 devastated young Christopher, then a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, whose "[presidential] campaign is the most public chapter in his career-long quest for his father's redemption." How, according to Senator Dodd's brother Thomas Jr., Christopher "said to me once, 'Every time I walk on the Senate floor, I feel that he's vindicated.'"
At which point, THE SCRAPBOOK is not ashamed to say, we reached for our handkerchief. The only problem with the story, of course, is that Times readers are somehow left with the impression that the noble Roman Thomas Dodd was censured by his Senate colleagues (92-5) four decades ago not for "diverting $116,000 in campaign funds for his personal use" but because he was so gosh-darned decent and law-abiding, especially when prosecuting Nazis.
"Mr. Dodd," writes Elisabeth Bumiller, ".??.??. insisted that [Letters from Nuremberg] was not meant as a vindication, but as a reminder about the commitment to due process at the admired Nuremberg trials when civil liberties are under assault at Guantanamo--a formulation that earns him big applause on the campaign trail. .??.??. Friends say that Mr. Dodd has been personally overwhelmed by what he learned of his father through the letters and by his passion to redefine his legacy."
To which THE SCRAPBOOK feels constrained to add two dry-eyed comments. First, only someone like Christopher Dodd, a reliable apologist for left-wing tyrants in Latin America since arriving in the Senate, would see the lawful detention of the world's most dangerous terrorists in a compound open to public inspection as "civil liberties .??.??. under assault."
And second, tender letters to his wife notwithstanding, the late Tom Dodd was a crook. The "diverting [of] $116,000 in campaign funds for his personal use" was the standard sort of tip-of-the-iceberg charge meant to symbolize his long and squalid career of shaking down people for cash, in exchange for political influence, and pocketing the proceeds. If Christopher Dodd wants to learn more about his father, may we recommend Above the Law: The Rise and Fall of Senator Thomas J. Dodd by James Boyd (New American Library, 1968), an account of criminality written by the old senator's onetime administrative assistant which, 39 years later, still makes chilling reading.