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| Principles: Presidential contender Christopher Dodd (D) says it's important for America to 'regain its moral footing'. Mary Knox Merrill |
Christopher Dodd: a worldview shaped by his father and fatherhood.
The five-term Connecticut senator is a strong Roman Catholic who showed an early commitment to social justice.
By Alexandra Marks | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the December 27, 2007 edition
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DES MOINES, IOWA - Two days after terrorists imploded the World Trade Center and left a gaping hole in the Pentagon, Christopher Dodd became a father for the first time. His daughter Grace was born in Arlington, Va. That, in part, explains why the Connecticut Democrat, now in his early 60s, crisscrosses Iowa in what many say is a quixotic quest for the presidency.
"We could still see the Pentagon smoldering from that hospital," says Senator Dodd in a Monitor interview. "And I asked myself the question that parents have over the ages, 'What kind of a world is this child arriving in?' And then, 'What are you going to do about it?' "
The scion of a staunchly Roman Catholic family dedicated to public service, education, and the law, the five-term senator is running at the bottom of the polls – at 1 percent. He says repeatedly that he's driven not by any long-cherished desire to be president. Yet he's moved his family from a historic converted schoolhouse overlooking the Connecticut River to a rental in Iowa, stumping from dawn in Des Moines to long past dark in Sioux City. The reasons, he says, are Grace and his second daughter, as well as a deep belief in the rule of law, which was instilled in him by his father.
Time and again at cafes, libraries, and colleges, Dodd cites the war in Iraq, the scandals of Abu Ghraib, the Central Intelligence Agency's secret prisons, and the Bush administration's wiretapping without warrants of millions of Americans as proof that the nation must "regain its moral footing."
"Over the past six years, this administration has waged an assault on the Constitution," he told a packed coffeehouse in Des Moines in early December. "They're selling a false dichotomy that in order for us to be more secure, we're going to have to give up some rights. I believe the opposite is true: If you give up your liberty and your rights, you become far less secure."
Lessons from Nuremberg
Perhaps more than any other presidential candidate running, Dodd has values steeped in and shaped by history. He's the fifth of six children born to Grace Murphy Dodd, a teacher, and Thomas Dodd, a federal prosecutor who took on the Ku Klux Klan in the 1930s. The elder Mr. Dodd then rose to become a chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials in the 1940s, as well as a US senator known as an early and vocal champion of the oppressed in the former Soviet Union.
When Christopher was just 14 months old, his father left for what was to be a two-week assignment doing the initial interrogations of the 21 Nuremberg defendants. They included Hermann Goering, who was second in command of the Third Reich; Wilhelm Keitel, Adolf Hitler's chief of staff; and Rudolf Hess, Hitler's first deputy of the Nazi Party.
Thomas Dodd's skill as an interrogator of what he called "the Nazi big boys" and his adept legal mind were quickly recognized by America's No. 1 Nuremberg prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson. As a result, those two weeks stretched to 15 months, and the senior Dodd soon became Justice Jackson's right-hand man.
When Dodd Sr. rose for the first time to address the international court, "He charged the Nazis, among many other heinous crimes, with 'the apprehension of victims and their confinement without trial, often without charges, generally with no indication of the length of their detention,' " Dodd writes in "Letters From Nuremberg," a collection of his father's letters to his mother during the post-World War II trial.
When the trial ended, President Truman awarded the older Dodd the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Christopher, meanwhile, at home in Lebanon, Conn., was just learning to walk.
Upon his father's return, Christopher became what his family called "his shadow," following him everywhere he went. Throughout the years, he also became a student of his father's thinking.
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Heading into Election 2008, the Monitor profiles the candidates through the lens of their core convictions – through their values, worldviews, and, when applicable, religious faiths. |
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