2007.09.30: September 30, 2007: Headlines: Figures: COS - Dominican Republic: Politics: Congress: Election2008 - Dodd: Hartford Courant: Bill Curry writes: Dodd's Book Reveals A Father To Follow

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Bill Curry writes: Dodd's Book Reveals A Father To Follow

Bill Curry writes: Dodd's Book Reveals A Father To Follow

Dodd's campaign, like his book, outshines his competitors in its substance. More than any other candidate, he has taken the lead on ending the war in Iraq, defending the Constitution and combating global warming. His proposals on health care, wage stagnation and the credit crisis are credible and specific. Dodd's performances of late are crisp, impassioned and on target. He must do a better job of getting his core message into every interview and speech but after Bill Clinton, he's as gifted and natural a politician as I have met, and these days it's all on display. Still, polls seem frozen. Barack Obama's candidacy may help Hillary Clinton. He shares her caution; his inexperience, besides being an issue in voters' minds, hinders his campaign. But the attention he gets keeps candidates with deeper differences and better credentials from getting noticed. The attention to Obama has faded slightly, causing Clinton to grow complacent. I don't know when it's safe to start acting like the nominee, but it isn't the year before the election. It's the first serious misstep of her campaign and it nudges open a door. Dodd can still walk through it. The debate we're having doesn't measure up to the magnitude of the problems we face, nor does it acknowledge the boldness of the actions our government must undertake to solve them. Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic in the 1960's.

Bill Curry writes: Dodd's Book Reveals A Father To Follow

Dodd's Book Reveals A Father To Follow

Bill Curry

September 30, 2007

Ever since John Kennedy won a Pulitzer for "Profiles in Courage," presidential candidates have written books. They range from vacuous policy tomes to memoirs meant to inspire to, in John Edwards' case, a book about houses people grew up in. It's hard to decipher Edwards' point but his central theme - there's no place like home - has proven appeal.

Chris Dodd's "Letters from Nuremberg" is many things: an insider's view of history's most famous fair trial, a meditation on our recent failures to uphold its principles and a poignant family history. Calling it the best campaign book of the election cycle would be damning it with faint praise. No need for that. It's the best book I've read this year.

The insider's view of Nuremburg and most of the family history are to be found in the letters of the book's title, written by Dodd's father, the late Thomas Dodd - at 38, second in command of the Nuremberg prosecution team - and addressed to Dodd's mother, Grace Murphy Dodd.

The letters are superb, especially in light of the strained circumstances of their composition. They fascinate because they illuminate at once the inner workings of a historic event and the inner life of a public man living in an age that still has lessons to dispense.

Justice Robert Jackson called the Nuremberg trials "one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason." The defendants were 21 leaders of Hitler's high command, the ones who hadn't already taken their own lives, including such monuments to evil as Hermann Goring, Martin Bormann, Rudolph Hess and Albert Speer.

Thomas Dodd had a shrewd eye for their vanities and deceits. He regarded them as perpetrators of history's worst crimes, yet retained a sense of their fallen humanity and accorded them genuine due process, as was then American policy. Twelve of the defendants were executed, three acquitted, the rest imprisoned. The trial stands today as a monument to the rule of law.

The portrait the elder Dodd leaves of himself is of a man besotted with his wife and children, in love with his country and devoted to his Roman Catholic faith. A Yale graduate and son of a Norwich contractor, he's at times erudite, at other times more like Gary Cooper, as when lamenting a rupture among the "soreheads" on his staff.

Most of all, he's a man in love. He writes Grace almost daily the whole time he's away. His words of love, startling in their depth of feeling, vouch for the truth of everything else he writes and help make these letters what they are: as good a map as you'll ever find of how, within a whole human being, the personal and political are connected.

Chris Dodd provides the book his own moments of eloquence, and in so doing proves himself an attentive as well as devoted son. He knows how long a fall it is from Nuremburg to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and understands the consequences for America's security and reputation in the world.

Dodd's campaign, like his book, outshines his competitors in its substance. More than any other candidate, he has taken the lead on ending the war in Iraq, defending the Constitution and combating global warming. His proposals on health care, wage stagnation and the credit crisis are credible and specific.

Dodd's performances of late are crisp, impassioned and on target. He must do a better job of getting his core message into every interview and speech but after Bill Clinton, he's as gifted and natural a politician as I have met, and these days it's all on display.

Still, polls seem frozen. Barack Obama's candidacy may help Hillary Clinton. He shares her caution; his inexperience, besides being an issue in voters' minds, hinders his campaign. But the attention he gets keeps candidates with deeper differences and better credentials from getting noticed.

The attention to Obama has faded slightly, causing Clinton to grow complacent. I don't know when it's safe to start acting like the nominee, but it isn't the year before the election. It's the first serious misstep of her campaign and it nudges open a door.

Dodd can still walk through it. The debate we're having doesn't measure up to the magnitude of the problems we face, nor does it acknowledge the boldness of the actions our government must undertake to solve them.

In Tom Dodd's day our democracy defeated its enemies, established a broad middle class and sanctified the rule of law. No one has studied more closely than Chris Dodd the kind of leadership it took to make it happen.

Bill Curry, former counselor to President Bill Clinton, was the Democratic nominee for governor twice. His column appears Sundays on the Other Opinion page. He can be reached at billcurryct@gmail.com.




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Headlines: September, 2007; RPCV Chris Dodd (Dominican Republic); Figures; Peace Corps Dominican Republic; Directory of Dominican Republic RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Dominican Republic RPCVs; Politics; Congress; Connecticut





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Story Source: Hartford Courant

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