Candidate Who Sees Triumph in His Father's Nuremberg Efforts Hopes for Equal Measure in Iowa

WASHINGTON — On a sunny April day in 2006, Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd asked his wife to take a walk beside the Connecticut River near their home in East Haddam.

"I said, 'Great, I'll get the girls ready,' but he said, 'I think we need a baby sitter,'" recalled Jackie Clegg Dodd. At the time, their daughter Grace was 4 and her sister Christina was 1.

"I thought he was going to say that we should have a third child. That was going to be a hard sell," said Mrs. Dodd, now 45. "When he said he wanted to run for president, I agreed to it much too soon. But at my age, I was relieved that he wasn't saying, 'Let's have another baby.'"

Now, Mrs. Dodd said, whenever she and the girls land in an airplane, Christina asks, "Is this Iowa? Are we in Iowa?"

Of course, they often are.

A national Gallup poll released this week showed Dodd with 1 percent of the support among Democratic voters, tied with Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich at the back of the pack of their party's presidential hopefuls. A surprisingly good showing in the Iowa Caucus, the first electoral stop on the road to the nomination, is vital for his candidacy to continue.

"It would be hard for me not to do better than my expectations in Iowa," joked the 63-year-old candidate.

And expectation is the name of the game in primary season. A third place finish in Iowa would be a calamity for front-runners Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards, but a third place finish for Dodd would make him the big story of the campaign heading into the New Hampshire Primary.

"Dodd is the longest of long-shot candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. But he doesn't seem too agitated about that," wrote David Yepsen, the political columnist for the Des Moines Register. "He's an experienced politician. He knows how the caucus game often breaks late."

——————————

Chris Dodd learned about patience early in life.

His father left his family for 17 months after World War II to pursue justice for Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg trials. With Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill calling for firing squads, Thomas Dodd wanted the rule of law to prevail for even the most evil of humanity, his son explained.

"I have great respect and admiration for my father," said Dodd. The admiring son has compiled his father's letters to his mother during this long absence as lead prosecutor into a book entitled "Letters from Nuremberg: My Father's Narrative of a Quest for Justice." The book was released last month.

The candidate compares the triumph of the rule of law in those trials — for Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Rudolf Hess and other notorious Nazi criminals — with what he sees as a disregard for the rule of law in the Bush administration's fight against terrorism.

"My real reason for publishing the letters was my outrage over what this administration has done for the rule of law," he said. "My father fought for the ideal of a trial for some of the worst violators of human rights in history."

Dodd first read the letters in 1990 after his sister found them in her basement. He said the handwriting expressed an emotional devotion and longing by his father for his wife and family that the son had never imagined.

"I thought, 'Who is this guy writing love letters to my mother?'" he said from Iowa in a telephone interview.

The fifth of six children, Chris Dodd was born in 1944 — the year before his father went to Nuremberg. As a 16-year-old student at Georgetown Preparatory School, he stood at the Capitol and heard President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address calling for citizens to serve their country.

The younger Dodd was a 23-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic in 1967 and his father was a Democratic U.S. Senator from Connecticut when another searing moment in family history occurred. By a 92-5 vote, the Senate censured Thomas Dodd for diverting campaign funds for personal use.

The elder Dodd died four years later — "a broken man" as described by The New York Times.

Chris Dodd disputes any notion that his book or his campaign is aimed at vindication for his father.

"No, my father has been gone for almost 40 years," he said.

Dodd said he is running because he believes that he has — amongst the candidates — a unique ability to bring the Congress and the nation together after "the most important election in our lifetime."

"For 26 years, I've brought people together" in the Senate, he said. "No one party is going to solve our problems. It's going to take leadership that knows how to bridge that gap."

Dodd said he has worked with Republicans on all of his legislative achievements. He recalled forming the first Senate Children's Caucus with Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter in 1983, co-authoring the Family and Medical Leave Act with Missouri Republican Kit Bond, joining Utah Republican Orrin Hatch to create the Child Care and Development Block Grant, and working with Ohio Republican Mike DeWine to pass the FIRE Act to provide federal funds for communities to train and equip firefighters. On other issues, he worked with Texas Republican Phil Gramm and Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell to pass bills, said Dodd.

"I deliberately sought out people I don't normally agree with," said Dodd. "If there is anything I hear while campaigning, it's how angry people are over the leadership's inability to do anything."

Other candidates talk about working with political opponents to get things accomplished, said Dodd. "That's what I do every day."

—————————-

Even Dodd's marriage provides a lesson in bipartisanship.

"With my dad, if you were a Democrat, you were pretty much at the bottom of the barrel," said Michael Clegg, the candidate's brother-in-law and a physician living in Logan, Utah. "It took awhile for him to fully embrace Chris."

Jackie Clegg was a staffer for Sen. Jake Garn, R-Utah, when she met Dodd two decades ago at a charity ski event that her boss held every year in Park City, Utah.

The senator had been divorced since 1982 after a 12-year marriage to Susan Mooney. For awhile, he was one of Washington's most publicized bachelors whose high-profile dates included Bianca Jagger, Patricia Duff and Carrie Fisher. But he and the attractive, athletic Republican staffer quickly became a couple after she accepted his invitation to lunch upon returning from the ski outing. They were married in 1999.

"He's Irish — slow to come to conclusions," said Jackie Dodd, explaining the long courtship.

She said details of the proposal are "a private matter" but "involved Yeats quoted extensively, a lighthouse and crashing waves. Any sane girl would have said 'yes.'"

By then the liberal Democratic senator from the East Coast had converted the conservative Republican family from Utah — on a personal, if not political, level.

One of Dodd's first visits to the extended Clegg family was for their annual Easter picnic, which entails a contest where "we roll Easter eggs down a hill to see who can roll theirs the farthest," recalled Michael Clegg. That particular year, one of the brothers-in-law had devised a rocket-propelled egg.

"It took off and darted straight toward Chris. All I was thinking was, 'Please hit one of the others. Not the senator,'" said Clegg. "Frankly, he fit right in like one of us."

——-

"I can't immediately think of a scenario that produces a Dodd nomination, unless it is scandals and gaffes affecting all the other candidates," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

"Chris Dodd has done acceptably in the debates. He makes sense, and appears pretty reasonable. I doubt that Democrats have anything but good feelings toward him, but he just hasn't connected," explained Sabato, whose latest book is "A More Perfect Constitution."

The candidate said it's hard to get media coverage in a crowded field when low in the polls — which helps keep him low in the polls.

"That's what happens in the debates," he told the Hartford Courant. "I could almost go sit in the audience and have a hot dog by the time they get to me. So it's frustrating."

"Part of it is that Dodd has a tough time standing out in this historic field that includes the first potential black president, the first possible woman president, and perhaps the first Hispanic president," said Sabato. "Dodd, like Joe Biden, is a white male and a longtime creature of Washington politics."

———-

When not in Washington, the Dodds live in a converted two-room schoolhouse built in 1854 in East Haddam. Grace and Christina love to ring the bell by pulling the rope that comes down through the ceiling, their mom said.

After the school closed, the structure became a rehearsal hall for the Goodspeed Opera House — where "Man of La Mancha" debuted in 1964, recalled Jackie Dodd.

So it was at Sen. Chris Dodd's house in Connecticut where they perfected the song: "To Dream the Impossible Dream."