Catastrophe - Dick Morris [71]
Dodd took a different and less difficult road but one that was just as influential on his decision about what to do with his life. From 1966 to 1968, Dodd served in the Peace Corps in a small town in the Dominican Republic, an experience he later described as “life-changing.” During a two-year stint, he helped people in a remote village build a school and improve their infrastructure and community. He told National Public Radio, “I came back from that experience determined that, one way or another, I wanted to be involved in the public life of my country.”274 In 1969, on his return to the United States at the height of the Vietnam War, Dodd joined the Army Reserve. In 1972, at the age of twenty-eight, he graduated from law school, spent about a year and a half in private practice, and then ran for the Connecticut House of Representatives seat that he would hold for three terms. In 1980, he was elected to the Senate.
WATCHING THE CONSEQUENCES OF CORRUPTION…
It wasn’t just the Peace Corps that inspired Dodd to enter politics. There was another big factor. While Dodd was living in the Dominican Republic, his father, then–Connecticut senator Thomas Dodd, was serving his third term in the U.S. Senate. In 1967, Thomas Dodd was formally censured by the Senate for taking $116,083 in campaign money ($782,183.62 in 2009 dollars) for his personal use and for accepting other illegal gifts.275 Chris Dodd was far from home when it happened, but he could not have escaped the family’s sorrow over his father’s downfall. Though Thomas Dodd avoided impeachment and remained in the Senate for several more years, he was a broken man, with few friends and no influence. Returning home, he lost the race for his own party’s nomination to the Senate in 1970. Even after the Democratic Party abandoned him, Dodd refused to give up and ran as an independent. Chris Dodd served as campaign manager for his father’s final, unsuccessful Senate race.
Dodd’s understanding of his father’s painful humiliation in the Senate and his stunning rejection by the voters seems to have left him with a visceral need to exonerate his father and probably contributed to his decision to enter politics. For the next thirty years he would try, with some success, to rehabilitate his father’s name and legacy. According to Chris Dodd’s older brother, Thomas Jr., his father is always on his brother’s mind. “He said to me once, ‘Every time I walk on the Senate floor, I feel that he’s vindicated.’”276
…BUT NOT LEARNING FROM THEM
One thing Dodd didn’t learn from his father’s tragic fall from power was to beware of friends bearing gifts. For years, other people have paid down payments, expenses, and mortgages on homes where he resided and that he claimed to own. Some of these benefactors had business with the federal government, which created, at the very least, an appearance of impropriety. Bur Dodd saw nothing wrong with that. He thought it was just a “courtesy.”
And that kind of courtesy is something Chris Dodd has come to expect. As a senator for twenty-nine years, he’s grown accustomed to the “courtesies”—small and large—that are provided to him. Dodd’s comments over the years suggest he thinks they’re no big deal. Most of us, on the other hand, might think otherwise and would describe the “courtesies” as special treatment he received solely because of his elected position.
The same might be said of Congressman Rangel. As a young lawyer in Harlem, he watched as one of the most respected leaders in his community, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was unseated in the House while under investigation