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| Tom Dodd |
Former U.S. Senator Tom Dodd, censured in 1967 for having misused campaign funds, was a man more sinned against than sinning.
The rededication of the Thomas Dodd Center at UConn has
brought Thomas Dodd once again into public notice.
This Sunday (10/17/21), the Hartford Courant ran a long
piece on the continuing effort of his son, former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, to
“restore the political honor of his father,
Thomas Dodd.”
The Courant noted, “Thomas Dodd was an advocate for human
rights as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, for which he was awarded the
U.S. Medal of Freedom. Later, he became a critic of the totalitarian leaders
who ruled in Europe behind the Iron Curtain and called out the U.S. State
Department for what he said was its inadequate response to the persecution of
Soviet Jews.”
Former Connecticut Republican Party Chairman Chis Healy was
quoted in the piece on both the father and the son. A critic of Chris Dodd when
he was Senator, Healy said that Dodd the younger “believed in what he did,
which is a rarity in politics nowadays, when everything is so transactional.”
And Healy bestowed a rich compliment on Dodd the elder. He was “a great senator,”
Healy said. Tom Dodd “was actually what we would call a conservative Democrat,
and he supported the Vietnam War when it wasn’t popular, but he stuck to his
guns.”
Tom Dodd’s relentless opposition to Soviet totalitarianism
may have played a part in his downfall.
Healy got Tom Dodd’s character right. He was
a man who “:stuck to his guns,” as was Winston Churchill who, during his 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster
College in Fulton, Missouri, warned, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in
the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that
line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.
Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all
these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the
Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet
influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control
from Moscow.”
Like Churchill, and largely because of his trial experiences
at Nuremburg, Dodd viewed the Soviet government’s domination of Eastern
European countries following the war as similar to that of Nazi Germany. And when
the Soviet controlled Polish government tried to present Dodd with an award for
his service, he refused to accept it.
Over in France, Albert Camus wrote in his book The
Rebel, “The strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can
be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and
philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which
nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time. The prophetic
dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended
by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational
or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror."
That sentiment was enough to ensure Camus’ ejection from a
philosophic movement in France led by Jean Paul Sartre.
The tyranny of the Nazi totalitarian state was a settled
matter; not so with Soviet totalitarianism. To a certain extent,
anti-totalitarian writers of the post war period – among them Arthur Koestler,
author of Darkness at Noon, George
Orwell, author of 1984, Whittaker
Chambers, author of Witness,
Friedrich Hayek, author of The Road to
Serfdom, and other farsighted intellectuals of the period, were all unheeded
prophets unloved in their own countries. When then President Ronald Reagan, speaking
from the Brandenburg Gate beside the Berlin Wall as late as 1987, beseeched Soviet
General Secretary Gorbachev to
“tear down this wall,” there were
titters in editorial boards all across the United States.
Tom Dodd, a fervent anti-totalitarian, early on saw the
future of liberty denying totalitarianism and knew it wouldn’t work. His
fierceness was met with a carefully concealed, buried resentment on the part of the kinds of intellectuals derided by Julian Benda in his book, The
Treason of the Intellectuals.
In the perpetual quarrel between authoritarianism and the
liberty of the individual, Tom Dodd was on the side of the angels.
Bill Buckley, discussing with Tom
Dodd the excesses of commentator Drew Pearson’s charges, rejected the notion
that Dodd would lose re-election because, “There are a great many people [in
Connecticut] who value very highly Senator Dodd’s achievements in foreign
policy.”
In the end, Tom Dodd, abandoned by his own party in a primary, lost the general election in a three way race to Lowell Weicker, the obverse of Dodd in foreign policy. The Nixon supported Weicker, flirting with conservatism, ran in the general election as a pro-Vietnam War candidate and suggested to the anti-war Democrat candidate that war protestors should be jailed. Many years later, he apologized to Chris Dodd for having roughly treated his father. But by that time Weicker's liberal America for Democratic Action rating exceeded that of Chris Dodd.
Tom Dodd’s real story, much more interesting than Drew
Pearson’s politically salacious version, likely will never be told – not even
by his son.
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