Return Of The Page
After two years of writing wills and representing local small businesses, a tightly held Congressional seat surprisingly opened up. Dodd was talked into running for it and won. So, at age, 30 the boat-hole litigator set sail for Washington.
Dodd was young, he acknowledges, to be in the House of Representatives. But the job was not unfamiliar. Pointing to his father’s extensive political experience, Dodd says he doesn’t “remember a time growing up that there wasn’t politics going on. So, I wasn’t sort of dropping into an arena without the knowledge.” And thanks to seeing his father’s wins and losses, Dodd says he didn’t arrive in Washington with a “glamorized version of politics.” He had, he tells me, “a deeper awareness [than] most 30 year olds running for public office about the vicissitudes of a political life.”
In 1981, just six years after his election to the House, Dodd began his first of five terms in the Senate. He jokes that he served with members who were there when he was a page in 1962. “I ended up sitting next to people who were snapping their fingers at me.”
The Influence Of The Nuremberg Trial
In 1945, Thomas Dodd, a 38-year-old Assistant U.S. Attorney, was tapped to serve on the United States prosecution team for the Nuremberg trial. Dodd spent fifteen months in Europe as a participant in the four-country joint effort to bring to justice 21 Germans for war crimes. He left his wife and five children back home in Connecticut, including fourteen-month old Christopher.
Dodd’s initial role was behind the scenes -- conducting pre-trial interviews of the defendants. He had hoped his job would end there as he was very keen to get back to Connecticut. But Dodd’s skills came to the attention of the lead prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Dodd was called on to stay for the trial and Jackson elevated him to second in charge. In the end, all but three of the defendants were found guilty and twelve hanged.
[Justice Jackson wrote a dissenting opinion in Korematsu v. U.S., the Supreme Court’s 1944 opinion that upheld the constitutionality of Japanese internment camps during World War II. Korematsu was overruled the day before I’m sitting in Dodd’s office talking about Jackson. The coincidences are mounting.]
Understandably, Chris Dodd could have a bias in his praise of his father’s role in Nuremberg. But the German magazine, Der Spiegel, has none. It called Thomas Dodd “the star of the courtroom” with the gift of “being able to make the evidence sing.”
While in Europe, Dodd wrote hundreds of letters to his wife, Grace. They were thought to have been lost in a fire, until they were discovered, in 1990, in Chris Dodd’s sister’s basement. Dodd published many of them in “Letters from Nuremberg,” a 2007 book co-written with Lary Bloom.
The letters are remarkable on many levels. First and foremost, historical. The trial was plagued with challenges and its outcome was far from a foregone conclusion. Dodd’s letters offer a unique look at the prosecution efforts in real time, something the many post-verdict books can’t offer.
The letters are also deeply emotional, demonstrating a husband’s love for his wife. I tell Dodd there’s no way I can let my wife read the book. She’ll ask why I can’t write such affectionate letters. Dodd jokes that his first reaction upon reading the letters was “who’s this guy talking to my mother this way?” The letters are also prophetic. In one, Dodd mentions that, as he is not keeping a diary, the letters can serve as a record of what he sees and hears.
For Chris Dodd, his father’s letters are also very emotional. On September 1, 1945, Thomas Dodd wrote to his wife: “I suppose Christopher is growing rapidly. Did I understand correctly, from a brief sentence in one of your letters, that he is now walking?” When describing the importance of the trial: “Someday, the boys will point to it [Dodd had three sons at the time], I hope, and be proud and inspired by it. Perhaps they will be at the bar themselves and perhaps they will invoke this precedent and call upon the law we make here.” Dodd calls this a “powerful passage” in one the letters that he had “the hardest time reading.”
“Around our dining room table growing up,” Dodd tells me, “there was a lot of talk about Nuremberg.” And Dodd credits for his influence in Congress the commitment to the rule of law that his father’s work in Germany demonstrated. “We did something no one had ever done. We took this outrageous, corrupt and vicious government, responsible for the deaths of eleven million people, six million Jewish . . . and we’re going to give them a trial with a lawyer to present evidence. That was stunning . . . the magnitude of it.”
Thomas Dodd died while his son was in law school and never got to see that he followed in his path. “I’d like to think today, given the career over 36 years in the Congress, that he felt that I did continue his work in a way.”
Dodd gave high praise to his own wife, Jackie, for her instrumental role in bringing “Letters from Nuremberg” to fruition. As I was leaving, Dodd gave me an instruction: “Make sure you mention that.” A wise man.
Legislation Comes From A Story
I point to Dodd’s walls and the mementos of his legislative achievements that are household names. But what about one that Dodd cares deeply about that people may not know? The former member of the world’s most exclusive club does not need to think long. He tells me that his sister was blind from birth. It’s an issue personal to him. He worked to increase the number of people who can read Braille, telling me that only ten percent of the blind know Braille and it has the highest unemployment rate of any of the disabilities. He pushed publishers to timely release text books in Braille and lobbied to change the law that prevented the blind from working as Foreign Service Officers.
“When I passed the Help America Vote Act,” Dodd tells me, “I stuck a provision in there that made sure that a [blind person] would never have to vote with someone in the [voting booth]. It was insulting to my sister to have to have someone go in and know how she was voting.”
Dodd shared with me the story of a young girl who he met in church who was a quadriplegic. The girl’s mother expressed to him the challenges of working and having a child who needed constant care. “That’s Family and Medical Leave and that’s where it came from,” Dodd tells me. “A lot of legislation comes from a story.” The woman lived to be 23 and Dodd gave the eulogy at her funeral.
Dodd-Frank
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was passed in 2010, making dramatic changes to financial regulation following the 2008 crisis. The law owes its name to the significant efforts of Dodd, as Chair of the Senate Banking Committee and Representative Barney Frank, Chair of the House Financial Services Committee.
The Act, best known simply as Dodd-Frank, was of course on my agenda. But it is 2,000 pages and as dense as a New York subway train at rush hour. I gave up all hope of understanding it and simply prayed that Dodd didn’t ask me which provisions I found most interesting.
I joked with Dodd that every time he sees the name Dodd-Frank in print he must say to himself – “Hey that’s me.” Dodd opposed having his name on the law, he told me, voting against the motion made by a Pennsylvania Congressman to initially call it the Frank-Dodd Bill. “Barney said ‘you can’t do that, they’ll think it’s one person.’”
Dodd stresses to me that the law is designed to “minimize the next crisis. It doesn’t eliminate the next crisis. It just means you can manage it better so you don’t come on the brink of a total financial collapse.”
There have been recent efforts to roll back some of the law’s provisions. “Is it tough to pick up the paper and read that Dodd-Frank is being dismantled?” I ask Dodd about his namesake law. “It’s tough to read the stories because they really didn’t,” he says, chuckling. Dodd acknowledges that “any bill of that size and magnitude” is going to be subject to some changes. “The only perfect piece of legislation I ever saw was the Ten Commandments and we’re still debating those things 4,000 years later.”
“The recent legislation that was adopted is pretty minor,” Dodd characterizes the efforts. “There were a couple of things I didn’t like about it.” But with the profitability of banks today being historic in level, Dodd says he doesn’t “know what the complaint is. If the complaint is that they’re not making money, they’ll have a hard time convincing anyone who knows what they’re doing.”
Dodd then transitions into some technicalities of the Act and rattles off a long list of its major provisions that are still in place. He might as well be speaking to me in Chinese at this point. I need to get him off the subject quickly before he becomes the questioner.
Ironically, Dodd tells me that he spoke at the Central Bank of China and was presented with a copy of Dodd-Frank translated into Mandarin. He gets up, grabs a book from a shelf and opens it: “That’s Dodd-Frank in Mandarin.” And I thought I was the only one with that book.
The Hollywood Ending
I ask Dodd about gridlock in Washington. “There’s nothing quite like this moment,” he tells me. Asking about it in historical terms, Dodd describes the country as being “ripped apart” by the fight over the Affordable Care Act.
Dodd was instrumental in the passage of the healthcare law after becoming the Acting Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in November 2008. Chairman, Senator Ted Kennedy, suffering from brain cancer, had been forced to pass the baton. Kennedy died in August 2009. Dodd and the Massachusetts Senator were very close friends for 30 years.
The healthcare bill passed in the Senate on Christmas Eve 2009. Dodd was heading home to Connecticut. But he made a stop at Arlington National Cemetery before the airport. He hadn’t yet visited Kennedy’s grave and chose this moment. Standing alone in the snow Dodd said to himself: “Do you want to do this for seven more years? And the answer was quicker than the question. I said ‘that’s enough.’ . . . I’ve never looked back.”
Hollywood And The Preordained Law Firm
How Dodd made the decision to quit the Senate is a Hollywood ending. And not long after, he began a seven-year tenure as Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America – the trade association that represents the six major Hollywood film studios. The MPAA are also the folks who decide if a film should be rated G or NC-17 or somewhere in between. Dodd’s time at the helm included such challenges as competition from Netflix and Amazon, cyber-attacks and ever-present piracy.
But Dodd had no experience in the entertainment industry. So what was Disney CEO Bob Iger thinking when he recruited him? He must have been goofy. “The job is less about Hollywood than it is about representing the industry globally,” Dodd explains. “More than 70 percent of the revenues of the quote ‘Hollywood business’ come offshore.” People think “I was spending my time down there with George Clooney,” he says, laughing. In fact, he spent a “huge amount of time traveling” and built operations in Brussels and Asia.
Dodd gave me some good advice about the movie industry: the Golden Globes are more fun than attending the Academy Awards. I’ll keep that in mind.
Dodd joined Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer at the start of this year, as Senior Counsel. He is working in such areas as legislative and foreign policy and financial services. The move feels preordained to him. One of the firm’s founders was Abe Fortas, who was a Yale Law School classmate of Dodd’s father’s. [Fortas would later join the U.S. Supreme Court.] And Dodd’s seat in the Senate had belonged to Abe Ribicoff before his retirement. Ribicoff then went to the Kaye Scholer firm in New York, which recently merged with Arnold & Porter.
Dodd touts the firm’s commitment to pro bono work -- saying that no other firm in the country does as much -- as well as the public service roles that many of its senior lawyers have held. “The pejorative today of this revolving door has discouraged this and I think to the detriment of the country.”
My time with Chris Dodd comes to an end and I’m packing up my things. He sums it all up very simply: “Life is good.” |