Weird Crap About Thomas Dodd

[Peter Lemkin]

Thomas Joseph Dodd (May 15, 1907 – May 24, 1971) was a United States Senator and Representative from Connecticut, He was the first Senator censured by the US Senate since Joseph McCarthy in 1954, and was one of only six people censured by the Senate in the 20th century. He is the father of U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd and Thomas J. Dodd, Jr., who served as the United States Ambassador to Uruguay from 1993–1997 and to Costa Rica from 1997-2001 .Contents [hide]
1 Early life
2 Nuremberg Trials
3 Congress
4 Senate censure and loss of office
5 Death and Legacy
6 Portrayal in popular culture
7 Footnotes
8 External links

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Early life

Dodd was born in Norwich, New London County, to Abigail Margaret O'Sullivan and Thomas Joseph Dodd, a building contractor; all four of his grandparents were immigrants from Ireland.[1] He graduated from Saint Anselm College's preparatory school, run by Benedictine monks in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1926[2]. He graduated from Providence College in 1930 with a degree in philosophy, and from Yale University Law School in 1933. In 1934, Dodd married Grace Murphy of Westerly, Rhode Island. They had six children.[3]

He served as a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1933 and 1934, the highlight of his career there being his participation in an unsuccessful trap set for famed gangster John Dillinger.[4] He was then Connecticut director of the National Youth Administration from 1935 to 1938. He was assistant to five successive United States Attorneys General (Homer Cummings, Frank Murphy, Robert Jackson, Francis Biddle and Tom Clark) from 1938 to 1945.[5]

As a special agent for the Attorney General, Dodd was basically a trial-level federal prosecutor. He worked primarily on criminal and civil liberties cases, including the prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1930s.[5] In 1942 he was sent to Hartford to prosecute a major spy ring case in which five men were accused of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 by conspiring to gather and deliver U.S. Army, Navy, and defense information to Germany or Japan. Four of the five pled guilty; Dodd tried and won the conviction of the fifth, Reverend Kurt Emil Bruno Molzahn.[6]

Dodd became vice chairman of the Board of Review and later executive trial counsel for the Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality at Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945 and 1946. He practiced law privately in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1947 to 1953.
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Nuremberg Trials

Both Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the U.S., and Dodd insisted upon a fair and legal trial to prosecute the Nazi war criminals. Dodd accepted Jackson's offer to join him in Germany. Dodd expected the position to last only several months, but he wound up spending 15 months there. Dodd suggested Heidelberg as the location for the International Military Tribunal, since it had survived the war almost completely unscathed, but Nuremberg was eventually chosen.[7] In October 1945, Jackson named Dodd to his senior Trial Board for the Nuremberg Trials, and later in 1946, named him Executive Trial Counsel, putting him in the number-two position at the trials. In the summer of 1946, Jackson appointed Dodd as the acting Chief of Counsel while he returned to DC. Dodd finally returned to the U.S. in October 1946.[5] He described the delegation as "an autopsy on history's most horrible catalogue of human crime."[8]

Dodd cross-examined defendants Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Walther Funk, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel and Arthur Seyss-Inquart. In addition to cross-examining, Dodd drafted indictments against the defendants, showed films of concentration camps, provided evidence of slave labor programs, and presented evidence of economic preparations by the Nazis for an aggressive war.[5]

Dodd showed through his evidence that Ukrainian Overlord Erich Koch and defendant Polish Overlord Hans Frank were responsible for the plans to deport one million Poles for slave labor.[9] Dodd also showed evidence that defendant Walther Funk turned the Reichsbank into a depository for gold teeth and other valuables seized from the concentration camp victims. Dodd showed a motion picture of the vaults in Frankfurt where Allied troops found cases of these valuables, containing dentures, earrings, silverware and candelabra.[10] Dodd showed many gruesome items of evidence, such as a shrunken, stuffed and preserved human head of one of the concentration camp victims that had been used as a paperweight by the commandant of Buchenwald Concentration Camp.[11]

Final pleas were made on August 31, 1946, and the Tribunal announced its judgment in September 1946. Dodd assisted the Allied prosecuting team of convicting all but three of the defendants.[5] All but one of the defendants had claimed innocence, including Hermann Göring, whom Dodd had charged with ordering Reinhardt Heydrich to set the Holocaust in motion.[12] In addition to prosecuting the individual defendants, Dodd demanded in his summation to the Tribunal that all six of the indicted Nazi organizations be convicted of crimes against humanity, on the same grounds of the crimes against humanity ascribed to the individual defendants. These six organizations are the Leadership Corps, the Reich cabinet, the Gestapo, The Storm Troops (SA), the Armed Forces, and the Elite Guard (SS). Dodd said that these organizations should not escape liability on the grounds that they were too large, part of a political party, etc.[13]

Dodd was given several awards in recognition of his work at the Nuremberg trials. Jackson awarded him the Medal of Freedom in July 1946 and President Harry Truman awarded him the Certificate of Merit, which Jackson personally delivered to him in Hartford in the fall of 1946.[5] Dodd also received the Czechoslovak Order of the White Lion.[3] In 1949, the Polish government had intended to award Dodd with a badge of honor called the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, but Dodd rejected the medal due to his commitment to human rights and views that the Polish government was imposing a tyranny similar to that imposed by the Nazis, and accepting an honor from the President of Poland would be like accepting one from the Nazis.[14][15]
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Congress

Dodd was elected as a Democrat to the House of Representatives in 1952, and served two terms. He lost a Senate election in 1956 to Prescott S. Bush, but was elected in 1958 to Connecticut's other Senate seat and then re-elected in 1964.

Before becoming a U.S. senator, Dodd was hired to lobby for Guatemala in the United States for $50,000 a year by dictator Carlos Castillo Armas.[16] According to the North American Congress on Latin America, Dodd "had perhaps the coziest relationship with the Castillo Armas government."[17] After a short trip to Guatemala in 1955, Dodd urged the House of Representatives to increase aid to the Central American country. Dodd's amendment passed and Guatemala received $15 million of US aid in 1956.[18]

As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Dodd worked to restrict the purchase of mail order handguns, and later shotguns and rifles. These efforts culminated in the Gun Control Act of 1968, which Dodd introduced.[19]
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Senate censure and loss of office

In 1967 Dodd became the first Senator censured by the US Senate since Joseph McCarthy in 1954,[20] and was one of only six people censured by the Senate in the 20th century. The censure was a condemnation and finding that he had converted campaign funds to his personal accounts and spent the money.[21][22] Beyond the Senate Ethics Committee's formal disciplinary action, other sources (such as investigative journalist Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson's Congress in Crisis) suggest[23] Dodd's corruption was far broader in scope, and there were accusations of alcoholism.[23][24] In response to these accusations, Dodd filed a lawsuit against Pearson claiming that Pearson had illegally interfered with his private property. Although the district court granted a partial judgment to Dodd, the appellate court ruled in favor of Pearson on the grounds that Dodd's property had not been physically abused.[25] For 1970 the Democrats endorsed for his seat Joseph Duffey, who won the nomination in the primary. Dodd then entered the race as an independent, taking just under a quarter of the vote, in a three-way race which he and Duffey lost to Lowell Weicker.
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Death and Legacy

Months after his defeat, Dodd died from a heart attack at his home. His son Christopher Dodd was elected to the Senate as a Connecticut Democrat in 1980.

Thomas J. Dodd Memorial Stadium in Norwich was named in his honor.

In 1995, The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center was established at the University of Connecticut. The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center or Dodd Research Center houses the Human Rights Institute, Archives & Special Collections for the University of Connecticut Libraries, and the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Connecticut.[26]

In 2003, the University of Connecticut established the Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights.[27]

In 2008, Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire established the Senator Thomas J. Dodd Center for the Study of International Affairs and Law. The center seeks to promote understanding of the forces that drive politics and the political economy in the global world; to sensitize students to the cultures of other countries, and to spur interest in the needs and problems of other nations and countries.[28]
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Portrayal in popular culture

Thomas J. Dodd has been portrayed by the following actors in film, television and theater productions;
Hrothgar Mathews in the 2000 Canadian/U.S. T.V. production Nuremberg.[29]
Rupert Vansittart in the 2006 British television docudrama Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial.[30]
Protest singer Phil Ochs references Dodd in his song "Draft Dodger Rag": "I believe in God and Senator Dodd and keeping old Castro down."
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Footnotes Constructs such as ibid. and loc. cit. are discouraged by Wikipedia's style guide for footnotes as they are easily broken. Please improve this article by replacing them with named references (quick guide), or an abbreviated title.

^ Battle, Robert. "The Ancestors of Chris Dodd". Retrieved 2007-09-04.
^ http://media.www.saintanselmcrier.com/me...3624.shtml
^ a b "Thomas J. Dodd, 1907-1971". Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. University of Connecticut. 2006-12-23. Retrieved 2007-09-04.
^ Dodd, Thomas in American National Biography, American Council of Learned Societies, 2000.
^ a b c d e f Barrett, John Q. (March 2005). "From Justice Jackson to Thomas J. Dodd to Nuremberg" (pdf). Retrieved 2007-09-04.
^ Associated Press (1942-08-15). "Prosecutor Calls Kunze Liar and Nazi at Molzahn Trial". p. 4.
^ Dodd, Chris. "Prosecuting The Peace Of The World: The Experiences Of Thomas J. Dodd At The International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, Germany, 1945-46" United States Supreme Court, Washington, D.C. (2005-02-15). Retrieved on 2007-09-04.
^ Boyd, James (1968). Above the Law. The Rise and Fall of Senator Thomas J. Dodd. New York: The New American Library. p. 12. OCLC 233961.
^ "Ukraine Murder Chief Still Hunted by Allies". Los Angeles Times: p. 4. 1945-12-12.
^ "Funk Claims Aides Handled ‘Stained’ Gold". The Washington Post: p. 2. 1946-05-08.
^ "[Nuremberg Trials]". American Experience. PBS. 2006-01-30. No. 6, season 18. Transcript.
^ McLaughlin, Kathleen (1946-09-01). "20 of 21 Nazis Claim Innocence As Nuremberg Trial Is Concluded". The New York Times: p. 1.
^ "Convictions Asked for 6 Nazi Groups". The New York Times: p. 5. 1946-08-30.
^ "Rejects Polish Badge of Honor as a Dishonor". Chicago Daily Tribune: p. 8. 1949-04-26.
^ "Nazi Trial Prosecutor Rejects Polish Medal". The Washington Post: p. 13. 1949-04-26.
^ Gerassi, John (1966) [1965]. The Great Fear in Latin America. New York: Collier Books. p. 183. OCLC 17447442.
^ North American Congress on Latin America. "Guatemala", North American Congress on Latin America, Berkeley, 1974, p. 84-85.
^ Ibid, 84-85.
^ Zimring, Franklin E. (1975). "Firearms and Federal Law: The Gun Control Act of 1968". The Journal of Legal Studies 4: 133. doi:10.1086/467528. OCLC 1754648. ISSN 0047-2530. Retrieved 2007-03-13.
^ http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL30764.pdf
^ [1]
^ "1967 Year In Review, UPI.com"
^ a b Martin, Douglas (April 17, 2009). "Michael O’Hare, Figure in Ethics Case, Dies at 73". New York Times.
^ Pearson, Drew; Anderson, Jack (1968). The Case against Congress: A Compelling Indictment of Corruption on Capitol Hill. New York: Simon and Schuster.
^ Pearson v. Dodd. 11 Prosser, Wade and Schwartz's Torts Cases and Materials 81-84. United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit. 1969. Print.
^ Dodd Center Website, http://www.lib.uconn.edu/online/research.../about.htm
^ Dodd Prize website, http://doddprize.uconn.edu/about.htm
^ http://www.anselmalumni.net/s/655/index....190&crid=0
^ "Nuremberg (2000) (TV)". IMDb.com. Retrieved May 20, 2008.
^ "Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial (2006) (TV)". IMDb.com. Retrieved May 20, 2008.

From the Dodd Center: "Upon his return to the United States in 1947, Dodd began the private practice of law in Hartford and became active in Connecticut Democratic politics. He contemplated a run for governor in 1948, but concentrated instead upon civic, charity and service work. In 1950, Dodd campaigned vigorously on behalf of Connecticut Senator Brien McMahon against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to unseat him.

Dodd was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the First District in 1952, a position to which he was re-elected in 1954. He sat on the Government Operations and Foreign Affairs Committees, as well as the Select Committee to Investigate Communist Aggression. After running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1956 against incumbent Prescott S. Bush, Dodd ran again and defeated Republican William A. Purtell in 1958.
Grace Dodd, Thomas Dodd and President Kennedy


Dodd served on the Foreign Relations Committee, co-chairing its Internal Security Subcommittee; the Judiciary Committee, chairing its Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee; and the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee. He championed the overhaul of the nation’s gun control legislation even before the assassination of President Kennedy. Dodd ardently supported the civil rights legislation of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, particularly anti-lynching and voting rights laws. He also strove to protect children through such measures as curbing violence on television and stemming the traffic of illegal drugs. Dodd vigorously opposed Soviet Communism, which he considered the moral equivalent of German Nazism. Although an early and enthusiastic supporter of the United Nations, Dodd grew disillusioned with the organization as it came more and more to represent Third World interests. He won a second Senate term in 1964 and became President Johnson’s leading foreign affairs spokesman in the Senate."