Dodd: Father’s Nuremberg Service Forged My Values

At Chris Dodd’s Iowa City appearance Friday, he spoke more about his father than himself, using his father’s service as the number two prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials to focus on the importance of the Constitution and the rule of law.

Larry Baker, an author and former Iowa City council member, asked the last question and said he had agreed with every word Dodd had said.  But in that case, asked Baker, why aren’t George Bush and Dick Cheney being impeached?

“I won’t argue the substance,” said Dodd  “But Having been through it, it takes all of the oxygen out of the room.  To be very practical, the most important thing is to elect a new administration.”  Dodd predicted that a focus on impeachment would lead to Democratic defeat. 

Dodd spoke at Iowa City’s famous Prairie Lights book store, discussing “Letters From Nuremberg,” a book he wrote based on the letters his father, Thomas Dodd, wrote home to his mother during the trial of Nazi war criminals. Before Nuremberg, Thomas Dodd was an early FBI agent.  He later worked for the Justice Department trying Southern civil rights cases.  The elder Dodd was originally assigned to Nuremberg for a two-week stint, which eventually grew to the 15-month duration of the trial.  After Nuremberg, Thomas Dodd served two terms in the Senate

Chris Dodd says he didn’t know his father’s daily letters home from Germany, which he called “contemporaneous first draft of history,” existed until he just a few years ago.  Before reading the letters, Dodd organized them chronologically

“These letters are epistles to our generation about the rule of law,” said Dodd.  The principles are the same.  You cannot tailor your principles to the facts of the day.”  Giving up our rights for the perception of safety is fundamentally flawed, he said, and in one of only a few direct references to his campaign he added, “one of my reasons to put my name forward for President was to fight for these rights.”  He said too many Democrats have not done that today.

Dodd noted that Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, called the trials “the most significant tribute power ever gave to reason.”  Contemporary history gives the Nuremberg trials a place of honor.  Dodd argued they were the basis for the Marshall Plan, the World Bank, the World Court, and the United Nations and gave America a moral high ground we lack today.

But Dodd said the trials were “very presumptuous at the time”, unpopular with the American public, and opposed by most of the Supreme Court other than Jackson.  Winston Churchill argued for summary executions, the Russians wanted a kangaroo court show trial, and even top defendant Hermann Goering argued that the Nazis had done little different from previous wartime regimes.

Senator Thomas Dodd

Thomas Dodd felt differently.  Reading from the letters, the younger Dodd described a dramatic courtroom scene where his father displayed a cloth covered table, and built up suspense over the object hidden on it for minute after minute until a young office pulled away the cloth to reveal