The Volunteer Who Was Elected to Five Consecutive Terms in the U. S. Senate | Christopher Dodd (Dominican Republic)

Profile in Citizenship

by Jeremiah Norris (Colombia 1963-65)

Senator Christopher Dodd (Dominican Republic 66-68)

Christopher Dodd served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominion Republic 1968-71, after graduating from Providence College. Thereafter, he was elected to the first of three terms as a U. S. Representative in 1974. Following his father’s career path, Chris ran and was elected to the U. S. Senate in 1980. He was reelected in 1986, 1992, 1998, and 2004—the first Connecticut senator to be elected to five consecutive terms.

Chris’s time in Congress was marked by an interest in child welfare, fiscal reform, and education. He served on the Senate’s committees on banking, housing, and urban affairs (Chair from 2007), foreign relations, health, education, labor and pensions and rules and administration (Chair 2001-2003 In 1995-97, he served as General Chair of the Democratic National Committee. In January 2007, Chris announced that he planned to pursue the 2008 Democratic Presidential Nomination. His bid for the presidency never garnered widespread public support and he withdrew from the race after finishing sixth in the Iowa Democratic caucus in January 2008.

Chris was subsequently involved in health care reform, and he played a key role in attempts to overhaul the country’s financial regulatory system in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis. Facing a difficult reelection campaign, Chris announced in January 2010 that he would not seek a sixth term in the U. S. Senate. He later served as Chairman (2011-17 of the Motion Picture Association of America.

While serving in Congress, Chris wrote our nation’s first childcare legislation—the Family and Medical Leave Act, which he had spent nearly a decade working to enact. He also founded the first Children’s Caucus in Congress, and drove legislation to fully fund Head Start, childcare, and preschool programs to reduce childhood hunger and help lift families out of poverty, provide services for premature infants and children with autism.

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Letters from Nuremberg

Chris’s father, Thomas, served as a jurist in the Nuremberg Trials after WW II. His papers from that trial were memorialized in Chris’s book Letters from Nuremberg: My Father’s Narrative of a Quest for Justice.’ For Chris, the lessons of Nuremberg helped to guide a noteworthy career of public service punctuated by a legacy of human rights advocacy and action. The Chief justice of the U. Supreme Court opened that Trail with these words: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hands of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law, is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason”.

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Given Chris’s long-term distinguished public service in the Senate and his active support of Human Rights, he has more than justifiably earned a Profile in Citizenship.