Chris Dodd’s phone rang Thursday afternoon as he prepared for the next day’s 24-hour trip to the Dominican Republic as a member of a delegation representing President Joe Biden and the United States at the inauguration of President Luis Abinader.
There was no caller ID. Just the familiar, teasing voice of an old friend.
“I hear you’re going to the Dominican Republic. Vacation?”
It was Biden.
“I’m going for you,” Dodd shot back.
Dodd told him he would be in Chicago on Monday for Biden’s address on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention, part of a planned tribute to a man who still enjoyed the party’s affection but not its confidence to continue as the nominee for president.
The conversation Thursday was their first since Biden ended his presidential campaign, bowing to the urgings of Democrats who questioned the 81-year-old president’s ability to defeat Donald J. Trump a second time after a disastrous debate performance. Dodd was not among them.
“I was of the view that he was still our best choice to win the election on Nov. 5, and I thought he ought to be given the opportunity to make a case for himself after the debate,” Dodd said.
Dodd said he had suggested Biden’s advisers place the president before 50 or 60 voters in a state of their choosing, taking questions in what would be “not quite a town hall but more of a conversation.”
“I thought that he would do well in that setting,” Dodd said. “And, certainly I thought as well, would calm some of the some of the hyperbole associated with his ability to do this. So that was my recommendation.”
Dodd had flown with Biden to Washington on Air Force One after a fundraiser in Greenwich on June 3, three weeks before the ill-fated debate. They talked for 40 minutes. Biden asked him for suggestions on speech he would be giving on immigration.
“Plane landed 11 o’clock or so. Had been a long day for him, did well,” Dodd said.
Also on the plane was Jim Himes, the Greenwich congressman who would reach a different conclusion weeks later, publicly urging Biden to end his campaign.
On Sunday, July 21, while vacationing in Ireland, where Dodd has owned a cottage for 30 years in rural Galway, the younger of Dodd’s two college-age daughters showed him a news alert on her phone: Biden was out.
Dodd did not share how he took the news. But he and Biden, both proud of their Irish ancestry, share an affinity for the poetry of William Butler Yeats, who once wrote of prominent friends now gone, “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”
On Monday night, the focus will be on Biden’s legacy after 36 years as a U.S. senator, eight as vice president and four as a president who managed to pass a string of major bills in a bitterly divided Washington. On Tuesday, the party will turn to the new nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, and other politicians who came after Biden and Dodd.
“She’s done a terrific job in the last month. I thought her statements have been strong — including the statement on the night of the debate,” said Dodd, who co-chaired the Biden campaign’s vice presidential vetting four years ago. Harris had vigorously defended Biden after the debate.
Dodd is 80, 18 months younger than the president who turns 82 in November and would exit the White House in January as the oldest man ever to hold the office. At a fundraiser for Dodd in December 2009, Biden called him “the single most gifted legislator in Congress, now that Teddy Kennedy’s gone.”
Two weeks after that fundraiser, while looking for Kennedy’s snow-covered grave at dawn on Christmas Eve day, Dodd confronted the same question that faced Biden last month: Was it time to go?
Dodd had represented Connecticut in Congress for 36 years, elected to the House in 1974 and the Senate in 1980. In 2008, Dodd ran for president, quitting the night of the first contest, the Iowa caucuses.
On Dec. 24, 2009, Dodd, then 65, was looking back on one of his hardest years in politics — and ahead to the prospect of an uncertain reelection in 2010.
His approval rating had plummeted. Voters had concerns about his presidential gambit, his role passing a Wall Street bailout as the Senate Banking Committee chairman and fresh stories about real estate purchased long ago with the assistance of wealthy friends.
Ted Kennedy had died in August from a brain tumor — but not before insisting Dodd take Kennedy’s chair leading the Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee and his role negotiating what would become the Affordable Care Act.
Merged with another version, the bill passed in the early hours that Christmas Eve.
With time to kill before his flight home to Connecticut, Dodd decided to visit Kennedy’s grave for the first time. His resting place is marked by a simple cross and a flat stone, and a pathway linking his grave to his brothers’ had not been built yet.
“I couldn’t find it,” Dodd said. “And I’m sitting there, and all of a sudden I said to myself, ‘Do you want to do this for seven more years?’ And I said, ‘No, that’s enough.’ That’s how long it took. That’s how much conversation I had about it. And I got on the plane, went home, and I told Jackie and the kids. I said, ‘That’s enough.’”
On the sixth day of 2010, Dodd announced he would not seek a sixth term, all but ensuring that an endangered Senate seat would remain in Democratic hands. He was succeeded by Richard Blumenthal, now in his third term.
Dodd’s legacy is intertwined with Biden’s. Their tenures in the Senate overlapped for 28 years. And both tease each other about their short-lived campaigns for president in 2008, when the two old hands could not compete with a freshman senator named Barack Obama. Strapped for funds, they shared a plane.
Biden chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, while Dodd, who lived in the Dominican Republic for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer, chaired the subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.
For the past two years, Dodd has been a special presidential advisor to Biden for the Americas, working on the Biden administration’s Americas Partnership. He said the goal is to promote investment and stabilize Latin American economies — providing an alternative to the “dramatic, drastic step of emigrating.”
In October 2021, Biden was the keynote speaker at the rededication of the University of Connecticut’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center — the 1995 opening of which was attended by President Bill Clinton — as the Dodd Center for Human Rights, an honor to father and son.
“We truly are really good, close friends,” Biden said that day.
The convention
While Dodd will be a spectator Monday night, he has his own memories of the United Center in Chicago, the convention venue. In 1996, Dodd delivered a speech nominating Bill Clinton for his second term in the same arena — and calling for greater civility in politics.
“Stop attacking the president’s family. Stick to the issues. We may at times oppose one another, but we must always respect each other. Let us begin now,” Dodd said.
Dodd said Thursday he recently was reminded that he then took the unusual step of praising the GOP nominee, Sen. Robert Dole of Kansas, the decorated and grievously wounded World War II veteran.
“So let me say to Senator Robert Dole, on behalf of the thousands here in this United Center, thank you from a generation of Americans living in freedom because of your sacrifices,” Dodd said.
The remark, and by extension Dole, got a standing ovation from the Democrats.
Last week, before heading for the airport and the Dominican Republic, Dodd laughed as he recounted the moment. “I’m thinking myself, you know, boy, things have changed.”