Like Father, Like Son

Room S-211 is not on the Capitol tour. It is a small, ornate chamber, with the look and feel of the late Grant administration. There are two tables, covered in white cloth, one for Republicans, one for Democrats. The room has been the scene of much Senate history, high and low. It was here that Lyndon Johnson twisted arms for civil rights (the room is named after LBJ) and here that Bobby Baker, the secretary of the Senate majority in the early 1960s, informed President Kennedy that he had received the best oral sex ever from a call girl named Ellen Rometsch (later suspected of spying for East Germany and deported by the Kennedys).

Once, there was a lot of chatter and teasing between the Democratic table and the Republican table, but not so much anymore, says Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. "This is not a fraternity, it's a business," he says, and that's the way it should be—the business of governing. Still, as he sat in S-211 late one afternoon, he said he missed the close relationships, often between members of different parties, that marked the institution he joined 28 years ago, before his hair turned silver, then white. He ticks off old Senate buddies dead or departed, leaving him a senior man—he had his choice of chairmanships and chose, possibly to his regret, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

Dodd is a natural politician. He is charming, smiling, engaged, genuinely empathetic; for years he has been a force in the Senate for human rights and the protection and care of poor mothers and children. But he is in deep political trouble, and he knows it. Told that 54 percent of the voters in his state, in a recent Quinnipiac University poll, did not find him "honest or trustworthy," he visibly winced. In a heavily Democratic state, the poll showed him trailing one possible Republican challenger by 16 points. He conceded that the odds of his reelection next year are "about 50-50." The popular anger against him is so great that it can, he says, be "very hard to walk into a room" of voters. He is the victim of a "perfect storm" of circumstances, "a series of coincidences" that have robbed him of support. Just as the recession was biting his constituents, it was reported that he had received favorable treatment on a mortgage for his home in Connecticut and, his enemies allege, a sweetheart deal on a cottage in Ireland. In the Senate, Dodd tried to play the populist by pushing through a bill to cap executive pay at financial institutions receiving federal bailouts—only to be embarrassed when he was blamed for creating an exception for bonuses awarded by AIG, the troubled insurance giant headquartered in Connecticut. (Dodd's wife, Jackie Clegg, was until 2004 a director of a Bermuda-based affiliate of AIG.)

So far none of the allegations has added up to much. "You can weave anything together," protests Dodd, who insists that he did not financially benefit from the mortgage; that the Irish cottage was, as he puts it, "a plain vanilla deal"; that the bonus exception was carved by the White House, and he only learned that it applied to AIG employees after the fact. A NEWSWEEK investigation into Dodd's Irish cottage reveals, at most, some eyebrow-raising coincidences. But the appearances are unfortunate, and Dodd concedes that he has not done a good job of laying suspicions to rest.

That Dodd should be in trouble for allegedly feathering his own nest is ironic. In a body populated by multimillionaires, Dodd is a relative pauper who has never shown much interest in making money. "[Joe] Biden and I used to have a contest: who's the poorest senator?" Dodd jokes. It is also ironic, if not tragic, because something similar has happened before—to the man Dodd esteems above all others, his own father.

Chris Dodd grew up in a large Irish Catholic family listening to his father's tales of crusading for justice. Thomas Dodd had chased the Dillinger gang as an FBI agent, and prosecuted Nazi war criminals and the Ku Klux Klan as a government lawyer. As a U.S. senator from Connecticut in the 1950s and '60s he was a protégé of LBJ and was seriously considered as his running mate in 1964. But in June 1967, Dodd was censured by his Senate colleagues, in a 92–5 vote, for allegedly diverting more than $100,000 of his campaign funds for personal use. As the votes were cast on the Senate floor, the elder Dodd hissed at his colleagues, "I hope it never happens to you what has happened to me."

Young Chris was in the Peace Corps at the time. But he came back to run his father's campaign as an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1970. The senior Dodd was badly beaten. "It killed him," recalls Bill Curry, a longtime Dodd family friend who was at campaign headquarters that night and saw Chris drive his broken father home. "He died less than a year later." Curry and Dodd—onetime drinking buddies, sometime political rivals, now close friends again—often talk about the old days, and Dodd's current political predicament. The father's experience is a big reason why Dodd is running all-out for reelection, says Curry. "It's always hard to walk away from politics, but Chris, of all people, won't walk away under a cloud since so much of his life has been a kind of reclamation project for his father's reputation."