Father's Day for the Senate's ‘Legacy Caucus’

WASHINGTON - It's a Washington group that has never had an official meeting. Evan Bayh's a member, and has jokingly called it the "legacy caucus." Six U.S. senators: Evan Bayh, Chris Dodd, Bob Bennett, Lincoln Chafee, Lisa Murkowski and David Pryor — three Democrats and three Republicans — are linked together by history. Each currently represents the same state his or her father once did in the Senate.

They join a list of 39 other children who followed their fathers into the Senate, according to the Senate Historical Office. 

In individual interviews, these senators reflect on their fathers' Senate careers and the impact on their own political careers, as Father's Day approaches.

Senators Dodd
(Democrats-Connecticut)
Thomas Dodd (1959-1971) and his son, Chris Dodd (1981-Present)
Chris Dodd has fond memories of coming to the Capitol for the first time in 1953 for his father, Thomas Dodd's, swearing-in to the U.S. House. A decade later, the younger Dodd came back to work as a Senate page for the summer. To this day he remembers taking orders from senators.  "I still find that when senators will snap their fingers, I twitch," Dodd say.

Dodd has done research on father-son and father-daughter combinations in congressional history, and even toyed with the idea of writing a book. "There's a very healthy suspicion people have about anyone that thinks they have a right to an office because of their last name," he explains. "It's a very delicate relationship. You can eventually earn the respect of a constituency, but at the outset, if people think that you think you have a right to this, they will vote against you so quickly it will make your head sweat."

While Chris Dodd was in the Peace Corps in 1967, his father was censured by the Senate and then, in 1970, lost his bid for re-election. Looking back on the censure almost 40 years later, Chris Dodd says he still views it as a "miscarriage of justice," but has refrained over the years from encouraging senators who wanted to pass a resolution to exonerate him. "I never wanted to go back and reopen all of that," he says. "My own view was that he was a person of strong views, deep convictions, strong values, and I thought that he got a raw deal. But he's not the only person in public life that's happened to."

Comparing himself with his father, Chris Dodd says, "Stylistically, I think, in a sense, my father was maybe less collegial… He was more inclined to not develop relationships with people whom he disagreed with. I have good relationships with people I don't necessarily share substantive views with."

Something his father taught him that still sticks: "Good politics are good manners." Asked what advice he thinks his father would have offered on his decision whether or not to run for president in 2008, Dodd starts laughing and jokes, "I suspect he might want to have me checked out by some psychiatrist." He says the first bit of advice his dad would probably give him is "don't be presumptuous, go out and see how you're received, see how people react to what you have to say." But, Dodd adds, "I'd like to think he'd be supportive of it."

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