History as it unfolded: ‘Letters From Nuremberg’

I had seen all of this from a quite different perspective from President Reagan. To him, Communism was the issue. In American politics, such broad stances continued to play well with a significant segment of the public. Phil Gramm, the senator from Texas, weighed in during the debate on Nicaragua and whether to aid the contras in their rebellion against the leftist Sandinista government. To paraphrase my former colleague, he would often say that Nicaragua is only ten days by tank from Texas.

My own investigations made it clear to me that the excesses of power transcend political labels. The rule of law, on which my father’s stance was always firm, is the ultimate standard. Murder, in short, is still murder. The idea of simply sending unrestricted funding to anyone fighting Communism was, as Senator Edward M. Kennedy said, “giving a blank check to death squads and despotism.”

My view on Communist influence differed from that of my father’s — he had firmly believed in the domino theory, so prevalent in regard to Vietnam. But I recalled that in his later years he understood that there were ominous forces quite apart from anything supported by the Soviets.

In the case of El Salvador in the early 1980s, it was clear to me that the wisest stance for the United States was to send aid to that country’s government only if certain conditions were met. And so, as a freshman senator, I introduced an amendment to a foreign appropriations bill that tied such support to measures of human rights.

Political opponents called this effort naïve, particularly in that it was the idea of a Senate newcomer. But my experiences in Latin America had taught me otherwise, and I pressed on. A report in the New York Times on February 28, 1982, revealed the results: “In approving aid last fall, Congress, under Mr. Dodd’s prodding, made support for El Salvador conditional on a Presidential certification that the junta was making progress on human rights.”

This policy was not only correct for us but, moreover, proved useful to some of those in power in Central America. I remember my conversations with El Salvador’s leader, José Napoleón Duarte, who had come to Washington to lobby for support. In the years before his ascension to high office, he too had been victimized, imprisoned by a military dictatorship. Once in power, he had initiated land reforms and other progressive policies. Even so, death squads were still prevalent. He told me that my efforts to tie aid to human rights measures had actually helped him against his political opponents. There was now a standard that had to be met if the political power structure in the capital of San Salvador hoped to survive.

I thought of all this as the 2006 debates on President Bush’s tactics intensified. I recalled that although Democrats did not hold the White House or the Senate during the debates on Central America, they had still made a significant difference in foreign policy. I was determined to make that happen again.

During our lunch in the LBJ Room, I argued that if we were to go along with the compromise plan, and therefore lend our support to a policy that undermined the rule of law, we would one day regret our actions.

We were, in effect, rolling back the Magna Carta and undermining the Geneva conventions, the dramatic and humane precedent of Nuremberg.

We could regret such a move even more than we regretted our original support for the war in Iraq. I was concerned about the welfare of our own soldiers—what it would mean to those fighting this war and future wars — if we abandoned humane treatment. I was concerned, too, that information gained from unlawfully cruel treatment is not reliable. Even John McCain, whose patriotism has never been in question, admits that when things got bad enough during his more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese he would tell his captors anything they wanted to hear.

My colleagues around the table did not dispute my points. They nodded approvingly. Patrick Leahy argued eloquently in support of them, saying that the Administration’s policy was “flagrantly unconstitutional.” But we were in a box. The election was coming up, and the Republicans would no doubt transform any reasonable defense of human rights into thirty-second spots that played to the fears of voters. We all knew this from painful experience.

I thought of my friend Max Cleland. In 2002, the senator from Georgia was ambushed by the lowest kind of political attack. Max was a Vietnam hero — a triple amputee in the war. He served with distinction in Congress, but just before the 2002 election he expressed opposition to labor restrictions in the president’s Homeland Security bill that unduly restrained the rights of U.S. citizens.

Though Max voted in favor of the bill, Republicans painted Max as a man who lacked the courage to be a leader in a time of crisis. In one television spot, images of Max and Osama bin Laden were presented in the same grainy way. The Republicans did this even though Cleland had certainly demonstrated his courage on the battlefield. That such a tactic worked disheartened us. I remember the reaction of Robert Byrd to the disgraceful campaign. The very senior senator from West Virginia had an incredulous look on his face and said, “Have they no shame? Have they no shame?”

I had no doubt that if we, as a group, had the audacity to take a firm stance against the commander in chief on the interrogation issue we’d get the same treatment.

But we also knew there was another side to this that transcended politics as usual. The stakes had become very high. What looked like a mere compromise was something else — an abandonment of principle.

In all of my time in Congress, I have been influenced by the lessons of what my father did in Nuremberg — and by his defense of principle. The trial that consumed him in 1945 and 1946 was the most important work of his life; he knew this even at the time, as he expressed in his letters.

He was among those who stood firmly on the side of the rule of law — of giving even the world’s most notorious criminals the right to examine fully the evidence against them and to defend themselves with every possible legal tool.

Excerpted from “Letters From Nuremberg: My Father's Narrative of a Quest for Justice" by Christopher Dodd. Copyright © 2007 by Christopher Dodd. Excerpted by permission of Crown Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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