16 SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2020
NVice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
knew how to flatter an old friend.
He had been sitting in the Oval Office in
May 2014, in his telling, convening pri-
vately with Chancellor Angela Merkel of
Germany and President Barack Obama
when another commitment demanded
his attention: Christopher J. Dodd, the
former Connecticut senator turned mov-
ie industry lobbyist, was expecting Mr.
Biden imminently at a trade conference
nearby.
The vice president said he bid the
chancellor farewell.
“Angela Merkel looked at me like,
‘What in the hell is he talking about?’ ” he
recounted a short while later — perhaps
with characteristic exaggeration — talk-
ing up Mr. Dodd’s clout before his col-
leagues at the Motion Picture Associa-
tion of America.
The vice president noted the “rumors,”
dating to their time as legislative peers,
that Mr. Dodd “controlled” him despite
Mr. Biden’s Senate seniority.
“I’ve given new life to those rumors,”
he joked.
Six years later, Mr. Biden would appear
to be doing so again. With the biggest de-
cision of his long campaign life looming —
choosing a running mate before accept-
ing the Democratic presidential nomina-
tion in less than two weeks — he has
tasked Mr. Dodd with helping to lead the
selection process.
The choice is about comfort and trust
for Mr. Biden, his friends and allies say:
Mr. Dodd, a fellow septuagenarian Irish
Catholic from the Northeast, has known
Mr. Biden for decades and is intimately
familiar with the capital’s corridors of
power. As a legislator, Mr. Dodd was re-
garded as canny and effective by biparti-
san consensus, traits that could serve
him, and the former vice president, well
in a role that necessarily entails seeking
agreement from disparate groups.
Yet his involvement in 2020 has also
struck some Democrats as curious, at
minimum, from the moment it was an-
nounced in April. As Mr. Biden pledges to
name a woman to the ticket and works to
convince progressive voters that he
hears their calls for wide-scale change,
he has elevated, in Mr. Dodd, a Washing-
ton uber-veteran long trailed by allega-
tions of personal and financial indiscre-
tion.
Criticisms of Mr. Dodd, lobbed quietly
in some Democratic circles for months,
spilled into open view late last month af-
ter Politico reported that Mr. Dodd had
privately complained about a lack of “re-
morse” from Senator Kamala Harris of
California, a top vice-presidential con-
tender, over her attacks on Mr. Biden
when she ran for president last year.
While former staff members have de-
fended Mr. Dodd as a champion of women
and he issued a statement saying the re-
marks as reported “do not represent my
view on Senator Harris,” some younger
Democratic women have accused him of
conveying a retrograde vision of female
political ambition. “The 1980s called,”
tweeted Jess O’Connell, a former top ad-
viser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential
campaign, “and wants Sen. Dodd back.”
But then, so did Mr. Biden, a fact as re-
flective of his political instincts as any
vice-presidential pick he might make.
In many ways, Mr. Biden, who is often
publicly wistful about a bygone era of
Senate harmony, has identified in Mr.
Dodd a kind of avatar of the Washington
he loved, when lawmakers got along and
the chamber retained a sheen of states-
manship. He once called Mr. Dodd his
“single best friend” in Congress.
“You look at Chris, and you think, man,
there’s a lot of tradition there,” said Bob
Kerrey, a former Democratic senator
from Nebraska who served with both
men, nodding at Mr. Dodd’s legislative
lineage as the son of a senator.
“Chris Dodd, John Kerry — the guys,
right?” Carol Moseley Braun, a former
Democratic senator from Illinois, said of
Mr. Biden’s friend group in his Senate
heyday. “Being the Black girl, I was not
part of the old boys’ network. I was not
part of the circle of friends, and I would
never be. That was just the way things
are. But they were all nice to me.”
In an emailed statement, a Biden cam-
paign spokesman, Andrew Bates, said
the former vice president was “deeply
grateful for Sen. Dodd’s friendship and
his contributions to the selection process,
alongside his incredibly talented col-
leagues.”
But in naming Mr. Dodd one of four se-
lection committee co-chairs, Mr. Biden
has also revived examinations of his
friend’s own checkered résumé.
This includes a politically damaging
controversy over whether Mr. Dodd re-
ceived preferential treatment on Coun-
trywide loans. A Senate ethics panel
cleared him of serious wrongdoing in
2009 but scolded him for not taking great-
er care to avoid the appearance of impro-
priety.
There was also a longstanding accusa-
tion that Mr. Dodd participated in an
episode of sexual misconduct involving a
waitress and Senator Edward M. Ken-
nedy, his close friend, in the mid-1980s.
Tales of Mr. Dodd’s womanizing as a
then-unmarried senator were so legion
that veterans of Capitol Hill at times in-
voked his name in private last spring af-
ter Mr. Biden faced his own accusation of
sexual assault.
Yes, there were lawmakers who had a
reputation for lasciviousness, they al-
lowed. But Mr. Biden was not one of them.
He was no Chris Dodd.Big on LoyaltyWhile Mr. Biden, a teetotaler who fa-
mously took the train home to Delaware
each night, did not share his friend’s so-
cial appetites, their dual political arcs
seemed to bond them through the years.
Both men reached the Capitol in their
early 30s — Mr. Biden as a senator, Mr.
Dodd as a congressman until his promo-
tion in 1981 — growing into caucus emi-
nences and frequent collaborators.
And both men joined the historic Dem-
ocratic presidential primary of 2008,
when Mr. Obama outlasted Hillary Clin-
ton for the nomination, and saw their
nonhistoric campaigns roundly rejected
by voters, a parallel setback that friends
say drew them closer.
Like Mr. Biden, former aides say, Mr.
Dodd valued loyalty as a principal virtue
early in his public life, holding close to fa-
vored confidantes.
“He’s one of the rare politicians who
not only expects loyalty but returns it,”
said Marla Romash, who worked on Mr.
Dodd’s first Senate campaign and later
served as his press secretary in the
1980s.
Ms. Romash was among the women
whom Mr. Dodd placed in senior posi-
tions in his office and campaigns.
“That door opened for me through
Chris Dodd,” said Rosa DeLauro, his for-
mer campaign manager and chief of staff
who has been a Connecticut congress-
woman for nearly three decades.
In some corners of the capital, though,
Mr. Dodd’s personal life could occasion-
ally overshadow his record.
He dated Bianca Jagger and amassed
prolific bar tabs with Mr. Kennedy, who
had a starring role in two prominent ac-
counts of Mr. Dodd’s hard-living years.
In one, captured in a 2011 book by the
actress Carrie Fisher, she described a
blind date with Mr. Dodd during a night
out with the two senators. “So, do you
think you’ll be having sex with Chris at
the end of your date?” Mr. Kennedy
asked, according to Ms. Fisher, who re-
called Mr. Dodd leering with “an unusual
grin hanging on his very flushed face.”
A more serious charge circulated in
media reports decades earlier: that Mr.
Kennedy had sexually assaulted Carla
Gaviglio, a young waitress at a Capitol
Hill restaurant, when he was with Mr.
Dodd in 1985. Ms. Gaviglio said in a re-
cent interview that Mr. Kennedy and Mr.
Dodd had summoned her to a private din-
ing room. When she arrived, she recalled,
“I was thrown across the table and then
picked up and thrown on top of Senator
Dodd by Senator Kennedy.” Mr. Kennedy,
Ms. Gaviglio said, then rubbed his geni-
tals on her.
Mr. Dodd did not try to stop Mr. Ken-
nedy during the assault, she said, but she
did not consider Mr. Dodd the instigator.
A spokesman for Mr. Dodd declined to
comment on Ms. Gaviglio’s account.
Friends say Mr. Dodd’s life took a dra-
matic turn after he remarried in 1999 and
became a father. (His first marriage
ended shortly after he reached the Sen-
ate.) And at no point did his after-hours
conduct appear to dent his standing as a
reliable Democrat who was well liked byhis colleagues.
For years, amid an extended stay on
the Foreign Relations Committee and
legislative victories on children’s issues,
Mr. Dodd was perhaps best known for
working to pass the Family and Medical
Leave Act, which offered workers unpaid
time off to care for a child or sick relative
and became law under President Bill
Clinton.
Seeking the presidency himself in2008, Mr. Dodd anchored his bid around
ending the Iraq war, which he had voted
to authorize, and promising financial se-
curity to retirees. He offered himself up to
Democrats with a less-than-stirring self-
description: an “unknown quantity with
experience.”An Emissary RoleThe electorate did not reward thispitch.
And Mr. Dodd and Mr. Biden found
themselves at last on divergent profes-
sional paths after their twin 2008 cam-
paign failures.
Mr. Biden became vice president. Mr.
Dodd became a lame duck, though not be-
fore co-writing what is now his most cited
legislative legacy: the Dodd-Frank regu-
latory overhaul of 2010, expanding fed-
eral oversight of the financial system.
As chairman of the Senate Banking
Committee, Mr. Dodd had fought percep-
tions that he had grown too close to spe-
cial interests and corporations he was
charged with overseeing. The senator’s
top campaign contributors included ma-
jor insurance, securities and investment
firms, according to the Center for Re-
sponsive Politics, and the pharmaceuti-
cal industry pushed for Mr. Dodd’s re-
election.
But facing the prospect of a difficult
race, Mr. Dodd resolved to leave on his
terms. He announced in early 2010 that
he would not seek re-election.
And in 2011, he took a job with the Mo-
tion Picture Association of America,
earning $2.4 million that year — more
than double what his predecessor had
made — as Hollywood’s top lobbyist. For
his full six-and-a-half years with the non-
profit trade association, Mr. Dodd re-
ceived more than $25 million, according
to filings with the I.R.S.
In that post, he was credited with help-
ing to increase the distribution of Ameri-
can movies in China. He referred to Mr.
Biden as “our champion inside the White
House.”
Mr. Dodd stepped down in 2017, citing
his age as a factor. But rather than retire
from lobbying — work that in 2010 he had
said he would never pursue — he joined a
white-shoe law firm in 2018. In recent
years, lobbying disclosure reports show,
Mr. Dodd has focused on the interests of
victims of terrorist attacks in Israel, rep-
resenting the plaintiffs in a high-profile
case brought by a group of American
families against the Palestine Liberation
Organization.
His return to the political fore this year
was both unexpected and unsurprising to
former colleagues, given the presump-
tive Democratic nominee.
Of the four co-chairs on Mr. Biden’s se-
lection committee — which also includes
Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester of
Delaware, Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los An-
geles and Cynthia Hogan, a former Biden
aide — Mr. Dodd is viewed by many in the
party as a first among equals.
People who have spoken to Mr. Dodd
understand him to be occupying some-
thing of an emissary role: collecting im-
pressions (and sharing his own).
“Chris’s role is to try and bring them to-
gether and to report to Joe as to what the
consensus is,” said Barbara Boxer, a for-
mer Democratic senator from California
who served with both men.
As the campaign nears its choice, Mr.
Biden’s faith in his judgment would ap-
pear to be unswerving.
In 2018, when Mr. Dodd’s new law firm,
Arnold & Porter, held a party to honor its
newest lobbyist, the former vice presi-
dent stopped in for a toast. Mr. Biden
complimented the firm partners on their
“incredibly good judgment in convincing
Chris to come on.”
He closed with a joke.
“Anyway, I just wanted to say congrat-
ulations,” Mr. Biden said. “And I hope I
don’t need you.”Biden Puts an Old Friend in Charge of Picking His New Partner
Insider Helps in Hunt
For a Running Mate
This article is by Matt Flegenheimer, Re-
becca R. Ruizand Sydney Ember.
From left, Senators John Kerry, Ben Nelson, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Christopher J. Dodd and Barack Obama were colleagues on Capitol Hill in 2005.DENNIS COOK/ASSOCIATED PRESSMr. Dodd in 1984. Mr. Biden once called him his “best friend” in Congress.BOB CHILD/ASSOCIATED PRESSMr. Dodd unsuccessfully sought the presidency in 2008, as did Mr. Biden.STEPHEN CROWLEY/THE NEW YORK TIMESAfter stepping down as a lawmaker in 2011, Mr. Dodd became a top lobbyist.RICHARD PERRY/THE NEW YORK TIMESKitty Bennett contributed research.