A reminder that the words of politicians matter
State Rep. Anne Dauphinais accused Gov. Ned Lamont of being like Adolf Hitler for using his emergency powers to issue mask and vaccine mandates. “King Lamont aka Hitler,” she wrote.
Then Dauphinais responded to an uproar over her savage Facebook post with a statement, it hardly seemed possible, that made her sound worse. Dauphinais, a Republican from Killingly, claimed she had intended to compare mask and vaccine mandates to the genocidal
German Fuhrer’s early years, not the Hitler who began the Second World War and escalated the Holocaust that claimed six million Jewish lives.
With that defiant explanation, Dauphinais added a side order of incoherence to her plateful of malice.
On Tuesday, legislative leaders of both political parties issued a joint statement condemning comparisons of public policy decisions to the Holocaust, Hitler and genocide. They did not name Dauphinais.
Lamont responded with dignity and a history lesson. He said that hurling Nazi epithets at officials and comparing unhappy members of the public to Holocaust victims diminishes the suffering of those caught in the Germans’ death machine.
Venomous revelations can serve a painful purpose; public figures sometimes unmask themselves.
When a politician’s bile erodes his or her internal filter, we see the authentic person.
We have been warned.
I’m sorry that Lamont endured a comparison to Hitler, but Dauphinais’s dark nature unfurled in public ought to halt her climb through the thin ranks of Republican officeholders. Jarring as the knowledge is, it is better to know a public figure’s malicious beliefs than to assume in error that he or she shares our essential common values.
The Dauphinais episode and Lamont’s response provided reminders that we must remind
ourselves and others of the events that created the world we inhabit. History matters.
President Joseph Biden unintentionally provided a reminder Friday of the price of forgetting. He was at UConn on Friday for the rededication of The Thomas Dodd Research Center as the Dodd Center for Human Rights. The center will now honor both Thomas Dodd, who served in the U.S. Senate for two terms, and his son, Christopher Dodd, who was elected to the Senate five times before becoming a Washington lobbyist.
The center was originally a tribute to the late Sen. Dodd, the father who was censured in 1967 by his colleagues for taking more than $100,000 in campaign funds for personal use during his final term in the Senate. The elder Dodd’s low regard for a free press came into view when he unsuccessfully sued columnist Drew Pearson over columns exposing the senator’s abuse of his office.
The sullied Democrat ran for reelection in 1970 as an independent and placed a distant third. Christopher Dodd served as his campaign manager.
Christopher Dodd has also managed the decadeslong campaign to burnish his father’s image. Without it, Thomas Dodd would have faded from view.
The rededication is an appropriate moment to understand who the state’s premier public university continues to honor.
It’s the rare human rights organization that is named after a prosecutor of Nazis at the Nuremberg trials who also lobbied for a Guatemalan dictator while out of public office in 1957, as Thomas Dodd did. As a member of the House in 1956, Dodd successfully sponsored legislation to increase American aid to Guatemala.
In 1967, the year of his censure, Dodd turned his rage on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Connecticut Democrat was an unyielding supporter of President Lyndon Johnson and his escalation of the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Dodd was furious when Dr. King delivered an address urging a negotiated withdrawal of American troops.
According to David Garrow, a King biographer, the speech received little attention until a few months later when “Dodd, a close ally of Johnson, attacked Dr. King and cited an obscure 1799 criminal statute, the Logan Act, that prohibited private citizens from interacting with foreign governments.”
The threat, which the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize recipient believed Dodd delivered on behalf of Johnson, worked. King, already hounded by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, saw the danger Dodd’s attack posed to the civil rights movement. King knew the power of unhappy government officials to jail him on specious charges. In his final months,
King muted his criticism of Johnson’s Vietnam policies. He was assassinated in Memphis the following April.
Let us study history in its many forms, but UConn soils its mission as the host of a human rights center that honors Thomas Dodd.