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Christopher J. Dodd and
Christopher H. Shays sit on opposite sides of the aisle and in separate
houses on Capitol Hill. Dodd, a Democrat and candidate for his party's
2008 Presidential nomination, is considered a left-of-center liberal who
has served as a U.S. Senator since 1981. Shays, a member of the U.S. House
of Representatives, is the only Republican from the New England states to
survive a sweeping shift from right to left in the 2006 election. One of
the more non-partisan members of Congress, many in his party have derided
him with the term RINO (Republican in Name Only) for his tendency to side
on some issues with the opposition. Political affiliation aside, the two
men have much in common besides their shared first name.
Born in
Connecticut
only slightly more than a year apart on the cusp of the "Baby
Boom," both came of age during the 1960s. As young men facing the
challenges of the Defining Generation, President John F. Kennedy's words
about national and global responsibilities resounded strongly in both of
their young minds. After graduating from college both men opted to answer
that challenge by serving in the newly established Peace Corps, Dodd at
age 22 during the period from 1966 to 1968 and Shays at age 23 from 1968
to 1970.
While researching for this
book we found particularly interesting and refreshing, the response of
Congressman Shays' office when we called for an interview. "You
know," responded John Cardarelli in Congressman Shays' Press Office,
"Senator Dodd ALSO served in the Peace Corps." Seemingly
innocuous on the surface, upon reflection we came to realize that Peace
Corps service provides those who have accepted that challenge a sense of
fraternity that transcends partisan politics or political affiliation.
Indeed, proportionally, the number of members of the 110th U.S. Congress
who have served in the Peace Corps vastly eclipses the ratio of
legislators who have served in the military.
CHRISTOPHER DODD
Born May 27, 1944, in
Willimantic, Connecticut, Christopher Dodd was raised in a large family,
the fifth of six children. It was a family dedicated to public service and
concerned with both home-grown and global injustice. His father, Thomas
Dodd, served as a Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.)
in 1933-34 and then as assistant to five successive Attorney Generals.
Many of his cases involved investigating and prosecuting civil liberties
violations and criminal activities of the Klu Klux Klan. Following World
War II he served as one of the lead prosecutors during the Nuremberg war
crimes tribunals, and was recognized for his exemplary work with award of
the Medal of Freedom in 1946.
In 1952 Thomas Dodd was
elected to the first of two terms as a Congressman from Connecticut, and
in 1958 was elected to represent his state in the United States Senate.
When President John F. Kennedy was inaugurated on January 20, 1961, by
virtue of his father's position in Congress 17-year-old Christopher Dodd
was privileged to be among the crowd that stood on the Capitol steps to
witness that historic moment. He was personally moved by the President's
challenging words to a new generation, "Ask not what your country can
do for you - ask what you can do for your country."
After obtaining a Bachelors
Degree in English Literature from Providence College in 1966, Chris Dodd
acted upon President Kennedy's challenge by joining the Peace Corps.
"By the summer of 1966, I was carrying a 30-pound backpack for five
miles through the mountains of the Dominican Republic, and as the sweat
ran down my face, my socks dissolved inside my boots, and several dozen
large insects ate me alive, I remember thinking, very distinctly--'This'll
make a great introduction for my speech to the National Peace Corps
Association'," he recalled in 2006.[i]
Remembering those days of
foreign service when the 22-year-old son of a United States Senator left
the security of a comfortable home in
America
to help strangers in a foreign land, Dodd says it was one of the two most
nerve-wracking moments of his life. The second came two decades later when
Dodd was himself a U.S. Senator, and it came in the same place.
"The first (most
nerve-wracking moment) came in 1966, on the road to Monción, a village in
the rural hills," he says. "I was a new Peace Corps volunteer,
and I couldn’t believe what I’d just gotten myself into.
I was 22 years old, barely spoke a word of Spanish, and had no idea
what I was doing. I’d been
proud of my idealism; but at that moment, it felt like pure naiveté.
It felt like my family was on the other side of the world.
I focused on the road and thought about two years with no one to
talk to and no place to call home.
"I’d never worked so
hard in my life as I did the first summer in Monción.
And the more I got my hands dirty, the less I worried.
With the local workers, I helped finish building a library, a youth
club and a maternity clinic–projects I’d never imagined undertaking.
We would take breaks in the heat of the day, sitting together in
the shade and speaking mostly in gestures and stray syllables.
But every day I picked up five or 10 new words of Spanish.
The first thing I learned to ask for was a drink of water!
"When I could finally
make my way through a conversation, I tried to answer the one question
that came from almost everybody: “¿Por que viniste?”
Why did you come here? What
made you leave your home and your country and live with us for two years?
"I had a simple answer
for them: Someone asked me to….
"I recalled standing
on the East Front of the Capitol on a freezing January day in 1961,
listening to President Kennedy’s famous inaugural address.
I understood that when he talked about a torch being passed, he was
talking to me, to my entire generation. President Kennedy asked us to
stand up and lead–and that’s what I was trying to do. All of that
probably didn’t come across as clearly in my halting Spanish.
But I think my friends caught the drift of it."[ii]
Dodd's two years in the
Dominican Republic left an indelible impression on his life. He came away
from the experience with a new realization as to how fortunate he was to
live in a prosperous country like the United States. In a sense he left
his heart in Central America where he had witnessed how difficult life
could be in other parts of the world. The experience left him with two key
ideals that would later mark much of his work as a public servant. Dodd
truly came to believe that those with privilege had an inherent obligation
to reach out to others as he had helped the people of the Dominican
Republic. Further, he came to a firm belief that in helping others he had
enhanced his own life, and that an important factor in developing good
citizens at home was a call to EVERY young American to public service.
Chris Dodd's pride in the
important work of the Peace Corps has made him not only one of its
greatest proponents, but also one of its most astute historians. He likes
to point out, for instance, that months before President Kennedy set forth
his vision in his inaugural speech, he had alliterated the message in an
impromptu speech at the
University
of
Michigan
.
While on the campaign trail
in October 1960, President Kennedy arrived late at night at the
University
of
Michigan
where he was surprised to find a crowd of 10,000 students wanting to hear
from him. Drawing on a speech recently written by Ted Sorensen and meant
to be delivered two weeks later at the Cow Palace, candidate John F.
Kennedy improvised. "How many of you (students) who are going to be
doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana?" he asked.
"Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in
Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling the world?" The crowd
of young responded with cheers and applause.
"I don't know exactly
why the idea came to Kennedy on the steps of the Michigan Union;"
says Dodd, "but if any of us should ever be lucky enough to have
10,000 young men and women waiting for hours to see us outdoors in the
cold, I'd hope we could come up with something as meaningful. President
Kennedy didn't have an organization for this idea, he didn't have
funding--he didn't even have a name for it! But this is exactly where we
trace our (Peace Corps) origin, before bureaucracy, before executive
orders, all the way back to the spontaneous and nameless need."[iii]
John Kennedy reiterated his
challenge to a young America again, this time as planned, in San
Francisco. Noting the humble beginnings of the organization, Dodd likes to
point out with a laugh that this came at a venue called the "Cow
Palace." The noble concept quickly embraced by the young however, was
not so eagerly welcomed by the older. Vice President Richard Nixon,
running against Kennedy in the Presidential election called the Peace
Corps a "haven for draft-dodgers." Even President Eisenhower
scoffed, calling it "a juvenile experiment." Kennedy won the
election, set forth his vision at inauguration, and the Peace Corps was
born.
During that period when the
Defining Generation came of age the United States was involved in two
wars. In Vietnam there was the war of bullets, during which one of Chris'
friends, a Marine, lost his life at Khe Sanh in the defense of freedom.
The other was a war of ideology…the Cold
War around the globe, in which Chris shared his life to spread
freedom.
President Kennedy had
spoken to that new kind of warfare, and ideological struggle against
Communism in a battle for hearts and minds in the world in his "Cow
Palace" speech, noting:
| "I want to turn now to the
problems of our foreign policy staff overseas. Many Americans have
marveled at the selfless example of Dr. Tom Dooley in Laos. Many
have shuddered at the examples in "The Ugly American."
Both examples may be found in great numbers in our oversea
missions. But most of our personnel are somewhere in between, most
could be doing a better job, and most must do a better job if we
are to survive the modern techniques of conquest.
"For on the other side of the globe,
diplomats skilled in the languages and customs of the nation to
whom they are accredited - teachers, doctors, technicians and
experts desperately needed in a dozen fields by underdeveloped
nations - are pouring forth from Moscow to advance the cause of
world communism.
"The Lenin Institute for Political Warfare
exports each year hundreds of agents to disrupt free institutions
in the uncommitted world. A friend of mine visiting the Soviet
Union last year met a young Russian couple studying Swahili and
African customs at the Moscow Institute of Languages. They were
not language teachers - he was a sanitation engineer and she was a
nurse. And they were being prepared to live among African nations
as missionaries for communism.
"Already Asia has more of these Soviet than
American technicians - and Africa may by this time. Russian
diplomats are the first to arrive, the first to offer aid, the
only ones represented by key officials at diplomatic receptions.
They know the country, they speak the language - and in Guinea,
Ghana, Laos, and all over the globe, they are working fast and
effectively. Missiles and arms cannot stop them - neither can
American dollars. They can only be countered by Americans equally
skilled and equally dedicated - and if I am elected, I ask you to
help me find those Americans." |
Christopher Dodd notes,
"In sending muscle and know-how to the Third World, in fighting to
lift up the destitute, in a thousand painful acts, the Peace Corps was
also doing America's work. Our reputation thrives when the world sees our
ideals not just in ink, but incarnate in the young man or woman with dirty
hands who is working in the sun beside you."[i]
Following his Peace Corps
service and upon returning home, Christopher Dodd voluntarily offered
himself to that other conflict. Through he never served in Vietnam, Dodd
enlisted in the National Guard in 1969 and later served in the U.S. Army
Reserves. He was honorably
discharged in 1975.
Decades later in the
aftermath of the horrible attack on America on September 11, 2001, Senator
Dodd said, "In all the controversies of the last five years, all the
vagaries of strategy and tactics and plan and counter plan, there's one
policy that guarantees success: sending our best young men and women into
the world to make America known.
"You can only hate
America if you don't know America."[ii]
At the time of that
statement Christopher Dodd was the United States Senator from Connecticut.
First elected in 1981, he is the only person from that state to follow his
father into the Senate, the youngest Connecticut man ever elected to the
Senate, and the only Connecticut Senator popularly elected to five
consecutive terms. He has used his role to promote not only Peace Corps
friendly legislation, but to challenge all Americans to service.
When he launched his bid
for the 2008 Presidential election he introduced an "American
Community Initiative" that would make public service mandatory for
all Americans. "People want to be asked (to help)," he explained
his new Kennedy-esque idea. "They love to be asked. If you ask people
to do things, to become a part of something like this, you'd be amazed at
the response. People in a time of crisis do it almost voluntarily. But if
you can begin early enough in schools, with the leaned experience of doing
this, it becomes contagious in a way."
In fact, the second
most-nerve-wracking moment in the life of Christopher Dodd was what
cemented the great value of service, not only for those served, but for
those who volunteer.
"Twenty years after I
arrived in Monción as a volunteer," he says, "I went back as a
U.S. Senator. I was truly scared--not as a young man in a new country, but
as an older man in a familiar one. Would I be a stranger again? Would
anyone remember me?
"I was overjoyed when
they did. My old friends still knew me by name--and I had reason to think
that I'd made as deep a mark on their lives as they'd made on mine. We sat
and talked about the years that had brought us back together, in sight of
the library we'd built with our own hands."[iii]
"In the years since,
as a Senator and a returned volunteer, I've come to understand that
nothing has shaped my life as powerfully as that Peace Corps experience.
It taught me that working side-by-side toward a common goal has an
enormous power to bridge differences of background, culture, and
language."[iv]
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS
Even as Christopher Dodd
was departing for two years of service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the
Caribbean
, 21-year old
Connecticut
native Christopher Shays, one year Dodd's junior, was completing his own
education while recalling President Kennedy's challenge. Born October
18, 1945, in Stamford, Connecticut, Shays would grow up the youngest of
four boys in Bud and Peggy Shay's home in Darien.
While still in grade
school Chris became enamored reading about great American public
servants: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln.
Their examples so inspired him that early in his life he determined he
wanted to spend his own life in public service. By the time he was a
Junior at
Darien
High School
his sights were zeroed in on a political career in public office,
although he shied away from running for student government at that time.
"I was afraid I would lose and that I would be embarrassed,"
he says.
A member of the Church of
Christ, Scientist, following graduation he enrolled in Principia, a
private Christian Scientist school in Elsah, Illinois. The year was 1964
and the war in Vietnam had not yet become an American issue. Shays
registered as a Conscientious Objector and began his educational pursuit
to prepare for a life time of individual service.
After graduating with his
Bachelor's Degree in 1968, Shays returned home to Connecticut with his
high school sweetheart Betsi DeRaismes who had also graduated with him
at Principia. Betsi wanted to become a teacher and would, in fact do
just that, spending 27 years in Connecticut classrooms ranging from 1st
through 10th grade to teach social studies and liberal arts. The two
were married that summer but, before setting out to fulfill their career
goals, they answered another call to service that would ultimately
empower and inspire those later efforts.
It would probably be
accurate to say that Chris and Betsi honeymooned in Tahiti. Certainly
that sounds glamorous on the face of it. The fact is, shortly after
Chris and Besti said "I do" they jumped into their little
black Volkswagon and drove to Washington, D.C. to say "I
will." Arriving in the Nation's Capitol they filled out
applications to become volunteers in the 7-year-old Peace Corps.
"Everything about the Peace Corps seemed wonderful to us,"
Betsi said in a 2001 speech at her
alma
matter; "the opportunity to
make a difference, to live and work in another country, to have a great
adventure. Those two years provided some of the best Love stories of our
lives."[i]
While the idea of young
newly-weds spending two years in Tahiti sounds at once both privileged
and exotic, Chris and Betsi didn't go there for romance…they went
there to work. Tahiti is part of French Polynesia, a scattering of small
islands in the South Pacific that are primarily heavily jungled rain
forests. The larger island of Tahiti itself is a popular tourist
destination with developed urban areas, but Chris and Betsi were sent to
bring American assistance to the more out-of-the-way places. They had
two assignments, one on a remote island and the other in a small town
where they worked in the poorest performing school in the country.
"You get these
debates as Peace Corps volunteers, what are you doing here," Chris
says. "You are teaching in their schools, you are healing their
wounds, you are helping them build their roads, you are helping farmers
know what to farm, you are helping fishermen fish better…I felt fairly
convinced what we were doing as teachers in particular was to…help
young people grow and learn, but you are also trying to identify the
jewels that could get ignored in an education system that doesn't know
how to pick out the jewels, the future leaders of countries.
"I became fairly
convinced that as the population of these countries grow they just
gravitate to their urban areas. They can't live their old ways. We are
not westernizing them, we are urbanizing them. We are helping someone
learn a trade, if you are a teacher, so that they can be a bookkeeper or
someone who can contribute in an urban life and be able to support
themselves and their families."[ii]
While Chris and Betsi's
work was largely with children and the underprivileged adults in remote
areas of Fiji, they further voluntarily engaged in a project their
American experience gave them unique insights to handle. The wives of
Fiji's King and Prime Minister headed a cooperative of some 10,000 local
women who worked to improve their families by making and selling
handicrafts to visiting tourists. Thanks to the insight and efforts of
the Shays, these women were able to modify their program to the point
that the price of their handmade items quadrupled. It would have made an
American entrepreneur proud but Chris Shay's noted, "they felt a
little guilty at first so I said, 'If you were middlemen, I'd feel
guilty, but this (profit) all goes back to the women in the network.' We
were just bringing basic marketing skill that every American
knows."
The Shays returned home
to Connecticut in 1970 inspired by their experience to face an uncertain
future. "When it was time to come home, I think we expected
everything to fall into place easily; jobs, a place to live, a
family," she says. "Instead the story looked more like this: a
recession, no jobs, no income, no place to live, and some unexpected
heartache. Not exactly the story we were expecting." No doubt it
was those years living among the poor of Fiji that gave them both hope
and inspiration. While Betsi began her teaching career, Chris entered
politics.
In 1975 Chris was elected
to the State Legislature. As he had fought to reform life during his
Peace Corps service, he now fought to reform injustice at home. While
speaking out against judicial corruption he became something of a local
hero when he refused to sit down in an anti-corruption trial and was
sentenced to jail for contempt of court. His notoriety from that
personal stand propelled him into the United States House of
Representatives to serve Connecticut's 4th Congressional District in
1987. He has been reelected to that seat ten times.
"I don't say this
with any reluctance," he once told a Congressional hearing.
"Most of the growing I have done in my life I attribute to the 2
years that I was in the Peace Corps, an amazing time in which I did a
great deal of growing as a human being. I think I am a better person
today because of my experience. I think I am a better public servant
today because of the experience that I had in the Peace Corps.
After teaching for 27
years, in 1998 Betsi joined her husband in Washington, D.C. where she
returned to the Peace Corps as director of the Coverdell World Wise
School Program and then later as director of the
Corps' Domestic Programs. In her 2001 address at Principia she
shared the story of a similar Peace Corps couple she had known. It
illustrates well that while serving others, we often become the
beneficiaries of new insights. She said:
"A husband-wife team
from Chicago had been given a very remote assignment in a very
traditional mountain village of Papua, New Guinea. These seemingly
simple villagers had built the couple a bamboo house on stilts, planted
a huge garden, and strewn flower petals on the path, welcoming them to
their new home.
"One evening, during
a story-telling session, the couple pulled out some photographs they had
brought from home. One of them was of two obviously homeless men in
front of a sleek office building in Chicago. In the words of the Peace
Corps volunteer: "Crowding around the photograph for a good stare,
the villagers could not comprehend how the men became homeless, or why
the passersby in the photo were so indifferent. They bombarded me with
questions, and I did my best to make sense of the two ragged beggars in
the midst of such glittering skyscrapers.
"I read from their
questions and solemn mood that they had made an important observation
— these two men must not lack only food and shelter, but also a
general sense of affection and purpose in their community.
"Early the next
morning, we were startled to hear a sharp rap at the door. 'After you
left last night, all of us men on the village council had a very big
meeting. For a long, long time we discussed the two men in your picture.
We have reached a conclusion and have a proposal for you. Please contact
those two men as well as your government. Ask the government if they
will fly those two men to My-ma-fu, just like they did for you. We have
marked two spots of land where we will build houses for those two men,
just like we built for you. Our men will build the houses, and the women
will plant the gardens to feed them.'"[iii]
[i]
Shays, Besti,
Upper
School
Graduation Talk,
Principia
College
,
June 2, 2001
[ii]
Shays, Christopher, Testimony before the Committee on International
Relations, March 18, 1998.
[iv]
Dodd, Senator Christopher J., "The Heart of Peace Corps is in the
villages, not in Washington"
[i]
Dodd, Senator Christopher J., National Peace Corps Association's
Capitol Hill Lunch, September 14, 2006
[ii]
Dodd, Senator Christopher J., "The Heart of Peace Corps is in the
villages, not in Washington"
[iii]
Dodd, Senator Christopher J., National Peace Corps Association's
Capitol Hill Lunch, September 14, 2006
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