The Providence Journal has a good column today about Chris Dodd’s book about his father Thomas Dodd, a Nuremberg prosecutor. The piece excerpts a September 1945 letter from the father that characterizes Jews in a negative way:
“You know how
I have despised anti-Semitism. You know how strongly I feel toward
those who preach intolerance of any kind. With that knowledge — you
will understand when I tell you that this staff is about seventy-five
percent Jewish. Now my point is that the Jews should stay away from
this trial — for their own sake. For — mark this well — the charge ‘a
war for the Jews’ is still being made and in the post-war years it will
be made again and again. The too large percentage of Jewish men and
women here will be cited as proof of this charge. Sometimes it seems
that the Jews will never learn about these things. They seem intent on
bringing new difficulties down on their own heads. I do not like to
write about this matter —it is distasteful to me — but I am disturbed
about it. They are pushing and crowding and competing with each other
and with everyone else.”Chris Dodd tells me that when he reads this letter, “I first of all cringe a little bit because I wonder what he’s driving at.”
Columnist Charles Bakst goes on to say, "Today, many Jews fault FDR for not having acted more boldly to save the Jews of Europe."
It’s interesting how the Holocaust resonates in our politics today. I remember how Tom Lantos justified his (disastrous) judgment that we should invade Iraq by equating Saddam to Hitler. And I have questioned Dodd’s motives in publishing this book right now. (Though I admire him for including the squeamish passage above.) The political scientist Michael Desch has argued (in "The Myth of Abandonment, The Use and Abuse of the Holocaust Analogy") that Holocaust lessons, true and false, distort our Middle Eastern policy…
