Your Humble Blogger was impressed by quite a few things about Letters from Nuremberg. The letters are from Thomas Dodd, during the time he was involved in the Nuremberg Trials. Mr. Dodd begins as a sort of staff attorney, gets the responsibility for interrogating many of the key defendants, and is eventually named Executive Trial Counsel, second only to Robert Jackson, and for a good deal of the trial the top man while Justice Jackson was away. He talks about the trial and its progress, his feelings about it and about his fellow litigants, and the political situation that they are all stuck in. It’s fascinating stuff.
The letters are about two-thirds of the book. The other third is divided between a rather clumsy retelling of the trial itself, intended to put the letters in their context, and a stirring polemic by Senator Chris Dodd applying his feelings about the Nuremberg Trials to our current situation. This bit is particularly interesting because Sen. Dodd was running for President while the book was coming out.
There’s a lovely tradition of Presidential candidates releasing books during or just before the campaign. These books act both as tools of persuasion and as fund-raisers; they are generally pretty weak as books (with notable exceptions). They talk about the candidate’s life, presented as a compelling (one hopes) narrative sweeping to the White House. They talk about the candidate’s ambition, abilities, policy priorities, advisors, mentors, vision, favorite foods or rock bands, and other helpful information.
This one does not talk about Chris Dodd much at all. He’s a minor character in the letters, being a toddler at the time, and his screed is focused very clearly on issues relevant to Nuremburg. That’s not to say it isn’t political—it’s very political. It’s focused on the political problems of the moment, and the political solutions to them (largely replacing Our Only President and his secretive cabal of crooks and incompetents with some good people), and he does figure in those solutions, but the focus is strongly on the issue and not on the candidate. It may be a helpful book in pulling our country out of some of the worst excesses of our time, but it isn’t very helpful in making a decision about a candidate. Which, as I say, is interesting.
I don’t want to ramble on too long, but I do want to point out something else I find interesting, particularly in a campaign book: the cover. Christopher Dodd’s name is prominent on the cover, but his picture is not. Neither is his father’s. Nor Justice Jackson’s. Nor any of the defendants. Nor any picture of the trial proceedings. No, they chose for the cover an image of the citizens of Nuremburg clearing away rubble. The city was almost entirely destroyed in the war, of course, with the Courthouse (and prison) one of the few buildings remaining in nearly usable shape. Thomas Dodd writes about how terrible the destruction is and how long he imagines it will take them to rebuild. That’s the image presented on the cover of the book: German citizens, defeated in the war, clearing rubble away in a city destroyed by Americans.
That’s an interesting choice to make, at this moment, in this country, for a book by a Presidential candidate.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.