Biden Will Honor Disgraced Senator With Friday Visit to Dodd Center.

President Joseph Biden will visit the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut when he travels to the state Friday. Thomas Dodd represented Connecticut in the United States Senate from 1959-1971. He was defeated for a third term in 1970 as a petitioning candidate, losing to Republican Lowell P. Weicker, Jr.

Thomas Dodd would largely be a faded bad memory for Connecticut but for his son Christopher J. Dodd’s decades-long efforts to polish his father’s reputation. Thomas Dodd, a Democrat, was censured by the Senate in 1967 for diverting for his personal use $116,083 in proceeds from seven testimonial dinners.

Dodd was the first Senator since Joseph McCarthy in 1954 to be censured by his colleagues. Dodd’s troubles began when staff members copied records and gave them to columnist Drew Pearson. When news of Dodd’s larceny became public in Pearson’s widely circulated column, members of the Senate first directed their wrath at the staff members.

Pearson renewed his focus on Dodd and devoted more part or all of 100 of his daily column to the scandal. Some Connecticut newspapers that carried Pearson’s column declined to publish his Dodd saga.

Dodd’s defense was to accuse critics of seeking to damage him because of his unyielding support for American involvement in the war raging in Vietnam. There were nearly 500,000 troops in the besieged Southeast Asia country by 1967 and public opinion had begun to turn against President Lyndon Johnson’s escalation.

Christopher Dodd served in the Senate from 1981 to 2011. He declined to seek a sixth term as his own personal finances in purchasing and financing three homes in the United States and Ireland came into public view.

Dodd said he wanted to teach after announcing he withdrew from the 2010 contest. Instead, he moved quickly into lobbying for the movie business, where he maintained his long friendship with producer Harvey Weinstein, the serial sexual assaulter and generous Dodd contributor. Dodd now lobbies for a Washington firm, trading on his long friendship with Biden.

Friday’s event will require presidential speechwriters to apply several layers of whitewash to Biden’s prepared remarks on behalf of the Dodd he served with and the one who left the Senate two years before the president won his first term from Delaware.

President Bill Clinton was the featured speaker at the 1995 dedication of the Dodd Center. He returned to the center in 2015 to receive the Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights. Clinton received the award 17 years after flying to an airport in Rwanda to insist he knew nothing of the 1994 genocide Tutsi Rawandans by majority Hutus.