The Other Dodd

By David Lightman of the Hartford Courant

Chris Dodd first noticed Jackie Clegg on the Senate floor one day about 20 years ago.

She was young and attractive, but the congressional aide was not about to get close with a U.S. senator.

"I was a staff person," she said. "I was rather deferential."

But Dodd had asked her boss, Utah Sen. Jake Garn, about her, and when Garn organized a charity ski event in Park City, Clegg, coincidentally, was designated as Dodd's ski instructor.

It wasn't an easy assignment. Dodd had not skied in years, and he was being asked to head down the lower part of a course that much later would be used for racing in the 2002 Olympics. Clegg's job was to make sure he made it in one piece.

Turns out he was a pretty good skier. Or maybe there was something about Jackie...

Jackie Clegg Dodd is suddenly everywhere on the campaign trail. Speaking out in South Carolina or Nevada, by her husband's side after the debates, on the bus in Iowa with the kids.

Outwardly, Chris Dodd's wife of eight years may not seem the ideal match for her bon vivant husband. She looks so sophisticated, so cool, the portrait of the strait-laced businesswoman-cum-proper political spouse in her powder blue suit with the gleaming Dodd 2008 jewelry prominent near her left shoulder.

But the calm, even serene appearance masks a complex woman who can be both soft and hard-edged, sometimes both at once. She can get sarcastic with a smile, and can surprise with a zinger or a quip even as her voice doesn't rise a note. Or she can, on a moment's notice, riff at length on the infrastructure of Zagreb, Croatia, or on the virtues of her husband's national service plan.

Jackie, say her friends, is more organized, more detail-oriented than Chris. Though Chris is highly regarded as a Senate power broker - he's chairman of the banking committee and a master of crafting legislation - his motto has long been to get along with everybody and have a good word for them. And as his wife says of her husband around the house, "He can make cleaning up a utility room fun."

Clegg Dodd can be a live wire, too, but seems more inclined to size up the room, to think things through before acting.

Take the campaign event Thursday in Dubuque, Iowa. While Chris spoke, the family standing on stage with him, Jackie watched her children protectively. When he was done, Chris lifted 5-year-old Grace and flipped her over as father and daughter laughed heartily.

The similarities, though, are apparent, too. Both are passionate about the policies the senator champions, and both can offer a dozen from-the-heart ideas on a variety of subjects effortlessly. And, like his wife, if he sees a chance to get a laugh, he seizes it.

The spotlight has been a new place for Jackie Dodd. Though she's been a congressional member and top executive at the Export-Import Bank, she's not used to talking to the media at length. Even when she became the wife of a senator from a small state, she maintained a low profile.

When interviewed for this story, she was barely into her first set of answers when a thunderstorm approached.

Maybe, she said, she wasn't meant for scrutiny by the media.

"Maybe," she said as thunder boomed, "we're going against the gods."

Jackie Marie Clegg Dodd, now 45, had the all-American upbringing, growing up in a place named Utah Valley but known as Happy Valley in Orem, Utah, a middle child among six - "that meant I could hide most of the time," she said. Her father was a staunch Republican, a role model of a man who had been a history and economics teacher, but became a real estate broker and home builder when the third child arrived.

He provided a comfortable life for his family, an "idyllic setting," she said. The front door was rarely locked and, if it was, the kids knew they could jump through the open window in the front of the house.

It was a place where Jackie Clegg could play in the nearby waterfall or ride her 10-speed to the barns "where we kept horses, 4½ miles away ... and no one worried."

What did worry her mother was her daughter's unquenchable energy level, so Jackie got pushed into sports. As a result, the smartest girl in the room also became an accomplished skier, gymnast, swimmer - and it's a legacy she can't shake.

After this spring's South Carolina debate, Grace Dodd kept tugging at her father, begging to go back to the hotel to go swimming. Then she turned to her mother and asked if she would do a 2½ flip off the diving board.

"I was a gymnast," Clegg Dodd said, smiling warmly. "She's seen the pictures."

During the second Clinton administration, she was a star at the Export-Import Bank, which wasn't always a popular role.

The bank helps finance and promote U.S.-made goods and services in other countries. Clegg's toughest challenge came from inside the bank, where the sight of a younger woman dashing about, setting the agenda, was not always welcome.

"There was a lot of jealousy," recalled fellow board member and close friend Julie Belaga, a longtime state House representative from Westport and onetime GOP candidate for Connecticut governor. "But she was a smart woman who played it cool and just did her job."

Jackie Dodd recalls that her greatest triumph at the bank was fostering a renewed commitment to rebuilding infrastructure in other nations, with a special emphasis on small business.

But Belaga recalled another side, as well. As organized and detail-oriented as she was, Dodd realized one April that the cherry blossoms were blooming a half-mile away. Forget work for a while, she told her friend; let's go look.

She moved to Washington to work for Garn, an amiable Republican who became best known for his command of banking issues and his role as the only sitting U.S. senator to go into space.

On the day she was to interview with the senator's office, Garn had to run to the site of a big mudslide in Spanish Fork Canyon, just south of Provo.

Garn wanted to cancel the interview; Clegg offered to drive to the site and be interviewed there. "Her answers blew me away. She was so good on every question," Garn said.

Under Garn, Clegg, who had a master's degree in national security studies from Georgetown University, specialized in a number of areas, including national security, foreign policy and trade.

She was the classic Washington staff member, anonymous to the media and invaluable to her boss, one of those people you see in the halls, all business, briefed to the teeth and ready to spill it all out to the senator.

After their meeting in Utah, Clegg's and Dodd's relationship became Washington's worst-kept secret when the two began showing up at Clinton White House state dinners. She was by his side in Connecticut when Dodd announced he would seek re-election in 1998.

They married quietly in June 1999. "I didn't want it to be a big thing," Jackie recalled, and it wasn't. They wed in the backyard of Dodd's East Haddam house overlooking the Connecticut River in a quiet ceremony in front of 60 friends and family.

Both Dodds seem to enjoy talking about their earlier times.

Chris Dodd gets almost a glow when discussing his wife. "Bright, interesting, attractive," he says. He laughs a hearty Dodd laugh.

"We went sailing, and I don't think she had ever been on a sailboat," he recalled. A gale came through, and Jackie "looked like Freddie Bartholomew in `Captains Courageous.' She said, `Is this usual when you go sailing?' `Sure,' I said."

He laughs again.

"Of course it wasn't normal," he said. But he sure was impressed by what he called "her wanting to go along and do things."

Jackie Dodd also seems almost radiant, reminiscing. "We did things backward," she said. . Unlike most couples today, "We got married, then we moved in together five months later." After all, she had a place in Arlington, Va., and he was living in Washington's Kalorama neighborhood.

By then, she was a Washington force of her own, chief operating officer and vice chairman of the board of the Export-Import Bank. She was traveling around the world - 110 countries, by her estimate - and became known as a master of trade minutiae, someone who always had the answer or a way to get one quickly.

"She's a highly professional woman," said Belaga. "Everything she does, she wants it to be perfect."

She's been to the movie theater only twice since her marriage, seeing "Master and Commander" and "Pooh's Heffalump Movie."

She studies history for fun - she can go as far back as 1630, when ancestor Jeremiah Mecham was an alderman in East Salem, Mass.

And, she boasts, her family was in Connecticut even before the Dodds, who came in the 19th century. And she can prove it.

"One day my mother pulled out a book, 800 pages, on the Mechams. She turns to Chris and says, `Here it is, New Haven. Part of the Yale campus is on what was their farm.' "

Most of her time these days is spent raising their children, Grace and 2-year-old Christina. And it's when talking about them that she gets most serious, even steely.

She still works, sitting on five corporate boards and running a consulting firm, working from home and steering free of conflicts. Virtually no one, even in this age of instant Internet reaction to everything, has raised questions about the wife of the Senate Banking Committee chairman engaging in such activity.

Jackie Dodd volunteers answers to the questions anyway. The Chicago Board of Trade's business goes through the agriculture committee, not the banking committees in Congress. The rental giant Blockbuster does give her discounts on rentals - she chuckles at the thought - but somehow that doesn't seem likely to incite a major scandal.

She'd rather dwell on her children, clearly the centerpiece of her life today.

The symbolism surrounding the birth and early life of her first daughter sounds like something for one of those history books.

On 9/11, Jackie went into labor early in the morning, although the labor was eventually interrupted and the baby would not be delivered until two days later. But as she was heading down Constitution Avenue to the hospital that morning, the road was blocked. The Pentagon had just been hit. Looking in the car's rear-view mirror, she saw the plume of smoke rising from Arlington, Va.

Those early days of Grace's life were uncertain ones. After the baby was taken to her father's office for the first time for a one-month birthday party, the family learned that anthrax had been detected in the building.

"We've got a problem," the senator said. He wasn't joking.

It took about six weeks for officials to test Dodd's office for anthrax, and it turned up there was some contamination in a mail drop at the senator's office. The Capitol physicians' office and its infectious diseases team called the Dodds to discuss the findings.

The couple asked about the risks to their infant. "They said if she'd been exposed," Clegg Dodd recalled, "she'd have been dead long ago."

She became the protective mother, reluctant to let her children out of her sight. Wander over to the Provo River alone? Forget it. Visit exotic countries like mommy did? No way.

"We're only going to go to countries where we can safety drink the water, breathe the air and not be at risk of attack," she said, listing Bermuda, Canada and Ireland as likely prospects.

"Maybe," she said, deadpan, "that rules out the United States."

These days on the campaign trail, Clegg Dodd is frequently shifting roles, from campaigner to mother and back. At a community barbecue in Waverly, Iowa, Thursday night, she was speaking to a crowd of about 30, looking affectionately at Chris and telling people, "He's a wonderful husband. He's a wonderful father."

She glanced suddenly at Christina. "I believe we have a diaper lost here," she said, her tone unchanging. She stooped down, fixed the problem, and continued, "We're so divided in this country..."

The same day, the family visited the site of the 1989 movie, "Field of Dreams." As Dad got up to bat (drawing a walk), Jackie brought the kids to a nearby lawn, squatted like a catcher and taught them how to throw a baseball.

Were she to get the opportunity to live in the White House, Jackie Dodd says, she would focus her energy in several areas: helping elderly people learn more about handling their finances, and helping to raise awareness about childhood allergies. Grace suffers from a severe nut allergy.

At this time in her life, the role of this formerly high-powered businesswoman is very much the traditional one, that of mother and wife, campaign or no campaign. That's where she's directing that energy, that analytical mind.

As first lady or not, she has concluded, "My role is supporter-in-chief."