Thomas Joseph Dodd (May 15, 1907 – May 24, 1971) was an American attorney and diplomat who served as a United States Senator and Representative from Connecticut. He is the father of former U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd and Thomas J. Dodd Jr., who served as the United States Ambassador to Uruguay from 1993 to 1997 and to Costa Rica from 1997 to 2001. Early life Dodd was born in Norwich, New London County, to Abigail Margaret (née O'Sullivan) and Thomas Joseph Dodd, a building contractor; all four of his grandparents were immigrants from Ireland. His paternal grandparents were farmers in the Housatonic river valley with large commercial tobacco leaf farms located near Kent and New Milford. He graduated from Saint Anselm College's preparatory school, run by Benedictine monks in Goffstown, New Hampshire, in 1926. He graduated from Providence College in 1930 with a degree in philosophy, and from Yale Law School in 1933. In 1934, Dodd married Grace Murphy of Westerly, Rhode Island. They had six children. He served as a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1933 and 1934, the highlight of his career there being his participation in an unsuccessful attempt to capture John Dillinger at Little Bohemia Lodge. He was then Connecticut director of the National Youth Administration from 1935 to 1938. He was assistant to five successive United States Attorneys General (Homer Cummings, Frank Murphy, Robert Jackson, Francis Biddle and Tom Clark) from 1938 to 1945. As a special agent for the Attorney General, Dodd was basically a trial-level federal prosecutor. He worked primarily on criminal and civil liberties cases, including the prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1930s. In 1942, he was sent to Hartford to prosecute a major spy ring case in which five men (Anastasy Vonsiatsky, Wilhelm Kunze, and others) were accused of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 by conspiring to gather and deliver US Army, Navy, and defense information to Germany or Japan. Four of the five pleaded guilty; Dodd tried and won the conviction of the fifth man, Reverend Kurt Emil Bruno Molzahn. Dodd became vice chairman of the Board of Review and later executive trial counsel for the Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality at Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945 and 1946. He practiced law privately in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1947 to 1953. Nuremberg Trials Both Supreme