Fathers figure in Dodd race

It is interesting that Sen. Chris Dodd and his Democratic challenger, Merrick Alpert of Mystic, are both promoting books, one just out, the other resuscitated, in these opening months of the campaign season.

Both candidates, their books reveal, are easily prone to tears.

In the preface to Dodd's "Letters From Nuremberg," the 2007 compilation of letters his father, Thomas J. Dodd, wrote home while prosecuting Nazi war criminals, the senator recalls reading the first letter after it surfaced from a box in his sister's basement.

The 1945 correspondence from his father to his mother, written on tissue-thin air mail stationery, described their parting at Union Station in Washington, Dodd recalled.

"As I finished that first letter, and I thought about the way he described my mother, I wept," he wrote.

One of the teary moments in Alpert's new book, "Morning Sun," occurs when the author describes his return to the United States from military duty in Bosnia. Stepping outside the airport terminal in Chicago, waiting for a connecting flight, he looks up to see an American flag fluttering in the cold wind.

"The emotions came pouring over me at once and I didn't waste time touching the tears as they flowed," Alpert wrote. "The salt was in my mouth and I just kept staring at the stars."

Yes, it's a new twist on the notion of campaign literature.

Curiously, both candidates' books are about their fathers.

Dodd's book, released during his campaign for president, highlights the acclaimed work his father did in bringing war criminals to justice, and the compilation of letters earned praise from historians for the insight it provided into those famous trials.

It also reinforces the image of Chris Dodd inheriting the political mantle of his father, who also represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate.

Alpert's memoir, on the other hand, is a tribute to his mother, who became a single mom after her husband abandoned the family when Alpert was 6 years old.

By the end of the book, after Alpert has put himself through law school, served a tour of duty in the National Guard, married and started a family and founded a successful company, he decides to confront his long-lost father.

He finally tracks him down in a small town in Iowa, where he had become a school superintendent, and in their first face-to-face meeting in more than 30 years he asks what happened all those years ago.

In the end he's not satisfied with his father's answer to the question of why he left, and he rejects a suggestion that they begin anew.

"I did not want this man in my life," Alpert wrote. "This was not someone I respected."

"If there was ever a time in my life I wanted a father it had passed long ago," Alpert wrote, before describing driving away from the meeting with his father.

"In the rearview mirror I saw him standing in the parking lot, arms limp by his sides, head down. The final image."

You couldn't have two candidates with more different perspectives on their fathers.

Indeed, Dodd and Alpert come from very different places, one the son of political privilege, the other a survivor of a scrappy childhood in Colchester, where his mother, a schoolteacher, raised three children in part by working a part-time job at the Colchester Bakery.

If Alpert succeeds in getting on the primary ballot - and I suspect he will - you're going to continue to see these differences illuminated, with the younger, energized candidate attacking the entrenched Senate warlord.

Alpert's book, published by Globe Pequot Press of Connecticut, is interesting for its candor and frank assessment of business and politics and dysfunctional family relationships.

Alpert is smart, hard-working, ambitious and successful. In his book he also makes the case that he cares about his country, his family and doing the right thing. And despite the occasional lapses into schmaltz, I find it convincing.

Dodd's book is one you'd expect to hear about on National Public Radio. Alpert's, on the other hand, seems to belong on Oprah.

And we know all know what Oprah did for another memoir-writing, politically ambitious son of a single mom.

This is the opinion of David Colllins.