Chris Dodd, the white-haired former senator from Connecticut, was in a wistful mood during a late afternoon chat Friday for many reasons, one being the 50th anniversary of the day he took his first oath as a member of Congress. Dodd spoke by phone from his law office a mile from the White House, a day after accepting a Presidential Citizens Medal from Joe Biden, a parting gift from a friend preparing to make his own departure from a much larger stage. “A lot of memories today,” Dodd said. When Congress acts today to certify the victory of Donald J. Trump over the man Dodd served as a friend, political adviser and part-time diplomatic envoy, Dodd expects his pro-forma resignation from the latter role — “just a polite letter thanking the president” — will be tendered. It will be a footnote to a half century in public life. Dodd was 30 on Jan. 3, 1975, taking office as one of the “Watergate Babies,” the 75 House Democrats who arrived in Washington after the Watergate scandal, hell-bent on upending seniority rules that kept Congress under the thrall of old white men, mostly from the deep south. “We went right after them,” Dodd said, his voice raspy from a lingering respiratory bug. “You could see change happening. Traditions and institutions that existed throughout the 20th Century were about to disappear.” It was a time of tumult and transition, dynamics that had gripped Washington before and will again, if never precisely the same way. Today’s transition is a step towards escorting the oldest man to ever occupy the Oval Office to retirement, succeeded by a man who would hold that distinction in three years and five months. Biden turned 82 on Nov. 20. Trump’s 82nd birthday would be on June 14, 2028, six months before his own constitutionally mandated exit from the White House. Dodd, the Watergate Baby, turned 80 on May 27.  “It happens more quickly than you want to believe,” Dodd said. He laughed and added, “So enjoy the hell out of it.” As the sun set Thursday, Dodd was seated next to Liz Cheney, the former third-ranking House Republican and Wyoming congresswoman, in the East Room of the White House. Cheney and Dodd were among recipients of the presidential medal, all seated in alphabetical order.  There are only one or two degrees of separation from Dodd, Cheney and major milestones of U.S. politics from the 1970s through this week, when Trump’s victory will be formalized and the body of former President Jimmy Carter will lie in state at the same U.S. Capitol assaulted by Trump’s supporters exactly four years ago. On the day the Watergate Babies arrived, Cheney was eight years old. Her father, Dick Cheney, was deputy chief of staff to Gerald Ford, who assumed the presidency upon the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 and would lose to Carter in 1976.  In 2009, Dick Cheney was the Republican vice president who presided over the uneventful certification of Democrat Barack Obama’s victory as the first Black president and Biden as vice president. Dodd, whose father was a Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor, once called for a criminal investigation into waterboarding authorized during the Bush-Cheney administration. Asked if the investigation should go “as high as Cheney’s office,” Dodd said, “You gotta go where you gotta go.” Before their names were called Thursday to accept their medals, Dodd asked Liz Cheney if she ever could have imagined such a day, seated together and waiting to be honored by a Democratic president with the nation’s second-highest civilian honor. Dodd said Cheney only laughed. Cheney was greeted by a standing ovation and sustained applause when her turn came. Attendees in the East Room stood when President Biden called Liz Cheney to accept her Presidential Citizens Medal. Credit: White House video She lost her leadership post and eventually her seat after denouncing Trump for his election denial and its contribution to the Jan. 6 assault. She called Trump’s actions a betrayal of the office, the Constitution and the American people and later was vice chair of the Jan. 6 investigation committee that elicited damning testimony from Trump’s inner circle about that day and what preceded it. “If you want leaders who will enable and spread his destructive lies, I’m not your person, you have plenty of others to choose from,” Cheney said in a speech before losing her leadership role. “That will be their legacy.” Now, Trump hints at potential prosecutions of her and other enemies, for crimes never articulated. Donald J. Trump and JD Vance stand in the V.I.P. box at the Republican National Convention. They take office in two weeks. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror Dodd and her father overlapped by one term in the House. Dick Cheney was elected in 1978 as Wyoming’s one at-large congressman, the seat his daughter would assume in January 2017. Dodd had departed in 2011 after six years in the House and 30 in the Senate. The last of the Watergate Babies in the House, George Miller and Henry Waxman of California, left the House in 2015 after not seeking reelection. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who retired in 2023 after 48 years in the Senate, was the last member of Congress first elected in 1974. On Friday, Dodd checked off things that might be remembered as his legacy, including two bills that framed his tenure in the Senate: A nine-year campaign to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act, which enabled tens of millions of Americans to care for loved ones without fear of job loss, and passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010. But he sped through a list of laws he helped craft and pass. He was more interested in reminiscing about his first day Congress — and Biden’s last in the White. “I just called Tom Downey. We met 50 years ago today,” Dodd said. At 25, Downey was the youngest of the Watergate Babies. The New York congressman was the minimum age for serving in the House. Dodd recalled finding himself in a line waiting to take a photo with Wilbur Mills, one of the old guard the newcomers were prepared to push aside. “What am I standing in line for?” he asked himself. “I stepped out of line.” Mills was the all-powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. He also was an alcoholic whose affair with a stripper, Fanne Foxe, became public the previous fall after she jumped from Mills’ limo into the Tidal Basin, a big finish to a night of drinking. Dodd’s first term would be Mills’ last. After leaving office, Mills established the Wilbur D. Mills Center for Alcoholism and Drug Treatment Center, helped raise funds for similar facilities and became a frequent speaker about alcoholism, at least once in Hartford. “I went home and introduced him. I came out from behind the stage and introduced him, talked about how he changed his life and changed the lives of many,” Dodd said. “People aren’t all defined by bad mistakes they make. I’m always grateful that I had a positive relationship with him at the end.” Dodd was among the last to defend the notion of Biden’s viability to continue his 2024 presidential campaign after his disastrous debate with Trump.  “He’s as decent a human being as I’ve ever known in any walk of life,” Dodd said. “He remembers people. He’s cares about them.” Former Sen. Chris Dodd accepts the Presidential Citizens Medal in Biden’s last month in the White House. Credit: The White House Biden had stood with Dodd until he abandoned a run for a sixth term in the face of falling approval ratings. At a fundraiser in December 2009, the month before Dodd quit the race, Biden praised him as “the single most gifted legislator in Congress, now that Teddy Kennedy’s gone.” Dodd served with Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for most of his time in the Senate. Biden was the committee chair, Dodd the chair of a subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. Dodd was president of the Motion Picture Association of America for five years after leaving the Senate. In 2020, Biden asked Dodd to oversee the vetting of his potential running mates, a process that ended with the selection of Kamala Harris. He was a special adviser to Biden on U.S. relations with the other nations of the Americas, helping to arrange a summit in 2022 and then to follow up on the resulting initiatives, primarily the creation of the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity. The U.S. and 11 other countries with two-thirds of the population in the Western Hemisphere are signatories, including the major trading partners of Canada and Mexico, and smaller nations such as the Dominican Republic, where Dodd was a Peace Corps volunteer in 1966 and 1967. Trump has threatened to upend trade agreements with major tariffs, but Dodd said there are Democratic and Republican senators and House members pushing to give the initiatives legislative backing.  Dodd also noted the president-elect’s choice for secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio, gave a speech in April about “the importance of private investment and increased economic opportunities in the majority of these countries in Latin America.” “So even though I won’t be around to continue it,” Dodd said. “it’s kind of got a life.” On Thursday evening, after the public medal ceremony, Dodd and his invited guests were ushered into the Oval Office, a courtesy not extended to all the honorees. His wife, Jackie Clegg Dodd, whom he married in 1999, and their two college-age daughters, Grace and Christina, joined him, as did his brother Thomas Dodd Jr., a former U.S. ambassador, and two staffers from his Senate days, Steve Kinney and Lee Reynolds. His old chief of staff, Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro, popped in. Dodd, a writer of notes, had reached out to other former staffers earlier, offering thanks. “This wasn’t a solo act by any stretch of the imagination,” Dodd said. “So many of them participated, so directly, in legislative stuff and everything else. I had great, great people, both in Connecticut and down there.” The end of long political careers inevitably take on the some of the pleasant aspects of a wake. Respects are made, stories told. There is laughter. It’s what Irish Catholic pols do. It’s what they did in the Oval Office. Dodd said his last conversation with the president was personal. They spoke of Michael “Goose” McAdams, who died in 1998. McAdams was Dodd’s best friend at Georgetown Prep, a prodigy in all things political. On a cold January day long ago, Dodd and McAdams watched John F. Kennedy’s inaugural parade. Neither Dodd nor Biden could remember when the two of them first met, an odd lapse for two men who like to memorialize such things. Dodd reminded Biden that one of his early hires after his election to the Senate in 1972 had been McAdams. Dodd could not conceive of his friend failing to insist he meet his boss, the youngest man in the U.S. Senate. It must have been then, a long time ago.