Jerry Wagner Political Collection

A resident of Bloomfield, Connecticut, Jerry Wagner was a judge at Hartford Superior Court for a number of years. A longtime resident of the town of Bloomfield, Wagner served the town in a number of capacities, to include being the town's first Jewish volunteer firefighter, president of the Wintonbury Historical Society, and an influential advocate for the revitalization of the town's center. He served as a judge trial referee at Hartford Superior Court. An active memeber of the Connecticut American Jewish community working to further the goals of the community at home and abroad, Judge Wagner died 30 September 2014 at the age of 88.

Emilio Daddario was born in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, on September 24, 1918 and attended Boston University Law School from 1939 to 1941 but transferred to the University of Connecticut School of Law from which he graduated in 1942. He was admitted to the bar in Connecticut and Massachusetts that year and began his law practice in Middletown, Connecticut. Daddario won election in 1958 to the Eighty-sixth Congress and served in till January 3, 1971. In Congress, he chaired the House Science Committee's subcommittee on science research and development, and the subcommittee on patents and science inventions. He also served on a subcommittee that was involved with the planning and development of the Apollo missions to the moon. Daddario did not seek re-election to the Ninety-second Congress in 1970. He ran unsuccessfully for Governor of Connecticut in 1970, losing the general election to Thomas J. Meskill. He continued his career in public service as Director of the Office of Technology Assessment from 1973 to 1977. The materials in the collection pertain to his unsuccessful gubernatorial bid.

Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr. was a Senator from Minnesota and a Vice President of the United States. Born in Wallace, Codington County, South Dakota, May 27, 1911, he attended the public schools of Doland, SD, where his family had moved. He graduated from Capitol College of Pharmacy, Denver, CO, (1933) and the University of Minnesota (1939), earned a graduate degree from Louisiana State University (1940), and was a pharmacist with Humphrey Drug Co., Huron, SD, from 1933 until 1937. Humphrey was assistant instructor of political science at Louisiana State University (1939-1940) and University of Minnesota (1940-1941) and State director of war production training and reemployment and State chief of Minnesota war service program (1942), professor in political science at Macalester College (MN) 1943-1944. He was elected mayor of Minneapolis (1945-1948) and as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1948, 1954, and 1960. In December 29, 1964 he resigned to become Vice President under Lyndon Johnson and was Democratic whip 1961-1964. Known in the Senate as “the Happy Warrior”, he was chairman of Select Committee on Disarmament (Eighty-fourth and Eighty-fifth Congresses) and was elected Vice President of the United States on the Democratic ticket with Lyndon Johnson in 1964, serving from January 20, 1965, until January 20, 1969. Humphrey was elected in 1970 to the United States Senate and served from January 3, 1971, until his death in January 1978. The materials in the collection pertain to his unsuccessful bid as a Democratic nominee for President of the United States in 1968.

Toby Moffett was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Syracuse University in 1966, studied in Florence, Italy, from 1963 to 1964 and received his Master of Arts from Boston College in 1968. An avid Democrat and leading voice on environmental issues, Moffett first appeared on the national scene in the 1970s as an environmental activist and coalition-builder in his home state of Connecticut. Moffett served as Director of the Office of Students and Youth in the Office of United States Commissioner of Education within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from 1969 to 1970, but quit to protest the Vietnam War. Aligned with consumer activist Ralph Nader, Moffett founded the Connecticut Citizen Action Group and parlayed this to a victory in 1974 for the seat vacated in the U.S. House of Representatives for Connecticut's 6th congressional district seat when Ella T. Grasso ran for Governor.

Moffett held the northwestern Connecticut seat until 1982. He was regarded as a liberal and an opponent of the oil industry. He was also closely aligned with trade unions. Moffett served as chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources. In 1982 Moffett challenged U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker and lost. In 1986 he sought to gain the Democratic nomination over incumbent Governor William O'Neill. That effort also failed. After serving in Congress, Moffett worked as a news anchor, producer and investigative journalist, and spent nearly a decade as a syndicated statewide columnist. In 1999, Moffett was nominated by President Clinton to be U.S. Ambassador to Argentina. Moffett is now a well-known Washington consultant, and chairman of The Moffett Group, representing both for-profit and nonprofit entities, including large renewable energy developers and several foreign governments. In 2007, Moffett joined with former Louisiana Congressman Bob Livingston and well-known consultant Tony Podesta to form the PLM Group, which represented the government of Egypt for 4 years.

The materials contained in the collection document Moffet’s stance on certain elements of American-Israeli relations, the debate surrounding his negative vote on the Sinai Pact, and the Connecticut Jewish community's reaction to his positions.