Joe Duffey, who inspired liberals during his 1970 anti-war campaign for U.S. Senate in Connecticut, dies at 88; Paul Newman was his honorary campaign chairman

Joseph Duffey, the quiet Hartford Seminary professor whose anti-Vietnam War-fueled Senate race helped launch the careers of senators, congressmen, TV hosts and a future president, died Thursday. He was 88 and had been ill for some time.

Born in Huntington, W.V., Duffey came to Connecticut in the early 1960s to attend Yale University. A decade later, after receiving his doctorate from the Hartford Seminary Foundation, he launched a quixotic and unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate seat, which was held at the time by fellow Democrat Thomas Dodd.

Dodd, the father of future Sen. Chris Dodd, had been censured as part of a corruption investigation and did not receive the endorsement of the Democratic Party. In 1970, with the Vietnam War tearing the nation apart, Duffey won a three-way party primary and became Democrats’ nominee against a Lowell P. Weicker, then a one-term Republican congressman. (Dodd wound up running as an independent.)

“He was a fine man and a fine public servant,’' Weicker said Friday. The 1970 race was “a tough race, one of the hardest races I had.”

Duffey’s campaign was fueled by strong anti-war activism and a passion for liberal causes. He drew a large crew of fired up young progressives, many of whom had come to Connecticut from the 1968 presidential races of Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy.

The group included writer Michael Medved, who was Duffey’s speechwriter, Tony and John Podesta, future Fox News host and Trump appointee Larry Kudlow and politicians such as Joe Lieberman, Sam Gejdenson and a Yale Law School student from Arkansas named Bill Clinton.

“In those days, it was really a war in this country,” Duffey told The Courant in 1993, days before Clinton’s inauguration as president. “It was between young people in college and blue-collar working people. My campaign was an effort to identify that and try to overcome that. Bill instinctively understood that.”

Actor Paul Newman, fresh of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” barnstormed the state with Duffey, creating traffic jams where the candidate and the famous actor appeared.

“You know where Joe Duffey stands,” Newman said in May 1970, according to Courant archives. “He always gives you a straight answer. You may not like the answer, but he always gives you one.”

The pair drew a crowd of about 1,000 in Portland on Oct. 7, prompting one local to tell The Courant “we haven’t had that many people together in downtown Portland in 40 years – and the last time, it was when the bank was robbed.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Clinton’s law school classmate, said Duffey was a man of faith who “led by the power of his conscience.”

“At a time when young people were so desperately hungry for honesty and conviction, he met that moment with grace and eloquence,’' Blumenthal said.

Another alumnus from the 1970 Senate race was Lieberman, who opposed the Vietnam War but, as a Democratic senator from Connecticut, later voted in favor of the Iraq War.

Duffey was a generation older than the college students drawn to his campaign. “He was 15 or 20 years ahead in chronological age but spoke to us from a conviction and spirit that evoked strong loyalty and passion,’' said Blumenthal, who did not actively work on Duffey’s campaign.

Duffey lost the 1970 Senate race to Weicker but he gained something important in the process: In 1974, he married Anne Wexler, who managed his campaign.

Wexler later became a powerful Washington lobbyist while Duffey went on to a career in higher education. He served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1977 to 1982 before becoming the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (running the entire UMass system was later added to his responsibilities.) He also spent two years as president of American University in Washington, D.C.

But Duffey’s legacy might best be reflected in the generation of political leaders whose careers began with that 1970 Senate run.

About three weeks ago, the campaign staff reconnected for a 50th anniversary gathering via Zoom. The group, which included Clinton, reminisced and shared campaign war stories.

“We had a great time and people were talking about how much Joe meant to their lives,’' said Barry Wanger, who served as Duffey’s press secretary in 1970.

Daniela Altimari can be reached at dnaltimari@courant.com.