'Daniel Patrick “Pat” Moynihan' (
March 16,
1927 –
March 26,
2003) was a
United States Senator,
Ambassador, and eminent
sociologist. He was first elected to the United States Senate for
New York in 1976, and was re-elected with the
Democratic Party three times (in 1982, 1988, and 1994). He declined to run for re-election in 2000. Prior to his years in the Senate, Moynihan was a member of four successive
presidential administrations, beginning with the administration of
John F. Kennedy, and continuing through the administrations of
Lyndon B. Johnson,
Richard Nixon, and
Gerald Ford.
Education
Moynihan was born in
Tulsa, Oklahoma and was brought by his family to
New York City at the age of six. There he was brought up in a poor neighborhood, shined shoes for money, and attended various
public, private, and
parochial schools before graduating from
Harlem High School. He and his brother spent most of their childhood summers at his grandfather's farm in
Bluffton, Indiana. He studied for one year at the
City College of New York, which at that time provided free
higher education, but then joined the U.S. Navy, receiving
V-12 officer training at
Tufts University. He served on active duty from 1944 to 1947, last serving as
Gunnery Officer of the
USS ''Quirinus''. He went on to graduate from
Tufts University, and received three
graduate degrees from the
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Afterwards, he studied as a
Fulbright fellow at the
London School of Economics. He was later given an Honorary Doctorate of Law from Tufts and has the distinction of being the only person to hold five degrees from Tufts.
Public service
Moynihan was a member of
Averell Harriman's New York gubernatorial campaign in 1954 and thereafter served 4 years on the Governor's staff, in positions including acting secretary to the Governor. He was a
Kennedy delegate at the
1960 Democratic National Convention.
Assistant Secretary of Labor; controversy over the War on Poverty
Moynihan was an
Assistant Secretary of Labor for policy in the Kennedy Administration and in the early part of the Johnson Administration. In that capacity, he did not have operational responsibilities, allowing him to devote all of his time to trying to formulate national policy for what would become the
War on Poverty. He had a small staff including
Paul Barton,
Ellen Broderick, and
Ralph Nader (who at 29 years of age, hitchhiked to Washington, D.C. and got a job working for Moynihan in 1963).
They took inspiration from the book ''Slavery'' written by
Stanley Elkins. Elkins essentially contended that
slavery had made American blacks dependent on the dominant society, and that that dependence still existed a century later, supporting a view that the government must go beyond simply ensuring that members of minority races have the same rights as everyone else, and offering minority members benefits that others did not get on the grounds that those benefits were necessary to counteract that lingering effects of past actions.
Moynihan found data at the Labor Department that showed that even as fewer people were unemployed, more people were joining the
welfare rolls — these recipients were families with children, but only one parent (almost invariably the mother). The laws at that time permitted such families to receive welfare payments in certain parts of the United States.
Moynihan's
report was seen by people on the left as "Blaming the Victim",
[1] a slogan coined by
William Ryan [2]. He was also seen as propagating the views of racists,
[3] because much of the press coverage of his reports focused on the discussion of children being born out of wedlock. Despite Moynihan's warnings, the
Aid to Families with Dependent Children program had the "Man out of the house rule." Critics said that the nation was paying poor women to throw their husbands out of the house. Moynihan supported
Richard Nixon's idea of a
Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI). Daniel Patrick Moynihan had significant discussions concerning a
Basic Income Guarantee with
Russell B. Long and
Louis O. Kelso.
After the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress, Moynihan agreed that something had to be done about the welfare system possibly encouraging women to raise their children without fathers: "The Republicans are saying we have a helluva problem, and we do."
[4]
Local New York City and academic career
By
1964, Moynihan was politically supporting
Robert F. Kennedy. For this reason he was not favored by then-President Johnson, and he left the Johnson Administration in 1965. He ran for but did not win the presidency of the
New York City Council. He then became an academic, becoming Director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at
Harvard University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at
Wesleyan University from 1964 to 1967. During this time he continued to write about the problems of the poor in the cities of the
Northeast. With turmoil and
riots in the United States he wrote that the next administration would have to be able to unite the nation again.
Nixon Administration
Connecting with
President-elect Richard Nixon in 1968, he joined Nixon's
White House Staff as an urban affairs advisor. He was very influential at that time, as one of the few people in Nixon's inner circle who had done academic research related to social policies.
He once wrote in a memo to President Nixon that "the issue of race could benefit from a period of
benign neglect". He argued that Nixon's conservative tactics were playing into the hands of the radicals, but he regretted that he was misinterpreted as advocating that the government should neglect minorities.
U.N. Ambassador
He later served as the Ambassador to
India from 1973 to 1975, and as the
United States Permanent Representative to the
United Nations, serving a rotation as President of the
United Nations Security Council in 1976.
Perhaps the most controversial action of Moynihan's career was his response, as Ambassador to the UN, to the
Indonesian invasion of
East Timor in 1975. The
Ford Administration considered Indonesia, then under a military dictatorship, a key ally against
Communism. Moynihan ensured that the UN Security Council took no action against this annexation of a small country by a larger one, which would involve massacres that killed over 200,000 Timorese. As he put it in his memoirs:
"The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success." (A Dangerous Place, Little Brown, 1980, p. 247) Later, he admitted that he had defended a "shameless" Cold War policy toward East Timor.
Moynihan was also known for his consistently strong support of Israel during his tenure as U.N. Ambassador.
[5]
Career in the Senate
In 1976, Moynihan was elected to the U.S. Senate from the State of New York, defeating U.S. Representative
Bella Abzug in the Democratic Primary, and
Conservative Party incumbent
James L. Buckley in the general election. Moynihan's strong support for Israel while U.N. Ambassador, may have increased support among the state's Jewish population.
[6]
While considered by many to be a liberal, Moynihan did break with the orthodox positions of his party on numerous occasions. As chairman of the
Senate Finance Committee he strongly opposed President Clinton's proposal to expand health care coverage to all Americans. Seeking to focus the debate on health insurance and the financing of health care costs, Moynihan garnered controversy by stating that "there is no health care crisis in this country."
In the mid-1990s, Moynihan was one of the few Democrats to support the controversial ban on the procedure known as
partial-birth abortion. He said of the procedure: "I think this is just too close to infanticide. A child has been born and it has exited the uterus. What on Earth is this procedure?" Earlier in his career in the Senate, Moynihan had expressed his annoyance with the adamantly pro-choice interest groups petitioning him and others on the issue. He complained to them saying, "you women are ruining the Democratic Party with your insistence on abortion."
[7]
Daniel Patrick Moynihan had a theory about government called the "professionalization of reform" by which the government bureaucracy thinks up problems for government to solve rather than simply responding to the problems identified by others.
Public speaker
Moynihan was a popular public speaker with a distinctly
patrician style. He had some peculiar mannerisms of speech, somewhat akin to
William F. Buckley, Jr. in the form of slight stuttering and drawn-out vowels for emphasis. They both paraphrased the final line of
Robert Frost's "
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" in their book titles.
Commission on Government Secrecy
Main articles: Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy
In the Post–
Cold War Era, the 103rd Congress enacted legislation directing an inquiry into the uses of government secrecy. Moynihan chaired the Commission. The Committee studied and made recommendations on the "culture of secrecy" that pervaded the United States government and its intelligence community for 80 years, beginning with the
Espionage Act of 1917, and made recommendations on the statutory regulation of classified information.
The Committee's findings and recommendations were presented to the President in 1997. As part of the effort, Moynihan secured release from the
Federal Bureau of Investigation of its classified Venona file. This file documents the FBI's joint
counterintelligence investigation, with the United States
Signals Intelligence Service, into Soviet espionage within the United States. Much of the information had been collected and classified as secret information for over fifty years.
After release of the information, Moynihan authored
Secrecy: The American Experience where he discussed the impact government secrecy has had on the domestic politics of America for the past half century, and how myths and suspicion created an unnecessary partisan chasm.
Academe and authorship
In addition to his distinguished career as a politician and diplomat, Moynihan was a
sociologist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Harvard University,
Wesleyan University, and
Syracuse University. He authored some 19 books, including ''Beyond the Melting Pot'', an influential study of
American ethnicity, which he co-authored with
Nathan Glazer in 1963, followed by ''The Negro Family: The Case for National Action'' otherwise known as the
Moynihan Report in 1965, ''The Politics of a Guaranteed Income'' (1973), ''Family and Nation'' (1986), ''Came the Revolution'' (1988), ''On the Law of Nations'' (1990), and ''Secrecy'' (1998).
Death and posthumous honors
In 2003, Moynihan died at the age of 76 after complications suffered from an emergency
appendectomy about a month earlier. He was survived by his wife of 39 years,
Elizabeth Brennan Moynihan, three grown children, Timothy Patrick Moynihan, Maura Russell Moynihan, and John McCloskey Moynihan, and two grandchildren, Michael Patrick and Zora Olea.
In 2004,
Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of
New York City, announced plans to replace
Penn Station as the city's railroad hub. Built a block away within the historic landmark James A. Farley Post Office Building, the new station would be named for Moynihan.
In 2005, the
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs renamed their Global Affairs Institute the
Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.
Quotes
:''"To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart."'' — Speaking after the assassination of
John F. Kennedy, November 1963
:''"There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos... And it is richly deserved."'' — "Family and Nation", 1965
:''"No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty."''— "The Politics of a Guaranteed Income", 1973
:''"Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is."'' — "Secrecy: The American Experience", 1998
Selected books
It was sometimes joked of the scholarly Moynihan that he had written more books than most of his colleagues had read.
★ Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (1969) ISBN 0029220009
★ Violent Crimes (1970) ISBN 0807660531
★ Coping: Essays on the Practice of Government (1973) ISBN 0394483243
★ The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan (1973) ISBN 0394463544.
★ Business and Society in Change (1975) ISBN 0884390022
★ A Dangerous Place (1978) ISBN 0316586994
★ Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year, 1980 (1980) ISBN 1565545168
★ Family and Nation: The Godkin Lectures (1986) ISBN 0156301407
★ On the Law of Nations (1990) ISBN 0674635760
★ Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (1994) ISBN 0198279469
★ Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy (1996) ISBN 0674574419
★ Secrecy: The American Experience (1998) ISBN 0300080794
★ Future of the Family (2003) ISBN 0871546280
References
This article draws from the book "The Promised Land" by
Nicholas Lemann,
Bill Clinton's statements when awarding Moynihan the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in
2000, and statements by senators on the occasion of his death in
2003, as well as the sources noted below.
1. The Nationional Review; March 27, 2003
2. See Blaming the Victim, William Ryan, Random House 1971
3. Graebner, William
The End of Liberalism: Narrating Welfare's Decline, from the Moynihan Report (1965) to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (1996)
Journal of Policy History - Volume 14, Number 2, 2002, pp. 170-190
4. Down on the Downtrodden Richard Lacayo
5. Daniel Moynihan, WRMEA.
6. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Oxford University Press Political Biography.
7. Human Life Review, Summer 2003, page 13.
See also
★
List of U.S. political appointments that crossed party lines
★
Benign neglect
External links
★
AP obituary
★
Senator Moynihan's congressional biography
★
MoynihanStation.org
★
Moynihan Commission Report
★
George Will Tribute Column
★
Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs
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