Moynihan embodied the patriotism of public service. The breadth of his career–from a young naval officer to a policy intellectual whose views were sought by Democrats and Republicans alike–is unmatched by anybody in politics today. The idea of a Senate intellectual is almost a contradiction. There are bright minds in the Senate today but nobody of Moynihan’s stature. He got his start as a young aide to President John F. Kennedy, but he was never a reliable liberal. He refused to be pigeonholed, and he spoke the truth as he saw it to liberals and conservatives alike, whatever the consequences.
The senator from New York could be maddening to deal with. When my husband and I interviewed him several years ago for a book we were writing about politics, he responded to many of our questions by pulling a book off the shelf and reading from it extensively. Only later did we realize he was quoting himself. Moynihan wrote or edited more than a dozen books, none of them a commercial success but a reflection of how he chose to spend his time, writing and thinking.
Moynihan came from an age when bipartisanship was not so rare as it is today. He took heat from both sides when he crossed the aisle, but he believed every politician had a sweet spot when progress was possible. “When a Democrat is elected, he has to go to the right,” Moynihan counseled. “When a Republican is elected, he has to move left. The key is to get them when they’re in the center.”
As he moved from Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, Moynihan’s focus never shifted. His analysis and his policy proposals concentrated on strengthening the family, the bulwark of American society. When race riots erupted in the late 1960s, Moynihan warned there would be “no social peace” for generations if blacks as a group did not fare better economically. In 1970, a memo he had written to Nixon was leaked to the press. In it, Moynihan urged a period of “benign neglect” on matters of race, a phrase he had culled from Canadian constitutional history. Moynihan was calling for a lowering of the explosive political rhetoric on race, not a lessening of commitment to minorities, but his liberal critics assailed him as a racist.
Moynihan would spend the next 30 years trying to explain himself, but the phrase stuck. An aide said it was like a case of herpes: it would subside, but never go away. New York Rev. Al Sharpton revived the old charges of racism when he challenged Moynihan in the 1994 Democratic primary. Though Moynihan easily defeated Sharpton, reliving the experience was painful. In 1996 when President Bill Clinton signed a welfare-reform bill ending the federal guarantee of assistance and shifting much of the burden to the states, Moynihan vehemently opposed the measure. In the poisonous political climate at the time, he was one of the few politicians of stature who could credibly defend an entitlement to welfare.
His dapper manner and patrician airs belied an unstable upbringing that included stretches of poverty and despair in some of New York’s toughest neighborhoods. But class was never far from his mind. He was furious when Senate rules classified him as a millionaire because the farm he’d bought for a pittance decades earlier had risen in value. Robert Frost, the poet who read at Kennedy’s inaugural, told the young president to be “more Irish than Harvard” if he wanted to win over the American people. A former Moynihan aide says Moynihan was “more Harvard than Irish, and he had the luck of the latter to have been both.”
Former Moynihan aides are everywhere. They dot the government, the think tanks and the television networks, and they vary as much in their ideological grounding as Moynihan. Among the most familiar, because of their television presence, are Bill Kristol, one of the leading intellectuals behind the war in Iraq; Tim Russert, the host of “Meet the Press,” and Mike McCurry, President Clinton’s press secretary.
Moynihan was the last of the great pretelevision personalities. He spoke with a 19th-century cadence and with a clarity of expression that forced the world to slow down and pay attention. Whether you agreed or disagreed with his ideas, he had them. That was a gift that will be missed all the more because it is so rare.
