Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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. It was often said of the scholarly Moynihan that he had written more books than most of his colleagues had read.
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. 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; received three
graduate degrees from the
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (a Tufts University graduate school); studied as a
Fulbright fellow at
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 that university.
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", a slogan coined by
William Ryan. He was also seen as propagating the views of racists, 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.
Local New York City and academic career
By
1964, Moynihan was supporting
Robert F. Kennedy, (the brother of the assassinated president who had appointed him). For this reason he was not favored by then president Johnson. 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, but continued to write about the problems of the poor in the cities of the
Northeastern part of the United States. 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's 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 Representative to the
United Nations, serving a rotation as President of the
United Nations Security Council in 1976. He remained a member of the Democratic Party, although he feared that the party had moved too far to the
left at that time.
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 the clearly illegal annexiation of a small country by a larger one, nor at the subsequent 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.
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.
While considered by many to be a liberal, Moynihan did break with the orthodox positions of his party on numerous occasions. He strongly opposed President Clinton's proposal to expand healthcare coverage to all Americans, calling the plan "fantasy" and dismissing the entire case for reform by saying that "there is no healthcare crisis in this country."
In the mid-1990s, Moynihan was one of the few liberal Democrats to support the controversial ban on
partial-birth abortions. 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."
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 was able to secure release from the
Federal Bureau of Investigation its classified Venona file, documents on 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 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.
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. After completing a tour of duty in the United States Navy in 1947 which he began in 1944 during
World War II at age 17, Moynihan used his
GI Bill benefits to attend
Tufts University. He then received a
Fulbright Fellowship to study at the
London School of Economics. 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).
Moynihan died at the age of 76 after complications suffered from an emergency
appendectomy about a month earlier. He is 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 for a replacement of
Penn Station as the city railroad hub. Built a block away at the old Farley Post Office Building, it would be named for Moynihan.
In 2005, the
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs dedicated their previously Global Affairs Insitute to his name.
*"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts." U.S. Senator Pat Moynihan, quoted in
Robert Sobel's review of 'Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies' edited by Mark C. Carnes.
*"The Department of State desired that the
United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook [with regard to
East Timor]. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with not inconsiderable success." (
A Dangerous Place, Little Brown,
1980, p. 247)
*"If the news papers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people"
*"The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country." (see
Moynihan's Law)
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.
*
List of U.S. political appointments that crossed party lines*
AP obituary*
Senator Moynihan's congressional biography*
Moynihan Commssion Report*
George Will Tribute Column*
Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs
