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Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary
When Daniel Patrick Moynihan died in 2003 the Economist described him as s intellect and interests, his appreciation for his constituents, his renowned wit, and his warmth even for those with whom he profoundly disagreed. Its publication is a significant literary event.
736 pages, Paperback
First published October 12, 2010
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About the author
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
67 books49 followersDaniel Patrick “Pat” Moynihan was an American politician and sociologist. A member of the Democratic Party, he was first elected to the United States Senate for New York in 1976, and was re-elected 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 the United States' ambassador to the United Nations and to India, and was a member of four successive presidential administrations, beginning with the administration of John F. Kennedy, and continuing through Gerald Ford.
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June 24, 2011
Over the years there have been a handful of public figures whom I’ve come to admire greatly, and at the top of that list is Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A brilliant man, honest, brave, witty, compassionate, he was truly a statesman and we could use many more men like him.
This book is a collection from his letters and papers compiled primarily by his daughter. From his years as a member of the administrations of John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford, ambassador to Indian and to the UN, and senator from New York, he wrote so much and so well that it must have been difficult to pick only the best. Here are some of his comments:
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.
. . . one of the things I found most curious was the ease with which we obtained money for the education of children formally denoted as “uneducable,” while I could not interest the most wild eyed, radical, give-a-way, spender in the notion of a program of special state aid to provide “enriched” programs for the smart kids. . . . I ought not to sound cruel, but the faintly distasteful fact behind this is that the allocation of resources in education, as elsewhere, reflects the political power of the interests concerned, and where the parents of backward children were organized parents of the bright ones were not.
On the Catholic church: …while I am reasonably strict in my observances, I am like Lord Melbourne, more a buttress of the church than a pillar, in that I support it from the outside.
Too frequently of late the liberal upper middle class has proposed to solve problems of those at the bottom at the expense, or seeming expense, of those in between.
Since about 1840 the cultural elite in America have pretty generally rejected the values and activities of the larger society. . . . The leading cultural figures are going – have gone – into opposition . . . they take with them a vastly more numerous following of educated, middle class persons, especially young ones, who share their feelings and who do not need the ‘straight’ world. It is their pleasure to cause trouble, to be against. And they are hell bent for a good time.
. . . Among a large and growing lower class, self-reliance, self-discipline, and industry are waning . . . A large segment of the population is becoming incompetent and destructive. Growing parasitism, both legal and illegal, is the result; so, also, is violence. … today, there is the ‘spirit of confrontation,’ in which self-interest and a desire to change the system are merged in groups which depend for their existence on pursuing a ‘conflict’ strategy . . . the more one knows about welfare the more horrible it becomes: but not because of cheating, rather because the system destroys those who receive it, and corrupts those who dispense it. . . . . a services strategy tends not only to exclude working class whites, but also to set up a great many middle class whites (and blacks) in the resentment business. They earn very good livings making the black poor feel put upon, when they are, which is often the case, and also when they are not.
In the best universities the best men are increasingly appalled by the authoritarian tendencies of the left.
Letter to the president of Stanford University, 1975, regarding protests to his commencement speech: No one was disagreeing with any views I had put forth,. The disagreement (in its essentials) was with views I was falsely accused of holding. My accusers were and are liars. I recalled to you the Stalinist origin of this technique, which leaves the accused spluttering and mumbling that he never said any of those things, etc. . . . liberal academia, faced with the neototalitarian assault on persons such as myself who might be described as liberal dissenters, has adopted a devastatingly effective device for avoiding having to deal with what it is we have to say. They d not acknowledge the fact that our views are systematically and viciously distorted by the Left. To the contrary, they let the lies stand unchallenged. What they do instead is to say we should nonetheless be allowed to speak.
From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows large numbers 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. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder . . . are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable. And they are richly deserved.
And his famous statement after the assassination of John Kennedy: I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought he had a little more time.
2011 No 91 Coming soon: Charlie Chan, by Yunte Huang
This book is a collection from his letters and papers compiled primarily by his daughter. From his years as a member of the administrations of John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford, ambassador to Indian and to the UN, and senator from New York, he wrote so much and so well that it must have been difficult to pick only the best. Here are some of his comments:
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.
. . . one of the things I found most curious was the ease with which we obtained money for the education of children formally denoted as “uneducable,” while I could not interest the most wild eyed, radical, give-a-way, spender in the notion of a program of special state aid to provide “enriched” programs for the smart kids. . . . I ought not to sound cruel, but the faintly distasteful fact behind this is that the allocation of resources in education, as elsewhere, reflects the political power of the interests concerned, and where the parents of backward children were organized parents of the bright ones were not.
On the Catholic church: …while I am reasonably strict in my observances, I am like Lord Melbourne, more a buttress of the church than a pillar, in that I support it from the outside.
Too frequently of late the liberal upper middle class has proposed to solve problems of those at the bottom at the expense, or seeming expense, of those in between.
Since about 1840 the cultural elite in America have pretty generally rejected the values and activities of the larger society. . . . The leading cultural figures are going – have gone – into opposition . . . they take with them a vastly more numerous following of educated, middle class persons, especially young ones, who share their feelings and who do not need the ‘straight’ world. It is their pleasure to cause trouble, to be against. And they are hell bent for a good time.
. . . Among a large and growing lower class, self-reliance, self-discipline, and industry are waning . . . A large segment of the population is becoming incompetent and destructive. Growing parasitism, both legal and illegal, is the result; so, also, is violence. … today, there is the ‘spirit of confrontation,’ in which self-interest and a desire to change the system are merged in groups which depend for their existence on pursuing a ‘conflict’ strategy . . . the more one knows about welfare the more horrible it becomes: but not because of cheating, rather because the system destroys those who receive it, and corrupts those who dispense it. . . . . a services strategy tends not only to exclude working class whites, but also to set up a great many middle class whites (and blacks) in the resentment business. They earn very good livings making the black poor feel put upon, when they are, which is often the case, and also when they are not.
In the best universities the best men are increasingly appalled by the authoritarian tendencies of the left.
Letter to the president of Stanford University, 1975, regarding protests to his commencement speech: No one was disagreeing with any views I had put forth,. The disagreement (in its essentials) was with views I was falsely accused of holding. My accusers were and are liars. I recalled to you the Stalinist origin of this technique, which leaves the accused spluttering and mumbling that he never said any of those things, etc. . . . liberal academia, faced with the neototalitarian assault on persons such as myself who might be described as liberal dissenters, has adopted a devastatingly effective device for avoiding having to deal with what it is we have to say. They d not acknowledge the fact that our views are systematically and viciously distorted by the Left. To the contrary, they let the lies stand unchallenged. What they do instead is to say we should nonetheless be allowed to speak.
From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows large numbers 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. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder . . . are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable. And they are richly deserved.
And his famous statement after the assassination of John Kennedy: I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought he had a little more time.
2011 No 91 Coming soon: Charlie Chan, by Yunte Huang
January 22, 2019
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
If that is all the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said or did he would be my hero for life.
But he said and wrote much more and we can thank former editor and journalist Steven R. Weissman for this excellent sampling from Moynihan’s mountain of letters.
Editorialists excoriated Moynihan at the end of his career as having accomplished little as a politician. He wrote many books. He taught at Harvard, and MIT, and Syracuse. Before becoming a politician himself he served four American presidents in succession starting as one of the frontiersmen in John F. Kennedy’s administration.
To his critics he appeared to switch sides from being a liberal Democrat to a conservative for Richard Nixon. He was called a neocon and hated the term.
In his social science research he was labelled a racist by African American scholars for identifying problems in the nuclear family unit as one source of poverty for inner-city blacks.
But the story is more nuanced.
He fought in Nixon’s cabinet for a Guaranteed Annual Income, something Nixon approved of but never came to pass.
He wrote and lobbied for family support payments, something Republican conservatives forced President Clinton to back down on.
He detested the CIA and complained endlessly about secrecy in government. If the CIA was so good, he asked, why didn’t they predict the fall of the Soviet. Union, something he was expecting for a decade or longer.
He was unfairly pinned for gunning down Hilary Clinton’s health reform while he was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, but even Clinton herself came to acknowledge that she should have listened to him more closely.
Reading the letters of a politician in a democracy could be as dull as watching paint dry, but when you see up close how hard it is, and how poorly compensated these wretches are, you realize all the more how fragile democracy is and must be to work.
If that is all the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said or did he would be my hero for life.
But he said and wrote much more and we can thank former editor and journalist Steven R. Weissman for this excellent sampling from Moynihan’s mountain of letters.
Editorialists excoriated Moynihan at the end of his career as having accomplished little as a politician. He wrote many books. He taught at Harvard, and MIT, and Syracuse. Before becoming a politician himself he served four American presidents in succession starting as one of the frontiersmen in John F. Kennedy’s administration.
To his critics he appeared to switch sides from being a liberal Democrat to a conservative for Richard Nixon. He was called a neocon and hated the term.
In his social science research he was labelled a racist by African American scholars for identifying problems in the nuclear family unit as one source of poverty for inner-city blacks.
But the story is more nuanced.
He fought in Nixon’s cabinet for a Guaranteed Annual Income, something Nixon approved of but never came to pass.
He wrote and lobbied for family support payments, something Republican conservatives forced President Clinton to back down on.
He detested the CIA and complained endlessly about secrecy in government. If the CIA was so good, he asked, why didn’t they predict the fall of the Soviet. Union, something he was expecting for a decade or longer.
He was unfairly pinned for gunning down Hilary Clinton’s health reform while he was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, but even Clinton herself came to acknowledge that she should have listened to him more closely.
Reading the letters of a politician in a democracy could be as dull as watching paint dry, but when you see up close how hard it is, and how poorly compensated these wretches are, you realize all the more how fragile democracy is and must be to work.
January 5, 2017
There are wonderful sections in Kissinger that feature the big man taken to task by a much less imperious member of the Nixon White House staff, Pat Moynihan. I was intrigued by Moynihan's emphasis on openness versus secrecy, and on domestic policy versus foreign. I knew he had been a senator through the 1980s and 90s, and I wanted to know more.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan's version of liberal Democrat actually emphasized the moral agency of individuals, as well as family structure, for helping the country's poor and disadvantaged. His work before and after the book with Nathan Glazer, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, and the notorious 1965 Report on the Negro Family grapple with how tribes of people manage their families, leading to various paths towards or away from social advancement. And this has never been more relevant, with books like Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis giving us a peek into the major conflict of our American generation, that between the urban elite and a rural working class that is falling to pieces, families first. Moynihan would give the book a ringing endorsement, but likely add, "I told you so."
Moynihan was a wonderful writer of letters, often using the form as a way to give brief histories of an issue or event, as a lifetime of public service put in him in a seemingly permanent mood to set the record straight. His emphasis on honesty and decency and his attacks on secrecy and moneyed interests are a marvel, especially considering he represented the Senate for what was then the richest state in the union, New York. Another way to define liberalism in that era: Moynihan knew full well that New York paid more in taxes to the federal government than it received back in services and grants, and he supported keeping the gap wide.
The work is a bridge between the American history of the immediate post-war era, through Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon, and on to the years of Ford, Carter, Reagan and even the Clintons. Moynihan had a very complex, fractious relationship with the Clintons, which is likely a sign of his conflict over vast changes in his Democratic party and the tenor of the country as a whole.
The letters are in no sense cohesive, and often repetitious, but still an immensely enjoyable read, and a storehouse of primary sources that I will no doubt be using in future history courses, on topics like social welfare programs, the student protest movement of the 1960s and 70s, wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, Spiro Agnew and the conservative backlash to the students and blacks, US foreign policy, especially the India of Indira Gandhi during the Nixon administration, the origins of the term "neoconservative", reflections on Stalin and the USSR, fellow liberals Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, and Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic party in the Carter years, the origins of Reaganomics, which entails cutting taxes as a prelude to cuts in social programs, and much else, as well. Moynihan is among the first of the post-Bay-of-Pigs statesmen I have seen to consistently oppose the CIA, which he calls "brain dead" and hammers for not predicting the fall of the USSR. How many others in power have worked, however feebly, to end the creeping, clumsy totalitarianism of our so-called "intelligence community"?
Daniel Patrick Moynihan's version of liberal Democrat actually emphasized the moral agency of individuals, as well as family structure, for helping the country's poor and disadvantaged. His work before and after the book with Nathan Glazer, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, and the notorious 1965 Report on the Negro Family grapple with how tribes of people manage their families, leading to various paths towards or away from social advancement. And this has never been more relevant, with books like Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis giving us a peek into the major conflict of our American generation, that between the urban elite and a rural working class that is falling to pieces, families first. Moynihan would give the book a ringing endorsement, but likely add, "I told you so."
Moynihan was a wonderful writer of letters, often using the form as a way to give brief histories of an issue or event, as a lifetime of public service put in him in a seemingly permanent mood to set the record straight. His emphasis on honesty and decency and his attacks on secrecy and moneyed interests are a marvel, especially considering he represented the Senate for what was then the richest state in the union, New York. Another way to define liberalism in that era: Moynihan knew full well that New York paid more in taxes to the federal government than it received back in services and grants, and he supported keeping the gap wide.
The work is a bridge between the American history of the immediate post-war era, through Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon, and on to the years of Ford, Carter, Reagan and even the Clintons. Moynihan had a very complex, fractious relationship with the Clintons, which is likely a sign of his conflict over vast changes in his Democratic party and the tenor of the country as a whole.
The letters are in no sense cohesive, and often repetitious, but still an immensely enjoyable read, and a storehouse of primary sources that I will no doubt be using in future history courses, on topics like social welfare programs, the student protest movement of the 1960s and 70s, wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, Spiro Agnew and the conservative backlash to the students and blacks, US foreign policy, especially the India of Indira Gandhi during the Nixon administration, the origins of the term "neoconservative", reflections on Stalin and the USSR, fellow liberals Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, and Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic party in the Carter years, the origins of Reaganomics, which entails cutting taxes as a prelude to cuts in social programs, and much else, as well. Moynihan is among the first of the post-Bay-of-Pigs statesmen I have seen to consistently oppose the CIA, which he calls "brain dead" and hammers for not predicting the fall of the USSR. How many others in power have worked, however feebly, to end the creeping, clumsy totalitarianism of our so-called "intelligence community"?
February 17, 2025
Born in 1927, the letters start in 1959, when Moynihan was still an academic. Later, in 1969 he would join the Nixon adminstration as "Counselor on Domestic Affairs" before moving on to Ambassador to India, UN Ambassabor, and in 1977, the US Senate. There are few letters after his Senate Career ended in 2001.
Moynihan was an old fashioned liberal Democrat. He was committed to a strong foreign policy, anti-communism, support for Israel, helping labor unions and the poor, and liberal values such as freedom of speech, and tolerance. He was willing to "reach accross the aisle" to solve problems. While not a "Neo-con" he was a "quarter-con".
Sadly, none of Moynihan's actions, beliefs, and political stands were particularly interesting to me. As for his books: "Beyond the melting pot" is interesting for historical reasons if nothing else, but the others are dated.
Interesting tid bit: He was working with Len Garment, Nixon's Legal counselor, to "Pushback" against Agnew's "Demagoguery".
Moynihan was an old fashioned liberal Democrat. He was committed to a strong foreign policy, anti-communism, support for Israel, helping labor unions and the poor, and liberal values such as freedom of speech, and tolerance. He was willing to "reach accross the aisle" to solve problems. While not a "Neo-con" he was a "quarter-con".
Sadly, none of Moynihan's actions, beliefs, and political stands were particularly interesting to me. As for his books: "Beyond the melting pot" is interesting for historical reasons if nothing else, but the others are dated.
Interesting tid bit: He was working with Len Garment, Nixon's Legal counselor, to "Pushback" against Agnew's "Demagoguery".
February 8, 2023
I got this book over ten years ago in high school and use it today as a tool for writing my own memos for work, school, et cetera. This book contains not only the Pat Moynihan memorandums to Nixon, but letters written when DPM was on a Fulbright Scholarship to the London School of Economics, letters written to Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, the new governors of New York upon their election, and the intellectual culturati of the day. My vocabulary expanded pretty quickly reading this book. First time I learned of the word floccinaucinihilipilification came when reading this book. A visionary, an intellectual, this is the closest work to the memoir we never got from Senator Moynihan.
May 27, 2019
Moynihan...Moynihan...
A man to admire in his errors and his accuracies.
A man to admire in his errors and his accuracies.
June 16, 2020
The cover says it all.
March 18, 2023
Portrait of a relic of the past: a principled, educated politician not beholden to partisanship.
May 31, 2019
A bit repetitive but generally good if you are interested in knowing something about this man life, political career and views
October 24, 2020
The voice and collection of this lifelong activist to better American civilization is a necessary read when looking for a less a caustic Government. Daniel Moynihan had a good approach to civil society. He was evidence and science based. He deeply cared about humanity.
May 17, 2012
Although he only spent a year at CUNY in the 30s, Moynihan belongs firmly within the "neoconservative" set produced by that institution. To abuse Eliot's remarks on the metaphysical poets, these men felt their thoughts, as immediate as physical sensations. Saul Bellow expressed their sensibility in literary form, and, to wander off the point for a moment, it's striking how closely that Canadian/Chicagoan's intellectual journey (from Trotskyist in the 30s to conservative Jeremiah by the 70s) mirrors that of the rest of the group.
I read this progression as in some sense tied to the triumph of formerly peripheral ethnic groups (Irish, Jewish, etc.) Out of power, one is revolutionary, in power... otherwise. There were as well some real factors involving a. left-wing cultural and policy overreach and b. Communist aggression. In any event, their arrival came as a great shock to the conservative establishment, which (as Moynihan points out) had more or less resigned itself being the side without any intellectuals. Unfortunately the conservative establishment was (in my view) at first too wary, and then, just when neoconservatism had (for reasons I still don't understand) exhausted its constructive intellectual potential, too accepting.
Moynihan is very entertaining and perceptive, although, as he would be the first to point out, somewhere in the muddle between academic and civil servant. It's extremely impressive how early Moynihan was in addressing major intellectual/social issues that are, for the rest of us, only now coming into focus. He quite rightly spends a great deal of time crowing about his predicting the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and his writings on welfare, domestic racial policies, international ethnic conflict, and elite disconnect were all, as I said, ahead of the curve.
I read this progression as in some sense tied to the triumph of formerly peripheral ethnic groups (Irish, Jewish, etc.) Out of power, one is revolutionary, in power... otherwise. There were as well some real factors involving a. left-wing cultural and policy overreach and b. Communist aggression. In any event, their arrival came as a great shock to the conservative establishment, which (as Moynihan points out) had more or less resigned itself being the side without any intellectuals. Unfortunately the conservative establishment was (in my view) at first too wary, and then, just when neoconservatism had (for reasons I still don't understand) exhausted its constructive intellectual potential, too accepting.
Moynihan is very entertaining and perceptive, although, as he would be the first to point out, somewhere in the muddle between academic and civil servant. It's extremely impressive how early Moynihan was in addressing major intellectual/social issues that are, for the rest of us, only now coming into focus. He quite rightly spends a great deal of time crowing about his predicting the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and his writings on welfare, domestic racial policies, international ethnic conflict, and elite disconnect were all, as I said, ahead of the curve.
April 6, 2013
I came to political awareness in the post-Moynihan era of George W. Bush, so the portrait of this book was remarkable to me. It depicts a creature that our elders swear once walked the Earth, a bipartisan who really meant it. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a confirmed liberal who spent a lifetime resisting efforts by other liberals to tell him what to think. He was more interested in being right than being orthodox. I'm not convinced that he was right about everything, but genuine independence is a historical virtue.
He seemed convinced (convinced!) that something productive and essential happens when conservative principles are combined with liberal ones. Watergate pretty much put an end to that, but he never really stopped trying.
Moynihan was an engaging writer, which helps to keep the book readable in spite of necessary repetitions in its form. It can be thrilling for a reader of history to peruse the letters of an important figure, when so often we have to rely on second-hand narratives. All in all, an intriguing read.
He seemed convinced (convinced!) that something productive and essential happens when conservative principles are combined with liberal ones. Watergate pretty much put an end to that, but he never really stopped trying.
Moynihan was an engaging writer, which helps to keep the book readable in spite of necessary repetitions in its form. It can be thrilling for a reader of history to peruse the letters of an important figure, when so often we have to rely on second-hand narratives. All in all, an intriguing read.
March 3, 2013
The book confirmed my longstanding impressions and opinion of Senator Moynihan; a man I was proud to vote for 4 times to represent me (how far have we fallen in representation today) ; he was among the great men of American politics and intellectual discourse, who was, as the book plainly shows, ahead of the curve on any number of critical issues impacting America today - a true voice of the US century, but who was open enough to his own limitation to always seek knowledge and understanding not always believing his way was the only way.....a book that I will reread many times again I am sure, and share with my grandson at some point in the future to show him that there were political leaders of character and yes , intelligence, at one point in our history.....
January 29, 2011
He comes through these letters and memoranda as single bright point within the blinding glare of national government, standing out over the decades. A sparky, cunning fellow; we are not worth him now.
March 14, 2011
This was one of the most well written books that I have read lately. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a suburb writer. I learned so much about recent US History from reading his letters and documents. This is a must read.
October 2, 2012
Simply outstanding. Polarization has been the rule for many years - as bad as it seems now, this illustrates that politics is politics. Very engaging reading. He foresaw so many of the seeds of our present problems. I intend to write more later, as time allows.
September 26, 2014
Setting aside my own political critique of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, this is a lovely book of correspondence by a thoughtful politician who was also a beautiful writer.
January 29, 2016
A long book but well worth the read. Moynihan was an amazing person with an amazing intellect. We don't have anybody in the Senate like him anymore.
September 11, 2013
One of my heroes! A man who would have made a fine President.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews