PAT

Reviewed 6/21/2004

Pat, by Douglas Schoen

PAT: A Biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Douglas Schoen
New York: Harper & Row, 1979

Rating:

5.0

High

ISBN 0-06-013998-6 322pp. HC/BWI $12.95

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) was ambassador to India and to the United Nations, a U.S. Senator for 24 years, a professor at Tufts, Wesylan, Syracuse and Harvard universities as well as MIT, and served in the administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford. 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, Family and Nation (1986), Came the Revolution (1988), On the Law of Nations (1990), and Secrecy (1998).

Pat Moynihan had a hardscrabble boyhood.1 Perhaps I can sum it up by saying it was a time of shaky prosperity amid domestic strife until his hard-drinking, womanizing father left for good, after which things got really tough. But Pat was a survivor. He worked on a farm, his only wages a tall glass of iced tea at the end of the day. He shined shoes in Times Square. He worked as a stock boy at Gimbel's department store — a job which paid better than any he'd had and, says Schoen, "gave him the opportunity to liberate stray merchandise from his capitalist bosses." (page 17) He and his brother Mike were not above supplementing their incomes by running "pity scams".2 He toiled as a stevedore on the Manhattan docks, where his energy earned him the nickname "Young Blood". This last job overlapped with the year he spent at City College of New York; then, in June 1944, he entered the Navy.

Young Pat had a strong literary bent, and excelled in economics and history. However, he had trouble with math and foreign languages. Though he was known as an outstanding student in the various high schools he attended, his scholastic record at City College was mixed. His passions during the year he spent there were women and jazz.2 Though he seldom wanted for outward self-confidence, Moynihan was intimidated by the prospect of taking the entrance exam for the Navy Officer Training Course and kept putting it off. When he finally took and passed it, he telegraphed his friend Harry Hall, "MOYNIHAN IN NAVY, SECRETARY KNOX DROPS DEAD."

After studying at Middlebury College and Tufts University in New England, Moynihan graduated in 1946 with a bachelor's in naval science and a commission as ensign. He served aboard two ships until mid-1947, then returned to Tufts in the fall to complete his B.A. Despite getting to a scrape with the law, he graduated in 1948 (thanks to credits from previous college work) with a spot at the Fletcher School to study international law and politics. Moynihan's matriculation was punctuated by various pranks, scrapes, and picaresque adventures, as well as by bouts with back pain (finally diagnosed as a herniated disk) and periodic efforts to help his mother, who by then was running a bar in the Hell's Kitchen district of Manhattan. Also, somewhere in this period (for reasons Schoen was unable to discover), he lost interest in socialism and embraced capitalism. But he remained an ardent Democrat and was vocal in support of Roosevelt and Truman. Suffice it to say that, after doing graduate work at Harvard, in August 1950 he was offered a Fulbright Scholarship to the London School of Economics.

Arriving in London, Pat Moynihan found himself in paradise. For the first time in his life, he had plenty of money and no family crises to resolve. He indulged himself at the tailor shops of Saville Row, and kept up his vigorous social life and his visits to the pubs. His professors recall little academic output from him, and the friends he hobnobbed with during the period (who included Sander Vanocur and Howard K. Smith) remember him more as cheerful and fun-loving, a great party guest, rather than someone destined for high political office. Yet the seeds were there, visible in conversations with foreigners and in columns published in New Statesman.

In due course he returned to New York City. After dithering for a time, he joined Averill Harriman's campaign for New York governor as speechwriter and general "gopher", and married Elizabeth Brennan. Harriman's victory brought him a job in Albany and showed him his first political infighting: a dispute between reformers and Democratic party regulars over the choice of Harriman's running mate for re-election. The ugly squabble sent liberals running in droves and resulted in Nelson Rockefeller winning the governorship by half a million votes.

This bittersweet entré to politics was the start of a remarkable career. Moynihan served in the administrations of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. His Washington-based positions involved labor and poverty programs; he also was ambassador to India and the United Nations. He managed to interweave these duties with various academic positions. Ultimately he won a Senate seat for New York, remaining in that position for four terms until he retired in 2000.

Moynihan displayed forceful intellectual brilliance and a life-of-the-party geniality that masked some self-doubt about his own abilities. His childhood gave him a feeling for the common man and the practical side of life; he understood crime, chaos and poverty.5 However, his intellect prevented him from ever being comfortable with ordinary people. His greatest contributions were research and publications; yet he was never truly accepted by the academic community. His training and experience enabled him to develop valuable policy initiatives, but he was not a good enough back-room bargainer to get the policies he favored most enacted. An ardent Democrat, he served ably in two Republican administrations and Nixon held him in high regard, an attitude he returned. An eternal champion of blacks and the poor, he was nonetheless condemned as a racist by many black leaders during the civil-rights struggle of the 1960s and 70s. Steadfast and outspoken in defending American interests against third-world coalitions at the UN during that same period, he was held by professional diplomats to be too confrontational for an ambassadorial post. In the end, Moynihan is perhaps best described as a man of immense talent and drive who, beset by gnawing self-doubt and many defeats, nevertheless persisted in public life and held true to his core beliefs, becoming in the end an honored member of the Loyal Opposition.

Moynihan on international affairs (page 40)

The crucial battles are at present being fought round and about the world not with guns, but with ideas—specifically with symbols—and not amongst the high aristocracy or the parliamentarians, but amongst the sprawling, plodding, stupid, sluggish, ugly, beautiful working people of the world who like some great giant are awakening from the nightmare of the 19th century, thrashing about, and demolishing the world that was built on their backs.

Moynihan on African-Americans (page 108)

That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. That the Negro community has not only survived, but in this political generation has entered national affairs as a moderate, humane and constructive national force is the highest testament to the healing powers of the democratic ideal and the creative vitality of the Negro people.

Moynihan quoting an assessment of Henry Kissinger (page 212)

Moynihan recalls what the counsellor to the State Department, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, told him when he was considering taking the post: "You do not understand. Henry does not lie because it is in his interest. He lies because it is in his nature."

This thoroughly researched book presents Moynihan's life in a very readable way. Schoen weaves into the narrative a plentiful supply of his subject's words, and the text is supplemented by 15 black and white photographs. End-notes are provided for each of the thirteen chapters, and the index is very complete. Except for some sparseness when describing Moynihan's early years, the author misses very little. By now there certainly are other biographies of the Senator, but I am sure this one compares favorably with them.

1 Unlike another Irishman, Bill O'Reilly, who only pretends he started low in order to bolster his image.
2 Mike would enter a bar hawking newspapers. Pat would come up, declare that this was his territory, and knock the papers out of his younger brother's hands. The bar patrons would then buy up all the papers out of sympathy for poor Mike. Later, he and Pat would split the take. (page 17)
3 Schoen reports (page 21) that Pat spent hours at Leadbelly concerts and jazz clubs like Nick's in Greenwich Village and even "won the nickname Jellyroll (an old black jazz singer's name for sexual intercourse)." I wonder who that old black jazz singer was...
4 Once established in Washington, heading up the Labor Department's Office of Policy Planning and Research, Moynihan would hire a young consultant you may have heard of. His name was Nader, and he later became the author of Unsafe at Any Speed, a classic book on auto safety.
5 As shocked as anyone by the assassination of John Kennedy, Moynihan was one of the few officials who understood that Lee Harvey Oswald might be killed by the Dallas police. (See pages 79-82.) He spoke up strongly and persistently for taking Oswald into federal custody, but did not prevail. (Yes, I know it was Jack Ruby, a small-time crook with Mafia ties, who fired the shot. But, conspiracy theories aside, it would not have happened if the police had done their jobs properly.)
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