Gentleman, politician, scholar

Public Interest, Summer, 2003 by James Q. Wilson

I KNEW Pat Moynihan for over forty years. He was without a doubt, as Michael Barone once said, "the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson." He served four presidents, two from each party, was twice an ambassador, and graced the Senate for four terms.

We first met in 1962 when he came to the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard and M.I.T. to give a talk on why the FBI was wrong to ignore--indeed, even to deny the existence of--the Mafia. I immediately realized that I had to know a man who, as an Assistant Secretary of Labor, was willing to beard the most feared bureaucrat in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover. After the speech, I met him and found him to be a splendid conversationalist, a man who had read nearly everything (except the sports pages) and who remembered everything he read.

As his career unfolded, it was clear that he was a remarkable oddity, a politician who did not clamor for attention, disliked the cocktail-party circuit, and rarely struggled to get his name attached to legislative bills he fashioned (giving rise, alas, to the quite incorrect notion that legislation did not interest him). There was no famous "Moynihan Bill," but there were countless bills that he shaped and helped pass.

He spoke in a clipped, almost stuttering style that must have baffled many of his Senate colleagues. He was not a great orator; he was simply a fascinating one. He was immensely tolerant of other people and looked after his friends, whether they had something to celebrate or much to fear. But he could on occasion be blunt. His daughter, Maura, vividly remembers a diplomatic cable that Ambassador Moynihan sent from India to the State Department that, apart from its customary obsequies. contained just two words: "F-- you."

Some academics thought Pat was just a politician, and some politicians surely thought he was just an intellectual. Both were wrong. Pat was neither an academic caught up in politics nor a politician who dabbled in writing. He was, first and foremost, a man of important ideas, and he pursued them wherever he worked. He took up countless issues and said something valuable about all of them: highway safety, ethnicity, poverty, crime, the family, welfare, race relations, education, diplomacy, arms control, international law, architecture, state government, aid to parochial schools, natural law, Social Security, the distribution of tax receipts and government expenditures, government secrecy, and medical schools, to name but a few.

If he were a politician who merely dabbled in ideas and was concerned mostly with his political advancement, he likely would have said nothing, or certainly nothing beyond the banal, about aid to Catholic schools, excessive government secrecy, the plight of the black family, or Idi Amin, whom he denounced while serving as our ambassador to the United Nations as a "racist murderer." His support for aid to Catholic schools earned him the dislike of secularists; by attacking government secrecy, he gained the loathing of bureaucrats who enjoyed wielding their stamps marked "CONFIDENTIAL"; his analysis of the black family aroused the hostility of the civil rights community; and by portraying Idi Amin with such accuracy, he upset the delicate diplomatic instincts of Henry Kissinger.

PAT took ideas seriously, no matter for whom he worked. To him, an interesting idea had to have important consequences, and many of these involved public policy. But some had no policy implications at all. To the despair of some of his friends, and to the advantage of many of his critics, he never explained how the government might halt the weakening of families, black or white. "If you expect a government program to change families, you know more about government than I do," he once said.

But, in many other instances, public policy could play an important role. Pat was intrigued with the idea of having a negative income tax, but after the federal government experimented with this policy and discovered that it caused the breakup of more families, he abandoned the idea. Most politicians talk their way around critical facts or grab onto a convenient political slogan. Pat took facts seriously.

He came to believe that Social Security could be improved not by privatization, but by adding to it a means for creating wealth for ordinary people. Pat served as cochairman of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security. It was a good committee with interesting things to say, but it said them in a report published just three months after terrorists killed three thousand Americans. There are a lot of reasons for wishing that September 11 had never occurred, but a small one is that perhaps people might have read the introduction to the Commission's report. It was signed by both Moynihan and Richard Parsons, his co-chairman. I trust it is no disrespect to Parsons, a man who contributed much to the project, to say that the introduction was pure Pat.