Sen. Moynihan, Wet and Dry. - Review - book review

Reason, Nov, 2000 by John J. Pitney, Jr.

The Gentleman From New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, by Godfrey Hodgson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 480 pages, $35

I once poured for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And poured. And poured. The year was 1984, and I was a low-level aide for another lawmaker. Moynihan and my boss were on a charter flight to Albany to attend a conference on acid rain. My job was to sit in the jump seat behind Moynihan and keep his glass full of champagne. Moynihan kept me busy. When the flight landed, the senator darted toward a nest of reporters waiting in the terminal. "This will be a lively press conference," I thought.

It was, though not for the reason I thought. Moynihan's answers were as florid as his face, but they were utterly lucid and knowledgeable. This brief encounter left me with the suspicion that, like Winston Churchill and Frank Sinatra, Moynihan actually works better with some adult beverages in his bloodstream.

That's smart-alecky speculation, of course, but it may just solve a mystery. In his new biography of Moynihan, British journalist Godfrey Hodgson aspires to describe "the interplay between ideas and action" throughout Moynihan's life. In the light of the senator's much-vaunted public record, however, a careful analysis of the book reveals that the story is not about "interplay" at all. Moynihan's words have often diverged from his deeds. In fact, there are really two Moynihans: one with great insight into the limits of government and the booby traps of social policy, the other with an unstinting devotion to federal power and a lockstep liberal voting record.

Apropos of nothing in particular, I will call them Moynihan Wet and Moynihan Dry.

Hodgson prefers narrative to intellectual history and thus provides little insight into the dual nature of Moynihan's intellectual character. After a placid early childhood, Hodgson tells us, Moynihan went through a painful period when his father abandoned his family to troubled circumstances in New York City. Moynihan Dry has often cited this experience in explaining his support for social programs.

Hodgson's narrative suggests that Moynihan Wet may have sprouted in the unlikely soil of the London School of Economics. In spite of its reputation as a nursery for Third World socialism, he says, the LSE actually employed some free market thinkers when Moynihan did graduate work there in the early 1950s. The account of the LSE influence is sketchy, however. Hodgson even quotes Moynihan as saying, "Nothing and no one at LSE ever disposed me to be anything but a New York Democrat."

After serving as a top aide to New York Gov. Averill Harriman and completing a Ph.D. at Tufts in 1961, Moynihan became assistant secretary of labor in the Kennedy administration. When Lyndon Johnson became president, the capital got its first major taste of Moynihan Dry. With speechwriter Richard N. Goodwin, he drafted LBJ's historic 1965 address at Howard University, which helped lay the intellectual foundation for racial preferences by articulating equal outcomes as more important than equal opportunities: "[I]t is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates....We seek not just freedom and opportunity--not just legal equity but human ability--not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result."

The speech drew heavily on a report that Moynihan had written on the "pathology" of the black family. Liberals who believed in the power of government to right all wrongs were annoyed by the notion of "pathology" (though it would later become conventional wisdom) as an explanation for poor blacks' problems. When the report became public, Moynihan Dry, despite his call for government action to help blacks, found himself the target of liberal vilification.

Enter Moynihan Wet. By this time, he had left the Labor Department to run in the Democratic primary for president of the New York City Council. He lost. He would spend the next few years teaching, writing, and challenging the liberal orthodoxy he had recently championed.

In 1967 Moynihan Wet gave a series of lectures about "the war on poverty," which he later collected in a book, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding. His summation of the fate of "community action" programs was bluntly skeptical: "This is the essential fact. The government did not know what it was doing. It had a theory. Or, rather, a set of theories. Nothing more.

In 1968 the well-known Democratic policy maker took the astonishing step of contributing to an anthology called Republican Papers. Moynihan Wet sounded close to conversion. In his contribution, he wrote: "Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth, namely a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good."

Moynihan Dry and Wet fought most over racial preference. In 1968 Moynihan wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly titled "The New Racialism," which Hodgson unfortunately overlooks. Whereas Moynihan Dry had just advocated "equality of result," Moynihan Wet now grasped the unanticipated consequences: "That which was specifically forbidden by the Civil Rights Act is now explicitly (albeit covertly) required by the federal government. Employers are given quotas of the black employees they will hire, records of minority-group employment are diligently maintained, and censuses repeatedly taken."