It Must Be Nice To Have Washington On Your Side

U.N. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan and President Gerald Ford in the Oval Office, August 27, 1975

On February 15 this year, Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, gave a speech at the American International School in Even Yehuda, Israel. It came as part of a multi-day trip to Israel by Power, with the predictable itinerary for travelling diplomats: meetings with leading politicians and visits to the Holocaust Museum Yad Veshem and to an Israel-Palestine Coexistence Programme. The speech was delivered to students participating in the Israel Middle East Model UN. An ideal venue, one might have assumed, for some encouraging bromides about international co-operation.

Instead, Ambassador Power took the opportunity to publicly chastise the U.N. for anti-Israel bias. Within the organisation, Power charged, ‘Israel is just not treated like other countries.’ Some member states sought to use the institutional bodies of the U.N. ‘to delegitimize the state of Israel itself.’ The role of U.S., continued Power, was ‘to ensure that the criticisms of Israel are about policies and not of the existence of the state itself, which is what it still feels as though a lot of that criticism is motivated by.’[1]

A former professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, foreign correspondent, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Power has gained a reputation as forthright, even occasionally undiplomatic, during her time at the U.N. In November 2014, for instance, Power publicly criticised the European nations who failed to send representatives to the Berlin Conference on Anti-Semitism hosted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).[2] This blunt style has occasionally gotten Power into trouble, as in 2008 when she was compelled to stand down as a foreign policy advisor to then-candidate Barack Obama after describing his rival Hillary Clinton as ‘a monster’ in an interview with The Scotsman.[3]

She has been caricatured, according to The New Yorker, as ‘an Ivy League Joan of Arc’ and describes herself, in her role as ambassador, as a ‘pain in the ass’ for the Obama administration.[4] Power’s best-known book, 2002’s ‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide, was a scathing rebuke of the U.S. for having ‘done nothing, practically or politically, to respond to genocide’ and thus become a bystander in the face of mass slaughter at crucial points in the twentieth century.[5] Her ambassadorship has been informed by such readings of history and defined by a commitment to the use of U.S. power in defence of human rights. An Irish-American, a Democrat, an academic by training, a rhetorical pugilist, and a stout defender of Israel, Power closely resembles another U.N. ambassador, one who stood down after less than a year in the post almost exactly forty years ago. That ambassador is, of course, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

No, not really. You should have spotted the theme of this blog by now. If you want posts about Henry Cabot Lodge, go convene your own conference. This here’s Moynihan country.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the United States’ Permanent Representative to the United Nations from June 1975 until February 1976. President Richard Nixon, in whose White House Moynihan had served as Counselor for Urban Affairs, had originally planned to appoint him to that post in 1970. However, when the news leaked (or rather, when Moynihan accidentally leaked the news by sharing the information with a friend), the response from the press and State Department officials was so hostile that he was forced to withdraw.[6] In 1973, the by-now embattled Nixon appointed Moynihan ambassador to India, a post in which he served until early 1975.

The cause of Moynihan’s appointment to the U.N. position was an article that appeared Commentary in March 1975, and which had mostly been written in India, ‘The United States in Opposition.’ In this article, Moynihan argued that the political culture of the decolonising Third World had been shaped by British socialism, particularly the authoritarian Fabian variant that had emerged from the London School of Economics. As a direct consequence, he said, the U.S. found itself outnumbered in the international community, and outvoted in the U.N., by anti-‘imperialist’, anti-capitalist, and anti-American authoritarian states. This anti-American majority meant that the U.S. could achieve nothing productive within the UN, concluded Moynihan, and thus the U.S. should ‘go into opposition’ and use its moral authority to shame autocracies for corruption and abuses of power. ‘It is time that the American spokesman came to be feared in international forums for the truths he might tell.’[7]

Moynihan’s theory was, at least in part, pure bunkum. As the anthropologist St. Clair Drake pointed out, it dramatically oversimplified the political cultures of the postcolonial nations of the Third World, only a small minority of which could be said to have been influenced by Fabianism.[8] Nonetheless, his argument struck a chord in a White House which was growing increasingly receptive to the idea of a more aggressive posture at the U.N. In April, President Ford invited Moynihan to take up the post of ambassador. The New York Times was cautiously welcoming of his appointment. Its editorial hoped that Moynihan would steer clear of ‘a public brawl with the third world’ and that his ‘undoubted intelligence and awesome energies’ would be channelled into ‘constructive endeavors.’[9] Moynihan set the tone for his ambassadorship in a speech to the 69^th Annual American Jewish Committee a few weeks later. Americans, he said, had ‘suffered an erosion of belief in the value of liberty and the defense of democracy, along with a weariness with the international role.’ There was a danger that the U.S. might become part of ‘a beleaguered minority,’ but even if that should happen ‘we must not forget that we are the party of liberty.’[10]

As U.N. ambassador, Moynihan was representing not only the ‘party of liberty,’ but a faction within the Democratic Party that also felt itself increasingly beleaguered. It was a faction that defined itself in opposition to what it saw as the anti-internationalist inclinations of the New Politics movement, which had been born in opposition to the Vietnam War and evolved a broader critique of establishment liberalism, eventually coalescing in George McGovern’s unsuccessful candidacy. The anti-New Politics Democrats found their organisational expression in the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), which emerged out of meetings between labour leaders, party elders, and liberal intellectuals at the conference which nominated McGovern. The CDM had announced its creation with an advertisement in the New York Times and Washington Post in December 1972, headlined ‘Come Home, Democrats,’ an echo and a repudiation of McGovern (the refrain of his convention speech had been ‘Come Home, America’). The ad called on the Democratic Party to return to the tradition of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, which, in foreign affairs, consisted of a ‘sober but spirited assumption of America’s share of responsibility for … a more secure international order,’ and a ‘belief that democracy works.’[11] Though Moynihan had not been a signatory to this advert, many of his allies had, and he fully subscribed to its tenets. Moynihan had been an opponent of the Vietnam War – and a member of the anti-war group Negotiation Now! – but like many anti-communists liberals, he worried that the disillusionment of the New Politics was driving Democrats towards an isolationist stance. A few weeks after his nomination, Moynihan accepted an award from the CDM for his work on behalf of ‘a strong America in national defense, international affairs, human rights, and economic life.’[12]

When he arrived at the U.N. in July, Moynihan reportedly told his assistant, Leonard Garment, ‘Let’s try, in a responsible way, to get fired.’[13] If that was the goal, then he succeeded magnificently. At the U.N., Moynihan established himself as a pugnacious defender of American ideals and interests and, for perhaps the first time in his career, courted national popularity. He made his first splash on October 3 when, soon after Idi Amin had spoken to the General Assembly, Moynihan gave a speech to the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco denouncing Uganda’s dictator as ‘a racist murderer’ and adding that it was ‘no accident’ that Amin was head of the Organization of African Unity (OAU).[14] This drew condemnations on the Assembly floor from a number of African and Arab delegates a few days later. Though not present for the dressing-down, Moynihan was unrepentant, accusing Amin in a speech later that day of having ‘slandered’ the U.S., and adding that he was not in the U.N. ‘to hear totalitarian dictators lecture to us on how to run a democracy.’[15]

Unsurprisingly, Ambassador Moynihan infuriated fellow diplomats. Ivor Richard, Britain’s ambassador to the U.N., in a speech to the board of directors of the United Nations Association, tacitly chastised those who behaved as if they were ‘Wyatt Earp’ looking for a shootout at the O.K. Corral. Though not mentioned by name, Moynihan understood that he was the target of the rebuke. ‘Wyatt Earp didn’t do so badly,’ he noted in an interview soon after.[16] On another occasion, the ambassador from Mauritius, Radha Krishna Raphul, gave a speech to the General Assembly in which he said that many U.N. delegates avoided official contact with Moynihan because they ‘live[d] in positive dread of his manners, his language and his abuse.’[17]

Moynihan’s abrasive manner likewise exasperated his superiors at the State Department. In turn, he was frustrated by what he saw as their pointed refusal to support him. For example, when journalists asked whether he backed Moynihan’s remarks on Amin, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger replied that, while he agreed in substance, he might ‘express myself in a more restrained manner, given the differences in our temperaments.’[18] Moynihan interpreted this as a reproach. In November 1975, after less than five months in the post, Moynihan was reported to be considering resignation because of insufficient State Department support. Only a White House intervention persuaded him to stay.[19] Nonetheless, continued tensions with officials at State would eventually be the cause of his leaving the post in February 1976. Later that year, while campaigning for the Senate, Moynihan had a pie pushed into his face by a Yippie activist. Kissinger fired off a jaunty telegram promising that ‘[t]he State Department official who pushed the pie in your face will be severely punished. He will be sentenced to five years at USUN [the U.S. Mission to the U.N.].’[20]

While he served as ambassador, however, Moynihan declined to moderate his style. And growing admiration among the American public offered some insulation. Only a few months after the fall of Saigon capped America’s humiliation in Vietnam, after the OPEC oil shock and Watergate, at a moment of intense existential crisis for the United States, the fact that one of its representatives was mounting such a bullish defence of its values offered a form of catharsis. It proved immensely popular; one poll found 70 per cent of respondents wanted Moynihan to continue speaking out ‘frankly and forthrightly’ even at the expense of ‘tact and diplomacy.’[21] By January 1976, the U.S. mission to the U.N. had received over 28,000 pieces of mail relating to Moynihan’s performance, fewer than 200 of which were critical. The ambassador also received praise from former California governor Ronald Reagan, who was then challenging incumbent president Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination.[22]

Moynihan’s most dramatic confrontation, the one that defined his tenure, was in leading the resistance to U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3379 which declared ‘Zionism [to be] a form of racism and racial discrimination.’[23] Moynihan’s opposition was based less on any longstanding Zionist sentiment (‘Israel was not my religion,’ he said later) and more on what he understood Israel to represent.[24] This was of a piece with the theory he had espoused in his Commentary article, that democracy was embattled across the world and it was the duty of the U.S. to defend it. Israel was, Moynihan said, ‘one of the very few places … where Western democratic principles survive, and of all such places, currently the most exposed.’[25] That the resolution was sponsored principally by authoritarian Arab and Third World states, and apparently the product of Soviet machinations, was evidence to Moynihan of a totalitarian assault on democracy.

Despite increasingly desperate manoeuvres to defeat the resolution, in the end its opponents, and Moynihan in particular, could offer only symbolic acts of defiance. When the U.N.’s Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee passed the draft resolution on October 17, sending it to the floor of the General Assembly, the New York Times reported that Moynihan ‘walked to Israel’s permanent representative, Chaim Herzog, and embraced him.’ Diplomatically, the Times’ report omitted to mention that when Moynihan put his arms around Herzog, he had loudly said, ‘Fuck ‘em’ (these were, Moynihan said later, ‘pungent words of encouragement not necessarily found in the pages of the Babylonian Talmud’).[26]

The Assembly passed the resolution, 72-35, on November 9, 1975, coincidentally the 37^th anniversary of Kristallnacht. A furious Moynihan rose to declare that the United States ‘does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.’ Historians would calculate, he continued, ‘the harm this act will have done the United Nations’ and it was ‘sufficient for the moment to note one foreboding fact: a great evil has been loosed on the world … The abomination of anti-Semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.’ It was, Moynihan said, a ‘terrible lie’ that would have ‘terrible consequences,’ and it ‘behoove[d]’ those who opposed the resolution to demonstrate that ‘while we lost, we fought with full knowledge of what indeed would be lost.’[27]

 Full audio of Moynihan's speech to the U.N. General Assembly following the passage of Resolution 3379, November 9, 1975

Such pyrotechnics led more than one observer to wonder at Moynihan’s wider political ambitions. Several reports linked his name to the Democratic nomination for one of New York’s Senate seats (it would be contested in 1976 and the incumbent, Republican James Buckley, was widely thought to be vulnerable). This chatter rose to such a distracting level that in October 1975, appearing on Face The Nation in the midst of the ‘Zionism is racism’ fight, Moynihan was asked outright about his intentions. Moynihan was unequivocal in denying any political ambitions, saying he would ‘consider it dishonorable’ to leave to the U.N. to run for office.[28]

Nonetheless, Moynihan’s fractious relationship with State Department officials would eventually persuade him to step down. In January 1976, Moynihan sent a long cablegram to the State Department criticising its officials for their failure to support his tactics of ‘counterattack’ which, he claimed, had enjoyed considerable success in disrupting the bloc of ‘mostly new nations.’ The department, he wrote, had been ‘reluctant’ to recognise those successes. ‘This mission does not expect such persons to change their minds,’ he added. ‘We do ask however, that out of a decent respect for their profession they stop blabbing to the press what is not so.’ Predictably, the cablegram leaked to the New York Times, though Moynihan denied any hand in that.[29] He resigned on February 2, 1976, giving as his official reason the fact that Harvard University had declined to extend his leave and, were he to stay, he would forfeit his tenure.[30]

Within a few months, however, he was back in New York, as a candidate in the Democratic primary for the Senate election. In that race, Jewish voters (who made up a third of the Democratic primary electorate in the state) would prove crucial to his eventual, narrow victory. Campaigning in the predominantly Jewish diamond-and-jewellery district on 47^th Avenue, Moynihan was repeatedly buttonholed and thanked by passers-by for his support of Israel – it took him 45 minutes to cover 50 yards. This frustrated his more liberal opponent, Bella Abzug, who was herself Jewish and who had joined the Zionist youth group Hashomir Hatzair at age 12. ‘Two speeches do not a Zionist make,’ Abzug’s campaign manager noted tartly.[31]

Whether or not Moynihan was successful as ambassador depends on your perspective. Certainly, one can point to very few major policy accomplishments. For all Moynihan’s eloquent fury, Resolution 3379 passed, and was not revoked until 1991. Indeed, a Newsweek article from November 1975 on the controversy cited ‘many UN delegates and several experienced American diplomatists’ who felt that Moynihan’s noisy opposition actually made it more difficult to defeat the resolution.[32]

For Gil Troy, however, Moynihan’s abrasive style was itself the accomplishment. He argues that Moynihan was practicing ‘the politics of patriotic indignation’ at the U.N., an effort ‘to restore Americans’ sense of mission by getting Americans angry at the world’s bad guys.’[33] Moynihan characterised his own aims as ambassador in similar terms. ‘Did I make a crisis out of this obscene resolution?’ he said later. ‘Damn right I did!’[34] Kicking up a stink was the whole point. One’s judgement of that approach depends very much on whether one endorses Moynihan’s belief that the U.S. was ‘in opposition’ within the U.N. and had to embrace either Kabuki diplomacy or inaction.

As Troy acknowledges, probably the greatest practitioner of the ‘politics of patriotic indignation’ was Ronald Reagan. A number of ‘neoconservative’ Democrats, many associated with the CDM, who had supported Moynihan at the U.N. would shift their allegiance to the Republican Party under Reagan. The most striking symbol of that exodus was perhaps Jeane Kirkpatrick – a former Democratic activist who became the first woman to serve as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under Reagan – who, in her speech to the 1984 Republican convention, condemned the Democrats as the ‘blame America first’ party.

Moynihan was not one of those who switched parties, however. In fact, as senator from New York, he opposed Reagan’s military build-up in the early 1980s, arguing that the Soviet Union was living on borrowed time anyway, and so such aggrandisement was unnecessary. Nonetheless, he remained a defender within the Democratic Party of a tradition of robust liberal internationalism that he understood to extend back to Franklin Roosevelt. That tradition continues within the Democratic Party and is embodied as well as it could be in the person of the current U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power. Power has acknowledged Moynihan as a model, saying in a speech last November to commemorate the passage of Resolution 3379 that if U.S. representatives continue to echo Moynihan’s ‘moral clarity’ and his will to ‘relentlessly fight back against ignorance and hatred of all forms’ then ‘we will bring our nations and the United Nations closer to living up to their ideals.’[35]

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[1] Yair Rosenberg, “U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power Slams Its Bias Against Israel,” Tablet, February 19, 2016, <http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/197848/u-s-ambassador-to-the-united-nations-samantha-power-slams-its-bias-against-israel-2>

[2] Only around two-thirds of OSCE’s 57 members were represented, many of those by deputy-level officials. Alison Smale, “Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador, Issues Warning on Anti-Semitism in Europe,” New York Times, November 13, 2014.

[3] In fairness to Power, she had thought the remark was off-the-record. The Scotsman published it anyway.  “’Hillary Clinton’s A Monster’: Obama Aide Blurts Out Attack in Scotsman Interview,” The Scotsman, March 6, 2008, <http://www.scotsman.com/news/hillary-clinton-s-a-monster-obama-aide-blurts-out-attack-in-scotsman-interview-1-1158300>

[4] Evan Osnos, “In the Land of the Possible,” The New Yorker, December 22 & 29, 2014, <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/22/land-possible>

[5] Samantha Power, ’A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (New York, 2002),  xxi

[6] Moynihan was, editorialised the New York Times, ‘simply not qualified for this job.’ “Wrong Man for the U.N.,” NYT, November 25, 1970

[7] Daniel P. Moynihan, ‘The United States in Opposition’, Commentary, March 1975.

[8] St. Clair Drake, “Moynihan and the Third World,” The Nation, July 5, 1975.

[9] “New Man at Turtle Bay,” NYT, May 3, 1975.

[10] Irving Spiegel, “Moynihan Bids U.S. Retain World Role,” NYT, May 5, 1975.

[11] Coalition for a Democratic Majority ad, NYT and Washington Post-Times Herald, December 7, 1972.

[12] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, with Suzanne Weaver, A Dangerous Place (Boston, 1978), 73-74.

[13] Timothy Crouse, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Working Class Hero,” Rolling Stone, August 12, 1976.

[14] “Moynihan Assails Uganda President,” NYT, October 4, 1975.

[15] Kathleen Teltsch, “Africans and Arabs Denounce Moynihan in the U.N.,” NYT, October 7, 1975.

[16] Paul Hofmann, “Moynihan’s Style in the U.N. Is Now an Open Debate,” NYT, November 21, 1975.

[17] “African Diplomat Says UN Figures Avoid Moynihan,” Chicago Defender, December 17, 1975

[18] Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Biography (Boston, 2000), 247.

[19] “Moynihan, About to Quit, Agrees to Wait,” NYT, Nov 22, 1975

[20] Telegram from Henry Kissinger to DPM, September 7^, 1976, Papers of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress, Part I, Box 383.

[21] ‘A Fighting Irishman At The U.N.’, Time, January 26, 1976.

[22] Clayton Fritchley, ‘Moynihan-Kissinger Split: A Matter of Style’, WP, December 6, 1975.

[23] For a detailed and sympathetic account of the battle over Resolution 3379 see Gil Troy, Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism As Racism (New York, 2013).

[24] Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 5.

[25] ‘Moynihan Says U.N. Must Bar Resolution Condemning Zionism’, NYT, 22 October 1975.

[26] Paul Hofmann, “U.N. Unit Endorses Draft Linking Zionism to Racism,” NYT, October 18, 1975; Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 124.

[27] The full text of Moynihan’s speech can be found in Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 275-80.

[28] ‘Moynihan Sees U.N. Assembly Voting Anti-Zionism Resolution’, NYT, October 27, 1975; Hodgson, Gentleman From New York, 259.

[29] ‘I was in the Navy,’ he told the journalist who telephoned him for a comment, ‘and my code is not to give cables.’ Leslie H. Gelb, “Moynihan Says State Department Fails to Back Policy Against U.S. Foes in U.N.,” NYT, January 28, 1976.

[30] Kathleen Teltsch, “Moynihan Said to Feel He Lacked Vital Support,” NYT, February 4, 1976.

[31] Frank Lynn, “Democrats in Senate Race Wooing New York’s Jews,” NYT, August 9, 1976; For more on Moynihan’s 1976 Senate race, see Patrick Andelic “Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the 1976 New York Senate Race, and the Struggle to Define American Liberalism,” Historical Journal, 57:4, December 2014, 1111-1133.

[32] Moynihan found that accusation particularly wounding. Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York, 248.

[33] Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 212.

[34] Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York, 248.

[35] Ambassador Samantha Power, “Remarks on Overcoming the UN Resolution on Zionism is Racism: Herzog, Moynihan, and the Enduring Struggle to Eliminate Anti-Israel Bias at the UN,” November 11, 2015, <http://usun.state.gov/remarks/6972>