Maybe He's Born With It, Maybe It's Moynihan

As we've been reminded throughout the 2016 primaries, voters look for ‘authenticity’ in their political leaders. Insurgent candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are lauded for displaying it, while more establishment figures, like Hillary Clinton, are said to be struggling to overcome an ‘authenticity gap.’[1] An ‘authentic’ politician is unspun, unscripted, unusual and engaging, a walking rebuke to the tyranny of pollsters and PR consultants. While complaints that politicians are packaged and over-cautious are certainly not without merit, the concept of ‘authenticity’ in politics is, as Seth Masket has written, 'frustrating' because it is ‘essentially meaningless.’ All public figures are, in some sense, playing a role (which is not the same as dissembling or lying).[2] It nonetheless remains a stubbornly durable cliché, probably because it speaks to a deeper yearning among voters for something perceived to be missing in the political class.  

Pat Moynihan was ‘authentic.’ Journalists were irresistibly drawn by his eccentricities and no newspaper profile could pass without some florid effort by the author to capture them. In one of the first profiles published about the then-freshman senator in 1977, Edward Burks noted the attention the flamboyant Moynihan attracted when he rose to speak in the Senate: ‘Like John Wayne walking into a Wild West saloon … a verbal brawler … his florid delivery, flailing arms, and droll turn of phrase frequently bring on smiles and laughter from his colleagues.’[3] David Remnick wrote in a 1986 profile of ‘the theater’ Moynihan had become: ‘the herky-jerky Anglo-speech, the bow tie slightly askew, the tweedy caps and professorial rambles.’[4] In 1990 James Traub wrote of ‘Moynihan’s oratorical style, a peculiar sequence of plosives and mumbles and distended polysyllables sometimes mistakenly considered British.’[5]

 Pinstripes, bow-tie, and smoulder: Moynihan at a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored two-way television conference between business leaders and representatives of the Nixon administration, c.1970. 

Tall and rangy (6’4” or thereabouts), a frequent wearer of bow-ties and tweed bucket hats, and with a halting, staccato speech pattern, Moynihan cut a strange and enthralling figure in the often staid corridors of the Senate. A former ensign in the U.S. Navy, he responded to Senate roll call with the sailor’s cry, ‘Yo!’ (‘“Here” seems a little too much like fifth grade, and could give the Minority Leader ideas,’ he explained in a letter to William Safire); he began his constituent newsletters ‘Dear Yorker,’ an archaic form of address that Moynihan wanted to revive, though he eventually switched to ‘Dear New Yorker’ after his staff voiced concerns that it made him appear addled; his annual report on New York State’s fiscal imbalance relative to the federal government was called the ‘Fisc.’ after the feudal lands upon which the Merovingian and Carolingian royal households levied taxes.[6]

Such idiosyncrasies made him distinctive, even made it seem as though he rightly belonged to another age, as Remnick suggested, ‘an American Edmund Burke taking dominion on the Hill.’ Peter Steinfels has argued that Moynihan created ‘a new public type … the professor in politics. He does not suppress the professorial, he flaunts it. He has made it his style, just as Sam Ervin was a “country lawyer” and various wealthy western politicians project themselves as cowpunchers.’[7] Moynihan's professorial demeanour was as much of a construct as that of Ervin or those well-heeled Western cowpunchers (we're looking at you, George W. Bush), one that evolved and was cultivated over the course of his life.

But to view Moynihan as a absent-minded college professor who had wandered genially into the halls of power is to miss part of the story. Moynihan’s identity, political and personal, was more of a curious amalgam of ivory-tower academic and working-class tough. Most newspaper profiles made at least passing reference to an impoverished childhood spent shining shoes in Hell’s Kitchen, and an early career as a bartender and a stevedore, before an education at City College New York (at that time free to city residents), a stint as a Fulbright fellow at the London School of Economics, and a spot on the staff of New York governor Averell Harriman, set Moynihan on the path to Harvard, the Senate, and the confidence of presidents. The man (and it usually is a man) who rises from humble origins to great things by dint of grit and hard work is one of the oldest, and most potent, American myths. As Bob Strauss, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, reportedly used to joke, 'every politician wants every voter to believe he was born in a log cabin that he built himself.' Moynihan was certainly not averse to using that myth to his political advantage. 

The truth was, of course, far more complicated than that. As his biographer, Godfrey Hodgson has written, Moynihan’s life story was not exactly one of the ‘the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger.’ Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and did not actually live in Hell’s Kitchen until he was college-age. Though he was initially raised in middle-class comfort in suburban Long Island, after Moynihan’s father walked out, in 1937, the family were plunged into chronic financial insecurity. ‘Marriage broke up and down we went,’ he reflected later.[9] In these years, young Pat and his brother Mike did work as shoeshine boys in Times Square. As a senator, Moynihan enjoyed pointing out his old corner to journalists while campaigning.[10] The war saved the Moynihan family from a life of financial instability: Moynihan’s mother, Margaret, got a job as a chief nurse in a war production factory, while he sold newspapers, worked as a stock boy, and then a longshoreman, and ultimately enrolled in the U.S. Navy.

Despite his later affectations, he remained fiercely defensive of his working class roots. They marked him out, he understood, from many of his contemporaries, in ways that he both embraced and resented. He arrived to take the CCNY entrance test with his longshoreman’s loading hook in his back pocket. ‘I wasn’t going to be mistaken for any sissy college kid,’ he said.[11] Of his classmates at Tufts University, he recalled that most ‘needed a good swift kick in their blue-blood asses.’[12] He carried this attitude into his Senate career. In 1990, one of his aides observed, ‘There’s a certain touch of class warfare about Pat Moynihan.’ This aide cited one instance when Moynihan received a $1,000 contribution from a well-moneyed supporter with a suggestion that he might want to moderate his staunchly pro-Israel stance. ‘No socialite is going to tell me how to do my job,’ was his angry remark when he instructed his staff to return the cheque.[13]

Moynihan’s time in London – where he spent a year in 1950-51 as a Fulbright scholar at the L.S.E. – was transformational. The G.I. Bill and his scholarship guaranteed him a healthy income and Moynihan thrived. He had a lifelong love of good clothes – he was reportedly the only boy to show up to his junior prom in a tuxedo – which he indulged in the tailor shops of London. An ungenerous New York Times retrospective published a few months before Moynihan’s retirement from the Senate wrote of his metamorphosis while in London from ‘self-consciously working-class Irish roustabout’ into ‘an English dandy, replete with bowler hat, monocle and umbrella.’[14] In his enthusiasm to paint an unflattering portrait, the author fluffed some of the details, as an upset Moynihan was quick to point out. ‘A monocle? Any fact checker could have called me,’ he wrote in a letter to NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger. ‘Do you really suppose a student at L.S.E. in 1950 went about in a bowler hat carrying an umbrella?’ he continued in another letter around a fortnight later.[15]

The monocle was fictional, but Moynihan certainly took to wearing a brown derby hat. As late as 1967, according to one journalist, he was carrying his handkerchief up his sleeve, ‘in the English manner.’[16] He became a regular theatre-goer and attended numerous debates at the House of Commons, absorbing from the MPs ‘some of the lingering mannerisms of Edwardian England’ which he imported across the Atlantic.[17] He kept a journal, to which he gave the modest title, “An Intellectual History of Our Times: Being a Descriptive Journal of adventures & meditations having occurred to the author during a Grand Tour of Great Britain, Ireland & the Continent of Europe.” At the same time, he involved himself in Labour Party activism and insisted that he was known as ‘a New York Democrat who had some friends who worked on the docks and drank beer after work.’[18]

A dandy and a dockworker, then, a New York Irish boy who gleefully launched himself into the English establishment. Those contradictory elements of Moynihan’s identity sat in uneasy tension throughout his career. The Moynihan identity was an oxymoron in the original sense of the word: something that is simultaneously paradoxical and true. It fuelled his dislike of upper-middle-class liberals who he blamed for trashing the traditions of the Democratic Party.[19] Though he took pride in his erudition and his education, and though he seemed set on proving the viability of a politics-as-seminar approach, to the end Moynihan was determined not to be mistaken for a ‘sissy college kid.’

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[1] S. A. Miller, “Authenticity Gap Emerges as Major Challenge for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire,” The Washington Times, August 8, 2015,  <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/18/hillary-clinton-authenticity-gap-emerges-as-major-/?page=all>.

[2] Seth Masket, “The Bankruptcy of Authenticity,” Pacific Standard, June 30, 2014, <http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/presidential-candidates-politics-bankruptcy-authenticity-84641>; See also, Richard Skinner, “Against Authenticity,” Mischiefs of Faction, June 27, 2014, <http://www.mischiefsoffaction.com/2014/06/against-authenticity-by-richard-skinner.html>

[3] Edward C. Burks, “Moynihan’s Flamboyance and Quick Wit Draw Attention to Washington Freshman,” New York Times, November 7, 1977.

[4] David Remnick, “The Family Crusader, Belying Labels, Drawing Crowds & Loving It All,” Washington Post, July 16, 1986.

[5] James Traub, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Liberal? Conservative? Or Just Pat?” NYT, September 16, 1990.

[6] Letter, DPM to William Safire, June 23, 1984, Papers of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress, Part II, Box 9; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Steven R. Weisman (ed.), Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (New York, 2010), 387.

[7] Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Origins of a Movement (Rev. ed., New York, 2013), 114.

[8] NCC Staff, “The Annotated Bill Clinton Convention Speech,” Constitution Daily, September 6, 2012, <http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2012/09/the-annotated-bill-clinton-convention-speech/>

[9] Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman From New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Biography (New York, 2000), 24. 28-29.

[10] Moynihan’s corner was opposite Toffenetti’s restaurant, on the corner of Broadway and 43^rd Street, an establishment famous for its ham and sweets. Garry Wills, Lead Time, 135; Thomas Meehan, “Moynihan of the Moynihan Report,” NYT, July 31, 1966.

[11] Thomas Meehan, “Moynihan of the Moynihan Report,” NYT, July 31, 1966.

[12] Gil Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 44.

[13] James Traub, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Liberal? Conservative? Or Just Pat?” NYT, September 16, 1990.

[14] Jacob Weisberg, “For the Sake of Argument,” NYT, November 5, 2000.

[15] Moynihan, Weisman (ed.), Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters, 645-6.

[16] Timothy Crouse, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Ruling Class Hero,” Rolling Stone, August 12, 1976

[17] Hodgson, Moynihan, 48.

[18] Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 44.

[19] In a 1972 letter to Alan Pfifer, president of the Carnegie Corporation, Moynihan tore into ‘liberal elitists who live cosy upper-middle-class lives, secure in their salaries and their sense of superiority to all but the very lowest classes.’ The attitude, and the language, were typical. Letter, DPM to Alan Pfifer, March 8, 1972, DPM papers, Part I, Box 128.

'Liz and Pat and Bill and Hillary'

Hillary Clinton announces her 'listening tour' at the Moynihan farm, Pindar's Corners, New York, July 7, 1999 [AP Archive]

On a bright summer morning in early July, 1999, some 300 reporters descended on the Moynihan family farm in Pindar’s Corners, upstate New York. They had come to cover the start of a state-wide ‘listening tour’ to be undertaken by First Lady Hillary Clinton. Though Clinton had yet to make a formal announcement, it was widely expected she would seek election to the Senate from New York to replace Pat Moynihan, who would be standing down at the end of his fourth term. Illinois-born, and having spent most of her career in Arkansas and Washington, Clinton was already fielding accusations of carpetbagging. Outraged protestors clustered at every stop on her tour. ‘A New Yorker for New York,’ read one of their signs. ‘Hillary Listen: Go Home!’ read another.[1]

Clinton had come to Pindar’s Corners in search of a benediction from the man she aspired to replace. Moynihan and Clinton had a private meeting in the converted wooden schoolhouse in which the former did most of his writing and then the pair emerged to take questions from the media throng. Clinton acknowledged that voters had ‘legitimate questions’ about her candidacy and that she had ‘real work to do, to get out and listen and learn from the people of New York, and to demonstrate that what I’m for is as important if not more important than where I’m from.’ Standing beside her at the microphone and beaming genially, Moynihan was bullish when asked about Clinton’s prospects: ‘I hope she will go all the way. I mean to go all the way with her.’ After questions, they walked away from the microphone arm-in-arm.

Those who witnessed that tableau – the outgoing New York senator unwavering in his support for his likely successor – could be forgiven for thinking that Moynihan was a long-time Clinton ally. In fact, his relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton was far more complicated and fractious, riven with tensions that emerged from differing policy priorities and personal animosities. As one particularly snarky report on the Pindar’s Corners summit noted, anyone who ‘has spent any of the past seven years reading American newspapers … can remember an instance or two when the Clinton-Moynihan relationship seemed scarcely less hostile than that of Montague-Capulet.’[2]

But that hostility was by no means foreordained. In some respects, Moynihan and Bill Clinton should have been natural ideological partners. Both were self-identified defenders of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party against what they perceived as they excesses of post-1960s liberalism. In the 1970s, Moynihan had been associated with the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), an organisation founded in the aftermath of George McGovern’s landslide 1972 defeat to repudiate the ‘New Politics’ liberalism that McGovern’s campaign had embodied, and return the Democratic Party to its ‘Vital Center’ traditions.[3] The CDM had all but vanished by the early 1980s, but did serve as a model for the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), another internal party organisation founded by moderate Democrats after another landslide defeat in a presidential election (in that instance, Walter Mondale’s loss of 49 states to Ronald Reagan in 1984).[4] The DLC was established to push the Democratic Party to embrace pro-market solutions, moderate social positions, and a more hawkish foreign policy. Bill Clinton had been one of the founding members of the DLC, and also served as chair, 1990-91. As the two belonged to essentially the same wing of the party, and had fought many of the same opponents in their political careers, it would have been reasonable to expect them to have a harmonious working partnership.

From the off, however, relations were strained. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Moynihan had endorsed his Senate colleague, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska (‘My tiger,’ Moynihan called him).[5] Even so, Moynihan later took a share of the credit for Clinton’s victory. After Kerrey dropped out in March, Moynihan was featured in Clinton’s TV ads in New York denouncing California governor Jerry Brown, Clinton’s principal rival for the nomination, for supporting a flat tax that he claimed would jeopardise the Social Security trust fund. ‘And [Clinton] won New York, and that’s why he’s president today,’ Moynihan boasted on Meet the Press in early 1993.[6] Clinton’s decision to appoint Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas as Treasury Secretary elevated Moynihan to the chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee, on which he had served since 1977. In this position, Moynihan had jurisdiction over the policy areas at the top of the Clinton agenda, health care and welfare reform. The White House managed to offend the new chairman almost immediately, when a ‘top administration official’ told Time magazine, ‘[Moynihan] can’t control Finance like Bentsen did. He’s cantankerous but … we’ll roll right over him if we have to.’[7]

The president was furious with the quote, phoning Moynihan the same day to assure him that if found, the leaker would be fired. Clinton’s efforts to repair the breach went further, as one White House strategist recalled: ‘We had Liz [Moynihan’s wife and campaign manager] and Pat and Hillary and Bill dinners. We had Liz and Pat and Hillary and Bill movies.’[8] The president even made a personal appearance at a Moynihan fundraiser, praising New York’s senior senator in lavish terms: ‘You know, before I met Pat Moynihan, I actually thought I knew something about Government. Now I just feel like I’m getting a grade every time I talk in front of him.’[9]

Within a year of Clinton assuming office, Moynihan had clashed with the president on numerous fronts. He dismissed Clinton’s promises to ‘end welfare as we know it’ as ‘boob bait for the Bubbas,’ disparaged the rationale for Clinton’s health care reform proposals (‘we don’t have a health care crisis in America’), and was the first Democratic senator to call for an independent counsel to investigate the Whitewater, a failed Arkansas real-estate venture that seemed at one point poised to engulf the First Family. He also publicly mused about holding the Clinton health care reform proposals ‘hostage’ if the White House failed to deliver on welfare.[10]

The issue of welfare reform ought to have been the highest priority of the new administration as far as Moynihan was concerned. He was therefore infuriated by Clinton’s decision to focus on health care. Reforming the health system was of particular importance to Hillary Clinton, who led on the formulation of the legislative package in a way that was unprecedented for a First Lady. As Finance Committee chair, Moynihan was crucial to the success of the proposals. To the administration’s chagrin, his behaviour throughout the ferocious, protracted battle was sometimes less than helpful. Before the full bill had even been published, for instance, Moynihan was publicly rubbishing the plans as a ‘fantasy.’ For all that Moynihan disliked the lengthy and technical bill that the White House ultimately produced, he did labour to produce a workable compromise – as Bill Clinton himself private acknowledged – but without success.[11] Democratic hopes of a major overhaul of the healthcare system would have to wait another decade and a half.

In the 1994 midterm elections the Republican Party won control of Congress for the first time since the 1950s, in part by exploiting public discontent over the long and unproductive health care fight. Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House and Moynihan lost his committee chairmanship. Chastened by this ‘Republican revolution,’ Clinton turned back to welfare reform to reassert his moderate bona fides in advance of his own re-election. Though Moynihan had been pressing the White House to tackle welfare, he was virulently opposed to the Work and Responsibility Act that Clinton eventually sent to Congress. In particular, he opposed the provision to eliminate Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a New Deal-era programme that provided direct cash transfers to single mothers with young children. The plans to replace AFDC with the more stringent Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programme, argued Moynihan, would lead to a steep increase in child poverty. To Moynihan, the proposals were the panicked response of a White House still shell-shocked by the unexpected Republican insurgency. ‘I had no idea,’ he declared on the Senate floor, ‘how profoundly what used to be known as liberalism was shaken by the last election.’ Moynihan was one of only eleven Senate Democrats who declined to vote for the measure. In the aftermath, he wrote fuming to Senator Edward Kennedy that ‘[t]he Democratic party did not have to go along with this, but sure as hell did.’[12]

Moynihan remained basically estranged from the White House for the rest of Clinton’s tenure. During the Lewinsky scandal, though it had initially seemed that he would endorse impeachment, he ultimately came out against removing Clinton from office, saying that to do so might ‘very readily destabilize the Presidency.’[13] He declined to defend Clinton personally, however, and couched his opposition entirely in institutional terms. ‘Senators, do not take the imprudent risk that removing William Jefferson Clinton for low crimes will not in the end jeopardize the Constitution itself,’ he urged his colleagues.[14]

A few months before the Senate acquitted Bill Clinton, Moynihan announced his intention not to seek a fifth term. When Hillary began exploring the possibility of running to replace him, Moynihan was receptive. He met with Clinton, as did Liz, on several occasions and arranged ‘tutorials’ with leading figures to bring her up to speed on New York politics and policy. In one private meeting, Clinton joked that she had taken to sleeping with Moynihan’s ‘Fisc.’ (the annual report the senator prepared on New York’s fiscal relationship with the federal government) under her pillow.[15] Hillary Clinton’s assiduous courtship of Moynihan in these months doubtless went some way toward smoothing relations between them. Pat surely also recognised the advantages New York State would enjoy with a former First Lady for a representative.

The accusations of carpetbagging dogged Clinton throughout the campaign, as did the related, and by now wearily familiar, charge of ‘inauthenticity.’ Some cited examples of this were silly, as when Clinton, supposedly a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, was ridiculed for donning at New York Yankees cap at one of the latter’s games. However, such froths spoke to a deeper mistrust of Clinton, to the belief that she was a power-hungry opportunist who had parachuted into a convenient race. Clinton was sensitive to such accusations and tried to assuage them with a combination of hard work and humour. She embarked on a campaign tour of all 62 of New York’s counties (in a Ford conversion van that the press nicknamed the ‘HRC Speedwagon’), stopping at diners and cafes to speak with voters; she made appearances on David Letterman’s show and spoke at the annual press dinner in Albany in character as a ‘carpetbagger.’[16] Moynihan, for his part, span Clinton’s out-of-state origins to her advantage, cheerfully telling one interviewer that she would bring ‘that magnificent, young, bright, able Illinois-Arkansas enthusiasm to New York, which probably could use a little.’[17]

Moynihan was effusive in his praise of Clinton on the stump. ‘Eleanor Roosevelt would have loved Hillary Clinton,’ he told audiences. (This was, Clinton wrote in her memoirs, ‘the ultimate compliment’).[18] The fact that Clinton had the enthusiastic support of the popular outgoing senator certainly gave her campaign an invaluable boost. Indeed, one ad for her Republican opponent, Rick Lazio, included a mocked-up image of Lazio alongside Moynihan (the two had never been photographed together) in an effort to dilute the benefit Clinton received from Moynihan’s backing.[19] For all their disagreements, Moynihan respected Clinton’s determination and policy nous. She would be, he said proudly, his ‘legacy’ to his state.

However, Moynihan continued to assert his independence from the Clinton administration. In September 1999, two months after publicly anointing Hillary as his successor, Moynihan endorsed New Jersey senator, and former basketball star, Bill Bradley over sitting vice president Al Gore. ‘Nothing is the matter with Mr. Gore,’ he explained to the press, ‘except that he can’t be elected President.’ Unsurprisingly, he was asked how in his opinion Hillary Clinton differed from Gore. ‘I think she can be elected Senator,’ he replied, to laughter.[20]

As indeed she was. On Election Day 2000, with the Gore-Bush race grinding to a stalemate that would end in the Supreme Court, Clinton won handily, by a margin of over 800,000 votes. Riding in a freight elevator down to the victory celebrations in the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt hotel, Bill Clinton told Moynihan, ‘If it had not been for your endorsement, Hillary would never have won.’ Whether or not the president was merely being courteous, Moynihan was pleased enough with the compliment to record it in a memo for his files.[21] If Hillary Clinton does win the Democratic nomination, and the White House, later this year, Moynihan may justly claim a sliver of the credit for having assisted in the rise of the first woman to serve as president of the United States. He certainly would not have hesitated to stake that claim.

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[1] The Clintons would purchase a home in Chappaqua, just north of New York City, two months later. Michael Grunwald, “First Lady Dives Into N.Y. Bid, Carpetbag Issue,” Washington Post, July 8, 1999.

[2] Tish Durkin, “Hillary’s Got A Fella – Pat Moynihan,” New York Observer, July 12, 1999.

[3] Drawing on New Left currents, New Politics liberals advanced a systemic critique of American politics and society that ‘Vital Center’ liberals rejected. They were generally more culturally liberal (McGovern was famously, and inaccurately, denounced as the candidate of ‘acid, amnesty, and abortion’) and dovish on foreign policy. Coalition for a Democratic Majority ad, New York Times and Washington Post-Times Herald, December 7, 1972. For more on the New Politics, and the McGovern campaign, see Bruce Miroff, The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (Lawrence, KS, 2009).

[4] The DLC was formally dissolved in 2011 and its records purchased by the Clinton Foundation. For more on the organisation’s heyday, see Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence, KS, 2000).

[5] “Moynihan Endorses Kerrey’s Candidacy,” NYT, January 25, 1992.

[6] Tim Russert, “Wit and Wisdom: Moynihan and Meet the Press,” in Robert A. Katzmann (ed.), Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life (Washington, D.C., 1998), 162.

[7] According to Carl Bernstein, the official was Bentsen himself, trying to send a coded warning to Moynihan through the press. Carl Bernstein, A Woman In Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton (New York, 2007), 261.

[8] Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Biography (Boston and New York, 2000), 351.

[9] William J. Clinton, “Remarks at a Fundraiser for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in New York City,” December 13, 1993, The American Presidency Project, <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=46235>

[10] Richard L. Berke, “Prof. Moynihan and Clinton: A Course in ‘Washington 101’,” NYT, January 14, 1994.

[11] In private after-hours conversations with historian Taylor Branch, Clinton was keenly aware of Moynihan’s difficulty in corralling the members of this committee. ‘The health care bill was stuck in the Senate Finance Committee … [and Moynihan] was finding no majority for any version of the bill. Clinton analysed Moynihan’s performance with sympathy, observing that he was saddled with bad luck.’ Taylor Branch, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President (London, 2009).

[12] Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York, 375-76; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Steven R. Weisman (ed.), Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (New York, 2010), 605.

[13] Richard L. Berke, “Moynihan Favors A Clinton Censure,” NYT, December 25, 1998.

[14] Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York, 399.

[15] Dirkin, “Hillarys’ Got A Fella – Pat Moynihan.”

[16] Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (London, 2003), 510-13.

[17] Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York, 399.

[18] “For Clinton Faithful, Vindication Comes With Groundbreaking Victory,” NYT, November 8, 2000; Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (London, 2003), 513.

[19] Rodham Clinton, Living History, 520.

[20] Adam Nagourney, “In an Endorsement of Bradley, Moynihan Dismisses Gore,” NYT, Sept 24, 1999.

[21] Moynihan, Weisman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 661.

Mugged By Nomenclature

 “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

-      Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

A little over a week ago, National Review, disconcerted by Donald Trump’s refusal to obey the laws of political gravity, delivered a broadside against the be-coiffed would-be saviour of populist conservatism. Its “Against Trump” special issue included contributions from 22 leading conservatives – including Glenn Beck, John Podhoretz, Dana Loesch, and Bill Kristol – and a thunderous editorial that condemned Trump as ‘a philosophically unmoored political opportunist‘ and ‘a menace to American conservatism.’ Much of the commentary that followed this intervention noted NR’s historical role as the ‘great intellectual gatekeeper’ of the American right, purging those who threatened the respectability of the movement, as in the case of John Birch Society.[1]

Thirty-seven years earlier, another magazine with a respected political pedigree, disturbed by the presidential prospects of another controversial New Yorker, published a similar philippic. In that case, however, both were on the other side of the political spectrum: the magazine was The Nation and the New Yorker was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. By 1979, Moynihan, then only two years into his first term as senator from New York, was being talked of as a possible challenger to President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic primaries. Though a freshman, Moynihan had emerged as one of President Carter’s most colourful sparring partners in the Congress, particularly on foreign policy and New York’s fiscal relationship with the federal government. ‘If there is not yet a Moynihan campaign,’ wrote Morton Kondracke in The New Republic, ‘there is a Moynihan movement and a Moynihan logic.’[2]

The Nation’s response to this was to devote an entire special issue to Moynihan, under the heading “The Conscience of a Neoconservative” (a deliberate echo of the title of Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book, generally accepted as a mission statement of the New Right). ‘Why is this man on our cover?’ asked the editorial. Because, it went on to explain, Moynihan was ‘the point man for an increasingly visible, vocal and … powerful intellectual movement: the neoconservatives, who cloak conservative conclusions in the language of liberalism.’ Contributors dissected Moynihan’s positions, and by implication the ‘neoconservative’ prospectus, on welfare, foreign affairs, race relations, and the use (or misuse) of social science in answering questions of public policy.[3]

Look, if you can find more copyright-free photographs of Moynihan, we'll stop using this one to illustrate our posts.

Around the time of the Iraq War, the word ‘neoconservative’ enjoyed a resurgence as a political epithet. Indeed, by 2007 the New York Times’ Roger Cohen, a self-identified ‘liberal hawk,’ had diagnosed the condition of ‘neoconitis’ which he claimed had become ‘as rampant as liberal-lampooning a few years back.’[4] It is certainly the case that some deployed the word ‘neocon' in a manner that recalled George Orwell’s 1946 complaint about the widespread use of ‘fascist’: “The word Fascism now has no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.”[5] Many leftists who supported the 2003 invasion, in both the US and elsewhere, took exception to being branded as ‘neoconservatives.’ In this, they trod a similar path to Pat Moynihan, who found himself struggling to shake off the label from almost the moment it entered the American political lexicon. 

The widespread use of the term ‘neoconservative’ in a US context is generally dated to a 1973 article in Dissent magazine written by the socialist writer and activist Michael Harrington.[6] In Harrington’s original formulation, the ‘neo-conservatives’ were liberal intellectuals who had been so disillusioned by the apparent failures of the War on Poverty that they had embraced the conservative critiques of social welfare programmes as dependency-fostering. The modern understanding of the label gives far greater prominence to foreign policy concerns: ‘neoconservative’ is usually taken to denote one who supports overseas military adventurism in the service of the US national interest and the promotion of democracy. In its original form, however, neoconservatism was understood to be as much a reaction to the perceived failures of liberal social reform as any other factor. This was expressed in Irving Kristol’s better-known description of a neoconservative as ‘a liberal who has been mugged by reality.’

Kristol was perhaps the only person to whom the label was applied who ever willingly accepted it. Moynihan, by contrast, fiercely resisted its application to him. One can certainly make a strong case to identify Moynihan as a neoconservative: a former official in the Johnson administration, he had become disenchanted with the Great Society; as UN ambassador, 1975-76, he was a pugnacious defender of American ideals and interests, winning praise from Ronald Reagan, among others; and he enjoyed close friendships with many ‘neoconservatives,’ among them Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter. However, these flirtations did not add up to a broader rejection of the liberal tradition to which he always felt he belonged. Moynihan may have been mugged, but reality had left him with his wallet. His papers in the Library of Congress are littered with examples of him taking issue with journalists and editors who used the word to describe his politics.

In 1979, for instance, he wrote to Peter Steinfels of Esquire magazine to object to the latter’s use of ‘neo-conservative’ in a recent article. With typical self-effacement, Moynihan explained his concern:

A good many persons of open mind and friendly mien will simply learn that the smartest people these days are something called neo-conservatives, and adapt their own disposition accordingly. Is it a service to liberalism to encourage this? … We are liberals much as John F. Kennedy was a liberal. A bit more so.[7]

In December 1981, he wrote to his friend, the publisher of the New York Times Arthur ‘Punch’ Sulzberger to suggest that ‘insofar as a neoconservative is a liberal who votes for the defense budget’ the Times could perhaps refer to such legislators as ‘patriots’ instead (e.g. ‘Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a member of the patriotic faction of his party’). Many of Moynihan’s exchanges on this subject were with Sulzberger. That his ‘hometown’ newspaper, to his mind, so casually misrepresented his political leanings was a source of particular consternation.[8] Later that same month, he was dismayed to discover that the label had gone international when Le Monde Dimanche described him as ‘champion du neoconservatisme americain.’[9]

While many neoconservatives would find a new political home in the Republican Party (Norman Podhoretz wrote later that Moynihan’s refusal to jump into the 1980 race freed him to vote for Reagan), Moynihan emerged in the early 1980s as one of the president’s most trenchant critics. He blasted Reagan for failing to get to grips with the ballooning deficit, and accused the administration of ‘purposeful[ly]’ pursuing ‘a hidden agenda’ to create a fiscal crisis that would force the retrenchment of social programs.[10]

As Greg Weiner wrote in a recent article on the same topic, many conservatives who see an ideological soulmate in Moynihan attribute his refusal to embrace neoconservatism fully to his attachment to the comforts of the Senate.[11] Chester ‘Checker’ Finn – who moved from Moynihan’s Senate staff to become an Assistant Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration – shared this belief, writing in his memoir that Moynihan ‘gradually moved leftward’ on a number of issues as he prepared for his 1982 re-election bid.[12] David Stockman, Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, inclined to the same explanation. ‘Moynihan’s got a problem,’ he told presidential aide Dick Darman. ‘He went off and got himself elected senator from New York. He just can’t get away with holding a sound view of economic policy. New York is the welfare state.’[13]

There may be some truth to the charge that Moynihan’s role as a senator from New York compelled him to moderate his iconoclasm. Perhaps his positions on welfare reform would have been different if they had been made from a Harvard office rather than the Senate floor. However, to accept this explanation as satisfactory misses something that was fundamental to Moynihan’s political identity. He always understood his own politics within a liberal Democratic tradition that stretched back through John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman to Franklin Roosevelt. Throughout his ideological evolution, he never wavered from the central tenet of twentieth century American liberalism: that, used wisely, government is an invaluable tool for the amelioration of social and economic ills. As one newspaper columnist joked at the end of his Senate career, he had been ‘born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic.’[14]

This was demonstrated in March 1981, when, with Reagan in full pomp and the Democrats in disarray, Moynihan spoke at the first Gridiron Club dinner of the new presidency. The dinner – a light-hearted, white-tie affair held annually at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C. – traditionally featured a bipartisan pair of speakers delivering a humorous talk, alongside songs and sketches. Moynihan was that year’s Democratic speaker. He began by joking that Reagan was a mole planted to destroy the Republican Party from within: ‘Mr. President, you’ve been perfect, and by the time you’re through, we Democrats will be all set for yet another half century.’ The speech ended on a more serious note, with a full-throated defence of the ‘great idea’ at the heart of the Democratic tradition, ‘that an elected government can be the instrument of the common purpose of a free people; that government can embrace great causes; and do great things.’ Moynihan cast himself and his fellow Democrats as guardians of a faith whose day would come again. ‘We believe in American government and we fully expect that those who now denigrate it, and even despise it, will sooner or later find themselves turning to it in necessity, even desperation. When they do, they will find the Democratic party on hand to help.’[15]

It was rare in those months to find a Democrat prepared to make such a forthright case for government, and it was in this context that newspapers and magazines began to describe Moynihan as a ‘liberal’ again. The polarised political culture of the 1980s sharpened Moynihan’s identity as a Democrat. In October 1981, the senator from New York featured on the cover of The New Republic, smiling benignly under the headline “Pat Moynihan, Neo-Liberal.”[16] Three months earlier, he had been particularly delighted to find the New York Times referring to him as one of the ‘liberals from the Northeast’ (though the old hated soubriquet would still crop up in articles thereafter). ‘A Neo-Conservative no more!’ he exulted to Sulzberger. ‘Never underestimate the power of the Reagan administration!’[17]

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[1] For instance, Jeet Heer, “National Review Fails To Kill Its Monster,” The New Republic, January 22, 2016, <https://newrepublic.com/article/128176/national-review-fails-kill-monster>

[2] Morton Kondracke, “The Moynihan Movement,” TNR, July 22, 1978.

[3] The Nation, September 22, 1979.

[4] Roger Cohen, “The New L-Word: Neocon,” New York Times, Oct 4, 2007.

[5] George Orwell, The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (London, 1984), 359.   

[6] Michael Harrington, ‘The Welfare State and Its Neoconservative Critics’, Dissent, Autumn 1973.

[7] Steinfels article otherwise was, wrote Moynihan, ‘sensitive, informed, and, more to the point, fair.’ Letter, Daniel P. Moynihan to Peter Steinfels, February 20, 1979, Papers of Daniel P. Moynihan, Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress, Part II, Box 1

[8] Letter, DPM to Arthur O. Sulzberger, December 4, 1981, DPM papers, LOC, Part II, Box 4.

[9] Letter, DPM to Sulzberger, December 23, 1981, DPM papers, LOC, Part II, Box 4.

[10] DPM, “Reagan’s Bankrupt Budget,” TNR, December 31, 1983.

[11] Greg Weiner, “Moynihan and the Neocons,” National Affairs, 26, Winter 2016, <http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/moynihan-and-the-neocons>

[12] Chester E. Finn, Jr., Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik (Princeton, N.J., 2008), 92.

[13] David A. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed (New York, 1986), 244.

[14] Tish Durkin, “Hillary’s Got A Fella – Pat Moynihan,” New York Observer, July 12, 1999.

[15] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Came the Revolution: Argument in the Reagan Era (San Diego, New York, and London, 1988), 5-7.

[16] Fred Barnes, “Pat Moynihan, Neoliberal,” TNR, October 21, 1981.

[17] Letter, DPM to Arthur O. Sulzberger, July 28, 1981, DPM papers, LOC, Part II, Box 3.