Moynihan, a documentary by Joseph Dorman and Toby Perl Freilich; 105 minutes, coming to iTunes and DVD on April 9.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Raised in impoverished circumstances by a single mother, Daniel Patrick Moynihan always had compassion for those who were not as lucky as he was. By fortuitous circumstances, a Navy commission which led to him obtaining a PhD at Tufts University, he was able to escape poverty and rise to the upper echelons of American society. But, he insisted, others lacking such advantages were not at fault for their financially desperate situations. A shortage of employment opportunities, in his view, was the culprit.
During the administration of John F. Kennedy, Moynihan became an assistant to Arthur Goldberg, then the Secretary of Labor. He worked on a plan that would blossom under Lyndon B. Johnson as the “War on Poverty.” Brought back to government service by Richard M. Nixon, Moynihan championed a Family Assistance Act, which would have replaced welfare by creating a guaranteed financial floor for families with children, whether the parents were working or not. The plan was narrowly defeated in the U.S. Senate, and subsequently shelved.
While his concern for the impoverished was genuine, his motives were often attacked. Anyone who could work for two Democratic Presidents, followed by two Republican ones – President Gerald R. Ford being the last – was subjected to attack from both liberals and conservatives. The liberals called him a neoconservative; the conservatives called him a neoliberal, and later on he had framed magazine covers in his U.S. Senate bathroom, proving the dichotomous way in which he was viewed.
He had admirers and critics among black Americans. One comment that got him in hot water was his suggestion that the matter of race relations be treated with “benign neglect.” Critics charged that he wanted to ignore the race problem, bury it under some national rug, while admirers said anyone who read the whole article he had written knew that the reverse was true, that he wanted to cool down the malign racial rhetoric of the 1960s.
Arthur Goldberg was a Jewish mentor, and he had numerous other significant relationships with Jews – as one might expect of anyone elected to three terms as a United States senator from New York.
When he was serving as Nixon’s chief domestic advisor, he had a rivalry and friendship with Henry Kissinger, who started as Nixon’s national security advisor and went on to become Secretary of State. After Ford appointed Moynihan as Ambassador to India, it was Kissinger who recommended that Moynihan be elevated to the ambassadorship at the United Nations, serving as America’s most visible spokesman.
This is not to say that Kissinger, a Jew, and Moynihan, an Irishman, agreed on everything. Ironically, Moynihan was far more pro-Israel than Kissinger. The two quietly clashed behind closed doors about the best way to respond to the infamous 1975 United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. Kissinger told the documentary film crew that he had preferred to deal with it through ponderous U.N. procedures, “not attack it frontally but let it get soaked up and gradually disposed of.” According to Kissinger, Moynihan in contrast, “thought this was a moral issue that he wanted to fight to its conclusion.”
In a stirring speech at the U.N., Moynihan said the measure, which was approved over his objections, was not only about “the honor and the legitimacy of the State of Israel [but also about] the integrity of that whole body of moral and legal precepts which we know as human rights.” With the resolution, Moynihan said, “a great evil has been loosed upon the world: the abomination of anti-Semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.”
And then Moynihan stated with emphasis from the U.N. rostrum: “The United States of America declares that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.” The Zionism is racism resolution was revoked in 1991.
Between his service in the Johnson and Nixon administrations, Moynihan became director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of his Harvard students was Chuck Schumer, now the Democratic Majority leader in the U.S. Senate. In the documentary, Schumer recalled: “Pat Moynihan’s course was well known because he was a brilliant man, but he had practical experience. He was a bridge between academic thought and government, and there were very few bridges that were as strong, as durable, and had as much a foot in each camp as he did. The course was vintage Pat Moynihan. It led with policy.”
John R. Price, an assistant on urban affairs, recalled that during the Nixon administration, Moynihan “brought in Bruno Bettelheim who had written of children in the kibbutz in Israel and about the importance of early child development and forthwith Nixon created the first Office of Early Child Development in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and whom did Pat [Moynihan] put in charge of it? James Farmer, the head of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality).”
After leaving the United Nations, Moynihan ran successfully for the U.S. Senate in New York, defeating feminist Bella Abzug in the Democratic primary and incumbent Republican James Buckley in the November runoff. At one point while campaigning in a Jewish precinct in Brooklyn, a cream pie was shoved in his face by a Yippie.
Columnist George Will said appreciatively of Moynihan’s career in the Senate, “He wrote more books than many of his colleagues read.” Schumer reflected that “he was not an ideologue; he was an ideas person, but not an ideologue, so he had great friends on the Republican side…. One of my colleagues on the Republican side said you know you couldn’t have a Senate of 100 Moynihans, but you sure needed a Senate with one or two.”
Moynihan, witty and urbane, was credited with once saying: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.”
He retired from the U.S. Senate in 2001, and was succeeded by Hillary Clinton. The former Navy officer was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
For anyone who admires states craft and intellect, and treasures a politician who embodies bipartisanship, this is a documentary well worth seeing. Watch for it on DVD and iTunes in April.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com