From the WSJ Opinion Archives
IN MEMORIAM
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
He was a singular politician and thinker.
America has never had anyone in public life with the blazing originality of mind of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Such originality cannot be entirely explained: It is the product of an intellect and a character that are unique. Yet I think it owed something to the fact that Pat Moynihan was always in some sense an outsider--a boy who was raised by a single mother when most children grew up in two-parent families; a Catholic who did not attend, as most Catholics of his generation did, Catholic schools; an Irishman in the academy, most of whose colleagues were WASPs or Jews; a Democrat in the Nixon and Ford administrations; a diplomat whose plain speaking was deeply abhorrent to Foggy Bottom; a senator whose range of interests and intellectual productivity far exceeded those of his colleagues. He saw the world differently from the rest of us, and often got us to see it his way, in part because he stood in a slightly different place.
Consider how he first came to the attention of the intellectuals who were to remain his friends and admirers, despite their differing views on many issues, all his life. It was in 1959, when Irving Kristol published, in the Reporter, Moynihan's article "Epidemic on the Highways." As an aide to Gov. Averell Harriman, Moynihan had gotten interested in the problem of auto accidents. Previously it was thought to be a problem of engineering (build safer highways) or law enforcement (enforce the speed limit). Moynihan came to see it through the lens of epidemiology. Accidents and injuries should be thought of as a public-health problem; statistics should be collected; action should be taken, by government, by auto manufacturers, by drivers and passengers, that would reduce the number of accidents and injuries. And so it happened. From 1965 to 1993 the death rate per 100 million vehicles was reduced by two-thirds. Moynihan, who did not drive, pointed the way.
Or consider the way in which Moynihan became a prominent--and controversial--public figure. It was after the publication in 1965 of his paper "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," written when he was assistant secretary of labor. The notion then was that the problem of black poverty could be solved by ending racial discrimination, and the nation was striving to do that. But Moynihan the social scientist noticed something in the statistics. Unemployment was going down but the number of blacks on welfare was going up. A rising tide was not lifting all boats. And he identified the cause: "the breakdown of the Negro family." One-quarter of black children were born to single mothers. For this Moynihan was attacked for "blaming the victim." He was furiously denounced in the press and the academy. But he had identified the most agonizing social problem of the remainder of the 20th century. He saw that the problem was not just economic or legal but that it was also cultural. "The role of the family in shaping character and ability is so pervasive as to be easily overlooked." But not by Moynihan.
Post-New Deal social scientists, bowing to Marx, saw class--economics--as the explanation for most social phenomena. Moynihan, who never bowed to Marx--another way in which he differed from many around him--saw ethnicity as more important. His chapter on the Irish of New York in "Beyond the Melting Pot" was published in 1963 but still speaks to us today, explaining the culture that sent so many of those firemen into the blazing towers. It is a work of penetrating insight and astonishing beauty: I challenge you to finish the last paragraph without tears in your eyes. But ethnicity is important not only in New York. In 1979 he wrote an article predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union. His reasons? A rise in mortality rates--the one reliable Soviet statistic--and "the nationality strains." The Soviet empire, like the Hapsburg empire, was a multiethnic empire that would fly apart when not held ruthlessly together. On the 10th day of the 1980s Moynihan predicted that "the defining event of the decade might well be the breakup of the Soviet empire." Only Moynihan and Ronald Reagan saw it coming.
Moynihan's interests were varied, and sustained over many years. At the Department of Labor he wrote a paper on federal architecture that set policy for years and he initiated plans for making Pennsylvania Avenue the grand avenue L'Enfant had intended; a meeting was scheduled with President Kennedy after his return from Dallas. In his last years he could see his work as he walked from his apartment overlooking the National Archives to his office in the Ronald Reagan Building. At the U.N. he spoke the language of human rights and blazed with fury at the General Assembly's declaration that Zionism was racism. That was out of step with Henry Kissinger's realism, but, as Mr. Kissinger has since conceded, the championship of human rights contributed mightily to the downfall of the Soviet Union. His service as ambassador to India convinced him of the importance of that country; he encouraged the Clinton administration's rapprochement to India, which in turn helped influence Pakistan to cooperate with us after Sept. 11. At the end of his life Moynihan was still working, as co-chairman of George W. Bush's Social Security Commission; Mr. Bush is the ninth consecutive president he worked for or with. Moynihan had become convinced that Social Security, created as a program to guarantee income, should be expanded to enable people to accumulate wealth.
In 1993 I wrote that Moynihan was "the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson." Nothing to change there but the verb tense. But something to add. He was a social scientist, a consumer of statistics always delighted to come upon a new metric. But he understood that social science is not really science, it is art. And Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an artist of the highest quality. There was only one Michelangelo. There was only one Mozart. There was only one Pat Moynihan.
Mr. Barone, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, is a contributor to the Fox News Channel and co-author of the Almanac of American Politics (National Journal).
