Pat: A Biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan

...As Schoen reports, Moynihan's childJane Larkin Crain is a writer living in New York...

...hood-though not the one of unmitigated poverty in New York's Hell's Kitchen that is popularly assumed- was nonetheless unstable, and fraught with economic uncertainty...

...That he has been denounced for "moving to the Right" or becoming a "conservative" is in this respect only an indication of how far liberal opinion has moved to the Left...

...For stating so evident a truth (while in no way "blaming the victim," as he was accused of doing), Moynihan was charged with racism by a vociferous section of the black leadership and their left/liberal apologists...

...Given the anti-Americanism of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the malaise occasioned by our defeat in Vietnam, Moynihan's rousing patriotism, his assertion that America need not assume a posture of apologetic deference in the face of Communist tyranny and Third World bullying, was, truly, balm to the national spirit...

...During the mid-1950s, he served on Governor Averell Harriman's staff in Albany...

...Although Douglas Schoen's sympathetic biography lacks any serious interpretive analysis, of either Moynihan the private man or Moynihan the public figure, it does shed some light on the shape of Moynihan's life...

...periods of relative comfort alternated with those of real hardship...

...If, as his record clearly shows, Moynihan has in no way repudiated those attitudes toward public policy that place him squarely in the liberal tradition of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, one can only look to his views on foreign policy to fathom the venomous criticism directed at him from the left wing of the Democratic Party...

...At a time when it was considered racist to discuss matters of race openly, he had suggested, among other things, that there were pathologies ingrained in black family life to which public policy needed to address itself...

...In 1965, the "Moynihan Report," in fact a reasoned and compassionate study of the plight of the black family, unleashed a firestorm of abuse...

...The family never stayed in one place for very long...

...But to the extent that the label "conservative" makes any sense as it is applied to Moynihan, it does so because he is a public figure passionately dedicated to conserving what he unblushingly holds up as supreme American values: the "work ethic," the sanctity of the individual, social institutions like the family, liberty in itself and as the surest road to equality, and, perhaps above all else, the conception of America as embodying the ideal of freedom and standing as an inspiration for all those around the world who aspire to freedom...

...should "cease to apologize for an imperfect democracy" and instead try to forge a policy based on a rightful pride in our traditions of political and civil liberties...

...But it was not until he went to Washington, to serve in the Kennedy administration, that Moynihan began to win a national prominence-tainted, unfairly, with notoriety...

...PAT: A BIOGRAPHY OF DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN Douglas Schoen / Harper & Row / $12.95 Jane Larkin Crain In March 1975, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published in Commentary an article on America's role in the world that was to become one of the significant political events of the decade...

...Henry Kissinger, among others, read the article, and was taken by what was at the time a novel notion: that the U.S...

...Shortly after the Commentary article appeared, Kissinger's boss, Gerald Ford, appointed Moynihan Ambassador to the United Nations, where his bravura performances made him a national hero almost overnight...

...Americans, obviously, were hungry for the kinds of truths Moynihan, with such evident satisfaction and ebullience, was telling...

...In "The United States in Opposition," he argued that America, being "of the liberty party," stood for something precious, and that this being so, "it is something to be shouted to the heavens in the years now upon us...

...Often, these days, he is hailed for having infused American conservatism with a much-needed seriousness and substance...

...To be sure, the very terms "liberal" and "conservative" have in recent years come more to be wielded as epithets in parlous political discourse than used as objective descriptions...

...His critics on the Left to the contrary notwithstanding, Moynihan's career as a public servant (including stints during the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations as a subcabinet officer, political aide, presidential advisor, Ambassador to India, and Ambassador to the UN, and now as a U.S...

...Like other so-called neoconservatives, Moynihan stands most importantly for a strong America, holding the line against isolationism and McGovernism...

...Perhaps, though, this is a service he is actually providing to liberalism...

...Senator from New York) has been shaped entirely by his traditionally liberal view of the role that government should be expected to play in the national life...

...Although he may have come to feel of late that fewer human woes are amenable to the ministrations of the federal government than he had once thought, he still very much falls in line with the majority consensus in favor of the New Deal/Great Society welfare state...

...Although his detractors derided his uncompromising approach at the UN as inefficacious, their real complaint, and the reason he was fired, was his hard-line insistence that America keep faith with its allies and at the same time serve notice to its enemies that it is committed to using its power in defense of its international responsibilities...

...And, of course, the "benign neglect" brouhaha, coming in 1970 when he had already committed the unpardonable sin of agreeing to serve Richard Nixon, only hardened Moynihan's reputation-and this of a genuine stalwart of the civil-rights movement-as a man who was at best indifferent to the condition of blacks in America...

...Schoen portrays him as a perpetual outsider: a loner in high school and college, always on the fringes of New York politics, looked at askance by his colleagues at Harvard, unable to realize his major public policy initiatives during the 1960s, and so forth...

...Even as a young man, though, Moynihan began to make a name for himself: first as a journalist and intellectual and then, after a few years as a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics, in New York Democratic politics...

...Needless to say, Moynihan's fortunes-political and otherwise-had not always run so high...

...His father deserted the family when Moynihan was ten, leaving his mother with three children to raise on her own...