Reflections on Mr. Nixon
Moynihan, Daniel P.
Reflections on Mr. Nixon Daniel P. Moyniban Counsellor To The President Before returning to Harvard, Daniel Patrick Moynihan greeted his White House colleagues in the East Room and bid them adieu...
...Vice President, Members of the Cabinet: I feel, sir, not unlike a character in one of the Disraeli novels of whom it was said he was a man distinguished for ignorance, as he had but one idea, and that was wrong...
...But his initial thrusts were rarely followed up with a sustained, reasoned, reliable second and third order of advocacy...
...A company of honorable men The first is to be of good cheer and good conscience...
...Time and again, the President has said things of startling insight, taken positions of great political courage and intellectual daring, only to be greeted with silence or incomprehension...
...This is hardly a new condition...
...The issue is how henceforth to conduct ourselves...
...Therefore, three exhortations, and the rest will be silence...
...The restoration of trust would depend on this...
...Few peoples have displayed so intense a determination to define the most mundane affairs in terms of the most exalted principles, to see in any difficulty an ethical failing, to deem any success a form of temptation, and as if to ensure the perpetuation of the impulse, to take a painful pleasure in it all...
...To have seen him late into the night and through the night and into the morning, struggling with the most awful complexities, the most demanding and irresolvable conflicts, doing so because he cared, trying to comprehend what is right, and trying to make other men see it, above all, caring, working, hoping for this country that he has made greater already and which he will make greater still...
...Not, I think, unkindly...
...It comes to this...
...To the contrary, the achievement has been considerable, even remarkable...
...Moralism drives out thought...
...To the contrary, it is as if the disquiet and distrust in the nation as a whole has been eased by being focused on the government in Washington...
...The President's men must know them all, must understand how one thing relates to another,.must find in the words the spirit that animates them, must divine in the blade of grass the whole of life that is indeed contained there, for so much is at issue...
...it was coming apart...
...The agony of war was compounded by and interacted with the great travail of race which, once again, not so much divided as fractured the society...
...Racial bondage and oppression had been the one huge wrong of American history, and when at last the nation moved to right that wrong the damage that had been done proved greater than anyone had grasped...
...Not long before the war in Asia began, a French Dominican priest wrote that "Either America is the hope of the world, or it is nothing...
...Deliberately or no, the impression was allowed to arise with respect to the widest range of Presidential initiatives that the President wasn't really behind them...
...Racial rhetoric has calmed...
...It was my presumption that after Secretary Rogers and Dr...
...Of late these qualities have began to tell on the institution of the Presidency itself...
...But there is something more at work than the mere perversity of things...
...Civil disobedience and protest have receded...
...About Crime...
...For how else to interpret an attempt to deal with such serious matters in so innovative a way, if in fact the effort was not serious...
...About Communism...
...How then could it have been otherwise than that the election of 1968 would begin in violence and end in ambiguity...
...In foreign affairs the nation has asserted the limits of its power and its purpose...
...In domestic matters events have been similarly reassuring...
...Great American Series It is not the function of the government to relieve individuals of their responsibilities to their neighbors, or to relieve private institutions of their responsibilities to the public...
...About Corruption About Likker...
...Save fear...
...The prime consequence of all this is that the people in the nation who take these matters seriously have never been required to take us seriously...
...They are not true...
...Nixon Daniel P. Moyniban Counsellor To The President Before returning to Harvard, Daniel Patrick Moynihan greeted his White House colleagues in the East Room and bid them adieu wherein he reviewed in a thoughtful address Mr...
...The style which the British call "muddling through" is not for us...
...This is the single great temptation of the time...
...The result has been a set of myths and counter myths about ourselves and the world that create expectations which cannot be satisfied, and which lead to a rhetoric of crisis and conflict that constantly, in effect, declares the government in power disqualified for the serious tasks at hand...
...This is something those of us who have worked in this building with him know in a way that perhaps only that experience can teach...
...A large vision of America has been put forth...
...Nixon's White House is piquant...
...If that is not the case, I think it may be just as interesting to find how very consummate are the things which the three of us have chosen to say on this occasion, suggesting that there is some reality to . which we are responding...
...About Pot...
...The war disrupted the economy and then dictated that the onset of peace would do so as well...
...Serve him well...
...Far from seeking a restoration of outmoded principles and practices with respect to issues of social justice and social order, the President, on taking office, moved swiftly to endorse the profoundly important but fundamentally unfulfilled commitments, especially to the poor and oppressed, which the nation had made in the 1960's...
...An ominous new racial division made its appearance, and with it also a new sectional division, unattended and underappreciated, but not less threatening...
...This has been a company of honorable and able men, led by a President of singular courage and compassion in the face of a sometimes awful knowledge of the problems and the probabilities that confront him...
...Understand how much depends on you...
...A century ago the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt foresaw that ours would be the ageof "the great simplifiers," and that the essence of tyranny was the denial of complexity...
...Depressing, even frightening things are being said about the Administration...
...It is not enough to know one subject, one department...
...Moralism drives out thought But in the interval this old disposition has had new consequences...
...The thrust of the President's program was turned against - him...
...Serve him well...
...We have begun to dismantle the elaborate construct of myth and reality associated with the Cold War...
...As I am now leaving, it may seem to come with little grace to prescribe for those who must stand and fight...
...One thinks of President Kennedy's summation: life is not fair...
...As the President has said, we are now in the middle of the journey...
...It seemed the worst of times...
...The war in Asia, undeclared and unwanted, misunderstood or not understood at all, pursued by decent men for decent purposes but by means, and with consequences, that could only in the end be heartbreaking, had brought on an agony of the spirit that had had no counterpart in our national experience...
...He then moved on to new commitments to groups and to purposes that had been too much ignored during that period, and beyond that to offer a critique of government the like of which has not been heard in Washington since Woodrow Wilson...
...Try to understand what he has given of himself...
...The agony was elemental, irresolvable, and nigh to universal...
...A Critique of Government How, by that standard, would one measure the two years now past...
...I would plead only that I have been sparing of such counsel in the past...
...And, lastly, I would propose that if either of the foregoing is to be possible, it is necessary for members of the Administration, the men in this room, to be far more attentive to what it is the President has said, and proposed...
...Few ideas are correct ones," wrote Disraeli, "and what are correct no one can ascertain...
...Tocqueville noted it a century and a half ago...
...Elections are rarely our finest hours...
...Pray for his success...
...What was once primarily a disdain for government has developed into a genuine distrust...
...We have never learned to be sufficiently thoughtful about the tasks of running a complex society...
...Where it will end we do not know...
...Government had begun to do utterly unacceptable things, such as sending spies to the party conventions in 1968...
...The war in Asia has receded, the prospect of arms limitation has gradually impressed itself on our consciousness, the possibility of containing the endless ethnic, racial, and religious conflicts that may now become the major threat to world order has become more believable as here and there things have got better, not worse...
...In such circumstances confidence in American government eroded...
...Life would have no relish for them if they were delivered from the anxieties which harass them, and they show more attachment to their cares than aristocratic nations to their pleasures...
...Too soon the struggle recommences...
...It concedes too much to the probity of those who are trying to cope, and the probable intransigency of the problems they are trying to cope with...
...In one message after another to the Congress, the fundaments of governmental reform were set forth...
...The great symbol of racial subjugation, the dual school system of the South, virtually intact two years ago, has quietly and finally been dismantled...
...About Race Horses...
...And now, goodby, it really has been good to know you...
...A very little time is allowed the President during which he can speak for all the nation, and address himself to realities in terms of the possible...
...Understand how much depends on you...
...All in all, a record of some good fortune and much genuine achievement...
...It is the great corruptor, and must be resisted with purpose and with energy...
...Then came the President's inaugural address with its great theme of reconciliation, and restraint, and - in the face of so much about which we comprehend so little - reserve...
...The second thing is to resist the temptation to respond in kind to the untruths and half truths that begin to fill the air...
...Elections are rarely our finest hour The political process reinforces, and to a degree rewards, the moralistic style...
...We might have had a bit more time, but no matter...
...Shultz had spoken there might be still something of very great import that I might say...
...It all comes together in the story of the man who says, "They told me if I voted for Goldwater there would be half a million troops in Vietnam within the year...
...The Presidency requires much of those who will serve it, and first of all it requires comprehension...
...What we need are great complexifiers, men who will not only seek to understand what it is they are about, but who will also dare to share that understanding with those for whom they act...
...Since that time, mass urban violence has all but disappeared...
...It can only be furthered by men who share it...
...No men are fonder of their own condition...
...The country was not so much divided as fragmented...
...It was hardly in their interest to do so...
...Hence, we publish it below in its entirety...
...An astonishingly large cohort of Americans concluded, in the course of the 1960's, that it was nothing...
...It may be of some use, then, to try to reconstruct the circumstances in which the President was elected, and formed his Administration, just two years ago...
...The economic vitality of the nation was imperiled...
...It is no longer even clear where it began, our senses having long since been dulled by the relentless excess of stimulus which is the lot of any who involve themselves in American government...
...As a result, we have acquired bad habits of speech and worse patterns of behavior, lurching from crisis to crisis with the attention span of a five-year old...
...Name it...
...Pray for his success...
...It was on this bedrock of reality that trust in government must rest...
...He was right...
...but with words we govern men...
...It was the habit then to speak of the nation as divided, and to assert that the situation was grave beyond anything since the Civil War itself...
...As Mr...
...Those words of January 20, 1969, were and remain the most commanding call to governance that the nation has heard in the long travail that is not yet ended...
...I voted for him, and by God they were right...
...And now, goodby, it really has been good to know you...
...Government was not to be believed, nor was much to be expected of it...
...This was misleading...
...It was clear enough who had won, albeit barely, but not at all certain what had won...
...Herbert Hoover Life is not fair And yet how little the Administration seems to be credited with what it has achieved...
...In any event, in so intensely private a society it is hard to get attention to one's own concern save through a rhetoric of crisis...
...This when we tend to be most hysterical, most abusive, least thoughtful about problems, and least respectful of complexity...
...Our great werkness is the habit of reducing the most complex issues to the most simplistic moralisms...
...Time and again the President would put forth an oftentimes devastating critique precisely of their performance...
...No matter what one's view of the nation might be, events in Vietnam contradicted that view...
...It was a devastatine critique...
...Moynihan has acquired a singular perspective by serving two very dissimilar presidents, (President Nixon and President Kennedy), and as he is one of the most eloquent men to be recently exposed to the humiliations of public life, we think his evaluation of Mr...
...The prospect of a generation of peace has convincingly emerged...
...It had to fulfill them...
...About Capitalism...
...President, Mr...
...More was required of government, the President said, than simply to make promises...
...Nixon's first two years in office...
...It has made it difficult for Americans to think honestly and to some purpose about themselves and their problems...
...Serve...Pray...Understand I am of those who believe that America is the hope of the world, and that for that time given him the President is the hope of America...
...This has now happened for us...
...In a curious, persistent way our problem as a nation arises from a surplus of moral energy...
...About the SST...
Vol. 4 • February 1971 • No. 4
