Working with Moynihan
Garment, Leonard
The Alternative: An American Spectator • February 1976 • Volume 9, Number 5 Leonard Garment Working with Moynihan A Editor's Note Some years past, St. Martin's Press published a little book...
...In it, men who had toiled closely with the wartime Prime Minister reminisced about their service with him during those grim days...
...Against these defeats stands the discovery that the old ideas of freedom and pride of country still have the power to move and rally and unify...
...The reverse is true...
...That's the only hope we have of doing a few useful things while we are here...
...The United States played a key [he Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 5 role in the unexpected success of the Seventh Special Session, a meeting devoted to economic issues of crucial importance to the Third World, which ended in a resolution adopted without a dissenting vote...
...When I came to work for him last August, he laid out his general plan of action in these terms: Let's not worry about getting fired...
...Again, Bernard Levin's words: "Mr...
...rom: Leonard Garment ;ubject: "Working with Moynihan''' This is the way we do things in the Jnited States Government...
...The form solves most problems of style...
...Even if I were inclined to talk about the private life of Pat Moynihan, there would be little to say...
...No big secrets...
...it sounds sweet in my ears, and I suspect that it may awaken echoes long silent in the minds of many who have almost ceased to hope...
...He wrote his own major speeches and cables...
...It has been said that Moynihan's strategy from the start was to seek a confrontation with the Third World...
...No one at the United Nations was sleeping better because Moynihan was there...
...The truth, however, is that this was not his intention when he took the United Nations job...
...He didn't change his mind after his appointment...
...Moynihan not only directed the United States' operation, but personally conceived, drafted, and jammed thrugh the State Department's clearance process a comprehensive United States working paper that made this success possible...
...Let's hope so...
...Again the Commentary article: "[T]here exists the strongest possibility of an accommodating relationship [with Third World countries] at the level of principle —a possibility that does not exist at all with the totalitarian powers as they are now constituted...
...His lack of concern about guarding his tongue or position was put on public display at 9:45 a.m...
...And it's just you and me...
...War to Moynihan and the Third World Dizziness, and I was moved to ask this sentient and intelligent man to lay down some reflections on what it was like to work with Moynihan amidst the quotidian blitz of spitballs and paper airplanes that lend such dignity to the General Assembly...
...And the discovery of a voice...
...As a matter of fact, let's try in a responsible way to get fired...
...As you know, the spirit of the Special Session did not last long...
...There stood Moynihan, eloquent in his defense of principle—no, eloquent in his defense of civilization...
...Moynihan has begun to sound the trumpet to end a long retreat...
...Recently, while at lunch with—among others—Leonard Garment, Counselor to Ambassador Moynihan's delegation at the UN, the talk ran from Churchill and the Second World...
...Martin's Press published a little book entitled Action This Day: Working with Churchill...
...He did them in India for two years...
...Every officer at the United States Mission familiar with the workings of the Special Session—whether personally friendly or antagonistic to Moynihan—will confirm that at the moment of his intervention the conference was stymied and drifting toward failure...
...It was an interesting book, because these were interesting men, serving an interesting man, during interesting times...
...He was the first Ambassador since Adlai Stevenson who truly grasped the importance of words, and he had the nerve and the skill to use language to bring about a complete reversal of the United States' role at the United Nations...
...In fairness it should be said that Moynihan can do the quietly effective things that diplomats are supposed to do...
...0 6 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 19...
...Tough...
...And it was no secret...
...He kept strange hours, talked to strange groups, slept fitfully, napped randomly, and did most of his own work...
...He knew precisely where he wanted to take his Mission...
...And in some small way he may have reminded Ameri;ans that we were born of a declaration znd bred under a constitution...
...The first major performance of the United States Mission under Moynihan was faithful to these words...
...He used words as though discourse mattered...
...He is the kind of man Bernard Levin described in the New York Times (December 16): "in a fight over an issue that counts, he knows where to put the razor blades in the potatoes...
...As a consequence, he was cheerfully loose in the job...
...What follows is Leonard Garment's ',rief reminiscence.—RET Memorandum to: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...They mist matter ifa democracy is to function...
...Notwithstanding the mountebanks who hold forth )71 the Potomac today, words and princi>les have mattered throughout our history, and they matter today...
...He's a big, warm Irish guy, very much the same in private as in public, who sticks close to his family, friends, and some old-fashioned ideas...
...Oil, antisemitism, and Soviet manipulation introduced the Zionism resolution, a lunatic inversion so identifiably evil and so perversely unpredictable in its consequences that its adoption may come to mark a point of no return for the United Nations...
...Tbere was an assortment of other defeats for the West but nothing so grotesque as this return to the language of the Nazis...
...And he was passionate in his belief that the success in doing so depended on words—reading, writing, delivering, dissecting words...
...By memorandum...
...every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, when he presided over a meeting of the United States delegation members, staff officers, and secretaries, lecturing on the United Nations' follies of the moment, inviting information and disagreement, wisecracking, evenhandedly denouncing the "Stalinoid sons of bitches" in other delegations (named), and the "disgraceful" action of one or another high-ranking official in the United States Government (also named...
...His intention was tcychallenge the totalitarian states at the level of language and ideology while seeking common substantive ground with the Third World...
...You'll remember that before he was appointed he published an article in Commentary (March 1975) called "The United States in Opposition" where he declared his hope that the American United Nations spokesman would come to be "feared for the truths he might tell" and would "shout to the heavens" the case for liberty...
Vol. 9 • February 1976 • No. 5
