THE MOYNIHAN CAPER

...WILLIAM F. NERIN Steinfels (Cont...

...To skip to a later episode, a Commonweal correspondent noted Nixon's selection of Moynihan as domestic advisor was "a surprisingly good choice" Pec...

...The bankruptcy of the liberal left has been the single thread running through virtually all his writings since then...

...Does it include everyone who not only believes that at times the U.S., in Moyni-han's phrase, is "the party of liberty" in the world but at other times is the party of oppression and tyranny...

...is a Catholic liberal," and his "working description" of the type included being Irish and reading Commonweal...

...The old lesser evil argument...

...He will have influence on the selection of mayoral and congressional candidates within the state...

...sometimes the McGovern movement and its sympathizers...

...Moynihan wrote of the Nixon-McGovern presidential race, "I had not the least part in it...

...I recall shaking his hand on Broadway one day, near "Needle Park" at 72od Street, a then-notorious spot for heroin transactions...

...18, 1970...

...Sometimes Moynihan is attacking student Maoists or Arab terrorists, sometimes social workers and old fashioned do-gooders, sometimes chic liberals and jet-set swingers, sometimes the New York Times, sometimes the Village Voice...

...Having barely won a primary in which his major opponent was a woman with a reputation for radicalism and abrasiveness, he might have been expected to mend fences with the liberal left...

...So they must purge instead...

...To give Moynihan a Senate seat is to give him a national platform for leading a conservative coup within the Democratic party...

...His two views of the downfall of Lyndon Johnson, for instance, had one thing in common, the denigration of the militant opposition to the war in Vietnam...

...The first interpretation glosses over this factor...

...Again, is he simply deceiving his readers...

...There seem to be a breed of born Moynihan-haters, but the foregoing ought to prove that I am not one of them...

...If Carter loses, Moynihan, as a Senator from a large state, would immediately become the focus of presidential ambitions...

...As a conservative Harvard intellectual he can be stimulating even when he is terribly wrong...

...I will combine their views into a single voice: "Look," they said, "I'm a firm believer in the lesser evil argument...

...Perhaps this is a small item, but small items, like the pulled thread that unravels the garment, can be revealing...

...And what are we to think of his claim to "neutrality and silence...

...This only reinforced my impression of his good sense...

...So why, I ask myself, should he get it...

...For years I have resisted negative reports of him, often originating from people in government whom I respect...

...Right...

...in the January 1973 memo, to warn Nixon from committing himself to the war, a warning which would be more persuasive when garnished with a sneer at the "mob of college professors, millionaires, flower children, and Radcliffe girls...

...Or has he persuaded himself that a four-page puff in Life doesn't count...

...Bitterness, however, does not invite careful distinctions...

...I voted for Humphrey over Nixon in '68...

...and that, though I often disagreed with it, was usually perceptive and reasonable, never without a point which made me think harder and probably better...

...Which of these views, then, did Moynihan believe...

...Both views dovetailed with Moynihan's political aims of the moment: in the May article, to assimilate the anti-Johnson (and also anti-Humphrey-movement to the political center...

...To the Editors: Peter Steinfels' analysis of "The Four Jimmy Carters" [Aug...

...I was reminded of his [post-Watergate] comment on the Nixon White House: "From the moment those men . . . first started putting replicas of the American flag in their lapels, it was probable that they would end by disgracing it...

...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, soon to be Ambassador to India...

...But maybe, however distressing, that is the way things are...

...But Moynihan marshals the facts so as to create virtually contradictory impressions...

...In a sense, Moynihan was always a conservative, the premise of his proposals being that the capitalist market economy is basically benevolent and rational- if only we could help out the stragglers and the poorly trained so they could compete more effectively in the competitive race...

...The conservatives have now made their intentions clear-why help them to a victory...

...Does the Moynihan enemies list include everyone who thought that pursuing the war in Vietnam went beyond a blunder with terrible consequences and at some point deserved the characterization of immoral...

...His close associates include those in full agreement with the platform of that ably edited journal, namely that political progress in this country depends not only on the elimination of the remnants of the New Left but on the utter discrediting of a very wide body of political opinion vaguely identified as the "new politics" and historically rooted in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the Sixties...

...Maybe wings of the party are in mortal combat...

...the second inflates and caricatures it Moynihan could get along with Nixon, I suppose, because they hated the same people...

...Nixon fooling Moynihan, Moynihan fooling us, Moynihan fooling himself, or all of the above...

...13] was insightful and provocative...

...I've been voting and campaigning for lesser evils all my life...

...The newer conservatism at least produced some useful criticism of the assumptions behind various social welfare initiatives...

...once that is done, improvements can be made...

...But at two points in Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, written either before or immediately after the May article and long before his association with Nixon, Moynihan also speaks of Johnson being "toppled" and used imagery like that in the Nixon memo...

...Nixon's priorities are not ours...

...As for yet other aspects of Moynihan's conservatism, such as his interest in family stability, I agreed wholeheartedly...

...His earlier conservatisms I could live with, as a matter of fact I had no choice, since it charaterized most American policy-makers, Democratic as well as Republican...

...Was Nixon so skillful a dissembler, or Moynihan so ardent a believer...

...When the Moynihan Report emerged, Commonweal welcomed it warmly [Sept...

...The crucial thing is that the principle of a guaranteed family income be established...

...No matter that it was a mob of college professors, millionaires, flower children, and Radcliffe girls...

...Two examples: 1. In May 1968, then supporting Robert Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination, Moynihan wrote that the New Hampshire primary and Lyndon Johnson's decision Gene McCarthy Oklahoma City, Okla...

...This is all the more true since he has chosen to blast his critics out of the water by training on them the big guns of patriotic sentiment (A Moynihan supporter recently explained in the New Republic that Moynihan's opponents were, to put it plainly, soft on Communism...

...What are we to make of it...

...Moynihan, as someone said, is not a Commonweal Catholic but a Commentary Catholic...

...There are facts to support each of these views, and personally I believe the truth to be somewhere in between...

...Is this Nixon, apostle of civility, a pure fiction-political hackwork of a crude but familiar sort...

...Or is this the Nixon Moynihan actually experienced-or created...

...Why then do I contemplate his current candidacy so gloomily...

...Moynihan extends the adjective "honorable" to his opponent, Mr...

...And Moynihan's Family Assistance Plan, when hung up in the Senate Finance Committee, was the subject of a lead editorial: "As most readers of this journal know . . . Mr...

...If it is true, as Daniel Moynihan has suggested, that liberal forces have failed to rally behind the measure only because it has a Nixon tag on it, that fact must be a matter for regret...

...He has moved consistently to the right, and there is no reason for that to cease now...

...If we had learned the limits of intervention overseas, why not consider what the "limits of social policy," to use Nathan Glazer's phrase, might be at home...

...Eight months later, in a memo prepared for President-elect Nixon, Moy-nihan described the same events: "But the fact is that he [Johnson] could not win [in Vietnam], and the all-important accompanying fact is that the semi-violent protest that arose in consequence forced him to resign...

...The liberal left replies that the conservative Democrats started it, sabotaging McGovern, for instance, rather than allowing a liberal left victory...

...The article went so far as to render Nixon nothing less than the champion of "the 'Stevensonian' concept of civility and rational discourse...

...It has become unclear whether he would extend it to me or, for that matter, to Commonweal...

...I am not sure why a two-sided proposition like that should be difficult for a man of Moynihan's complexity to grasp...

...Moynihan did not persuade me on the particulars, but I had to concur with John Stuart Mill's conclusion on the merits of the conservative Coleridge: in such matters it is better to have intelligent, thought-provoking antagonists than feeble, bone-headed ones...

...But wait...

...The problem is that, as time has passed, the convictions he seems to feel most strongly about are negative ones...

...On the night before the New York primary vote, Moynihan concluded a debate with other candidates about specific issues of fiscal policy, unemployment, welfare, etc., by suddenly, though woodenly, denouncing unnamed enemies of America's greatness...

...Moynihan was campaigning with all the enthusiasm of a man who would rather be home reading a book...

...All one can do is choose sides...

...Erased were memories of the man who called Stevenson "Adlai the Appeaser" and "a graduate of Dean Acheson's spineless school of diplomacy...

...Nonetheless, a neoconservative is better than a paleoconservative...

...It is not unclear that he is surrounded by people who would not...

...Moynihan's bitterness toward the Democratic liberal left began with its failure to embrace the Moynihan Report wholeheartedly and with the personal abuse to which he was subjected...

...A striking exception...

...Who is fooling whom...

...This is what is meant by the democratic process" [Commentary, May 1968, p. 15...

...In a sense he was the first American President to be toppled by a mob...

...There is no indication he is not...

...Is Moynihan in full agreement with this outlook...

...26, 1965], the editors defended Moynihan's work against abusive attacks on it and warned against the shelving of the topic of black family life...

...That is what I had been thinking...

...Again, who is Daniel Patrick Moynihan...

...But giving him power-six years of it, if not lifetime tenure- is simply suicidal...

...Indeed, faced with five candidates in the recent New York Democratic Senatorial primary, I realized that, at one time or another, I had voted for four of them...

...Ultimately, it is hard to tell where Moynihan's enemies list ends...

...HI prove that you are unnecessary, he is saying to the left, I don't want your support...

...I would suggest that voting for Eugene McCarthy takes the risk out of the political elections this year...

...Who is Daniel Patrick Moynihan...

...My vote for Moynihan occurred in 1965, when he ran for President of the New York City Council...

...27, 1968...

...His payroll will be filled with people determined to purge the party of its liberal left...

...not to run again demonstrated how "reasoned and non-violent opposition to the course of American foreign policy did prevail...

...In either case, what are we to think of Moynihan's judgment...

...17, 1965...

...That position makes a lot of sense but it too leaves me very uneasy...

...They pursue the Politics of Negation with a vengeance...

...Instead, he appealed for Republican votes, suggesting in the process that the left of his own party was to be equated with Buckley's supporters on the right...

...Political differences give rise to vicious gossip, and these were things-matters of personality, for instance-I had no way of checking out All I could do was read what Moynihan published...

...Not only was I an editor of Commonweal throughout that period, but I had even once cast a vote for Moynihan...

...It was a superb piece of campaign literature, picturing Nixon as a man of peace, repeating his charge that Congress was responsible for the barrenness of his domestic record, emphasizing his opposition to quotas and his closeness to Jewish advisors, describing him as a kind of intellectual seeking a "coherent philosophy" to guide the nation for decades, even centuries...

...If the long shot comes in then we have a man whose record shows that he can more accurately zero in on the critical questions Steinfels raises...

...Moynihan's associates, while decrying what they see as an aversion to compromise on the part of the "new politics," are themselves ideologists of the most uncompromising stripe...

...They think that the liberal left, by hesitating about Humphrey and by supporting McGovern, was out to purge them from the party...

...2. In September 1972, as the Nixon-McGovern campaign was underway, an article appeared in Life magazine, titled "How the President Sees His Second Term...

...Apparently other New Yorkers did not see it that way...

...Or, to put it operationally, almost everyone to the left of Henry Jackson and Albert Shanker...

...I don't know how faithfully Pat Moynihan has followed Commonweal since then-he served on the magazine's Committee of 50 when it marked half a century of publication -but I do know that the magazine has followed him, and almost always sympathetically...

...Gne could almost make an historic drama of that moment in the voting booth-the vindication of the Irish Catholic liberal...

...He is in a distinct minority in the Senate...

...And a little while after that [Nov...

...It is, in fact, the mirror image of the view held by Moynihan's associates...

...This is not to suggest, as some have done, that Moynihan lacks political convictions...

...In May 1973 Moynihan tacked an "Addendum" on to the Introduction of Coping, a collection of his essays...

...Or both of them, persuading himself as well as others, as his mood swung...

...Or did he believe neither of them, tailoring his rhetoric to fit the opportunity...

...He is smart, and he has shown his willingness to use his intelligence demagogically...

...Then I spoke with two New York City politicians, neither of them from liberal enclaves...

...Years ago, Moynihan wrote that "The logical man to unite the New York Democratic party...

...The harm he can do is limited...

...His growing conservatism of the mid-Sixties amounted to the belief that there was simply less the society could do to help out than he had previously supposed...

...My doubts are not based on die familiar charge of political opportunism but simply on Moynihan's own published words...

...The retirement of the President is an act without precedent", but the substantive point is that policy changed almost routinely in response to a changed public opinion...

...Victory on this measure would be a memorable achievement for the Nixon Administration and a significant step forward for the entire nation" [Sept...

...The sad part is that the Irish Catholic liberal, whom Moynihan once imagined as bridging this fratricidal war among Democrats, has now become, in Moynihan's own person, the standard-bearer for its continuation...

...Liberals might like to think that Moynihan really held to the first interpretation, and later dissimulated his opinion before Nixon, perhaps.for a good reason (to argue effectively against the war) or a bad one (to curry favor with his employer...

...One reason is doubt about who he really is...

...is the Administration's welfare reform program which would for the first time in our national history put a floor under family inMOYNIHAN PETER STEM FEUS come...

...But in this election James Buckley, not Moynihan, is the lesser evil...

...A Democrat, I had served in the Cabinet of a Republican President, and I judged this to impose an obligation of neutrality and silence...

...Watergate and the tapes had by then instructed us further on Nixon's concept of "'Stevensonian' civility...

...And who was the author of this tour de force...

...A few weeks later Commonweal published an article by Herbert J. Gans which the sociologists Lee Rainwater and Willian Yancey, in their study of the controversy stirred by the Moynihan Report, called "the only thorough analysis of the report's social science base and political implications...