New York's senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, R I P
Vitullo-Martin, Julia
Julia Vitullo-Martin NEW YORK'S SENATOR Daniel Patrick Moynihan's legacy Many people thought that after Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he would place one of his first phone calls to...
...Violence," he said later, "is a routine way of life with destroyed and broken families...
...But I'm assuming that the testy old warhorse has left behind his memoirs, Churchillian-style, correcting history and settling scores...
...He was a man of contradictions-committed to the aspirations of the New Deal and the belief that government could improve the life of its citizens...
...He threatened to hold Clinton's health-care policy hostage to welfare reform, and did indeed both delay it and undermine it...
...No one who really knows has yet revealed the story publicly...
...His critics said that he careened from left to right and back again...
...His immensely controversial 1965 government report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," argued that three centuries of deprivation had destroyed black family structure, which languished in a "tangle of pathology" produced by welfare dependency and unemployment...
...Civil rights laws, he warned the Johnson administration, were not going to produce racial equality...
...Every major piece of social legislation in the last seventy years has had to pass through the toll gates of Southern committee chairmen," he said, chiding the Clintons on the health-care proposals that threatened New York teaching hospitals...
...All the while he attended, as a good senator should, to the needs of his home state...
...Shame on the president," he said, for leaving children to suffer in poverty...
...A White House official told Time that, "We'll roll right over him if we have to...
...You can say Senator Moynihan is devoted to his constituents in New York...
...With his astonishing gift for phrases, Moynihan made quotable fun of Clinton, calling his welfare ideas, for example, "boob bait for the Bubbas...
...He cared about the working class, and he knew its troubles well...
...He rose to the top of American society, but he nursed his class resentments even as he wore Harris Tweeds and relished the honors conferred by Harvard and Oxford...
...Just to turn the knife a bit more, he added later that destroying teaching hospitals was a "sin against the Holy Ghost...
...He saw early that the gulf between this lowest class and the true working class was widening, and that the working class was becoming deeply angry about crime and perceived racial favoritism...
...So why, then, did Moynihan agree to support his old adversary, Hillary Clinton...
...He made it up and out of what sociologists later called a "female-headed household," but he knew that most young men hadn't and wouldn't...
...Yet at the same time he regularly cited Rossi's Law, named after the sociologist Peter Rossi, that "the expected value for any measured effect of a social program is zero...
...The result was mayhem for the White House...
...Julia Vitullo-Martin NEW YORK'S SENATOR Daniel Patrick Moynihan's legacy Many people thought that after Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he would place one of his first phone calls to fellow Democrat, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
...Moynihan had been arguing for a long time that welfare had to be tied to employment, but when the Clinton administration came 'round to this point of view it proposed reform that was far too harsh for Moynihan's taste...
...He applied Karl Marx's term "lumpenproletariat"-the lowest stratum in society that Marx said was anarchistic rather than revolutionary-to desperately poor black neighborhoods, but also to the equally poor Irish neighborhoods he had once known...
...Put that down...
...He had his loyalties, and they were personal...
...A period of "benign neglect" of race as a political issue would help everyone calm down...
...for his Senate seat, after she made the deferential pilgrimage to his remote country place in upstate New York...
...He had worked at menial jobs from the age of ten, when his alcoholic journalist father walked out on the family he had uprooted from Tulsa, Oklahoma to East Harlem...
...It's little wonder that the Clinton people had trouble with him...
...And they weren't subtle about it...
...Now there's a New Yorker who's chairman of the Finance Committee for the first time in 155 years...
...Having successfully worked for four presidents in a row (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford), Moynihan as a third-term senator had been waiting a long time for a collegial occupant of the White House to implement serious welfare reform...
...What actually ensued, of course, was an uproar that didn't fully end for some twenty-five years, by which time almost everyone recognized that federal social programs designed to aid the poor and minorities weren't working...
...Regarding Moynihan as a dithering, cantankerous old man, the Clintons ignored him...
...In his 1970 memo to President Nixon he argued that race relations had been rubbed raw by "hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers" of all political stripes...
...The fact that Moynihan's ascension to the chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee had come about because Clinton appointed Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex...
...He argued that black children reared in fatherless homes found it hard to adjust to the nation's essentially patriarchal society, especially when they were also confronting ongoing racial injustice and trying to overcome poverty...
...His biographer, Godfrey Hodgson, has a more trenchant explanation...
...Moynihan, who died March 26 at the age of seventy-six, put every presidential appointment he could through the ringer...
...He was denounced for blaming the victim...
...He knew from his own childhood the despair of a family abandoned by its father, and the ferocious hardness demanded of the single mother...
...Moynihan later glamorized his upbringing, but no one can seriously doubt that his daily exposure to the inequities of America's class structure seared his soul...
...But the phone call never came...
...his Treasury secretary barely mollified the New Yorker...
...While Moynihan never stopped thinking of himself as a liberal Democrat, says Hodgson, he shared President Richard Nixon's resentment of orthodox liberalism-the "patriciate" he used to call it...
Vol. 130 • April 2003 • No. 7
