The Politics of Pat Moynihan??II: An Exchange
BANFIELD, EDWARD C.
In "The Politics of Pat Moynihan" (NL, April 2), Gus Tyler disputed the claims made for the defeated NLxon Family Assistance Plan in Moynihan's recent book, and argued that it would have substituted...
...A revenue sharing bill was on its way to Congress when Johnson, out of pique at disclosure of it in the press, withdrew the measure...
...That such a man is not seen for what he really is perhaps is not surprising...
...Presumably what is most "remarkably revealing" is that Moynihan is not just another liberal who deserted the cause "for a ribbon to pin on his coat" but actually the man who...
...Tyler thinks, who worked up this scheme...
...At the start of the Nixon Administration it was not Moynihan but Robert Finch, the new secretary of HEW, who brought up the matter of family assistance...
...Contrary to Tyler's assertion, revenue sharing has not been made a substitute for categorical grants...
...A plan developed by Worth Bateman, a civil servant in HEW, was rejected by Secretary Wilbur Cohen, apparently because he feared opposition from the likes of the ILGWU...
...Labor union opposition," says Alice M. Riv-lin, who was then assistant secretary for planning and evaluation in HEW, "might have killed the proposal at the White House level, if not below...
...No doubt Tyler hopes that these "revelations" will justify, if only retrospectively, the failure of the ILGWU and most of the liberal-Left to support a measure that would have benefited some 6 million households of the working poor...
...Family assistance never got that far...
...It is perfectly clear, however, that the Nixon Administration has not undertaken to dismantle the welfare state...
...These were directions in which the Johnson Administration was moving when it left office...
...It was Moynihan...
...To claim that the President seized on a scheme by Moynihan and turned it into a plot against the poor is childish...
...If the unions at that time opposed aid to the working poor, it was certainly not because they thought LBJ intended to dismantle the welfare state...
...His piece has elicited many comments, two of which are presented below, with a reply from Tyler...
...We are not turning away from the problems," he said, "we are turning to a better solution...
...Detailed proposals for family assistance and revenue sharing were worked out during the Johnson Administration...
...as late as March 31, 1973 the President, speaking to a group of state legislators in the White House, once again gave unequivocal assurance that the states and cities will get all the "new" money they were promised...
...Tyler's lack of understanding of his subject matter?that is the kindest way of putting it-is evident also in the very fact of his writing about Moynihan's "politics...
...But that he is belittled and ridiculed for qualities we stand desperately in need of -that is deeply disturbing...
...Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania...
...In "The Politics of Pat Moynihan" (NL, April 2), Gus Tyler disputed the claims made for the defeated NLxon Family Assistance Plan in Moynihan's recent book, and argued that it would have substituted an income for a services strategy...
...It has also sought to improve the remaining service programs both by consolidating many of them (hundreds of categorical programs came into existence in the '60s) and by transferring responsibility for the use of some Federal funds to state and local governments through revenue sharing...
...The first is by Edward C. Banfield, William R. Kenan Jr...
...Finch favored Bateman's (he was still on the scene), making it the basis of his own...
...the second is by Leslie Lenkowsky, a Harvard teaching fellow writing a dissertation on welfare reform...
...Moynihan there remarks that at a crucial point in the effort to pass the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) and the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) gave the Senate Finance Committee a prepared statement designed to insure that no Federal funds would be used to train workers in the apparel industry...
...The incoming Nixon Administration, bent on "dismantling the welfare state," found this "Moynihan thesis" "singularly useful...
...The President had proposed to give money to the poor...
...Systematic Thinking for Social Action, she spoke approvingly of "a new realism about the capacity of a central government to manage social progress effectively...
...And of the proposals suggested by his staff...
...Moynihan has no politics...
...Ideological subtlety," Moynihan reflects, "is no friend of principle...
...The Nixon Administration did no more than press forward vigorously in the directions that were generally agreed upon...
...It does not, however, reveal anything resembling what Tyler supposes...
...He belongs to a nearly extinct species in America: the public man...
...In her 1971 book...
...What Tyler calls the "Nixonian concept of public policy for the "70s" was widely accepted within the Johnson Administration and is accepted today by "certified liberals...
...THE POLITICS OF PAT MOYNIHAN-11 Edward C. Banfield Gus Tyler was barely halfway through The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, the editors tell us in "Between Issues," when he called to say that the book was in many ways "remarkably revealing" and could not be handled adequately in a mere review: On these grounds it was decided that he would write an article on the politics of Pat Moynihan...
...Rivlin is worth noting in passing...
...The 1966 Coleman Report on educational inequalities had convinced him that Head-start and other compensatory education efforts were a waste...
...The internationalist, socialist, militant unions were not sure...
...Moynihan, a "glandular enthusiast" who "likes to be in the thick of things and prefers to believe that where he is is where it's at," accordingly helped to set a "booby-trap for the poor" by proposing a family assistance plan that would offer them "crumbs," taken, moreover, "almost exclusively from the nonwealthy...
...More recently she has endorsed, in principle, the very advice that Tyler mockingly puts in the mouth of Moynihan?Give them that $1,600 and knock out those useless services-like Headstart, etc...
...Income transfer programs get a larger share of the proposed 1974 budget than of any budget in our history, and Federal expenditures on major "Great Society" programs increased from $1.7 billion in 1963 to $35.7 billion in 1973...
...the next year he told an Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) convention that although the Federal government might do well at redistributing wealth and power, it was a highly unreliable device for dispensing services-that in fact, the capacities of government for bringing about social change were limited...
...The plumbers were for this...
...Moynihan's book, probably the most candid and intelligent account ever written by a high official of the decision-making process of this or any other government, is indeed remarkably revealing...
...Very likely Tyler reached for the phone as he neared the end of the long paragraph on page 277 (almost exactly halfway through...
...There are no grounds whatever for believing that the Nixon Administration had (or has) any intention of substituting an income for a services strategy so as to "dismantle the welfare state...
...Writing in last February's Harvard Educational Review, she says: "It is now generally taken for granted that, given a free choice of policies, it is more efficient to reduce poverty by increasing the earnings or incomes of low income people directly than to embark on the long, risky and problematical process of raising future incomes of poor children through school reform...
...He is preoccupied neither with getting himself or someone else elected to office nor with policy as a means to that end...
...Moynihan's important contribution was helping Finch persuade the President to back the plan and give it first place on his domestic agenda...
...though it certainly did intend-as did many leading figures within the Johnson Administration-to shift the emphasis of Federal effort from service programs that were accomplishing little to direct family assistance...
...Unfortunately, his attempted justification is at the expense of truth and justice-truth as to what happened and justice to the President and his advisers, especially Moynihan...
...Obviously, adoption of an income strategy implies reduction of some services: One supports direct grants instead of, say, Headstart because one gets more for one's money that way...
...This is too well-known to need documentation, though the example of Mrs...
...had it remained in office, it would undoubtedly have continued on the same paths...
...rather, his mind turns naturally to large public concerns as another's turns naturally to making money, maintaining an organization, or raising the fervor of fellow ideologues...
...Even Headstart will be expanded if the President has his way...
...For the "income strategy" in general, as well as FAP and revenue sharing in particular, represented an extraordinary continuity of policy from the Johnson to the Nixon Administrations-and Moynihan, to his credit, did much to bring this about...
...According to Tyler, FAP was (and revenue sharing is) a "bitter hoax" because the Administration's secret intention from the first has been to put an end to the many services and agencies built up from FDR to LBJ while pretending to help the poor by giving them money directly...
...prior to the election, framed the "Nixonian concept of public policy for the '70s...
Vol. 56 • May 1973 • No. 11
