By BRETT WARNKE
Review of Daniel Patrick
Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an
American Visionary; published October 12, 2010 by Public Affairs.
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New York Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan said enough for himself, as you will notice upon picking up the
recently released 674-page A Portrait in
Letters of an American Visionary. But
with no complete memoir or autobiography (other than A Dangerous Place) this book reveals him as a gifted bureaucratic
pamphleteer. The letters reveal him as a
quirky, brilliant, calculating, thinker and a spiky and vengeful pain in the
ass. But they are the perfect medium for
a man whose life is best told in the memoranda and jottings through which he
hoped to spur action. (By others of course—Moynihan clearly enjoyed the study
and the debating stage.)
In the flurry of these letters, Moynihan
writes of growing up in Hell’s Kitchen just as the great New York wave of
immigrants had been halted by the racist Johnson Reed Act. He mentions his boyhood shoe-shining and
mischief, noting that the Kitchen was so Irish that he didn’t know he was Irish
until he left. After joining Kennedy’s
“best and brightest” Moynihan’s illusions began to evaporate; his stint in the
Johnson White House was brief.
Subsequently, he moved in and out of academia and became a fixture in
the Washington establishment. Moynihan
cottoned on to the incoming Republicans and understood the “self-made” mythology
which feeds conservatism; he adapted his tune accordingly to influence Richard
Nixon who had also lifted the awful Henry Kissinger from the failed Rockefeller
campaign. Moynihan’s writings are keenly
aware of the personalities and preoccupations in those squalid Nixon years and,
like Kissinger, he was able to stoke Nixon’s coals. In one memo, Moynihan describes Johnson being
“toppled by a mob”—ever the reactionary’s nightmare—and describes the unwashed crowd
comprised of “college professors, millionaires, flower children, and Radcliffe
girls.” (This was the White House
Democrat, by the way.) He wrote that
Nixon would be free to “dominate and direct” social transformation, cleverly
playing upon the red-baiter’s incurable narcissism.
Arthur Schlesinger’s similarly
excellent diaries reveal the personal contradictions and intestine squabbles
that made Moynihan notorious, relevant, and fascinating:
Pat Moynihan is up for reelection this year. He is a brilliant and entirely opportunistic
man. He anticipated the neoconservative
swing and in 1967 gave a talk to the ADA in which he said, in effect, liberalism
had gone too far, government couldn’t solve all our problems and, in
particular, the young and the blacks were becoming pains in the neck. I think that Pat had a bum rap after his 1964
study on the family but that he took it too personally and expended too much
energy in subsequent years paying people back.
Schlesinger, noting another exchange after one of his unnumbered
cocktail parties writes of Moynihan’s “egotism and rancor:”
Pat, I thought, was more than usually intolerable. He swells like a bullfrog and punctuates his
speech with a repertoire of sweeping gestures and smug expressions. Like the late Dean Acheson, he tells stories
all of which illustrate his triumph over someone else. He was superficially cordial but obviously
detests me (manners and feelings I reciprocate).
To say
that Moynihan, an elected politician for 24 years, was more “complex” or argue
that he had “enemies on all sides” would be offering two clichés, but true
ones. But Schlesinger’s criticism is not
(only) petty jealousy.
The New Yorker won overwhelming
majorities to a Senate seat beginning in 1976, yet he never exclusively belonged
to (what is called) left or right. As
well as being a pol, he was a writer, ambassador, and policy wonk. Liberals, before reading the Portrait’s letters, could describe him
as a vengeful courtier (not unlike the similarly bow-tied Schlesinger), a wily hanger-on,
who haunted the White House to satisfy ego and vendettas. In this view, Moynihan was an obliging pillow
who produced policy to fit the backsides of the powerful; an ambassador to
India, he was safe during the sordid close of Nixon’s tenure; an opportunist,
he finally deciding to round off an increasingly conservative career by getting
himself elected through ethnic politics in New York.
His internal criticisms would raise
liberal hackles even today. “Too
frequently of late,” he wrote to Nixon in 1969, “the liberal upper middle class
has proposed to solve problems of those at the bottom at the expense, or
seeming expense, of those in between.”
This from a Kennedy man who supported community action, favored racial quotas, and wrote that if the country
had four centuries of exploitation to overcome “we will not do so by giving
Negroes an equal opportunity with whites who are by now miles ahead.”
But those who may still denounce
him as a compromiser or collaborator should also note that Moynihan recognized
climate change as early as 1969, blasted the ossification and incompetence of
the CIA which (along with not foreseeing recent develops in the Middle East) was
astonishingly ignorant of the Soviet Union’s deterioration. He spoke out against torture at the UN, defended
what was left of the Great Society, bravely assailed the excesses of Clinton’s
shameful welfare “reform,” (which he called “boob bait for bubbas”) and warned
the world about the rise of ethnic politics in his prescient study Pandaemonium. He even warned about a “diffuse,
decentralized, irrational, even psychotic groups,” then plaguing the former
Axis powers in the 1970s.
But most importantly in the context
of today’s enduring national security state, Moynihan presciently criticized
the proliferation of government secrets as having no basis in law. In memos as well as a book he takes on the
culture of secrecy, quoting Max Weber, that secrets were the “sharp weapons of the
bureaucracy.” And, looking back, was Moynihan wrong to denounce, what he
called, “the more hysterical members of the New Left who assume that the only
thing that can save this civilization is for it to be destroyed”? Or when he wrote (in 1981) that “we shall
spend the coming years worrying about the deficit, arguing about military
spending, and trying to cut domestic programs to ease the burden of both”?
But how could we forget the
Buchananite faction of the right wing?
Their gorge will rise as they read of Moynihan’s support for
international law and the incisive though critical support he offered America’s
social programs. Moynihan’ pragmatism pushed
him to offer solutions today’s far-right crowd could never consider. He urged Nixon to pass an “income strategy”
that guaranteed a wage which, the senator argued, fit within conservative
principles not to offer a redistributive dole.
If employment was a key to the conservative goal of social stability, Moynihan
argued, why would they be against keeping post-industrialism’s losers within
the market rather than prey to crime or, even worse, leftists?
But Moynihan did not, in this
collection, comment on President Ford’s ghastly nod to Suharto’s invasion of
East Timor and was naïve enough to suggest to Kissinger that he broach human
rights at the UN. This astonishing
cluelessness reveals itself again when he wrote to Harry McPherson that Nixon
“would be genuinely interested in our views.”
Anthony Summers argued as much in Arrogance
of Power, writing that after a meeting with Nixon, Moynihan “came away from
a first meeting with Nixon amazed at his ready admission of the huge gaps in
his knowledge.” Moynihan’s illusion of a
humble and curious Nixon burned off as the President ignored his Cabinet and
extended his criminal policy in Southeast Asia.
Moynihan also half-rightly wrote that Communism in America was an “ethnic
phenomenon.” Maybe. But radicals like Thomas Paine, Eugene Debs, and
Cesar Chavez who could certainly not be considered Communists can still never
be discarded as merely members of the political consensus.
Moynihan called himself a
“Madisonian” but saw himself as a moral pragmatist. He also said he wouldn’t mind the label “Al
Smith Democrat.” But, more so than a
book by a “reliable” vote like Kucinich or Frank for the center-left of
American politics, Moynihan’s letters are worth reading and his ideas are worth
considering because he shook liberals
from their cozy illusions about the welfare state. The sadness which comes after reviewing
Moynihan’s letters is that, like Larkin and Bellow’s recent collections, they
are the last of a vanishing genre, the concluding pieces of an Enlightenment
tradition of reasoned, patient, and developed correspondence. This is a medium which has no heirs and
Moynihan was one of its masters.
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