Daniel Patrick Moynihan

At 76 years old, Daniel Patrick Moynihan has this physical status:

Patrick "Pat" Moynihan (March 16, 1927 – March 26, 2003) was an American politician, sociologists, and diplomat.

He served in New York's Senate as a strategist and adviser to Republican President Richard Nixon, who was a member of the Democratic Party.

Moynihan, one of the twentieth century's most influential and versatile public figures, and a pioneering scholar, moved from Tulsa, Oklahoma, at a young age.

He earned his Ph.D. in history from Tufts University after a stint in the navy.

Before joining President John F. Kennedy's administration in 1961, he served on the staff of New York Governor W. Averell Harriman.

He served as an Assistant Secretary of Labor under Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, devoting a significant portion of his time to the War on Poverty.

He published the controversial Moynihan Report in 1965.

In 1965, Moynihan joined the Johnson administration as a Harvard University professor. He accepted Nixon's invitation to serve as an Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy in 1969 and was promoted to the position of Counselor to the President later this year.

He departed the government at the end of 1970 and was accepted as the United States Ambassador to India in 1973.

In 1975, he accepted President Gerald Ford's appointment as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, occupying the position until 1976, after which he was defeated in the Senate. Moynihan served in the Senate from 1977 to 2001.

He served as Chairman of the Senate Environment Committee from 1992 to 1993 and as Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee from 1993 to 1995.

He was also the head of the Moynihan Secrecy Commission, which was also responsible for the collection of classified information.

He remained a vocal critic of President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy and sluggish against President Bill Clinton's health-care scheme.

He often disagreed with liberal ideals, but he opposed welfare reform in the 1990s.

He also opposed the Defense of Marriage Act, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Congressional authorization for the Gulf War.

He is tied for the longest-serving Senator from New York with Jacob K. Javits.

Early life and education

Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of Margaret Ann (née Phipps), a homemaker, and John Henry Moynihan, a reporter for a daily newspaper in Tulsa who hails from Indiana. He and his Irish Catholic family immigrated to New York City at the age of six. Until graduating from Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, he shined shoes and attended various public, private, and parochial schools. He was a parishioner of St. Raphael's Church, where he also cast his first vote. Michael Willard Moynihan and his brother spent the majority of their childhood summers on their grandfather's farm in Bluffton, Indiana. Before entering the City College of New York (CCNY), which at the time provided free higher education to city residents, Moynihan briefly served as a longshoreman.

Following a year in CCNY, Moynihan joined the United States Navy in 1944. He was assigned to the V-12 Navy College Training Corps at Middlebury College from 1944 to 1945, and later enrolled as a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps student at Tufts University, where he obtained his undergraduate degree in naval science in 1946. In 1947, he served in active service as a Gunnery officer of the USS Quirinus, in the rank of lieutenant (junior grade). Moynihan completed his undergraduate degree in sociology in 1948 and obtained an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1949.

He continued his doctoral studies at Fletcher School as a Fulbright Fellow at the London School of Economics from 1950 to 1953 after failing the Foreign Service Officer exam. Even as Moynihan maintained that "nothing and no one at LSE ever disposed me to be anything but a New York Democrat who enjoyed beer after work," he wrestled with writer's block and began to fashion himself as a "dandy," gaining "a fascination for Savile Row suits, rococo discussion riffs, and Churchillian oratory. He served at RAF South Ruislip for two years as a civilian worker.

He received his Ph.D. in history (with a dissertation on the link between the US and the International Labour Organisation) from the Fletcher School in 1961 when assisting in a government study program based on Avell Harriman's papers at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

Personal life

In 1955, Moynihan married Elizabeth Brennan. Tim, Maura, and John were married until Moynihan's death at Washington Hospital Center on March 26, 2003, ten days after his 76th birthday, ten days after his 76th birthday.

Moynihan was chastised for making inflammatory remarks against a woman of Jamaican descent at Vassar College in early 1990. "If you don't like it in this world, why don't you pack your suitcases and go back where you came from?" Moynihan told Folami Grey, a Dutchess County Youth Bureau official, during a question-and-answer session. In reaction to his remarks, 100 students took over the college's main administration building.

Maura Moynihan's daughter, Moynihan, was also chastised for bigotry. In March 2021, a Korean-American couple married in New York City was caught on a cell phone camera berating her. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she advised the couple to "go back to Communist China" and "you do not belong here." John Moynihan, a writer, died in 2004.

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Political career and return to academia

Moynihan's political career began in the 1950s when he worked with New York Governor Avell Harriman's staff in a variety of capacities (including speechwriter and acting secretary to governor). Elizabeth (Liz) Brennan, a student at Harriman's staff, was introduced to his future wife, Elizabeth (Liz) Brennan, who also worked with Harriman's employees.

Following Harriman's defeat to Nelson Rockefeller in the 1958 general election, this period came to an end. Moynihan returned to academia, teaching at Russell Sage College (1957–1958) and the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (1959) before taking a tenure-track position at Syracuse University (1959–1961). During this time, Moynihan was a delegate to the 1960 Democratic National Convention as part of John F. Kennedy's delegate pool.

Moynihan was first in the Kennedy administration as both special (1961-1962) and executive (1962-1963). Arthur J. Goldberg and W. Willard Wirtz were both employed in the Kennedy administration. He wrote the article "Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture," which forbaded the use of a formal style for federal buildings, and has been lauded for "a variety of innovative public building projects" in subsequent decades, including the San Francisco Federal Building and the United States Courthouse in Austin, Texas.

He was later named Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy, Planning, and Research, from 1963 to 1965, under Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He did not have operational expertise when he was in this role. He devoted his time to formulating national plans for the War on Poverty. Ralph Nader was one of Ralph Nader's nascent employees.

They were inspired by historian Stanley Elkins' book Slavery: A Study in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). Elkins argued that slavery had made black Americans dependent on the dominant culture, which was the reason for such dependence a century after the American Civil War. Moynihan and his employees believed that the government should go beyond simply ensuring that members of minority groups have the same rights as the majority, and that they must also "act positively" in order to combat the issue of historic discrimination.

And as fewer people were unemployed, more people were joining the welfare rolls, according to Moynihan's analysis of Labor Department results. These children's families had children but there was just one parent (mostly the mother). At that time, such families were entitled to welfare assistance in a few places in the United States.

In 1965, Moynihan conducted his studies under the heading The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, which has since been published as The Moynihan Report. Moynihan's book fueled a discussion over whether the government should take with the economic underclass, particularly blacks. Critics on the left slammed it as "blaming the perpetrator," a term coined by psychologist William Ryan. Some believed that Moynihan was propagating racial views because so much of the media coverage of the study was focusing on the question of children being born out of wedlock. Despite Moynihan's warnings, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program set out rules for payments only if there is no "Man [was] in the house." The program's leadership, including Moynihan, said that poor women were being paid to pull their husbands out of the house.

"The Republicans have said we have a hell of a problem, and we do." Following the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress, Moynihan decided that reform was needed for a welfare system that may have prompted women to raise their children without parents.

Moynihan had been identified as a political ally of Robert F. Kennedy by the 1964 presidential election. He was not favored by then-President Johnson and he left the Johnson Administration in 1965. He ran for office in the Democratic primary for the New York City Council's presidency, a position now known as the New York City Public Advocate. However, he was defeated by Queens District Attorney Frank D. O'Connor.

Moynihan remained a scholar at Wesleyan University's Center for Advanced Studies from 1964 to 1967, preserving his academic affiliation throughout this transitional period. He was welcomed as a full professor of education and urban affairs by Harvard University's Graduate School of Education and Graduate School of Public Administration in 1966. His faculty line was transferred to the University's Department of Government, where he remained until 1977, after starting a second extended leave due to his public service in 1973. He served as the head of the Harvard–MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies from 1966 to 1969. With upheaval and riots in the United States, Moynihan, "a national board member of ADA, raged at the new anti-war and Black Power movements,'s nascent anti-war and Black Power movements, wrote that the next government will need to reunite the nation once more.

Moynihan, a predecessor to the United States National Security Council, joined the Executive Office of the President in January 1969 as Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and executive secretary of the Council of Urban Affairs (later the Urban Affairs Council). He was one of the few people in Nixon's inner circle who had conducted academic studies pertaining to social policy in the early months of the administration. However, his disdain for "traditional budget-conscious positions" (including his forthcoming Family Assistance Plan, a "negative income tax or pledged minimum income" for families who met job requirements or showed that they were seeking jobs that resulted in stalemate in the Senate, sparking frequent clashes (belying their continuing mutual esteem) with Nixon's top domestic policy advisor, conservative economist, and Cabinet-rank Counselor to President Arthur F. Burns).

Moynihan conducted extensive discussions with Russell B. Moynihan when determining the Family Assistance Plan. Louis O. Kelso, long and a little boy.

Despite the fact that Moynihan was promoted from Counselor to Vice President Urban Affairs with Cabinet rank shortly after Burns was nominated by Nixon to serve as Chair of the Federal Reserve in October 1969, the university had not announced that Moynihan would return to Harvard (a stipulation of his departure from the university) at the end of 1970. Former White House Counsel John Ehrlichman's nominal replacement for the Urban Affairs Council was given operational control of the Urban Affairs Council by Moynihan. White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, a close friend of Ehrlichman since college and his main patron in the administration, prompted this decision. Moynihan was placed in a more peripheral context as the government's "resident thinker" on domestic affairs for the duration of his service, according to Haldeman's maneuvering.

NATO attempted to establish a third civil column on Nixon's initiative in 1969, establishing a center of inquiry and action in the civil sector, addressing both environmental and humanitarian topics. As appropriate foreign threats to be tackle by NATO, Moynihan cites acid rain and the greenhouse effect. NATO was chosen because the group had adequate expertise in the field as well as experience with international research coordination. After the failed Vietnam War, the German government was skeptical and saw the initiative as an effort by the US to regain international recognition. The conversations in civil conferences and institutions have gained traction.

"The time may have come," Moynihan wrote to President Nixon, "the issue of racial discrimination may have benefited from a period of 'benign neglect." The topic has been discussed too much. On both directions, the forum has been too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers. We need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades." As he saw it, Moynihan regretted that critics mistook his memo to say that the government should ignore minorities.

Following the reorganization of the White House domestic policy staff in October 1969, Moynihan was given the position of United States Ambassador to the United Nations (then held by career Foreign Service Officer Charles Woodruff Yost) by Nixon on November 17, 1969; after initially accepting the president's resignation, he stayed in Washington until the Senate Finance Committee stalled. Nixon refused to offer a second time due to rising family tensions and continuing financial difficulties; and the inability to effect change as a result of static policy directives in the position, according to Assistant Secretary of State William P. Rogers. Rather, he came from Harvard as a part-time member of the United States delegation during George H. W. Bush's ambassadorship.

Moynihan (who was skeptical of the administration's "tilt" to Pakistan) accepted Nixon's request to serve as the United States Ambassador to India in 1973, where he would remain until 1975. Following the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, the two countries' ties were at a low point. Ambassador Moynihan was alarmed that two great democracies were depicted as villains and decided to fix it. He recommended that part of the burdensome debt be written off, some used to pay for US embassy expenses in India, and the remainder converted into Indian rupees to finance an Indo-US cultural and educational exchange program that lasted for a quarter-century. He presented the Government of India with a check for 16,640,000,000 rupees, the equivalent of $2,046,700,000, on February 18, 1974, the first time a single check had paid in history. In the Guinness Book of World Records, the "Rupee Agreement" is recorded for the world's biggest check, written by Ambassador Moynihan to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Moynihan accepted his third bid to serve as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, but it would not serve as President of the United Nations Security Council on a rotation basis. Ambassador Moynihan took a hardline anti-communist stand under President Gerald Ford, in keeping with the White House's current agenda. He was also a strong supporter of Israel, condemning UN Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism to be a form of bigotry. During the scandal, Moynihan's wife Liz was told in the UN galleries by Palestine Liberation Organisation Permanent Observer Zuhdi Labib Terzi. He made a remark in which she later did not recall the exact words, but it was roughly translated as 'you have mixed feelings about remembering activities in New Delhi', which she and biographer Gil Troy characterized as a threatening hint to a failed assassination attempt against her husband two years earlier. The American public responded vehemently to the bill's partisanship over the resolution; his condemnation of the "Zionism is Racism" bill earned him celebrity and helped him win a US Senate seat a year later. Because he believed the argument was completely incorrect and perverse, Moynihan opposed it. In addition, his time in New York made him aware of a pragmatic problem: "Resolution against Zionism not only affected Israel but also many Zionist Jews, which included the majority of American Jews," which became evident when the community began a tourist boycott against Mexico as a result of the Resolution's acceptance. Gil Troy's Moment in Moynihan's memoir, says that Moynihan's 1975 UN address condemning the resolution was the pivotal moment of his political career.

In his memoir, Moynihan wrote:

Later, he said he had defended a "shameless" Cold War strategy against East Timor.

During his tenure at the United Nations, Moynihan's views began to change. He wrote an article in 1993 titled Pandaemonium that he began to think of the Soviet Union in a less ideological sense. He less regarded it as a growing imperialist Marxist republic and more as a weak realist state in decline. It was thought that self-preservation was the most motivating. This view would influence his thinking in subsequent years, as he became an outspoken proponent of the Soviet Union's then-unpopular belief that it was a failed state destined for implosion.

Nevertheless, Moynihan's time at the United Nations marked the beginning of a more bellicose, neoconservative American foreign policy that stifled Kissinger's unethical, détente-driven realpolitik. Although the claim was never proved, Moynihan originally believed that Kissinger ordered Ivor Richard Baron Richard (then British Ambassador to the United Nations) to denounce his activities as "Wyatt Earp" diplomacy. In February 1976, Moynihan, who would later refer to as an "abbreviated posting," had been demoralized. Moynihan blasted this decision, saying that he was "something of an embarrassment to my own government" and that he was "quitee" and was "properly dismissed before I was fired."

In November 1976, Moynihan was elected to the Senate from the State of New York, defeating former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, New York City Council President Paul O'Dwyer, and businessman Abraham Hirschfeld in the Democratic primary and Republican Party candidate James L. Buckley in the general election. The Liberal Party of New York also nominated him. Moynihan analyzed the State of New York's budget to see if it was giving out more in federal taxes than it received in spending just after the election. He found it wasn't, and he produced the Fisc, or French version of Fisc. Despite Moynihan's strong support for Israel, the UN Ambassador boosted his services for him among the state's large Jewish population.

Following M. A. Farber's prison time, Moynihan suggested that Congress might have to become concerned with press freedom, and that the Senate should be aware of the issue's seriousness in August 7, 1978.

Moynihan's strong support for New York's interests in the Senate was backed up by the Fisc reports and his continued support for US positions in the UN on one occasion. Senator Kit Bond, who is set to retire in 2010, was recalled with some embarrassment in a discussion on civil rights in the Senate floor after bond denounced an earmark that Moynihan had slipped into a highway appropriations bill. After a long day to discuss their mutual interest in urban renewal over a glass of port," Moynihan apologized, and the two often would chill in Moynihan's office.

Senator Moynihan continued to be concerned with foreign policy as a senator on the Select Committee on Intelligence. His pronounced anti-Soviet views became much more moderate when he came out as a critic of the Reagan administration's hawkish tilt in the late Cold War, as exemplified by the Reagan administration's embrace of the Contras in Nicaragua. Moynihan argued that there was no such thing as a running Soviet-backed conspiracy in Latin America or somewhere. According to him, the Soviets were suffering from serious internal problems, such as increasing ethnic nationalism and a slowing economy. Moynihan's editorial in the New York Times on December 21, 1986, predicted the replacement on the world stage of Communist expansion with ethnic conflicts. He chastised the government's "consuming obsession with Communism's expansion" that is not in fact continuing." Moynihan wrote to Erwin Griswold on September 8, 1990: "I have one purpose left in life, or at least in the Senate." It is to find out what will be involved in resurrecting the American government in the aftermath of [C]old [W]ars. Massive changes took place, some of which we hardly notice." Senator Ted Kennedy of Ireland and Speaker Tip O'Neill of the United States co-founded Friends of Ireland, a bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives who condemned the continuing sectarian unrest in Northern Ireland and sought to foster peace and harmony.

Some professionals (such as computer programmers, engineers, draftspersons, and designers) who relied on intermediary companies (consulting companies) were charged by Moynihan a self-employed tax status option, but other professionals (such as accountants and attorneys) were still exempted from Section 1706, although accounting and lawyers) continued to enjoy Section 1706 exemptions from payroll taxes. This revision in the tax code was supposed to offset other tax revenue levy changes that Moynihan's proposed to alter the law of foreign tax filings of Americans working in another country. Joseph Stack, a pilot who converted his airplane into a building housing IRS offices on February 18, 2010, issued a suicide note in which, among other things, the Internal Revenue Code's Section 1706 update was mentioned.

As a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Moynihan provided William K. Reilly with vital assistance and guidance under President George H. Bush's tenure as Administrator of the EPA.

Moynihan had expressed his surprise early in his Senate tenure, as pro-choice, pro-choice, and pro-choice organizations had petitioned him and others on the issue of abortion. "You women are ruining the Democratic Party with your insistence on abortion," he said.

On several occasions, Moynihan broke with his party's traditional liberal positions. He strongly opposed President Bill Clinton's plan to extend health care coverage to all Americans as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in the 1990s. Moynihan, who wanted to narrow the discussion over health-care financing, caused controversies by claiming that "there is no health care crisis in this country."

He was also more progressive on other topics, but not necessarily more sober. He voted against the death penalty; the flag desecration bill; the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act; and the North American Free Trade Agreement. He was skeptical of plans to replace the progressive income tax with a flat levy. The Gulf War's authorisation was also rejected by Moynihan. Despite his earlier writings on the adverse effects of the welfare state, he ended up voting against welfare reform in 1996, which abolished unemployment insurance. He was vocally critical of the bill and a few Democrats who voted against it, and others who voted against it.

Career as scholar

In several journals, including Commentary and The Public Interest, Moynihan wrote articles on urban ethnic politics and the challenges of the poor in cities of the Northeast.

Moynihan coined the phrase "professionalization of change," a policy that the government bureaucracy believes that rather than merely responding to issues reported elsewhere, the government must address the government's problems rather than simply responding to ones that have been identified elsewhere.

In 1983, he was given the Hubert H. Humphrey Award by the American Political Science Association "in appreciation of outstanding public service by a political scientist." He wrote 19 books, prompting his personal friend, columnist, and former professor George F. Will's observation that Moynihan "wrote more books than most senators have read." He returned to Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs after retiring from the Senate, where he began his academic career in 1959.

Moynihan's academic career led Michael Barone, who wrote in The Almanac of American Politics, to identify the senator as "the country's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and the country's top scholar among thinkers since Jefferson." "Defining Deviancy Down" by Moynihan in 1993 was particularly controversial. The book Pandaemonium by writer and scholar Kenneth Weisbrode is unusually early.

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Awards and honors

• In 1966, Moynihan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• In 1968, Moynihan was elected to the American Philosophical Society
• The 5th Annual Heinz Award in Public Policy (1999)
• Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Tufts, his alma mater.
• 1989 Honor Award from the National Building Museum
• In 1989, Moynihan received the U.S. Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.
• On August 9, 2000, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton.
• In 1992, he was awarded the Laetare Medal by the University of Notre Dame, considered the most prestigious award for American Catholics.
• In 1994 the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation awarded Moynihan its Lone Sailor Award for his naval service and subsequent government service.