[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 124 (Thursday, August 25, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 25, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                 TARA'S SON ON THE BANKS OF THE POTOMAC

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, anyone genuinely knowledgeable about the 
United States Senate knows that this is an assemblage of extraordinary 
and contrasting personalities, of brilliant and sometimes lovably 
eccentric men and women--in the best sense of that word ``eccentric''--
drawn from a sometimes dizzying array of backgrounds, with a broad 
spectrum of expertise and perspectives.
  But from time to time, even here in the U.S. Senate, one or another 
Senator arrives on our scene bearing such qualities and character that 
cause that Senator to stand out even here.
  In this instance, I refer to our much admired friend, the Senior 
Senator from New York, the Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Senator 
who graces the Senate with his logic, eloquence, wit, and taste--one 
who is niggardly in his use of words but precise in his choice.
  Among our colleagues, Mr. President, Senator Moynihan is, as it were, 
sui generis.
  I remember reading the 85 Federalist Papers that were written by John 
Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. And the thought has 
occurred to me that here in our own midst is a Senator who could very 
well have joined in the writing of those papers, those essays, in the 
effort to convince the various conventions in the States, and 
particularly to convince the people of New York State to support the 
Constitution that had been written in Philadelphia. Pat Moynihan would 
have added luster to that illustrious trilogy.
  During his long, varied, colorful, and distinguished career, Senator 
Moynihan has been a stevedore, a college professor, a bartender, an 
ambassador, a subcabinet member, and a United States Senator. Senator 
Moynihan has served executive branch roles under both Democratic and 
Republican Presidents. Even as a working, serving Senator, Patrick 
Moynihan still contributes significantly to national scholarship with 
his articles and his informed speeches. His ineffable serenity and 
obstinate veracity of vision have, more than once, probed through the 
mists of the future to foresee coming problems and to suggest solutions 
which, after time's pages have been turned, proved to be correct and 
wise.
  Senator Moynihan is, indeed, perhaps the nearest example that we have 
here in the Senate currently of a genuine ``Renaissance Man''--an 
expert in multiple scholarly fields and disciplines, all at once.
  Moreover, to know Daniel Patrick Moynihan is to understand, perhaps, 
the wellsprings of the incomparable era of Irish culture during the 
fifth and sixth centuries A.D., when Ireland was the repository of 
Classical and Christian civilization against the onslaughts of Nordic 
and Asian barbarians who toppled the last pillars of Roman authority in 
Western Europe and established a battery of semi-civilized kingdoms 
over provinces once ruled by the Caesars.
  Senator Moynihan embodies the charm and brilliance of Celticism at 
its best. To examine the corpus of Senator Moynihan's published works 
is to come to grips with the reflections of a visionary possessed of a 
tempered, nearly galaxy-wide view of reality. To paraphrase the famous 
Star Trek epigram, Senator Moynihan's mind has gone where few, if any, 
minds have ever gone before. Senator Moynihan is a virtual ``Davy 
Crockett of ideas,'' pioneering and cutting trails into the unknown 
economic and social wilderness that is the next century.
  ``In a most blinkered, bespectacled, logic-chopping generation, 
nature has gifted this man with an eye.''
  Madam President, a piece in the New York Times magazine of August 7, 
1994, captures perhaps better than any recent featured article on 
Senator Moynihan the breadth, depth, height, and caliber of this 
outstanding U.S. Senator and American statesman. I ask unanimous 
consent that this article titled ``The Newest Moynihan'' be printed in 
the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

            [From the New York Times Magazine, Aug. 7, 1994]

                          The Newest Moynihan

                          (By Todd S. Purdum)

       ``I don't think the air-conditioner adds much,'' Daniel 
     Patrick Moynihan says, his long, slim fingers fiddling with 
     the vents of a rental van on the morning after Memorial Day. 
     ``I'm going to suggest we turn the air-conditioner off. It's 
     a beaut-i-ful day. We don't get many. We just open the 
     windows, you see, and air comes.''
       The Moyni-van is rolling out of Binghamton, an old 
     shoemaking city in the Southern Tier of New York State, 
     toward the Democratic State Convention in Buffalo. The 
     candidate has just held a small rally on the courthouse lawn 
     in front of a bronze statue of Daniel S. Dickinson, the last 
     New Yorker before him to head the lordly Finance Committee of 
     the United States Senate, in 1850. With that event, Moynihan 
     has formally begun his campaign for a fourth term in an 
     office it once seemed entirely improbable that he would win.
       Kevin Ryan, his young driver and personal aide, stammers 
     and begins a balancing act that will last all day: toying 
     with the knobs of the air-conditioner, trying to tune it low 
     enough to escape his boss's notice without suffocating the 
     passengers in the rear seats. But the Senator, who simply 
     rolls up his window the moment the noise of rushing highway 
     makes conversation impossible, is already on to other things. 
     He begins a running discourse on the history, geology, 
     architecture and politics of the cities and counties he is 
     passing through on this brilliant May day, his voice 
     spluttering and stuttering like Jiffy Pop on a campfire.
       Now he explains the depth of the Finger Lakes; now the 
     origin of cobblestone houses; now the prevalence of towns 
     like Homer, Marathon and Ithaca, named in a fit of 19th-
     century republican idealism. As the van approaches Auburn 
     along Route 20--the path Alexis de Tocqueville took on his 
     survey of American prisons in the 1830's--the topic is the 
     past, and the dangers of its casual disregard.
       ``I have an incom-plete theory,'' says Moynihan, who is 
     cherished and mocked in Washington for no shortage of the 
     same. ``In the 1950's, with a progressive government and 
     newspaper, you got into urban renewal and destroyed 
     everything of value in your town.'' He is looking out the 
     window, addressing the strip malls and gas stations that make 
     up Auburn's mediocre modernity. ``If you'd had a reactionary 
     newspaper, and a grumpy mayor, you might still have it.''
       Might still have it, indeed. Entering his fourth decade at 
     the center of debate on social policy, Pat Moynihan has 
     become the Grumpy Mayor of America. It is a role he relishes, 
     although it has made for an excruciatingly delicate 
     relationship with a young Democratic White House that often 
     sees him as an impediment to its sweeping goals. His campaign 
     manager, closest adviser, defender and wife of 39 years, 
     Elizabeth Brennan Moynihan, attributes it to a simple 
     problem: ``They definitely don't get him.''
       Getting him has never been easy. He is the only member of 
     the Senate who had an honored seat at the funerals of both 
     Richard M. Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. His Irish 
     soul composed the epitaph for Camelot, answering Mary 
     McGrory's lament the weekend of J.F.K.'s assassination that 
     ``We'll never laugh again'' with the soft certainty, 
     ``Heavens, Mary, we'll laugh again; we'll just never be young 
     again.'' His Irish wit led the diarist H.R. Haldeman to 
     describe him as the most upbeat presence in the early Nixon 
     White House, the ``shot in the arm that the rest of the staff 
     lacks.'' Moynihan was the prescient heretic and brilliant 
     self-promoter who had the temerity to argue--before Ralph 
     Nader was a household word--that better cars and seat belts, 
     not better drivers, were the key to auto safety; who warned 
     anyone he could find on Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963, that the 
     Federal Government had better get Lee Harvey Oswald into 
     custody to protect his life and avoid conspiracy theories; 
     who accurately prophesized, years in advance and without 
     honor, the collapse of the black family, the fall of the 
     Soviet Union and the havoc that the Reagan revolution would 
     wreak in the form of crippling deficits.
       He is the onetime barkeep who (it is often said on Capitol 
     Hill) can be unreliable after lunch and he is the relentless 
     scholar and commentator who has written or edited 16 books--
     more (it is also said) than most politicians have read. He 
     also just happens to be the most popular politician in his 
     state, with favorable ratings about 60 percent. Six years 
     ago, Moynihan won the state by the largest majority of any 
     contested election in the history of the Senate, carrying 61 
     to 62 counties.
       Now, after 17 years harrumphing and needling and inveighing 
     on his pet topics, from transportation to welfare reform, he 
     finds himself in the seat of Russell Long, the long-time lion 
     of the Finance Committee, wielding power over taxes and 
     Social Security and trade--half the Federal budget. He 
     ascended to the chairmanship when President Clinton plucked 
     Lloyd Bentsen from the post to be Treasury Secretary. It was 
     a swap the Clinton White House has long since had occasion to 
     ponder, since in confronting the challenge of the President's 
     massive proposal for reshaping the nation's health care 
     system, Moynihan has given the Clintons, and much of the rest 
     of Washington, no end of grief. Indeed, the struggle over the 
     health care bill has been nearly as much a test of 
     Moynihan as of the President.
       The Senator's cautionary tale of Auburn's missing grump 
     helps explain why. Moynihan has always been more confident 
     perceiving problems than devising solutions, more comfortable 
     pointing than leading. The organizing political principle of 
     his public life has been a restless skepticism of Utopian 
     ideals. Asked to describe his credo, Moynihan at first 
     demurs. ``Nothing I want to give a name to,'' he says. ``I'm 
     not a Socialist and I'm not a Libertarian. I was never a 
     Stalinist and I was never a Trotskyite. I guess if I had to 
     say--and I don't have to say, but you asked--it's an 
     avoidance of ideology.'' He pauses, then adds acidly: 
     ```Which side are you on? If you're not on our side, you're 
     on their side.' There's a different their all the time.''
       Twenty-four years ago, zealous liberals and sour 
     conservatives in the Senate Finance Committee killed 
     Moynihan's dream, as Richard Nixon's urban policy czar, of 
     providing poor Americans with a guaranteed income. From this 
     and other bitter experiences, Moynihan has developed a 
     wariness that has only increased with age. Now, at 67, he 
     confesses he is not sure that Government can master even the 
     modest challenges he has forced it to spend money on--like 
     converting the old General Post Office into a grand new Penn 
     Station in Manhattan, to redeem the destruction of the old 
     one 30 years ago.
       This worries him, and the word he picks to describe it is 
     the physicist's term for the amount of energy unavailable for 
     useful work: entropy. What worries him even more is the 
     thought of making immodest promises and, as he wrote 20 years 
     ago, ``the failure of executives and legislators to 
     understand what is risked when promises are made.''
       ``He believes the function of Government is to do good in 
     society, and he's always looking for ways in which it can do 
     good,'' says James Q. Wilson, the U.C.L.A. social scientist 
     and a friend of 30 years. ``But he's also prepared to admit 
     that good intentions are not enough and that sometimes where 
     people set out to do good, evil follows.''
       The van rolls westward. Moynihan peers out at another town, 
     reading aloud a convenience store sign. ``Qwik-Fill Mi-ni 
     Marttt!'' he spits in contempt. ``Now do we call that 
     progress?''
       Outside the Ontario County courthouse in Canandaigua, 
     Moynihan is holding a short rally. ``As you all know,'' he 
     cheerily tells a blank-faced crowd, ``this is the courthouse 
     where Susan B. Anthony was tried in 1873 for vot-ing in the 
     election of 1872.'' Like many Moynihan asides that start out 
     seeming to have no point, this story in fact has one. He 
     tells it to apologize for being late, having dallied too long 
     in nearby Seneca Falls, where the Women's Rights 
     National Historical Park opened last year, thanks in part 
     to the sponsorship of . . . Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who, 
     he notes, won 60 percent of the vote in Ontario County six 
     years ago and would like to again.
       Moynihan starts to leave when a combo of high-school 
     students strikes up ``Danny Boy.'' He climbs carefully back 
     up the steep steps, waves to quiet the small crowd and points 
     to the saxophonist.
       ``Here's a young man,'' he says, ``prac-ti-cing to be Pres-
     ident!'' It is an affectionate reference and the crowd 
     laughs. But its delivery tells much about his relationship 
     with this President. The Senator likes to style himself as 
     the only person to have served in the Cabinet or subcabinet 
     of four Presidents--Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford--and he 
     has lectured them and their successors for years. When 
     Clinton was still a high-school student shaking Kennedy's 
     hand in the Rose Garden, Moynihan was already correcting 
     Kennedy's arithmetic in the Oval Office as an Assistant 
     Secretary of Labor. Now, as chairman of the Finance 
     Committee, Moynihan has power over virtually every aspect of 
     Clinton's agenda and the public preceptorial between them has 
     fascinated Washington for much of the last 18 months. The two 
     are as stylistically different as it is possible to be: 
     Clinton the ultimate flesh-presser, Moynihan skittish and shy 
     around strangers or a crowd he can't dominate.
       Back in the van, Moynihan's face pickles at the memory of 
     Clinton confessing to a young woman on MTV that he wears 
     briefs, not boxers. ``I don't mind the question, but how 
     could he have answered? He should have said: `Young lady, I 
     don't think that's a-pro-priate. Go wash your mouth out with 
     soap!''' On ``Meet the Press'' a few Sunday mornings after 
     the Buffalo convention, Tim Russert, a former top Moynihan 
     aide, asked the Senator to clarify the President's position 
     on health care. Moynihan smiled cryptically: ``Ask him on. 
     He'll come on, you know, if you had a little basketball hoop 
     or something like that around here.''
       Such references bewilder the White House and even 
     Moynihan's own aides, who profess much mutual respect and 
     affection between the two men. ``I was just saying he's a guy 
     who's always jogging and jumping around and doing things like 
     that,'' Moynihan explained later. ``And he goes on television 
     a lot, the way other Presidents have never done. You know, 
     that's something new in Presidential politics, those, you 
     know, talk shows.''
       In many ways, Clinton is the heir to the centrist 
     Democratic gestalt that Moynihan worked for years to make 
     respectable. As Governor of Arkansas in 1988, Clinton was 
     actively involved in the passage of Moynihan's Family Support 
     Act, which required more work training for welfare recipients 
     along with stricter child support enforcement. Just before 
     the 1992 election, Moynihan's newsletter to constituents 
     pronounced a blessing: ``I have to say, I like the idea of a 
     46-year-old Governor coming to Washington with a zest for new 
     ideas.''
       But almost from the beginning, there was trouble, and not 
     just over style. ``He's cantankerous, but he couldn't 
     obstruct us even if he wanted to,'' an anonymous top 
     Administration official was quoted as saying by Time 
     magazine, referring to Moynihan. ``We'll roll right over him 
     if we have to.'' Moynihan has spent a good part of the months 
     since showing who would do the rolling. In public and 
     private, he criticized the President's health bill as often 
     as he supported it. Last fall, he dismissed the 
     Administration's cost estimates for a health care bill as 
     ``accurate fantasy.'' When the White House signaled that it 
     might hold off on welfare reform, Moynihan described 
     Clinton's end-welfare-as-we-know-it campaign promise as crass 
     ``boob bait for the Bubbas.'' He added that there was no 
     health crisis and threatened to hold health care ``hostage.'' 
     Later, when asked on live television whether a special 
     prosecutor should look into the Whitewater affair, Moynihan's 
     ``Yep'' made him the first senior Democrat to say to.
       The Finance Committee's chief of staff, Lawrence O'Donnell 
     Jr., who confesses that as a Harvard student he was too 
     intimated to take Moynihan's class, attributes the frictions 
     partly to junior aides and partly to Moynihan's own candor.
       ``Pat Moynihan does a very simple thing that at the end of 
     the 20th century has become the most inexplicable trait a 
     politician can have: he says what he thinks.''
       ``He's a brilliant and complex man who speaks his mind,'' 
     says George Stephanopoulos, the senior Clinton adviser who is 
     often on Moynihan patrol. ``Washington isn't always prepared 
     for that. I think we understand Senator Moynihan and that he 
     believes in the President's agenda. That doesn't mean 
     there aren't tactical differences, or realities of the 
     Senate, which he communicates very clearly.''
       There have been big differences. Moynihan complained that 
     the Clintons' plan was drafted in secret, took too long to 
     produce and ended up too complex to ever draw the bipartisan 
     support he believes is necessary to pass and implement such a 
     major program. From the beginning, he warned that his 
     committee was narrowly divided, and he suggests that the 
     Clintons adhered to a rigid party line long past the time 
     when bipartisan compromise was possible. His own ability to 
     deal, he suggests, was hamstrung by their inflexibility.
       In a speech last month, Moynihan also complained that the 
     health debate ``has been plagued with press accounts of White 
     House aides doubting this Senator, questioning that 
     committee, detecting hidden motives--the while, of course, 
     hiding themselves behind the anonymous leak.'' Privately, 
     Moynihan complained that the Clinton plan's tilt against the 
     high-cost medical specialties--the pride of New York's 
     premier hospitals--smacked of 60's radicalism.
       The White House and its most ardent Democratic allies 
     countered, sotto voce, that the chairman was simply not on 
     board and that for all his garrulous, accommodating 
     affability he was not stroking his committee and could not 
     deliver the votes. It became a dialogue of the deaf. In the 
     end, Moynihan lost effective control of the narrow 11-to-9 
     Democratic majority on his committee. In the frantic hours 
     before the July 4 recess, a bipartisan group of moderates 
     produced a bill much less ambitious than Clinton's, one that 
     would not guarantee the President's bottom line of universal 
     coverage. Instead, the bill hopes to provide new subsidies 
     for the poor, intended to cover 95 percent of all Americans 
     by the year 2002; a commission would figure out how to 
     deliver coverage if that percentage was not met. About the 
     best most Democrats would say for the bill was that it kept 
     the legislative process alive and gave the Senate majority 
     leader, George Mitchell, a fig leaf to wrap around the other 
     proposals on the floor.
       As usual, Moynihan satisfied neither the liberals nor the 
     conservatives. ``If he really believes this was a 
     potential danger to American medicine, there's much more 
     he could have done to fashion a bipartisan bill,'' says 
     Bill Kristol, the conservative analyst and Moynihan's 
     former teaching assistant at Harvard. ``I'm worried that 
     Pat will have failed to influence the outcome in any 
     meaningful way.'' He adds: ``He's never in anybody's camp. 
     In a way, that's admirable. It's also fair to ask, if you 
     are going to be in real politics, don't you have to choose 
     sides?''
       Moynihan says with some heat that he was whipsawed between 
     the White House's unrealistic expectations and unexpectedly 
     partisan intransigence from the Republicans. But that reveals 
     the failure of the chairman's single strategy: he had counted 
     on cooperation from Bob Dole, his ally from the 1980's when 
     the two joined forces to rescue the Social Security system. 
     When the support did not materialize, he seemed to have no 
     clear idea where to turn. In his own defense, Moynihan points 
     with pride to his proposal for a trust fund, financed by an 
     assessment on insurance premiums, to support the nation's 
     great academic medical centers and teaching hospitals, which 
     happen to be located overwhelmingly in New York.
       ``If anyone had a bill out of the Finance Committee four 
     years ago with that much in the way of insurance subsidy, 
     insurance change and commitments, you would have said, `My 
     goodness, what on earth has happened?''' He adds: ``Down in 
     the White House, they never could quite hear us say, you 
     know, that nothing is 100 percent. We don't collect 100 
     percent of our taxes; the census doesn't count 100 percent of 
     the population.''
       As staunchly as Moynihan defends the jerry-built bill, 
     however, the fact remains that it was not truly his, merely a 
     bill eked out by a fractious committee. Instead of laying to 
     rest doubts about Moynihan's loyalty and legislative 
     acumen, the bill exacerbated them. The unkind whispering 
     on the Hill was that, by contrast, even Bentsen, the old 
     Texas Tory, would have been a better soldier for his 
     President: unruffled, sly, but in the end willing to twist 
     arms and persuade wavering colleagues, whatever his 
     private doubts. Bentsen even attended a couple of meetings 
     with White House aides and committee members, ready to act 
     as an informal liaison.
       The liberals on the Finance Committee were deeply 
     disappointed by Moynihan's performance, though 
     characteristically none are eager to talk about it for 
     attribution. ``He's done more clenching of teeth than 
     talking,'' says one Senate aide, explaining the reluctance of 
     that aide's employer, a Democrat, to offend Moynihan openly.
       On the topic he most cares about, welfare, Moynihan's 
     relations with the White House have been much better, mostly 
     because it has done what he wants: stress that welfare cannot 
     be a permanent dependency. After brutally deriding the 
     Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna E. Shalala, in 
     her confirmation hearings for appearing to back away from 
     Clinton's campaign promises on the topic, he has goaded and 
     prodded, all the while refusing to say exactly what changes 
     he favors.
       Indeed, when the President unveiled his welfare reform plan 
     in June, Moynihan was so delighted at Clinton's emphasis on 
     the danger of growing illegitimacy--a Moynihan crusade for 
     three decades--that he said he would co-sponsor the bill, 
     through he thinks its central tenet of ending benefits after 
     two years may be unrealistic. In his first hearing on it last 
     month, he dealt with Shalala like a Dutch uncle and praised 
     her testimony as ``historic.''
       ``We've come round to recognizing it, that's the big 
     thing,'' Moynihan says. ``You have to do something about how 
     children are raised in our society. The specifics of a bill, 
     how you're going to finance it or whatever, we've gotta work 
     out.''
       Such persistence ``drives the true believers absolutely 
     nuts,'' says Moynihan's old friend Roger Kennedy, the 
     director of the National Park Service. ``He's not the 
     vagrant, capricious spirit. They are. They focus intensively 
     on something for three months and then move on to something 
     else. He's consistent, slogging along for 30 years on the 
     same thing. And then, when the cavalry runs in, he's still 
     there, worrying about family structure.''
       If family structure has been Moynihan's most consistent 
     theme, it has also been the most painful subject of his 
     personal and professional life. In part that's because when 
     Pat Moynihan talks about unstable families, he knows what 
     he's talking about. As he said in a rare outburst during an 
     interview with The New York Times nearly three decades ago: 
     ``I grew up in Hell's Kitchen. My father was a drunk. I know 
     what this life is like.''
       In 1937, when Pat was 10, his father, John, an advertising 
     copywriter for RKO Pictures, left home and never saw Pat 
     again. Margaret Moynihan and her three children dropped out 
     of middle-class life in the New York suburbs into an unhappy 
     second marriage and a series of grim apartments. Pat shined 
     shoes, graduated first in his class at Benjamin Franklin High 
     School in East Harlem, worked as a stevedore on the Hudson 
     River piers and ultimately found escape via City College and 
     the Navy's V-12 program, which sent him in 1944 to train at 
     Middlebury College. On the G.I. Bill, he went on to college 
     at Tufts, returning on vacations to tend bar in a tavern his 
     mother had opened near Times Square. He finally broke out for 
     good with a Fulbright Scholarship to the London School of 
     Economics.
       Moynihan waves off any attempt to see reflections of his 
     upbringing in his work. ``Oh, don't, don't, don't, don't,'' 
     he says, lightly but firmly. ``We don't talk about that. I've 
     been around the world a lot, yeah. But there's less here than 
     meets the eye.''
       Perhaps, but perhaps only because Moynihan's triumph over a 
     shattered home is one of the exceptions that proves his rule. 
     He began his government career as an aide to Gov. W. Averell 
     Harriman of New York in the mid-1950's, then dipped into 
     academia at Syracuse University before joining the New 
     Frontier in 1961. In 1965, he left Washington for an 
     unsuccessful run for New York City Council President and a 
     return to academia. But it was with a report that year to 
     President Johnson entitled ``The Negro Family: The Case for 
     National Action'' that he made his biggest policy splash.
       In the report, Moynihan warned that rising illegitimacy 
     rates and a ``tangle of pathology'' posed grave threats to 
     the stability of black families and put at risk the gains in 
     income and equality that blacks had managed to achieve 
     through the civil rights movement. Moynihan saw himself as a 
     liberal watchman on the heights, summoning his country to 
     make whole in reality the revolution already occurring in 
     law.
       ``From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern 
     seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles,'' he wrote 
     at the time in a Jesuit magazine, ``there is one unmistakable 
     lesson in American history: a community that allows a large 
     number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated 
     by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male 
     authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations 
     about the future--that community asks for and gets chaos.''
       Instead of being praised, Moynihan was bitterly denounced 
     as blaming the victim and fueling racism. He retreated from 
     the fray into what friends say was the most painful period of 
     his life. Even now, he speaks of it only with the tightest 
     reserve. ``Well, it has made for difficult weekends, you 
     could say.''
       It's cold comfort that Moynihan's thesis is barely debated 
     today. ``It set a bad example to others who might have 
     carried on that work,'' he says. ``We took a generation to 
     pick it up again.''
       And the controversy continued. In 1969, after an interlude 
     at Harvard, Moynihan broke with his follow Democrats and 
     returned to Washington as Richard Nixon's chief urban affairs 
     adviser. There, a new storm broke over a memorandum, leaked 
     to The New York Times, in which Moynihan counseled the 
     President to focus on the problems of other minorities and 
     cool overheated rhetoric.
       ``The time may have come when the issue of race could 
     benefit from a period of ``benign neglect,''' Moynihan 
     wrote. The memo was immediately interpreted as calling for 
     neglect of black Americans, and Moynihan was despondent. 
     ``Moynihan in to see me, disturbed about staff leaks 
     designed to screw him,'' Haldeman wrote in his diary on 
     March 31, 1970. ``Made point he's ruined in Democratic 
     Party because of the `benign neglect' memo. He's really 
     distressed, mainly because he has nowhere left to go.''
       Moynihan moved on--back to Harvard, then to India as 
     Ambassador for Nixon and to the United Nations as chief 
     delegate for Ford. But the controversy never really went 
     away. This year Moynihan's opponent in the Democratic primary 
     for the Senate nomination is the Rev. Al Sharpton, the 
     protean black street protester who made a surprisingly strong 
     run for the Senate two years ago. No one gives Sharpton a 
     chance of doing much more than annoying Moynihan, but he has 
     used his campaign to do just that. ``I represent the historic 
     disfavor he's had in the African-American community,'' says 
     Sharpton, who turned what was to have been a 2-minute speech 
     at the Buffalo convention into a 15-minute broadside against 
     Moynihan. ``He rose to fame talking about the black family, 
     and I'm a broken family product.'' Sharpton goes on to 
     describe himself as the character that Shakespeare (had he 
     written a play about all this) would have introduced at the 
     peak of Moynihan's career ``to bring back all the 
     questions.''
       Indeed, when Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, eager to soothe Sharpton 
     and avoid alienating black voters, went out of his way to 
     meet with the minister in Buffalo, he thanked Sharpton for an 
     innocuous introduction, allowing that it was ``benign.'' The 
     Moynihan forces hit the roof at what they saw as deliberate 
     dig. Since then, half a dozen meetings between the Senator 
     and Governor to discuss the impact of health care legislation 
     were scheduled and mysteriously canceled by Moynihan's office 
     at the last minute.
       Moynihan's relations with New York's black political 
     establishment have always been touchy, and they were not 
     helped last year when he made a speech recalling how much 
     more livable the city was 50 years ago. Mayor David N. 
     Dinkins, in an uphill re-election bid, took that as a slap 
     at his stewardship. Even Representative Charles B. Rangel 
     of Harlem--who has endorsed Moynihan--refers to him as 
     ``Mon-a-han,'' in a kind of can't-be-bothered semi-slap. 
     As the fourth-ranking Democrat of the House Ways and Means 
     Committee (the Finance Committee's tax-writing 
     counterpart), Rangel was often called on by its former 
     chairman, Dan Rostenkowski, to find out what on earth 
     Moynihan had meant by some obscure remark. Rangel 
     inevitably returned just as puzzled.
       ``If he selects his audiences very carefully, those astute 
     enough to understand the papers that he writes, he'll have no 
     problems,'' Rangel said of Moynihan in a recent interview on 
     the ``MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.'' But when it's an across-the-
     board audience and when it appears as though he is indicting 
     rather than providing solutions, I think the professor part 
     of Pat Moynihan has many, many problems.'' When I asked 
     Rangel to repeat the remarks, he declined, saying he had 
     already heard complaints from Moynihan's staff.
       Just last month, Moynihan stepped into controversy again. 
     During a hearing on welfare, he noted that within the next 
     decade half of all American children will be born out of 
     wedlock. That prospect, Moynihan said, marked such a change 
     in the human condition that biologists could talk of 
     ``speciation''--the creation of a new species. Sharpton 
     promptly denounced Moynihan as a ``Harvard version of Jimmy 
     the Greek,'' a reference to the Las Vegas oddsmaker who lost 
     his job as a television commentator after saying that black 
     athletes were fleetfooted because they had been bred that way 
     in slavery.
       The bitterest pill for Moynihan may be that such criticisms 
     enabled the insurgent Reaganauts to call the problems 
     intractable and retreat from Government spending for the 
     cities and the poor.
       ``It was the last moment of a kind of expectancy about 
     activism in Washington,'' Moynihan says of his Family 
     Assistance Plan in the Nixon years. ``The problem, then as 
     now,'' he wrote with typical candor in 1992, ``is that no one 
     has a clue as to what it would take for public policy to be 
     sufficient.''
       On a frigid February day last year, Clinton and Moynihan 
     made a pilgrimage to the home of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 
     Hyde Park, N.Y., where the President pressed for his economic 
     plan. When they reboarded Air Force One, Moynihan banged a 
     table top in the V.I.P. cabin and growled with Falstaffian 
     flair; ``Whisky! Get me a whisky!''
       Nervous White House aides fluttered for a moment, unsure 
     whether he was joking, until, one of them later recalled, ``I 
     think the assumption was, if the Senator wants a drink, bring 
     him a drink.''
       Moynihan's drinking is a subject his friends and enemies 
     raise matter-of-factly. He drinks, by all evidence, more than 
     most public figures in this era of white wine and designer 
     water, and reporters and Washington insiders collect Moynihan 
     drinking stories like baseball cards. There is Moynihan, 
     asked for a late-night comment on the death of the Irish 
     Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands in 1981, declaiming 
     unintelligible dialogue from ``Juno and the Paycock.'' 
     Moynihan burbling an air-check for the Democratic response to 
     one of President Bush's weekly radio addresses, then snapping 
     into clear voice when the broadcast begins. Moynihan 
     consuming, according to a tablemate, 14 glasses of wine at a 
     recent White House dinner, asking the waiters to keep all 
     three of his glasses--white, red and Champagne--full.
       ``He's a rogue,'' one old friend says simply. ``Pat's an 
     Irish country person. And he drinks too much. We all know 
     him: he's the smartest guy in town, who doesn't have 
     enough good people to talk to, who exhausts himself and 
     those close to him and''--by drinking--``finds surcease 
     from that enormous intellect. He's a man who could easily 
     be a squire in the west of Ireland. But then there'd be 
     other squires and a bishop and a community to talk to.''
       In his classic chapter on Irish New York in ``Beyond the 
     Melting Pot'' in 1963, Moynihan mused on the curse of his 
     race. A dominant social fact of the Irish community is the 
     number of good men who are destroyed by drink. In ways it is 
     worse now than in the past: a stevedore could drink and do 
     his work; a lawyer, a doctor, a legislator cannot.''
       No one suggests that Moynihan's drinking--which friends say 
     appears to have tapered off a bit with age--has seriously 
     affected his work. On most mornings these days, he leads long 
     and complicated hearings on health care, welfare or trade, 
     perched on his dais like a lanky Jimmy Stewart on a lily pad, 
     praising a colleague, goading a witness, recounting a 
     favorite lesson.
       Asked why people talk about his drinking so much, Moynihan 
     says quietly: ``People just always have, and there's nothing 
     I can do about it.'' Asked if it's a problem, he replies, 
     ``It's not a problem for me. I'm sitting here, doing my work.
       Moynihan's drinking may be the least of his eccentricities. 
     This is a man who, if any aide tells him ``the White House 
     called,'' is sure to interrupt with a peremptory: ``No! 
     Houses don't talk. You spoke to a person. Now, who was it? 
     Begin again.''
       In the Senate, he lives by his own clock. After morning 
     hearings and the twice weekly Democratic caucus lunches, he 
     is apt to repair to the gym and an afternoon of reading and 
     telephoning in his hideaway just off the Senate floor. He'll 
     visit the floor for a speech and return to his office in the 
     late afternoon. He bunches his appointments at the end of the 
     day, sometimes forcing constituents to scramble for the last 
     shuttle back to La Guardia.
       He avoids the Washington social circuit and generally dines 
     quietly at home with Liz or close friends. A light sleeper, 
     he reads into the night. Though he affects disinterest in his 
     own press, by 8 or 8:30 a.m. he has read The Washington Post 
     and The New York Times ``more thoroughly than the owners of 
     either of those journals,'' says O'Donnell, chief of staff 
     for the Finance Committee. During the summer, in a former 
     one-room schoolhouse on his farm in the tiny Catskills 
     hamlet of Pindars Corners, Moynihan bangs out his books 
     and scholarly articles.
       In an era of handlers and ``message'' meetings, Moynihan 
     writes his own constituent newsletters (they are as likely to 
     review history as to tout his accomplishments) and rewrites 
     the efforts of consultants into his own distinctive 30-second 
     campaign commercials, with never an actor or gauzy soft-
     filter in the lot.
       He also spends inordinate time checking his footnotes. To 
     show the Senator's sympatico 
     relationship with Clinton, Stephanopoulos reveals that 
     Moynihan keeps up an active correspondence with the 
     President. A recent note praised Clinton's speech to the 
     French National Assembly after the D-Day commemorations, in 
     which Clinton warned of the dangers of resurgent ethnic 
     nationalism. Moynihan suggested that the President gather 
     experts to review the problem, the way the Manhattan Project 
     developed the atomic bomb for F.D.R.
       But a follow-up phone call with 
     Stephanopoulos revealed 
     Professor Moynihan's double-edged sword. When 
     Stephanopoulos said he guessed this would be like ``Dr. 
     Einstein'' coming to the White House, Moynihan broke in.
       ``Doctor? I don't think he was a doctor,'' said the 
     Senator. Stephanopoulos, a Rhodes Scholar, apologized for the 
     seeming error, but a couple of days later came another letter 
     from Moynihan, confessing his error and listing Einstein's 
     curriculum vitae. ``Even when I turned out to be right, I 
     still felt dumber,'' Stephanopoulos laughs.
       Moynihan's eclecticism has rubbed off on his three grown 
     children. In the Nixon years, when student protesters 
     threatened to burn down his house at Harvard, Moynihan had 
     nothing but contempt for the sons and daughters of privilege 
     who, in his view, had paralyzed the country and destroyed the 
     Johnson Presidency. But Moynihan's worldly success has given 
     his offspring the financial freedom to pursue decidedly 
     nontraditional lives. The eldest son, Timothy, is a sculptor 
     of papier-mache caricatures. (A life-size Thomas Jefferson 
     stands in Moynihan's office.) Maura is a sometime performer 
     who now works for the Campaign for Tibet. And the 
     youngest, John, is an animator. ``And none,'' Moynihan 
     says drily, ``are employed.''
       The gyroscope that keeps Moynihan balanced is Liz Moynihan, 
     the handsome woman he met in 1954 on the Harriman campaign. 
     An architectural historian and an expert on the Mogul gardens 
     of India, she has been his political alter ego, doing the 
     fund raising that bores him. She also drives--since, Tim 
     explains, ``the old man'' has a way of spying something 
     distracting out the window and driving off the road.
       Liz has her own back channels to all of Washington, 
     including Hillary Rodham Clinton. A recent cartoon in The 
     Washington Post mapping the brain of the prototypical 
     plugged-in Washingtonian included in the folds of the well-
     kept cortex ``Liz Moynihan's phone #''.
       The Senator has a flash temper and a long memory, but his 
     colleagues agree that Liz Moynihan is steelier. ``Sometimes 
     he tells you tough things that you know she's told him to 
     tell you,'' one Congressman says. ``But when you hear it 
     right from her, watch out.''
       Moynihan's record, as befits a wide-ranging intellect, is 
     more a story of influence on an array of issues than 
     authorship of a passel of big bills, though the Senator can 
     claim his share of those. In 1983, he and Dole worked out a 
     compromise involving higher taxes and fewer benefits to bail 
     out the floundering Social Security system. In 1988, he 
     shepherded his Family Support Act to passage. And in 1991, he 
     used the occasion of a highway reauthorization bill to create 
     the International Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, 
     which appropriated huge new sums for transportation and gave 
     states wide choice in whether to use the money for highways 
     or mass transit.
       Though he is often accused of disdaining parochial 
     interests, Moynihan keeps close track of how the Federal 
     Government parcels our revenue to New York, publishing an 
     annual report on the way entitlement formulas favor other 
     parts of the country. And he takes great pride in bringing 
     physical structures--new courthouses and office 
     buildings--to the state. In 1991, he forced the Feds to 
     repay New York $5 billion for the cost of building the 
     Gov. Thomas E. Dewey Thruway four decades ago.
       ``He's a spectacular votegetter, and I think the reason is 
     twofold,'' says Raymond B. Harding, the leader of the New 
     York State Liberal Party and a longtime supporter. ``He's a 
     marvelous pol, something he manages to hide most of the time. 
     Secondly, he's truly an upstater, in terms of his orientation 
     and knowledge.''
       After winning the Democratic nomination over a crowded, 
     more liberal field in 1976, Moynihan won an easy victory over 
     the Conservative incumbent, James Buckley. He has been re-
     elected comfortably since, running strong in Republican 
     districts and protecting his left flank with his outspoken 
     opposition to the Reagan administration's abandoment of the 
     cities.
       His opponent this fall is Bernadette Castro, a Republican 
     fund-raiser from Long Island and heir to the convertible sofa 
     business. Moynihan was edgy enough about the money she and 
     her adviser, Edward J. Rollins Jr., might spend to attack 
     him--or to repeat Sharpton's attacks-- that he called for her 
     to dismiss Rollins. Rollins caused a firestorm last year with 
     his boast, later retracted, that the campaign organization 
     for one of his clients, Christine Todd Whitman, had paid 
     black groups to suppress turnout in the New Jersey 
     gubernatorial election.
       Polls show Moynihan with a commanding lead over all comers, 
     but there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction on the left.
       ``Frankly, when I hear a Democratic Senator from the state 
     of New York say that there is no health care crisis in 
     America and suggest that it's O.K. for 3 million Americans to 
     have no health care coverage, that's deeply troubling to 
     me,'' says Jan Pierce, a vice president of the 
     Communications Workers of America in New York. Pierce 
     recently told a union gathering that he personally could 
     not support Moynihan. ``I said while I don't have the 
     courage to endorse Reverend Sharpton, I sure as hell 
     intend to vote for him.'' The union,which has given money 
     to the Senator for years, supports Moynihan again this 
     year.
       For his part, Moynihan appears to be doing his best to 
     enjoy his moment on the mountaintop. But the verdict on what 
     kind of chairman he will ultimately be--whether he can 
     express his will on issues that are not as dear to his hear 
     as welfare--remains open. Will the Senator, who long ago 
     decided, like Henry Clay, that he would rather be right than 
     President, rank as a Great Compromiser in the best sense of 
     the word?
       Every day brings a new test. The welfare debate is just 
     beginning, and once again Moynihan will be called on to be a 
     team player in steering a complex bill on a thorny topic 
     whose subtleties and pitfalls he sees too clearly. If health 
     care falls apart, the White House may well be less inclined 
     to humor him. Winning this fourth term would carry him into 
     the millennium and a quarter-century in Congress. Moynihan 
     may yet grow more confident and adept in his command. He 
     isn't getting any younger, though, and sometime seems to 
     grope harder to pluck things from that vast card catalogue in 
     his head.
       Being Moynihan, of course, he doesn't talk much about it. 
     But in a recent twilight conversation in his Senate office, 
     surrounded by old silver and boxed foreign editions of his 
     books, Moynihan did pause to reflect, his voice barely 
     audible as he dragged on a Marlboro, one of three he allows 
     himself daily.
       ``The century began with vast expectations of what 
     government could do and ended up with a huge amount of 
     disappointment,'' he said, fending off any suggestion that 
     his own goals are too modest. And he insists he is not as 
     complicated as people think. ``I don't find myself hard to 
     understand. I find a lot of the things I deal with hard to 
     understand. You know, there's a lot of complexity about the 
     world.''
       When he argued for seat belts or predicted the decline of 
     the Soviet Union, he adds, the world wasn't quite ready for 
     him. ``If you're outside a paradigm, people will think you're 
     crazy. It is by that kind of pattern in the sciences, and 
     what is wanly called social sciences, in which no argument 
     ever gets settled in one generation. A huge argument 
     breaks out, and it just goes on until another generational 
     comes along and it has accepted one or the other views. 
     And no one will say: `Gosh, oh golly-gee, I got that 
     wrong! My courses for the last 25 years have been wrong, 
     but I have now changed my ways.'''
       It is Moynihan's singular satisfaction to have been right 
     about some of the biggest arguments of his time. That he 
     might be wrong this time around on health care is a criticism 
     to be borne, not one to dwell on. As the conversation turns 
     to the well-worn doubts about his party loyalties and 
     legislative skill, Moynihan softens his voice until--after 
     discussing his drinking--he stops altogether.
       ``May I,'' he begins hesitantly, ``put you on a slightly 
     different course?'' He walks to a shelf where a two-foot 
     stack of honorary degrees rest in their colored leather 
     folders. He picks up the top one and displays it. The degree, 
     received this year, is from the University of Rochester. The 
     citation reads in part: ``Independent to the bone, he is the 
     vigilant guardian of the nation's well-being. We call to 
     honor Daniel Patrick Moynihan: teacher-politician, thinker-
     activist, international homeboy and pride of New York.'' He 
     enumerates other glories: the gold medal on the mantelpiece 
     from Notre Dame, the gold medal of the American Philosophical 
     Society.
       ``I don't think I've spent my life being denounced,'' he 
     says. ``So why should I go around with a hang-dog look?''
       The act is revealing: at the peak of 30 years of 
     accumulated power and respect, at the start of his barony as 
     Finance Committee chairman, he still feels insecure enough to 
     recite his honors for a visitor half his age. Moynihan picks 
     up a clipping from The New York Post, with the latest polls 
     showing his popularity, and turns again to his visitor.
       ``I get along with people in New York very well. I'm not 
     sitting here''--his voice has now risen almost to a shout--
     ``I'm not complaining! Why are you asking me?''
       This Senator knows what he cares about, what is lasting and 
     what is not, and he does not need colleagues, critics or the 
     President of the United States to tell him. The flash of 
     anger quickly past, his voice is silky again.
       ``Seriously,'' Daniel Patrick Moynihan says. ``Why go on 
     about being misunderstood? I mean, I'm still here.''
  Mr. BYRD. I yield the floor.
  Mr. CRAIG addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.

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