[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 37 (Thursday, March 20, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2624-S2626]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO SENATOR DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, on March 16, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the 
senior Senator from New York State, turned 70. Senator Moynihan has 
been referred to, quite properly, as the intellectual of the Senate and 
called by many, a renaissance man. I mean no disrespect when I say that 
during a couple of the gatherings of the Irish on March 17, he was also 
referred to as the ``World's Largest Leprechaun.''
  To me, Senator Moynihan is a good friend and a mentor, a wise voice 
that I heard before I was in the Senate, and since. He is a man who has 
spoken with great prescience on issues involving families and the 
economy, global power and welfare reform, on so many things.
  Senator Moynihan has served in administrations of both Democrat and 
Republican Presidents. He has always been ahead of his time, sometimes 
with a controversial voice that then turns out to be the only accurate 
voice.
  Like all other Senators, I wish him very well as he heads into the 
latest decade of his life.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a column by David Broder 
entitled ``The Moynihan Imprint'' be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Mar. 16, 1997]

                          The Moynihan Imprint

                          (By David S. Broder)

       Today is the 70th birthday of a unique figure in the public 
     life of this nation for the past four decades, the senior 
     senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Tomorrow, a 
     day-long symposium and a celebratory dinner at the Woodrow 
     Wilson Center will make it clear just how large Moynihan's 
     legacy is.
       Previewing the papers to be delivered, as Georgetown 
     professor Robert A. Katzmann, a onetime student of Moynihan's 
     and organizer of the tribute, allowed me to do, was a 
     reminder of just how rich and varied the New York Democrat's 
     contributions have been.

[[Page S2625]]

       He has been prescient about subjects as diverse as the 
     crisis of the American family and the breakup of the Soviet 
     Union. As his fellow scholar Seymour Martin Lipset points 
     out, his 1965 report for President Johnson, titled ``The 
     Negro Family: The Case for National Action,'' was bitterly 
     controversial at the time. But 30 years later, everyone has 
     come to understand that the wave of out-of-wedlock births and 
     the scarcity of jobs in the inner cities are overwhelming the 
     welfare system and threatening the stability of the whole 
     society.
       As Michael Barone of Reader's Digest notes, it was Moynihan 
     in January of 1980 who said that ``the defining event of the 
     decade might well be the breakup of the Soviet empire.''
       Moynihan was unable to persuade his colleagues in 
     government to move in timely fashion to head off the family 
     crisis he discerned, or to curb the excessive costs of the 
     1980s arms race with the Russians.
       But as Stephen Hess, his deputy in the Nixon White House, 
     and half a dozen others argue, he was a shrewd and often 
     successful operative in policy jobs and diplomatic posts 
     under four presidents (two of each party) and for the last 20 
     years as a member of the Senate.
       For all his focus on social problems, Moynihan has left a 
     strong physical imprint on the nation as well. In his Labor 
     Department days under President Kennedy, he managed to 
     rewrite the architectural standards for government 
     buildings and to launch the rehabilitation of Pennsylvania 
     Avenue into what is now nearing completion as the grand 
     ceremonial thoroughfare of the Republic.
       As a senator, Moynihan six years ago fundamentally 
     redirected national transportation policy by converting the 
     traditional highway program into something grandly called the 
     Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act--a charter 
     for states and communities to use federal funds for mass 
     transit as well as roads. Characteristically, as another 
     paper points out, he had written a magazine article as far 
     back as 1960 on the negative impact the highway-building boom 
     of the 1950s was having on older cities like New York.
       Sweeping as they are, the papers to be delivered tomorrow 
     do not embrace all the aspects of the Moynihan persona. 
     Together with his wife, Liz, a warmhearted woman with the 
     toughness it takes to have run most of his campaigns, 
     Moynihan has a great gift for friendship, a talent for 
     keeping score of slights or rebuffs--and a really wicked 
     sense of humor.
       On the last point, a speech that Moynihan delivered at a 
     Gridiron Club dinner during the Reagan administration remains 
     indelible in the memories of all who were there. It was his 
     idea to explain to a bemused President Reagan that David 
     Stockman--Reagan's precocious but controversial budget 
     director, who had been a live-in baby sitter of the Moynihans 
     during his Harvard graduate student years--was in fact a 
     Democratic mole who had been programmed to subvert the Reagan 
     presidency from within. It may have been the funniest 
     Gridiron speech ever.
       I also cherish the memory of a Moynihan speech in 
     Philadelphia during the Democratic presidential primaries of 
     1976. Moynihan was supporting his great friend, Sen. Henry M. 
     ``Scoop'' Jackson of Washington, and had been dispatched by 
     the Jackson campaign to fire up a dinner audience of labor 
     union Jackson backers. They were, of course, drunk and 
     boisterous by the time he arose, but Moynihan delivered a 
     scholarly discourse on the forces shaping the American 
     economy and the Western alliance, worthy of a Harvard 
     seminar. And when he got around to his candidate, a man of 
     sterling qualities but no great pizazz, he was inspired to 
     describe Jackson with one of the most gracious phrases ever 
     applied to someone who was really boring. ``Our candidate,'' 
     said Moynihan, ``is blessed with the charisma of 
     competence.''
       The union guys had no idea what the hell he meant, but they 
     knew it deserved applause. That's the way many of us in the 
     press feel about Moynihan. He's sometimes over our heads, and 
     often light years ahead of us. But we know he's something 
     special.

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. Broder speaks far more eloquently than I could of what 
Senator Moynihan has done and continues to do as he climbs new heights 
every year.
  Mr. President, I also ask unanimous consent that an article from The 
Hill of Wednesday, March 19, entitled ``The Senate's Renaissance Man 
Turns 70,'' be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                     [From the Hill, Mar. 19, 1997]

     Daniel Patrick Moynihan--The Senate's Renaissance Man Turns 70

       In a public career spanning three decades in the groves of 
     academe and the halls of government, Sen. Daniel Patrick 
     Moynihan (D-N.Y.) has helped shape public policy on a wide 
     range of issues that bear on almost every major aspect of 
     American life.
       Thus, when he turned 70 on St. Patrick's Day, a group of 
     Moynihan's friends, aides, colleagues and supporters used the 
     occasion to highlight his accomplishments at a day-long 
     celebration at The Woodrow Wilson Center.
       The four-term senator, former U.S. ambassador to India, 
     former Harvard professor and aide to three presidents was the 
     guest of honor at a dinner culminating the tribute to ``The 
     Intellectual as Public Servant,'' excerpts of which follow.
                                                                    ____


       (By Michael Barone, Senior Staff Editor, Reader's Digest)

       Harry McPherson, writing about the Senate of the 1950s, 
     described a Senate dominated by ``whales'' and populated 
     otherwise by `minnows.' But the Senate in which Daniel 
     Patrick Moynihan took his place was quite another place. The 
     senators after whom the three Senate office buildings were 
     named had all died--Richard Russell in 1971, Everett Dirksen 
     in 1969, Philip Hart in 1976. Sam Ervin had retired in 1974 
     and William Fulbright was beaten that year. Hubert Humphrey 
     was battling the cancer that killed him in 1978 and his old 
     adversary James Eastland would retire that year. Lyndon 
     Johnson and Robert Taft were long gone. Mike Mansfield had 
     retired and the new majority leader, Robert Byrd, was 
     regarded as a technician, in an office that carries none of 
     the great powers appertaining to the Speaker of the House. 
     Fully 18 of the 100 senators in January 1977 had been elected 
     for the first time. CBS News had to rent the large room in 
     the Sheraton Carlton Hotel and repaint it for their ``Meet 
     the Senators'' program. This was a heavily Democratic Senate, 
     but a Senate without driving Democratic leaders, and a Senate 
     which knew little or nothing about its new Democratic 
     president. It was a Senate in which political and policy 
     entrepreneurs could articulate their ideas and advance their 
     causes: not a bad place for a Renaissance man. ``In this 
     Senate, you do your work in committees, not on the floor,'' 
     Moynihan has said. And so Moynihan's first and perhaps most 
     important decisions were what committees to serve on. He had 
     confronted the question in a debate in the 1976 primary, 
     unsure at first how to answer. His opponents gave predictable 
     answers--Labor, said one, because that is where the great 
     urban aid programs are drawn up; Foreign Relations, said 
     another, the forum for the great debates on the Vietnam War; 
     another said Judiciary, which handled civil rights. 
     Moynihan's answer: ``Finance. Because that's where the money 
     is.''
                                                                    ____


   (By Nicholas N. Eberstadt, Visiting Scholar, American Enterprise 
                               Institute)

       Anyone even vaguely familiar with his long and 
     distinguished career will already know that Daniel Patrick 
     Moynihan is a polymath. For over four decades, this sometime 
     speechwriter, political adviser, domestic affairs counselor, 
     diplomat and senator has also occupied himself, with seeming 
     effortlessness, as an established expert--in fact, a pre-
     eminent authority--in an unnerving multiplicity of 
     intellectual disciplines and academic fields: among them, 
     American history, architectural criticism, arms control, 
     educational policy, ethnology, income policy, international 
     law, public finance, public policy research and evaluation, 
     the sociology of the family, and urban planning. As a 
     habitual and evidently incorrigible trespasser in the 
     sometimes jealously guarded fields of specialized learning, 
     it should come as no surprise that Moynihan's intellectual 
     ambit has taken him into many other areas not enumerated 
     above.
                                                                    ____


 (By Suzanne Garment, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute)

       The foreign service will never be composed of Moynihans--
     and a good thing, too. The international political system 
     would collapse under the pressure. Still, every so often the 
     debate resumes about whether the foreign service is 
     professionalized enough and whether too many ambassadorial 
     appointments are going to outsiders who do not have 
     ``ambassadorial temperament.'' When we hear this argument, we 
     should remember that making reasonable room for outsiders is 
     necessary if we are to have room for the Moynihans, and that 
     having one Moynihan around at a crucial foreign policymaking 
     juncture makes it worthwhile to put up with entire troops of 
     lesser professionals in the ambassadorial ranks.

  (By Robert A. Katzmann, Walsh Professor, Georgetown University, The 
                         Brooking Institution)

       But for the 20th Amendment, March 4, 1997, would have been 
     the day the nation inaugurated its president. Instead, it may 
     come to be remembered as the day when the nation began to 
     change its mindset about secrecy in government. For that is 
     when the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government 
     Secrecy issued its report.
       Most commissions receive scant attention. Rare is the 
     commission report which has a life beyond its issuance; most 
     are consigned to the microfiche collection in the basement of 
     some federal depository library. But this report on secrecy 
     would be different because of its chair, Sen. Daniel Patrick 
     Moynihan.
       If the typical commission is concerned with moving 
     organizational units from one place to another, this would 
     seek to change the way we think about a problem so as to 
     better address it. It is vintage Moynihan--using an 
     instrument of government, in this case a commission, to shape 
     the very definition of policy and its debate.
                                                                    ____


      (By Stephen Hess, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution)

       Sen. Moynihan is the political man of ideas. Some are his 
     own, some he borrows,

[[Page S2626]]

     some are cosmic, others more modest: Our generation greatest 
     spotter of ideas that might make our society somehow better. 
     This is a remarkable talent. But what turns it into a 
     national treasure is a finely attuned antenna for knowing 
     when an idea is ready for the public arena, the skill to be 
     in positions to make his ideas matter, and the flair to make 
     others notice. It is a harnessing of intellectual energy and 
     political smarts that is so rare that when such a person is 
     also blessed with long life, we must create opportunities to 
     celebrate.
                                                                    ____


  (By Seymour Martin Lipset, Hazel Professor of Public Policy, George 
                           Mason University)

       Why was Moynihan so prescient? I would say because he has 
     known from the start that there is no first cause, not in 
     politics, not in social science.
       What Pat teaches is that not only are there no utopias, 
     there are no solutions, not in the state or in the completely 
     uncontrolled market. There are only approximations, only the 
     continuing struggle for decency, for morality, for equality 
     of opportunity and respect.
                                                                    ____


      (By Robert A. Peck, Commissioner, Public Buildings Service)

       What did he know and when did he know it? Ask this about 
     Pat Moynihan in the matter of public works and, as in so many 
     other fields of public policy, the answers are: more than 
     everyone else and long before, as well. In public works, as 
     in other arenas, he has transformed the debate. Public 
     architecture he single-handedly disinterred from the grave 
     and resurrected on the political agenda. If you would see his 
     monuments in this field, look about you literally.
       On public buildings, urban design, highways, transit, 
     waterways, water supply and even sewers, he has brought to 
     bear his trademark qualities; an eclectic historical memory, 
     a rapier tongue and typewriter, a nose for demography and 
     geography, an inner ear for the data that matter and in 
     immunity to ideological blinkering. In this field in 
     particular Moynihan the political vote-counter and Moynihan 
     the passionate New Yorker rival Moynihan the political 
     scientist. Moynihan's achievements are worthy of the great 
     public builders, from Hadrian to Hausmann to Robert Moses, 
     only Moynihan's are humane.

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I thank the forbearance of my good friend, 
the senior Senator from North Dakota, and I yield the floor.
  Mr. CONRAD addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
  Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, I want to thank the Senator from Vermont 
for his observations on the ranking member of the Finance Committee, 
who is really an American legend.
  I also want to just say to my colleague, Senator Bumpers, who is 
coming on the floor, that I will be brief so that Senator Bumpers can 
have his time. And I look forward to hearing his remarks.

                          ____________________