[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.
____________________