[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 17]
[Senate]
[Pages 25287-25288]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



            TRIBUTE TO THE HONORABLE DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN

  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, the session is winding down. We are at a 
point where we are doing pro forma things.
  I have neglected to do something I think is important to do and that 
I have wanted to do. I will take the time available to us at the moment 
to fulfill my obligation.
  I wish to pay appropriate tribute to the senior Senator from New 
York, Mr. Moynihan, on the occasion of his retirement. I have already 
done this within the committee on which we jointly sit, but I think at 
a more formal setting it is also appropriate.
  I first met Pat Moynihan when I was serving in the Nixon 
administration. He was then a member of the White House staff. I was 
serving in the Department of Transportation. He was the President's 
primary enforcer, if you will, of improvements and efficiencies in the 
executive branch, particularly in domestic departments. We at the 
Department of Transportation were a little bit in awe, if not in 
terror, of the thought of Pat Moynihan showing up and checking on us to 
make sure we were doing things right.
  I remember one meeting in the White House where we were outlining 
what we wanted to do, that which I considered to be fairly bold, and 
listening to Moynihan saying: Well, in a Republican administration, 
this is probably about the best you could expect. He wanted us to be 
considerably bolder than we were. He wanted to go into directions of 
new initiatives that would have been very good for the country.
  In addition to this, he was one of the architects of Nixon's program 
of family maintenance which, had it been enacted over the objections of 
the Democrats, probably would have solved many of our welfare problems.

[[Page 25288]]

  Mr. Moynihan was well respected then. President Nixon later used him 
as Ambassador to the United Nations and Ambassador to India. When he 
was running for a seat in the Senate, even though he was a Democrat, I, 
for one, was rooting for him to win.
  I have just finished reading a book called ``The Trust,'' which is 
the history of New York City. I was interested to find that the 
editorial board of the New York Times almost unanimously decided that 
in that primary they were going to endorse Bella Abzug for the Senate 
seat in New York. Fortunately, the publisher of the New York Times, 
Punch Sulzberger, came to his senses long enough to dictate a New York 
Times endorsement of Pat Moynihan, and this body was spared the 
experience of having Mrs. Abzug as the Senator from New York.
  Senator Moynihan and I have disagreed about a number of issues since 
we have been here. We have debated on many issues and clashed many 
times, but we have served together in many areas. He was a member of 
the Senate Y2K committee, a committed, active member who scheduled 
hearings in his home State of New York. We went there often. I was 
always impressed and uplifted by the amount of bipartisan support he 
gave to that effort. He was always well informed and completely without 
guile or without bitterness.
  He now goes on to a career he loves, which is teaching. I have read 
some of his books and wish I could be one of his students.
  This country will hang on to Pat Moynihan as a major resource and a 
national treasure for the remainder of his life. But we in the Senate 
have been well served by having him here as our colleague.
  One last thing I will say about Pat Moynihan, which is little known 
but which demonstrates the man, there is a story going around in 
Washington that says when John F. Kennedy went down Pennsylvania Avenue 
in his inaugural parade, he saw how shabby the avenue was, and with 
that vision often attributed to the Kennedy clan, he said we must do 
something to clean up Pennsylvania Avenue, and the restoration of 
Pennsylvania Avenue then occurred. Well, in fact, from the scholarly 
writings of Pat Moynihan, we find that it was not John F. Kennedy at 
all; it was Arthur Goldberg, who was in that parade and saw that 
shabbiness of Pennsylvania Avenue, who pointed it out to President 
Kennedy and, to his credit, the President said, ``Yes, let's do 
something about it.'' But he probably gave it no more thought than 
that.
  The assignment of seeing that something was done to the Nation's most 
monumental avenue ultimately fell to a young staffer named Pat 
Moynihan. It was he who drove the effort to see to it that Pennsylvania 
Avenue was cleaned up from the pawnshops and the other shabby 
architectural edifices that were there to the monumental avenue that it 
is today. Interestingly enough, it was while he was chairman of the 
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, leaning on the public 
works side of that environment, where he led the effort within the 
Congress to see to it that the necessary money was appropriated to 
build the monumental buildings of which we are all so proud.
  So we have a lasting architectural legacy to the public career of Pat 
Moynihan right here in the District of Columbia. I, for one, shall miss 
him. But I look forward to staying in touch with him as he tells me 
that he is going to stay in the Washington area and teach. I hope that 
at some point, when my career in the Senate ends, he is still teaching 
and I can take one of his classes. It has been a great privilege to 
serve in the Senate with the senior Senator from New York.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania is recognized.

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