Good man.
Former Sen. Moynihan Has Died
Martin Weil
Washington Post Staff Writer
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the scholar and senator, the orator and author, whose intellectual and political leadership did much to shape national policy on the major issues of his time, died today, his successor, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced on the Senate floor.
The cause of death was not immediately announced but Sen. Moynihan, 76, had been ill for several months. This month he had been hospitalized at the Washington Hospital Center after an emergency appendectomy.
A Democrat, Sen. Moynihan represented New York in the Senate for four terms. He decided not to seek reelection in 2000
Throughout his 24 years on Capitol Hill, he was one of the most trenchant and memorable voices in the ongoing national debate on such issues as national security and Social Security, as well as on welfare reform and family matters.
Beyond that, he gained honor, recognition-and often ignited controversy-in many roles: Harvard teacher and lecturer, ambassador to India and to the United Nations, adviser to presidents.
He was an advocate of renewing and preserving cities and their downtown buildings, winning renown in Washington as a champion of restoring Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the U.S. Capitol. His use of the phrase "benign neglect" to characterize an approach to racial policy that he was advocating set off a firestorm that smoldered for years
A blend of the ivory tower and the big city streets, he combined gifts and qualities that were in many ways unique in American public life: a propensity to lecture fellow senators on sometimes abstruse topics and a proven ability to win the votes of an often fractious and fragmented constituency on election day.
An orator with an easy mastery of statistical fact and telling anecdote, he was a pungent phrasemaker, formidable in debate. In diagnosing the nation's social ills, he warned in an oft-repeated phrase, that America was "defining deviancy down."
During Clinton administration debates over health care reform, he said that to threaten the nation's teaching hospitals was "a sin against the Holy Ghost."
He was a spokesman for the nation's mass transportation systems and for high culture, with a demonstrable ability to use the political system to obtain funds for both.
In searching for parallels to his career, with its combination of intellectual virtuosity and political leadership, commentators cited the names of Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Jefferson.
Often seen as a politician ahead of his time, he was recognized as a liberal Democrat who was also a dedicated foe of communism, a combination that led commentators to characterize him as one of the first and most prominent of the so-called neoconservatives.
In 1980 he warned that the "Soviet empire" had begun again to expand, extending influence into Central America while bolstering its nuclear forces in a manner that was "mad and relentless."
Further, he was regarded as one of the first to foresee the decline of the Soviet menace, and the eventual collapse of the Communist empire.
Throughout his career he maintained a vigorous interest in protecting the long-term vitality of American society by shoring up Social Security and reforming welfare.
But he was also notable for his opposition to aspects of the welfare reform measures passed during the Clinton administration.
He expressed the fear that it penalized helpless children, and when it was signed he said: "Shame on the president."
Peering owlishly through horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a bow tie, a lock of hair tumbling across his forehead, he often displayed the slightly disheveled look that many considered to be distinctively professorial.
In his style of address, he was described at times as staccato, or stammering, or even spluttering. Sudden pauses were followed by rapid bursts of speech.
Those practices and mannerisms that seemed suggestive of the scholar led some to believe that he might not be well suited to the gritty arts of legislative politics, the trading of favors and crafting of compromises.
Yet when he rose to become chairman of the Senate Finance Committee for a time in the Clinton administration, he was credited with signal service in guiding the administration's budget and tax measures to passage.
Sen. Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Okla., to a father who was in journalism and advertising. When he was still young, his father deserted the family and there were years during the senator's childhood in New York when keeping the family afloat was a difficult struggle for his mother.
After attending New York public and parochial schools, the senator enrolled at City College of New York in 1943, reportedly worked for a time as a longshoreman and served in the Navy during World War II. As part of officer training, the Navy sent him to Tufts University in Medford, Mass., where he received a bachelor's degree in 1948. He received masters and doctoral degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.
He held a Fulbright fellowship at the London School of Economics and political science and later in the 1950s became an aide to New York Gov. W. Averell Harriman.
His academic and vocational interests both showed leanings toward politics, government and urban affairs. From 1959 to 1961 he was the director of Syracuse University's New York State Government Research Project.. At one time he ran in the Democratic primary for the post of chairman of the New York City Council.
At the start of the Kennedy administration in 1961, he joined the Labor Department, starting as a special assistant to the secretary and becoming assistant secretary for policy planning, serving through the early years of the Johnson administration.
After a sojourn in the academic world, he returned to Washington as an urban affairs adviser in the Nixon administration, and later served Presidents Nixon and Ford as ambassador to India. President Ford later made him ambassador to the United Nations, where he served through 1976 . While there, he denounced Soviet intransigence and expansionist policy and challenged Third World policies that he viewed as motivated less by morality than by greed. He brushed aside criticisms of the United States, defying listeners to "find its equal."
He also impressed his future New York constituents with his vigorous defense of Israel.
An advertisement for his Senate race urged: "He spoke up for America. He'd speak up for New York." He was first elected to the Senate in 1976.
In office, he staked out the positions that came to be characterized as neoconservative: hostility to Soviet imperialism, compassion for the American poor.
Speaking in August, 1980, at the Democratic National Convention that renominated Jimmy Carter, he warned that the "Soviet empire" had begun again to expand, extending influence into Central America while bolstering its nuclear forces in a manner that was "mad and relentless."
The next year, the first year of the Reagan administration, he expressed his opposition to cuts passed by the Senate Budget Committee. "We have undone 30 years of social legislation in three days," he complained.
He was author, coauthor or contributor to many books, including "Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City," on which he collaborated with Nathan Glazer.
He wrote on international law, on the role of ethnicity in international politics, on secrecy in government.
The Godkin lectures which he gave at Harvard University in 1985 were published as "Family and a Nation."
A reviewer described it as "a tale of the inability of politicians and social scientists to do something about the continuing destruction of the two-parent family," and the catastrophic consequences of this inability for the nation's social fabric.
This was an issue that Sen. Moynihan had been identified with throughout his career in public life, and another review of the same book said that its true strength came not from the marshalling of statistics, but when the senator "talks to us from the heart."
A review of another of the senator's books said that it went far toward showing that "the story of modern American social policy and the story of Daniel Patrick Moynihan are one and the same."
In 2000, President Clinton awarded Sen. Moynihan the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
He and his wife had three children.
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