Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003)

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

If that is all the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said or did he would be my hero for life.

But he said and wrote much more and we can thank former editor and journalist Steven R. Weissman for this excellent sampling from Moynihan’s mountain of letters.

Editorialists excoriated Moynihan at the end of his career as having accomplished little as a politician. He wrote many books. He taught at Harvard, and MIT, and Syracuse. Before becoming a politician himself he served four American presidents in succession starting as one of the frontiersmen in John F. Kennedy’s administration.

To his critics he appeared to switch sides from being a liberal Democrat to a conservative for Richard Nixon. He was called a neocon and hated the term.

In his social science research he was labelled a racist by African American scholars for identifying problems in the nuclear family unit as one source of poverty for inner-city blacks.

But the story is more nuanced.

He fought in Nixon’s cabinet for a Guaranteed Annual Income, something Nixon approved of but never came to pass.

He wrote and lobbied for family support payments, something Republican conservatives forced President Clinton to back down on.

He detested the CIA and complained endlessly about secrecy in government. If the CIA was so good, he asked, why didn’t they predict the fall of the Soviet. Union, something he was expecting for a decade or longer.

He was unfairly pinned for gunning down Hilary Clinton’s health reform while he was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, but even Clinton herself came to acknowledge that she should have listened to him more closely.

Reading the letters of a politician in a democracy could be as dull as watching paint dry, but when you see up close how hard it is, and how poorly compensated these wretches are, you realize all the more how fragile democracy is and must be to work.… (mehr)