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Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (March 16, 1927 – March 26, 2003) was an American politician and diplomat. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented New York in the United States Senate from 1977 until 2001 after serving as an adviser to President Richard Nixon, and as the United States' ambassador to India and to the United Nations.

This article is about the U.S. senator from New York. For the U.S. representative from Illinois, see P. H. Moynihan.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Joe Califano
(Domestic Affairs)

John Ehrlichman
(Domestic Affairs)

(1927-03-16)March 16, 1927
Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.

March 26, 2003(2003-03-26) (aged 76)
Washington, D.C., U.S.

Elizabeth Brennan
(m. 1955)

3

United States

1944–1947

USS Quirinus (ARL-39)

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Moynihan moved at a young age to New York City. Following a stint in the navy, he earned a Ph.D. in history from Tufts University. He worked on the staff of New York Governor W. Averell Harriman before joining President John F. Kennedy's administration in 1961. He served as an Assistant Secretary of Labor under Presidents Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, devoting much of his time to the War on Poverty. In 1965, he published the controversial Moynihan Report on black poverty. Moynihan left the Johnson administration in 1965 and became a professor at Harvard University.


In 1969, he accepted Nixon's offer to serve as an Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, and he was elevated to the position of Counselor to the President later that year. He left the administration at the end of 1970, and accepted appointment as United States Ambassador to India in 1973. He accepted President Gerald Ford's appointment to the position of United States Ambassador to the United Nations in 1975, holding that position until early 1976; later that year he won election to the Senate.


Moynihan served as Chairman of the Senate Environment Committee from 1992 to 1993 and as Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee from 1993 to 1995. He also led the Moynihan Secrecy Commission, which studied the regulation of classified information. He emerged as a strong critic of President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy and opposed President Bill Clinton's health care plan. He frequently broke with liberal positions, but opposed welfare reform in the 1990s. He also voted against the Defense of Marriage Act, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Congressional authorization for the Gulf War. He was tied with Jacob K. Javits as the longest-serving Senator from the state of New York until they were both surpassed by Chuck Schumer in 2023.

Early life and education[edit]

Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of Margaret Ann (née Phipps), a homemaker, and John Henry Moynihan, a reporter for a daily newspaper in Tulsa but originally from Indiana.[1][2] He moved at the age of six with his Irish Catholic family to New York City. Brought up in the working class neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen,[3] he shined shoes and attended various public, private, and parochial schools, ultimately graduating from Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. He was a parishioner of St. Raphael's Church, where he also cast his first vote.[4] He and his brother, Michael Willard Moynihan, spent most of their childhood summers at their grandfather's farm in Bluffton, Indiana. Moynihan briefly worked as a longshoreman before entering the City College of New York (CCNY), which at that time provided free higher education to city residents.


He also had a half-brother, Thomas Joseph Stapelfeld, born on June 28, 1941 to Margaret Ann (née Phipps) Moynihan and Henry Charles Stapelfeld.


Following a year at CCNY, Moynihan joined the United States Navy in 1944. He was assigned to the V-12 Navy College Training Program at Middlebury College from 1944 to 1945 and then enrolled as a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps student at Tufts University, where he received an undergraduate degree in naval science in 1946. He completed active service as Gunnery officer of the USS Quirinus at the rank of lieutenant (junior grade) in 1947. Moynihan then returned to Tufts, where he completed a second undergraduate degree in sociology[5] cum laude in 1948 and earned an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1949.


After failing the Foreign Service Officer exam, he continued his doctoral studies at the Fletcher School as a Fulbright fellow at the London School of Economics from 1950 to 1953. During this period, Moynihan struggled with writer's block and began to fashion himself as a "dandy", cultivating "a taste for Savile Row suits, rococo conversational riffs and Churchillian oratory" even as he maintained that "nothing and no one at LSE ever disposed me to be anything but a New York Democrat who had some friends who worked on the docks and drank beer after work." He also worked for two years as a civilian employee at RAF South Ruislip.[6]


He ultimately received his PhD in history from Tufts (with a dissertation on the relationship between the United States and the International Labour Organization) from the Fletcher School in 1961 while serving as an assistant professor of political science and director of a government research project centered around Averell Harriman's papers at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.[7][8]

Public speaker[edit]

Moynihan was a popular public speaker with a distinctly patrician style. He spoke with a slight stutter, which led him to draw out vowels. Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg compared his speaking style to that of William F. Buckley, Jr.[56]

Personal life[edit]

Moynihan married Elizabeth Brennan in 1955. The couple had three children, Tim, Maura, and John, and were married until Moynihan's death.


Moynihan was criticized after reportedly making offensive comments towards a woman of Jamaican descent at Vassar College in early 1990.[58] During a question-and-answer session, Moynihan told Folami Grey, an official at the Dutchess County Youth Bureau, "If you don't like it in this country, why don't you pack your bags and go back where you came from". This incident caused a protest in which 100 students took over the college's main administration building in response to his comments.

Death[edit]

Moynihan died at Washington Hospital Center on March 26, 2003, from complications of a ruptured appendix,[59] ten days after his 76th birthday.[60]

Beyond the Melting Pot, an influential study of , which he co-authored with Nathan Glazer (1963)

American ethnicity

, known as the Moynihan Report (1965)

The Negro Family: The Case For National Action

Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (1969)  0-02-922000-9

ISBN

Violent Crimes (1970)  0-8076-6053-1

ISBN

Coping: Essays on the Practice of Government (1973)  0-394-48324-3

ISBN

The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan (1973)  0-394-46354-4.

ISBN

Business and Society in Change (1975)  1440432

OCLC

A Dangerous Place coauthor , (1978) ISBN 0-316-58699-4

Suzanne Garment

Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year, 1980 (1980)  1-56554-516-8

ISBN

Family and Nation: The Godkin Lectures (1986)  0-15-630140-7

ISBN

Came the Revolution (1988)

On the Law of Nations (1990)  0-674-63576-0

ISBN

Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (1994)  0-19-827946-9

ISBN

Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy (1996)  0-674-57441-9

ISBN

Secrecy: The American Experience (1998)  0-300-08079-4

ISBN

Future of the Family (2003)  0-87154-628-0

ISBN

In 1966, Moynihan was elected to the [69]

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

In 1968, Moynihan was elected to the [70]

American Philosophical Society

The 5th Annual in Public Policy (1999)[71]

Heinz Award

Doctor of Laws degree from Tufts, his alma mater.

Honorary

1989 from the National Building Museum[72]

Honor Award

In 1989, Moynihan received the U.S. Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, an award given out annually by .[73]

Jefferson Awards

On August 9, 2000, he was presented with the by President Clinton.[74]

Presidential Medal of Freedom

In 1992, he was awarded the by the University of Notre Dame, considered the most prestigious award for American Catholics.[75]

Laetare Medal

In 1994 the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation awarded Moynihan its Lone Sailor Award for his naval service and subsequent government service.

The , which opened in January 2021, is named for him. It expanded New York Penn Station with a new concourse for Long Island Rail Road and Amtrak passengers in the adjacent, renovated James Farley Post Office building.[76] Moynihan had long championed the project, which is modeled after the original Penn Station; he had shined shoes in the original station as a boy during the Great Depression. During his latter years in the Senate, Moynihan had to secure federal approvals and financing for the project.[77]

Moynihan Train Hall

In 2005, the of Syracuse University renamed its Global Affairs Institute as the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.[78]

Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs

The in Manhattan's Foley Square was named in his honor.

federal district courthouse

"I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought we had a little more time."
– Reacting to the assassination of , November 1963[79]

John F. Kennedy

"No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty."
The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, 1973

[80]

"Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is."
Secrecy: The American Experience, 1998

[81]

List of U.S. political appointments that crossed party lines

Benign neglect

The Public Interest

Aksamit, Daniel. "How the pathology became tangled: Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the liberal explanation of poverty since the 1960s." PS: Political Science & Politics 50.2 (2017): 374-378.

Andelic, Patrick. “Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the 1976 New York Senate Race, and the Struggle to Define American Liberalism.” Historical Journal 57#4 (2014), Pp. 1111–33. .

online

Fromer, Yoav. "Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the Politics of Tragedy." Review of Politics 84.1 (2022): 80-105 .

online

Geary, Daniel. Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (University of Pennsylvania Press; 2015)

Heath, Karen Patricia. "Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his 'Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture' (1962)." PS: Political Science & Politics 50.2 (2017): 384-387.

online

Hess, Stephen. The Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House (2014)

excerpt

Hodgson, Godfrey. The Gentleman From New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan – A Biography (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2000) 480 pages.

Hower, Joseph E. "'The Sparrows and the Horses': Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Family Assistance Plan, and the Liberal Critique of Government Workers, 1955–1977". Journal of Policy History 28.2 (2016): 256-289.

online

Rowe, Daniel. "The Politics of Protest: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Great Society Liberalism and the Vocal Minority, 1965-1968". PS, Political Science & Politics 50.2 (2017): 388+.

Sánchez, Marta E. "One 'in bed' with la Malinche: stories of 'family' á la Octavio Paz, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Oscar Lewis." in Shakin'Up" Race and Gender (University of Texas Press, 2021) pp. 23–38.

Weiner, Greg. American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (University Press of Kansas; 2015) 189 pages;

Wilson, William Julius. "The Moynihan Report and research on the black community". The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621.1 (2009): 34–46.

United States Congress. . Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.

"Daniel Patrick Moynihan (id: M001054)"

A film clip is available for viewing at the Internet Archive

"The Open Mind – Taking a Stand for American Beliefs (September 27, 2007)"

on C-SPAN

Appearances

Ambassador Moynihan's 1975 Address to the United Nations General Assembly

at Internet Archive

Works by or about Daniel Patrick Moynihan

: Moynihan Season 38, episode 2

American Masters