Moynihan To Speak Today

Daniel Patrick Moynihan doesn’t exactly fit the profile of a bully.

With his slight build, shock of gray hair, spectacles and bow ties, the 75-year-old who will deliver this year’s Commencement address looks more like a gentleman than a ruffian.

But when he was younger, growing up in New York City, Moynihan used to augment his income by picking on smaller, weaker newspaper boys—or so onlookers thought.

A teenaged Moynihan devised a ploy in which his younger and smaller brother, Mike, would go into Manhattan pubs trying to sell newspapers.

Mike would often enjoy little success finding customers in a bar, until his brother walked in.

“Sometimes he’d go in, and I’d show up a few minutes later,” the elder Moynihan brother recalls. “I’d say, ‘Hey this is my beat! Get the hell out of here!’ Sometimes I’d knock his papers to the floor and walk out. And a few more people would feel sorry and buy newspapers from my brother.”

With this kind of ingenuity, the newsboy bully went on to become a Harvard government professor and a respected and controversial U.S. senator.

The man who has spent almost 50 years in public service was born of an Irish-American family in Oklahoma in 1927. His family moved to New York City while he was still a baby, and he spent much of his childhood in a poor neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

His father left the family when Moynihan was about 10 years old. And the financial instability of his family prompted him to spend much of his time trying to earn money. He worked on the docks, as a stockboy at a department store and on a suburban farm, in addition to a number of other odd jobs.

“I learned about Pearl Harbor from a man whose shoes I was shining,” he recalls.

Despite his own relatively modest background, Moynihan says the United States during the Depression era was still a “land of large opportunity.”

Moynihan excelled academically at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem and matriculated at New York’s City College after graduation.

In 1944, after his first year at City College, he entered the U.S. Naval Reserve. He served on active duty for three years and spent two decades in the reserve, retiring in 1966.

He continued his education at the same time, attending several East Coast schools with the help of the G.I. Bill. By the time he retired from the Naval Reserve, he had earned a bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate—all from Tufts University—and had studies at the London School of Economics as a Fulbright Scholar.

After his active-duty years, Moynihan cultivated his interest in politics, which had begun with a political science class in high school, by working on the staff of New York Governor Averell Harriman in the late 1950s.

From state politics, he moved on to the U.S. Department of Labor, in which he served as an assistant to the secretary of labor from 1961 to 1965.

In his last year with the department, his office released a report entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” which analyzed the link between black urban poverty and the breakdown of black family structure.

The watershed study, which sustained criticism from civil rights activists because they felt it blamed blacks themselves for black poverty, became known as the “Moynihan Report” and threw the relatively unknown government official into the limelight for the first time.

The next year he was named director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard and MIT and gained tenure at Harvard as a professor of government.

His time in the Faculty raised doubts in his mind about the credibility of the sociological research he had undertaken on the black family.

“It was when I got to Harvard that I realized I wasn’t a scholar,” he once told a biographer. “My training in international law really didn’t prepare me for what I would be doing.”

But Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, who chaired the government department during the later years of Moynihan’s stint, says he had confidence in Moynihan’s work.

“As a political scientist, he was at the very top,” Mansfield says. “He’s someone you can count on for brilliance and scholarship.”

Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) expresses a similar sentiment, despite having sat on the other side of the aisle when both he and Moynihan were senators.

“Pat Moynihan is a man with great intellect and great humor and is one of the most profound thinkers on American public policy in this generation,” he says.

After a decade in the Faculty, he left Harvard to gain a position in the government that, for years, he had studied and for which he had worked.

In 1976, Mansfield notes, Moynihan became the first Harvard professor since John Quincy Adams, Class of 1787, to run for the senate while still a member of the Faculty.

“The University was not thrilled with his time away,” Mansfield says.

To the present day, though, Moynihan denies that the campaign had any effect on his role as a member of the Faculty.

“I decided to run in June of ’76,” he says. “I got on the ballot, won the nomination but taught the class all through the campaign.”

After winning his first bid in 1976, he went on to win reelection three times—only the second New York senator to accomplish the feat.

Moynihan became an eminent figure in the Senate because of his longevity in an institution that values seniority. He served as both chair and, later, ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee. But he caught flak for his aloofness and isolation from other senators.

He was best known for having opposed NAFTA, advocated the expansion of Social Security and pushed for federal subsidization of New York’s public transportation.

In the mid-1970s, during the years before his first Senate bid, he served as ambassador to India and, later, the U.S. representative to the United Nations. In fact, the very year he decided to run for the senate, he served as president of the U.N. Security Council.

Moynihan is the only person in American history to have cabinet or sub-cabinet positions under four presidents—John F. Kennedy ’40, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford—an achievement he cites as his proudest accomplishment in a career of public service spanning nearly half-a-century.

After deciding not to run for reelection in 2000, his seat was filled by Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I had a good run, and when I felt it was a good run, I decided to call it quits,” he says of his decision to conclude his career as a politician.

Throughout his Senate years Moynihan gained national notice as a writer as well as politician. He wrote 18 books and his latest, called Secrecy: The American Experience, criticizes the U.S. government for concealing information both from the public and from government officials.

And after Sept. 11, Moynihan’s views on the government’s response to terrorism have received significant attention.

“Proclamation of a wartime crisis automatically increases the amount of government secrecy,” he said this winter.

Now Moynihan the politician and policy-wonk has returned to academia. He currently teaches at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

—Anthony S.A. Freinberg contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Alexander J. Blenkinsopp can be reached at blenkins@fas.harvard.edu.