The Wit and Wisdom of Daniel Patrick Moynihan

In 1952, Daniel Patrick Moynihan returned to America after completing a Fulbright scholarship at the London School of Economics. In his diary, he recorded feeling “distress with the idea of becoming a half-baked academic who’s growing more and more bitter at being deprived of the fruits of the great wide world beyond and being increasingly unsatisfied with the bitter fruit of the withered vines of the ivory tower.” Moynihan went on to become an advisor to presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, ambassador to India and the United Nations, senator from New York, and a professor in the Department of Government at Harvard. His early-career anxieties would have been good fodder for a memoir. Unfortunately, Moynihan never wrote one. The closest thing we have is his voluminous correspondence, collected for the first time in Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, edited by Steven R. Weisman and published October 12 by PublicAffairs.

Moynihan, who died in 2003, was a true rarity in American politics: an intellectual. The author of 18 books on race, ethnicity, urban policy, and foreign affairs, as well as countless essays in magazines like Commentary and The Public Interest, Moynihan was described in The New York Times as “The Senate’s Philosopher King.” George Will quipped that Moynihan “wrote more books than most senators have read.” (For more on Moynihan’s transformation from scholar to politician see this 2001 Michael Nelson essay from The Chronicle Review.)

The scholar-politician’s correspondents include presidents and prime ministers, as well as Woody Allen, Saul Bellow, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, Lionel Trilling, and John Updike. Among the letters selected by Weisman, a public-policy fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, is a gem from 1970 in which Moynihan offers unsolicited advice to the Harvard Corporation regarding its search for a new president. “Unless the next President of Harvard is a man who simply will not suffer the lying and deceiving intellectual outrages of the radical left, you’re going to end up with a university in which the decent men simply do not try to serve their function of teaching and learning.” Moynihan adds in closing: “You need a man with balls for this job.” —Evan R. Goldstein