Word: moynihan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Moynihan is not exactly delighted about stirring up political storms, but he certainly thrives on them. His personality itself is something of a storm; people feel that it is heavy, but not unpleasant weather when he is around. Always approachable and cheerfully argumentative, he can, as a friend puts it, "elevate a pub crawl into an intellectual experience." With a memory that is rapacious for detail, he can reel off poetry as if it were statistics and make statistics sound much like poetry. He is friendly even with his ideological opponents like Arthur Burns, the conservative chairman of the Federal...
...Moynihan did not have a conventional liberal upbringing. There were books in his home, it is true, but they were always in danger of being repossessed, like the family auto. When he was eleven, his father, a ne'er-do-well newsman, walked out on the family, which partly explains Pat's lifelong preoccupation with broken homes. To provide for her daughter and two sons, Pat's mother became a night nurse and later opened a bar in Hell's Kitchen on Manhattan's West Side; Pat often served as bartender...
After graduating from Tufts University, Moynihan went to the London School of Economics where he underwent not so much an intellectual as a social conversion. "In England," he fondly reminisces, "the next best thing to being aristocratic and having an entree into society is being connected with the Labor Party. Every time you turned around, you were face to face with the Queen." He blossomed out in Savile Row suits and developed a taste for fine food and wines. Captious critics suggest that England gave him the airs of an Edwardian intellectual dandy who became intoxicated with the sound...
...When Moynihan returned to New York, he simultaneously began to contribute articles to Manhattan journals and to get involved in politics. "In the Jewish culture," says Harvard Sociologist Nathan Glazer, "you get out of poverty by going to college and becoming a lawyer or an intellectual. In the Irish culture, you get out by going into politics. Pat did both. He links the Jewish intelligentsia and the world of politics." On the intellectual side, he collaborated with Glazer in writing Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), a groundbreaking study that pointed out how strongly America's various ethnic groups have...
...Moynihan's Celtic exuberance often gets him into trouble. To be flamboyantly candid is not the safest form of political behavior. Last fall, when it became apparent that federal spending on domestic programs would not markedly increase after the Viet Nam War, he could not resist telling reporters that the peace dividend would be as "evanescent as the morning mists over San Clemente." White House economists had to reassure the nation that the potential dividend was not all that evanescent. He is also an inept administrator. Partly to make White House operations more orderly, partly to relieve Moynihan...