Word: moynihan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...stance was not inconsistent with views he had expressed all along. He landed the job, in fact, after writing an article for Commentary magazine urging Americans to stand up for their principles and talk back to their totalitarian detractors. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Moynihan that he wished he had written the article himself. Notes Moynihan: "He said I would know this was the highest compliment he could pay another...
...Moynihan lived up to his words. Certainly, the intemperate Third World attacks on the U.S. and Israel de served some kind of strong rebuttal. He replied to Idi Amin's ranting assault on Is rael by calling Uganda's dictator a "racist murderer." He excoriated the rest of the U.N. for tolerating vicious abuse of the world's dwindling democracies. "There are those in this country," he said, "whose pleasure, or profit, it is to believe that our assailants are motivated by what is wrong about us . . . We are assailed because we are a democracy...
Trying to assuage indignant Africans, the U.S. mission drafted a press release in which the ambassador would have acknowledged that while some of Amin's remarks were offensive, others deserved wide approval. Moynihan balked. "I let it be known," he writes, "that not one god damn thing Amin had said had won my 'wide approval.' " It began to dawn on Kissinger that his ambassador was more than he had bargained for. Bit by leaked bit, the Secretary indicated his displeasure, until a rebuke via James Reston's column in the New York Times persuaded Moynihan that...
...book, Moynihan settles some scores with the man who more or less dumped him. While professing to admire Kissinger's energy, ambition and daring, Moynihan portrays him as a Machiavellian who never says what he means. He claims that Kissinger's former aide, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, once told him: "Henry does not lie because it is in his interest. He lies because it is in his nature." (Denying he made such a remark, Sonnenfeldt says that it "sounds so much like a Moynihan aphorism...
Their dialogue is likely to continue. Moynihan, apparently, wants to run for President. Failing that, he will remain in the Senate. Kissinger, meanwhile, has said that he, too, might like to run for the Senate in New York in 1980. If he were elected as New York's "junior" member, would the Senate be big enough to contain two such irrepressible and combustible personalities...