Word: moynihan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...notion that black families are mired in self-imposed trauma stems from Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report, in which Moynihan argued that the black family was a "tangle of pathology" whose destruction by slavery had produced female-headed households, absent fathers and high illegitimacy. Interestingly, Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the few Negro leaders who refused to condemn the future New York Senator's report. "The shattering blows on the Negro family have made it fragile, deprived and often psychopathic," King said at the time. "Nothing is so much needed as a secure family life...
...Russert's first exposure to politics was in the wards of Buffalo, but his great teachers were national figures - Senator Pat Moynihan and Governor Mario Cuomo. It's easy to understand why a man as driven as Tim, who might have easily made a name for himself in his twenties, spent so much of his early professional career in their service. Like Russert, they were from working-class Catholic families and combined an intellectual appreciation of Democratic policies with a visceral understanding of Democratic voters. Moynihan was an intellectual raised in Hell's Kitchen; Cuomo was a gritty minor league...
...only an expert on policy when he worked for Moynihan and Cuomo, he was also their chief spokesman. As an aide he was famous for getting great press for his bosses and was a favorite among the press corps, which made his transition from partisan staffer to objective journalist - at the time an unheard-of move - appear effortless. In fact, Tim was the pioneer of a new generation of television journalists who got their start in politics. He was the first who crossed to the other side, but he was soon followed by Chris Matthews (who studied at the knee...
...lifetime favor by introducing me to his boss, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in 1978. Moynihan became a mentor and inspiration to me, and gave me a graduate education in all things New York. Tim's favorite Moynihan story was about the time he had to pick up Pat at the Pierre Hotel in New York to take him to a dinner. Tim arrived at the hotel and heard the distinctive laugh, "Ah-ah-ah-ah-AH!" from inside the room. "Ah-ah-ah-ah-AH!" Just peals of laughter. Russert paused a minute, uncertain about bothering the boss...
...appropriate that Russert found his way to Moynihan who, in his classic work with Nathan Glazer, Beyond the Melting Pot, offered the theory that ethnicity, more than class, had been the key social organizing principle in American cities. Tim was proudly, indelibly Irish - not only in his early beer-drinking years, but also in his more Jesuitical incarnation as the host of Meet the Press, when he refused to socialize on Saturday nights. "He's become a monk," Maureen would say. And yet, even at the top of his profession, he never lost track of his roots - in part, because...