A Whig in the White House: Daniel P. Moynihan

LBERALISM is a fractured philosophy: that is one of the LBERALISM is a fractured philosophy: that is one of the most obvious and most important facts about the American political scene. Conservatives or just cool pragmatists in the Nixon Administration are attacking, one by one, the most cherished liberal beliefs and programs. Both the beliefs and the programs are suddenly seen to be vulnerable because their backers clung to them too uncritically, too long, without sufficient regard for changing conditions. Close to the heart of this attack, and in a sense symbolizing it, is Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the President's Urban Affairs Counsellor, a man singularly well equipped to speak to both liberals and conservatives--and to infuriate both.

Last week a carefully argued memo, written by Moynihan and intended for the President only, was leaked to the press -- and created a furor. Countering the present pessimism about civil rights, Moynihan told Nixon that Negroes, in fact, made "extraordinary progress" during the 1960s. The family income of blacks considerably increased; the number of Negroes in professional and technical jobs doubled. Moynihan allowed that bitter hostility toward whites was widespread among young blacks and that the Nixon Administration had done little to reassure the Negro community. Nevertheless, he wondered if it was not time for "a period of 'benign neglect' "* on the subject of race. "We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades."

Whatever its intent, it is a phrase that will undoubtedly cling to Moynihan and the Nixon Administration. The President liked the memorandum and asked for its wide circulation. It went to three other White House assistants, four Cabinet members, and no fewer than 25 copies circulated around HEW, where, Moynihan suspects, the leak occurred. Reaction from liberals was swift. Twenty-one civil rights leaders made a highly emotional public reply, complaining that the memo was a "flagrant and shameful political document." It all depended on how the memo was read: it was, after all, written in the context of White House infighting; it could easily be interpreted as a slightly veiled attack on the conservatives in the Administration, especially John Mitchell: "At the risk of indiscretion, may I put it that lawyers are not professionally well-equipped to do much to prevent crime."

Power At an Ideological Price

There is nothing new in Pat Moynihan's sparking controversy. His memos have a habit of finding their way into print. Back in 1965, when he was an Assistant Secretary of Labor, he wrote a confidential report on the state of the Negro family; one of the chief factors condemning Negroes to poverty, he argued, was the unstable matriarchy created by the absence of fathers in so many homes. When the report got into the press, blacks and whites alike hotly denounced Moynihan for emphasizing black culpability more than white discrimination. In a book published last year, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, he argued that the antipoverty program exemplified splendidly the failure of participatory democracy. Many of his old friends in the New Frontier were angered and appalled.

Liberals find it hard to understand why Moynihan, who claims to be one of their own, spends much of his time rebutting his own creed. The answer is that Moynihan is a very undoctrinaire liberal who wants to get things done --and is willing to pay a certain ideological price to do so. This attitude distinguishes him from what Political Analyst Richard Scammon has dubbed the "uptight liberal" who insists on purity of doctrine, forgets that politics is the business of solving problems, and eats soul food even though he does not like it. By this standard, Moynihan qualifies as a downright loose liberal. He is loose in ideology--perfectly willing to blend liberal with conservative programs. He is loose in party affiliation, having served both Democratic and Republican administrations. He even acts loose. Amid the good gray personalities of the Nixon Administration Moynihan sports sideburns, drinks his whisky straight and displays a puckish humor.

When liberals chide him for joining a conservative Republican Administration, he retorts that too many of them have lost their way in contemporary America. They have, he believes, substituted moral fervor for political analysis. Many have "a frenzied attachment to the apocalypse," he says. "They see society in ahistorical terms: what is not altogether acceptable is altogether unacceptable; gradations are ignored and incremental movements are scorned." Many contemporary liberals, he says, have become arrogant and isolated from the rest of society because of their affluence. Today's liberal is "a well-educated middle-class person with an immense feeling of security and status and an almost impervious conditioning. This has led to an extraordinary decline in the sensitivity of liberal political thinking. Liberals have come to view the working-class experience as somehow debasing, and that amounts to a debasement of the only experience most people have. I have the feeling that behind a great deal of liberal posturing is nothing more than a Tory will to power."

An Income Strategy

Moynihan feels free to accept or reject liberal programs on the basis of their practicality. For this reason, he can work with Richard Nixon, who is also a pragmatist, though a conservative one. Both Moynihan and Nixon have questioned whether money alone is the answer to the nation's education problems or whether integration alone is an ultimate panacea for racial ills. This position, of course, can be an excuse for doing nothing at all, but Moynihan is as persuaded as Nixon that the country cannot be run from Washington, and he vigorously supports the President's call for a revitalization of local initiative and a sharing of federal revenues with the states. He has sharply criticized the federal highway program and much of urban renewal because they have insensitively uprooted local communities.

Like Nixon, Moynihan wants to keep the Federal Government from interfering excessively in individual lives. Thus, he proposes an "income strategy" to replace the "service strategy" traditionally favored by liberals. Instead of government providing the services--and the red tape --funds would go directly to the individual citizen, who would decide himself how to spend them. Moynihan would, in fact, restore a market economy for federal services; a recipient of federal aid would be able to choose among competing suppliers of services, whether housing, schools or medical care.

During his stay at the White House, Moynihan has seen one of his ideas reach the legislation stage. He was the principal author of the income-maintenance program that was voted out of the House Ways and Means Cammittee last week and stands an excellent chance of being passed by Congress this session. The program is a liberal-conservative hybrid. By guaranteeing a basic income for every U.S. family ($1,600 for a family of four) and doubling welfare expenditures to more than $8 billion, it appeals to the left. By requiring the head of every household who receives welfare aid to apply for a job or job training, it is palatable to the right. Beyond that, it may turn out to be the most important single piece of domestic legislation since the early New Deal.

Pat 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 Reserve Board.

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.

A Taste for Aristocracy

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 of his own voice; it is perhaps more accurate to say that London life turned him into a spiritual descendant of the Whigs --the 18th and early-19th century oligarchs who combined a sense of personal elitism with a certainty that they knew what was best for society. In any case, the experience imbued him with a fondness for place and a lively sense of the past. He is the contented owner of a 300-acre farm in the land of James Fenimore Cooper in upstate New York, where he spends summers with his wife Elizabeth and their three children.

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 resisted assimilation. In politics, he worked on Harriman's 1954 campaign for Governor of New York and later became Assistant Secretary of Labor under John Kennedy. The assassination hit him hard. "I don't think there's any point in being Irish," he said at the time, "if you don't think the world is going to break your heart eventually." In 1966, he accepted an invitation to head the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard and MIT. While there, he wrote an article for the Public Interest that caught Nixon's eye; the President decided that Moynihan was just the man to advise him on city problems.

Politics of Flamboyance

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 of bureaucratic routine, Nixon recently elevated him to a Cabinet-level Counsellor--and took away his staff.

His power may be somewhat clipped, but Moynihan, according to one White House aide, "still charms the pants off the President." "Some of his memos to Nixon are masterpieces," says a presidential aide, "and people in the White House would rather read Moynihan's stuff than anybody else's." His usefulness, however, may be coming to an end. He foresees tight budgets that will not permit more social experimentation of the scope of the welfare program. He also disagrees with many of the policies of Vice President Agnew and Attorney General Mitchell. When he first took the White House job, he said that he would stay only two years; he plans to stick to that timetable and leave sometime in 1970. "I'm a guest there," he has been heard to remark about his job.

But he is a guest who will be remembered and no doubt invited once again. Moynihan realizes that liberals constitute a minority in the house of American politics, and he is shrewd enough to know how to deal effectively with his host. Both in his politics and in his personality, Moynihan --unlike many doctrinaire liberals--has kept lines of communication open; he has tried to keep liberalism from congealing. No better service can be performed for any political creed.

* A phrase first used in 1839 by the Earl of Durham, Governor GenA phrase first used in 1839 by the Earl of Durham, Governor General of Canada; in a report to Parliament he praised the Whiggish policy of "benign neglect" toward Canada, which had helped, he said, move that country toward self-government.

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