A FIGHTING IRISHMAN AT THE U.N.
On one wall in the drawing room of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's apartment in Manhattan's Waldorf Towers hangs a painting of General Custer on a tightrope over Niagara Falls. That peculiarly American image of bravado might seem out of place in the otherwise formal eleven-room suite that is the official residence of the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. But it aptly reflects the spirit of fight and daredeviltry that Moynihan has brought to the U.S.'s Turtle Bay headquarters. Diplomatically and intellectually, Moynihan often does this kind of balancing act. Or, in another Custer image, he makes his stand against the anti-American and anti-Western onslaughts he perceives everywhere--but he is not about to suggest that it is a last stand. Moynihan has enraged Third World delegates, discomfited his Western European colleagues, and brought cheer to the hearts of Americans, who have taken to his brand of dukes-up diplomacy and feel that someone is at last talking back at the world.
Last week Moynihan was deep in his latest battle, at the U.N. Security Council. There the U.S. faced a concerted Arab effort to enhance the diplomatic status of the Palestine Liberation Organization, further isolate Israel and bedevil American peacemaking efforts.
As expected, the U.S. was unable to stand off an Arab drive led by the Syrians to allow the Palestine Liberation Organization to participate in the debate with all the privileges of a member state. Thus a Palestinian delegation, led by the P.L.O.'s "Foreign Minister," Farouk Kaddoumi, made the fourth for mal appearance in U.N. proceedings since Yasser Arafat's triumphal arrival at the U.N. the fall of 1974. Also as expected, Israel's Ambassador Chaim Herzog made good on his boycott threat if the P.L.O. was admitted. The U.S. was thus left alone to defend both Israel and its own Middle East policy.
Early in the week, Moynihan got into a short but sharp verbal tussle with his Russian counterpart. The admission of the P.L.O. delegation, Moynihan protested, showed a "totalitarian" disregard for due process that threatened to turn the U.N. into "an empty shell." Soviet Ambassador Yakov Malik replied: "I agree with the professor, who lectured us that totalitarianism is a terrible thing indeed. But no less terrible is gangsterism." Moynihan had the last, somewhat heavy word: "Totalitarianism is bad, gangsterism is worse, but capitulationism is the worst of all."
nt week's end differences between the moderate Egyptians and the more radical Syrians were still preventing the Arab bloc countries from working out a draft resolution that was expected to call for acceptance of "the national rights" of Palestinians and a timetable for Israeli withdrawal from all territory occupied since the 1967 war. Although the U.S. reportedly would be amenable to a resolution that recognized "the legitimate interests" of the Palestinians, Moynihan--who is acting under precise instructions from a somewhat nervous State Department during this debate--said the U.S. would veto any formulation that mentioned Palestinian "rights" or Israeli withdrawal.
Since he hung up his trademark Irish plaid hat at the U.N. last July, Moynihan has become one of the most jarring diplomats ever to inhabit the towering glass menagerie on Manhattan's East Side. A big (6 ft. 5 in.), bouncy, exuberant man with a cherubic Irish face and a floppy lock of prematurely gray hair, Moynihan, 48, has a well-developed ability to both charm and infuriate. Walking down a corridor, he can pick up a retinue with a nonstop monologue of patter, pontification and wisecracks ("If the U.N. didn't exist, it would be impossible to invent it").
His style is a blend of Gaelic eloquence, Harvard donnishness and American stump evangelism. In front of a microphone or over a dinner table, he can draw on a broad mental library of recondite words, literary and historical allusions and outlandish bits of jargon to taunt, flatter or flay adversaries. He has stormed the rostrum to denounce the General Assembly as "a theater of the absurd" and to dismiss reports on American imperialism as "rubbish." When something clear and pleasing emerges from U.N. newspeak, he quotes James Joyce to describe the rare phenomenon: "Its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance ... the object achieves its epiphany."
When words fail him, which is almost never, Moynihan does not mind making a point peripatetically: he will wander into the Security Council during a debate, walk around, sit down, get up, go out and come back in. "We sometimes feel that he does not take the Security Council seriously," complains one East Asian diplomat.
Some delegates fume at his hit-and-run habit of simply walking out of the Council or the General Assembly after delivering a tough speech and letting his deputies handle the fallout. On one such occasion, Moynihan started to stroll out of the Assembly when Saudi Arabia's voluble Ambassador Jamil Baroody was standing at the speaker's rostrum. "Come back, sit down, perhaps you may learn something," Baroody taunted. Moynihan came to an abrupt halt, wheeled around, sat down and peered up at Baroody with a look of exaggerated attention on his face.
Moynihan has won understandably mixed reviews at the U.N. The Israelis are delighted. But many Western allies are less enthusiastic. Before he introduced his resolution on worldwide amnesty for political prisoners (which was quickly defeated), Moynihan failed to consult any other delegations. One important Western ambassador first heard of the resolution when he tuned in to
NBC's Today show and heard Moynihan describing it to Barbara Walters as a major American initiative. In a widely publicized outburst last November, Britain's Ambassador Ivor Richard compared Moynihan (without actually naming him) variously to a trigger-happy Wyatt Earp, a vengeful Savonarola and a demented King Lear "raging amidst the storm on the blasted heath." Another Western delegate claims that "never in my U.N. experience have I seen such open criticism of an American ambassador by my colleagues."
On the other hand, some U.N. diplomats admire him without saying so in public. At least one Third World delegate has conceded that his "bluntness was necessary and good."
Certainly much of the U.S. would agree.
In the seven months since his appointment, messages have been pouring into the U.S. mission in unprecedented quantity--28,261 pieces of mail as of last week, only 191 of which have been critical. The cheers have been coming from both conservatives, who have historically distrusted the U.N., and liberals, whose commitment to the organization is not as automatic as it used to be, partly as a result of Israel's travails. In the press, praise for Moynihan has come from such politically distant quarters as the right-wing Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, which has applauded "the blunt speaking that has upset the cookie pushers in our State Department," and the generally liberal Atlanta Constitution, which has praised Moynihan in editorials arguing that "the U.S. should play hardball" in the U.N.
Moynihan has won encomiums from Ronald Reagan, who has invoked his name several times while stumping New Hampshire, and from former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, who says his only criticism of the ambassador is that "his so-called hard line seems too soft to me."
A recent survey conducted by the Opinion Research Corp. showed that although public support for the United Nations is waning, Americans overwhelmingly endorse Moynihan: 70% wanted him to continue speaking "frankly and forthrightly" even at the expense of "tact and diplomacy." Moynihan has a following of sorts in parts of the country where Turtle Bay seems about as close (and vital) as Timbuctoo. Says Texas Businessman Kenneth Welch: "Moynihan is a top, rough-cut stone. We don't produce many like that in the U.S." Adds Minneapolis Housewife Marion Lee: "So what if he goes off half-cocked sometimes? I think we need him."
Such views are not necessarily shared at the State Department, where many career diplomats regard Moynihan's pugilistic style as unprofessional and counterproductive. But the growing public support for the fighting Irishman has so far helped to shield him from open trouble from some of those at Foggy Bottom who are known to be uneasy about him, a list that includes the Secretary of State. Henry Kissinger is clearly nettled by Moynihan's addiction to center stage. Once Kissinger heard that Moynihan was getting credit for a well-received Kissinger speech that he himself had written. Said he angrily: "Pat Moynihan's attitude is that he gets a good day's work out of me."
Privately, Kissinger fumed when Moynihan threatened to resign last November over what he considered to be tepid support of him by State; but publicly, he insisted that his differences with Moynihan have merely been "over adjectives, not substance." At times, the differences have involved a divergence in styles so deep that they have become matters of substance.
Kissinger, however, had a hand in recruiting Moynihan. Early last year, in the wake of a number of foreign policy embarrassments--the fall of Cambodia, the Communist takeover in Saigon, the temporary collapse of Kissinger's Cairo-Jerusalem peace shuttle--Kissinger and President Ford were looking for someone to shore up the U.S.'s increasingly defensive position in the U.N. Moynihan got the job, quite literally through a magazine article--a lengthy analysis of what he called "the massive failure of American diplomacy" published in the once liberal but increasingly conservative monthly Commentary. In it, Moynihan argued that the U.S. was singularly inept at coping with the rapid change that has expanded the U.N. since its founding in 1945 from a manageable round table of 51 nations, with Western democracies in the majority, to a sometimes brawling arena of 144 delegations, more than 100 of which are hostile Third World or Communist countries.
Under the management of an anti-Western General Assembly President, Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, the 1974 session saw overwhelming votes to suspend South Africa from the Assembly, grant observer status to the P.L.O., and encourage the creation of raw materials cartels similar to OPEC. At the 1974 special assembly on a new economic order--a meeting occasioned largely by the devastating impact of that year's oil-price increases--the U.S. maintained a hangdog silence while it was accused of wasting energy, warmongering, polluting and eating too much.
After berating the West in public, Third World delegates would often privately explain that only bloc solidarity had motivated their diatribe and that this should not inhibit Western economic aid. As Moynihan put it, "For too long we have been given private assurances that public obscenities were not meant."
Rather than turn a deaf ear--much less another cheek--Moynihan suggested the West start fighting back. He urged:
"It is time that the American spokesman came to be feared in international forums for the truths he might tell."
The most notable truths--his critics would say half-truths--Moynihan has told concern the poor nations of the Third World. He concedes that in the past there has been exploitation by the West but perhaps, he suggests, economic inequality in the world is less a matter of capitalist rapacity than of the Third World's own economic inefficiency--an inefficiency rooted in history, geography and socialism. The plain, observable facts are, he says, that socialism has proved to be "a distinctly poor means of producing wealth" and that high living standards are associated with relatively free market economies.
Moynihan would concede that planned or mixed economies may be necessary in many underdeveloped nations. Nor does he think that socialism is inherently incompatible with American values. He makes the obvious distinction between totalitarian and democratic socialists. The latter, "closely involved with the labor movement, committed to long perspectives in politics," he feels, should be more heavily wooed and relied on by the U.S. in the common cause.
But, Moynihan argues, Third World socialism, which he regards as Britain's most important colonial export, rests on the assumption that there are "vast stores of unethically accumulated wealth" in the industrial countries. Feeling that there were still "scores to be settled" even after independence, Third World radicals began using socialist rhetoric to defend not only redistribution of wealth but "something ominously close to looting." Moynihan sees a spreading "bias for equality over liberty" all over the world. As new nations fail to achieve either equality or economic growth at home, they divert attention to inequalities between nations, ascribing "national ills to international causes."
Thus more and more newly minted Third World nations adopt or accept autocratic socialist forms of government. As a result, Moynihan says, there are today no more than two dozen genuine democracies remaining in the world, and indeed he has suggested gloomily that liberal democracy in the 20th century may be the kind of vanishing phenomenon that monarchy was in the 19th. As a consequence, the U.N. has become "a locus of general assault" by the majority of socialist nations "on the principles of liberal democracy."
Moynihan got his first opportunity to act on his ideas last August. Cuban representatives to the Committee on Decolonization called for recognition of the small Puerto Rican independence movement and proposed that a U.N. commission be sent to the island to investigate charges of American "political oppression." Moynihan made it clear that the U.S. would consider a vote for the motion "flagrant interference" in American internal affairs. Indeed, he made his point so forcefully that one Third-World delegate asked a U.S. mission officer: "Are you threatening us?"
The officer passed the question on to Moynihan, who answered: "Tell him yes." Debate on the question was suspended by an ll-to-9 vote. Later Moynihan defended his tactics: "The Committee on Decolonization consists of 16 police states, four democracies and four in-betweens. We are not about to be lectured by police states on the processes of electoral democracy."
Moynihan was similarly direct --and successful--last September when the Credentials Committee questioned the Chilean delegation on the ground that it was sent by a military dictatorship that did not really represent the Chilean people. Says Moynihan: "It was assumed that we would go rrr, grrr, boom, boom, boom, but we didn't. We said, 'That's an interesting question, and since you brought it up, we have here a list of 45 military governments and 35 other governments installed by military coups, and let's talk about them all.' " The committee dropped the matter.
Heartened by such successes, Moynihan started to take his show on the road. At an AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco last October, he approvingly cited a New York Times editorial that called Uganda's President Idi Amin a "racist murderer" and incorrectly added that it was "no accident" that Amin was chairman of the Organization of African Unity (O.A.U.). Moynihan thus in effect denounced moderate African leaders along with the infamous "Big Daddy"--a mistake that may have cost crucial votes on a motion to postpone, and thus possibly consign to oblivion, the notorious anti-Zionist resolution that the General Assembly passed in November (see chart).
Although most of his skirmishes have been with Third World delegates, last month Moynihan directed his fire at the Soviet Union. When several black African nations introduced an amendment to the apartheid resolution condemning South African intervention in Angola, Moynihan countered by standing up and reading excerpts from news stories that detailed the Soviet presence in Angola. Russia is the new colonizer in Africa, he said. "If this Assembly will not face that fact, then what is the good of this place?"
In this episode, Moynihan sidestepped a tacit understanding that Washington and Moscow would not attack each other by name at the U.N.
--an arrangement that dates back to the Nixon Administration's first experiments with detente. Russia's Ambassador Malik promptly attacked Moynihan as "an emotional man inclined to invent the most sensational assertions." But the amendment was dropped.
Moynihan sees nothing inconsistent between such ideological attacks on the Soviets and the policy of detente, which he considers an act of statecraft" by , Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger "that has not had its equal in our time." The trouble, he believes, is that most Americans fail to understand detente because it involves an inconsistency: the conflict between a "technological imperative" that demands cooperation between the two superpowers to prevent nuclear war, and an "ideological imperative" that demands competition. Detente may well mean more rather than less ideological conflict. But living with such contradictions, he argues breezily, is not at all unnatural."
It has not helped, Moynihan believes, "that we picked the wrong word to describe the process. Detente is a French word--perhaps the cause of precision would have been better served had we chosen something from the German*--which means relaxation of tension, as with physical objects like muscles. Now such wholesale relaxation is exactly what will not happen under detente."
Moynihan's critics say that such subtle distinctions are not evident in his rhetorical flights, especially against the Third World. They claim that his tactics only force the more moderate Third World delegates into a face-saving solidarity with their more radical colleagues. In effect, they argue, Moynihan ignores the famous Kennedy dictum, "Don't get mad, get even"; instead of venting his anger, he should be pressing for practical results.
Moynihan retorts that practical results are exactly what he is getting. Far from hardening Third World enmity to the U.S. and other developed countries, his tactics have begun to break up bloc voting in the U.N. For instance, when the anti-Zionist resolution was in committee last October, two African delegates voted against it and 14 abstained.
In the General Assembly vote in November, five African delegations voted against it and eleven abstained. Moynihan believes that the U.N. is still useful, not only as an occasional peacekeeper but as an instrument of persuasion. The U.S. mission has acquired a new tool: a computer to help keep track of votes for or against U.S. interests, which in turn may help decide who will get U.S. aid.
Moynihan is rankled by suggestions that his tactics are too "confrontational." Said he in an interview with TIME: "Now, in one issue after another the attack came from others and we defended ourselves. That isn't a doctrine of confrontation." He quoted an ironic piece of French doggerel: "Cet animal est tres mechant/ Quand on I'attaque, il se defend" (This animal is very wicked: when it is attacked, it defends itself). Moynihan added: "Do you have any sense of the depth of appeasement that comes out of discerning in self-defense an act of confrontation? Do you realize how passive everybody had become?"
Passive has never been the word for Pat Moynihan. Although he grew up in Manhattan, his route to the U.N. was circuitous. Born in Tulsa, Okla., on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, in 1927, he was brought to New York by his parents when he was six years old. His father, a classically hard-drinking newspaperman, walked out on the family in 1938. Much of his adolescence was spent shining shoes, hawking newspapers and tending bar in Moynihan's, the saloon his mother opened on New York's rough and garish 42nd Street.
Other stops on Moynihan's long road to the U.N. included high school in East Harlem and a longshoreman's job on the Hudson River docks. At the urging of a friend, he took the entrance exam for New York's tuition-free City College, "mostly to prove that I was as smart as I thought I was." In something of the same spirit, he went on to a Ph.D. at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, an academic career as a professor of education and urban politics at Harvard, and a parallel political career that has brought him jobs in two Republican and two Democratic Administrations.
After serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Moynihan, who still labels himself a liberal Democrat, took two leaves from Harvard to work for President Nixon. During his years with Kennedy and Johnson, Moynihan helped draft the Government's first antipoverty programs. Then, by enticing Nixon with visions of becoming the American Disraeli, the British Tory Prime Minister famed for his progressive social legislation, Moynihan almost succeeded in getting his Republican President to push the Family Assistance Plan through Congress. The FAP, a truly innovative plan for a federally administered guaranteed-income program, might well have been an important first step toward reforming the nation's welfare mess.
Twice in his career, Moynihan has been temporarily undone by his addiction to phrasemaking. In 1965, he wrote the still controversial "Moynihan Report," which argued that most of the social disadvantages suffered by American blacks are traceable to the instability of Negro family life. Although Moynihan clearly attributed that instability to more than two centuries of racial oppression, several black leaders took offense at his use of terms like "tangle of pathology" to describe the Negro family. Shortly afterward, Moynihan left his job at Labor. His stint as director of Nixon's Urban Affairs Council ended a year after his memo urging a period of "benign neglect" of the racial issue was leaked to the press in 1970. Moynihan still bristles at what he regards as widespread misinterpretation of that phrase. It did not, he insists, refer to less Government attention to civil rights, but to a need for more care, at a time of high racial tension, to avoid situations "in which extremists of either race are given opportunities for martyrdom" --such as the 1969 Chicago police raid on the Black Panthers.
After the"benign neglect" flap, Moynihan stayed out of the limelight until Nixon made him Ambassador to India in 1973. Arriving in New Delhi at a time when Indo-American relations were at their lowest ebb--in the wake of the U.S. tilt toward Pakistan in its 1971 war with India--Moynihan wisely decided to keep an uncharacteristically low profile. He stayed close to his official residence, Roosevelt House, which he loathed; he gave private showings of John Ford films to American visitors, and made only one or two speeches. The restraints of the New Delhi post have made the U.N. a doubly welcome forum for his ebullience.
Moynihan's bitterest critics today are doctrinaire liberals who still regard his sojourn in the Nixon White House as treasonous fraternizing with the enemy. "He has no ideological underpinnings," complains a Moynihan colleague from Harvard's Kennedy Institute of Politics. "He is not unlike Kissinger. They both have enormous egos, tremendous ambition, a great deal of moral flexibility, and the same kind of little boy attitude--'Look, Ma, I'm dancing.' "Other critics feel that Moynihan is so intoxicated by ideas that he is apt to skitter along from one to another. Moynihan in turn has spoken scathingly of his fellow intellectuals, in whom he diagnoses a failure of nerve. On one occasion he parodied the plea brought to Nixon by a group of antiwar college presidents: "If you don't end poverty, racism and the war right now, we'll ... hold our breaths until we turn blue."
Says Harvard Sociologist David Riesman, an old Moynihan chum: "The capacity of Harvard to make people feel vulnerable is Incredible, and I think Pat felt that quite keenly. He felt demeaned by having to establish his liberal credentials, pulling out his origins, his work with the Great Society programs. It was the same with the blacks issue. He knows what it's like to be desperately poor; he is a man of very lowly origins, lower than most of the black intellectuals who attacked him."
Riesman is an admirer of Moynihan's all-embracing academic interests, which he says equip him as a diplomat to "deal with issues on a plane of both contemporary and historical perspective." Riesman recalls a Phi Beta Kappa address that Moynihan delivered at Harvard in which he compared student radicals of the 1960s to the Quaker, Leveler and Digger religious dissidents of Cromwell's England, and then predicted that student activism would die out in the '70s when the demographic bulge produced by the postwar baby boom subsided. Says Riesman: "There aren't many people who have enough knowledge of the Fifth Monarchy Men of the 1640s and of demographics to advance those two thoughts."
Moynihan's wife Elizabeth, a part-time painter, sculptor and the mother of three teen-age children, says that her husband is, above all things, a word man who is "happiest when he writes every day." He goes to bed reading and wakes up writing--when he sleeps at all, that is. Most nights are a series of fitful catnaps, often with spells at the typewriter in between. At the family's 600-acre dairy farm in upstate New York, there is an old schoolhouse on the property that Moynihan uses as his word-mill whenever he has a chance to leave his U.N. life behind. The farming is done by a local tenant who pays Moynihan $350 and 23 gallons of maple syrup a year for the use of the land. At present, Landlord Moynihan is writing the introduction for a volume of collected David Levine drawings, doing "a long essay on the rise of frustration as a mode of social expression," and has just completed a report for the Rockefeller Commission on Critical Choices, "The Quality of Life"--a topic that even Moynihan found intimidatingly sweeping.
Unlike many independently wealthy ambassadors, Moynihan lives entirely off his $44,600 U.N. salary. The Moynihans are provided with the Waldorf suite, a car and a driver. But their only servant is Hives, a life-sized papier-mache butler who stands at the door of the apartment wearing the castaway clothes of a warm-blooded English butler who once worked for them. The figure is the creation of their son Tim. With all three children away at school, Hives and a wire-haired fox terrier named Mr.
Dooley are the only other live-in members of the Moynihan family. At home, there is a casual, rumpled air about the man. In public, he wears meticulously tailored suits, and his voice acquires a reserved, almost harrumphing Tory tone.
In both incarnations, he occasionally indulges a well-cultivated taste for Dubonnet, Scotch, brandy, port or stout. Even Moynihan's critics concede that his unfailing Irish wit and cheer make him a good man to take on a pub crawl.
Moynihan's spreading popularity has inevitably given rise to speculation that he may run for public office, and he is reportedly being strongly urged by supporters to seek the Democratic nomination for the New York Senate seat now held by Republican Senator James Buckley. But Moynihan has denied any intention of running, and he removed his name last week from the ballot for the Democratic primary in Massachusetts.
For the moment at least, Moynihan professes to be content to be the man who loosened up and livened up the U.S. posture in the U.N.--an effort that for him begins at home. One recent morning, the ambassador was chatting with visitors while padding barefoot around his Waldorf Towers suite dressed in a tatty gold dressing gown with a loose thread hanging from the sleeve. Sitting down in the armchair beneath his Custer painting, he began going over the wire traffic from Washington with a couple of his assistants. "Oh, God," he exclaimed, as another State Department memo was put in front of him. "If you read enough of this stuff, your mind turns to mush!"
On another level, Moynihan hopes to win Americans who are disillusioned by the tougher climate for U.S. diplomacy in the U.N. (as elsewhere) back to a recognition that "ideas matter in world affairs." He adds that in much of the world of the 1970s, with its new nations and new political perceptions, "ideas, just now, are all against us." But that is all the more reason, in Moynihan's view, why Americans should begin to pay more attention to their own ideas, including the increasingly rare faith in political and economic freedom that makes the U.S. what he calls "the liberty party" in the world today. Thus as the Ambassador sees it, his mission at Turtle Bay is not just to raise hell in the U.N., but to give other Americans something to think about.
* Unfortunately, the German vocabulary offers no more precise term for the meaning of detente. The closest approximation is Entspannung which, like detente, means a relaxation of tension.
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