Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary by Daniel Patrick Moynihan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Over the years there have been a handful of public figures whom I’ve come to admire greatly, and at the top of that list is Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A brilliant man, honest, brave, witty, compassionate, he was truly a statesman and we could use many more men like him.
This book is a collection from his letters and papers compiled by his daughter. From his years as a member of the administrations of John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford, ambassador to Indian and to the UN, and senator from New York, he wrote so much and so well that it must have been difficult to pick only the best. Here are some of his comments:
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.
. . . one of the things I found most curious was the ease with which we obtained money for the education of children formally denoted as “uneducable,” while I could not interest the most wild eyed, radical, give-a-way, spender in the notion of a program of special state aid to provide “enriched” programs for the smart kids. . . . I ought not to sound cruel, but the faintly distasteful fact behind this is that the allocation of resources in education, as elsewhere, reflects the political power of the interests concerned, and where the parents of backward children were organized parents of the bright ones were not.
On the Catholic church: . . . while I am reasonably strict in my observances, I am like Lord Melbourne, more a buttress of the church than a pillar, in that I support it from the outside.
Since about 1840 the cultural elite in America have pretty generally rejected the values and activities of the larger society. . . . The leading cultural figures are going – have gone – into opposition . . . they take with them a vastly more numerous following of educated, middle class persons, especially young ones, who share their feelings and who do not need the ‘straight’ world. It is their pleasure to cause trouble, to be against. And they are hell bent for a good time.
. . . Among a large and growing lower class, self-reliance, self-discipline, and industry are waning . . . A large segment of the population is becoming incompetent and destructive. Growing parasitism, both legal and illegal, is the result; so, also, is violence. … today, there is the ‘spirit of confrontation,’ in which self-interest and a desire to change the system are merged in groups which depend for their existence on pursuing a ‘conflict’ strategy . . . the more one knows about welfare the more horrible it becomes: but not because of cheating, rather because the system destroys those who receive it, and corrupts those who dispense it. . . . . a services strategy tends not only to exclude working class whites, but also to set up a great many middle class whites (and blacks) in the resentment business. They earn very good livings making the black poor feel put upon, when they are, which is often the case, and also when they are not.
Letter to the president of Stanford University, 1975, regarding protests to his commencement speech: No one was disagreeing with any views I had put forth,. The disagreement (in its essentials) was with views I was falsely accused of holding. My accusers were and are liars. I recalled to you the Stalinist origin of this technique, which leaves the accused spluttering and mumbling that he never said any of those things, etc. . . . liberal academia, faced with the neototalitarian assault on persons such as myself who might be described as liberal dissenters, has adopted a devastatingly effective device for avoiding having to deal with what it is we have to say. They d not acknowledge the fact that our views are systematically and viciously distorted by the Left. To the contrary, they let the lies stand unchallenged. What they do instead is to say we should nonetheless be allowed to speak.
In the best universities the best men are increasingly appalled by the authoritarian tendencies of the left.
From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future – that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder . . . are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable. And they are richly deserved.
And his famous statement after the assassination of John Kennedy: I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought he had a little more time.
2011 No 91 Coming soon: Charlie Chan, by Yunte Huang
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