Whether friend or foe, Republican or Democrat, you have to grant Daniel Patrick Moynihan at least this: No one gets his mind around an issue quite like the Senator.

Now Moynihan (the former senator) is a member of the Maxwell School faculty, where he'll apply his professorial bearing to matters directly professorial.

By Dana Cooke

n April 11, Daniel Patrick Moynihan attended the annual on-campus ceremony at which the Maxwell School names the latest winner of the Moynihan Prize for Outstanding Junior Faculty. It’s meant to encourage a pre-tenure faculty member during this challenging stage of his or her career.

Stuart Bretschneider, professor of public administration and first Moynihan Prize winner 15 years ago, spoke and happened to mention that all but one of the 17 prize recipients to date remain on the faculty—a remarkable retention rate. Moynihan, seated near the lectern, lit up with a dramatic, wide-mouthed-and-wide-eyed start of surprise. He himself had no idea the prize had been so successful in bonding young scholars to Maxwell.

The name Moynihan on the prize probably hasn’t hurt. He, too, was once a junior faculty member at Maxwell, in 1959-61. And while policy and politics lured him away from a full-time academic career, Moynihan’s lifelong display of sound facts and big ideas has earned him a scholarly reputation. He’s the kind of Senator a professor would approve of.

Rising to make a few remarks and congratulate this year’s winner, Rogan Kersh, assistant professor of political science, Moynihan launched almost immediately into a war story, of sorts, about 1989 and’90 wranglings on Senate ethics and his efforts to liberalize, slightly, the restrictions on a Senator’s secondary income. Faculty, staff, and students were enchanted as Moynihan’s voice danced and arms jabbed skyward with the memory of arguments made and lost in the chamber.

It was a tale ostensibly about the Senator’s efforts to bolster the income of Senators—not exactly populist fare—but it was also classic Moynihania, laced with proper nouns and obscure references, alternately operatic and then confidential. More than a few in attendance, though, may have begun to wonder what any of this had to do with Rogan Kersh.

Until the Senator, altering pace for the payoff, finally let on. “Had we prevailed that day,” he concluded,  “this prize might be a little more generous.” Somehow he’d managed to italicize the importance of the Moynihan Prize with a self-effacing, though joyously articulated, apology for the size of the endowing gift.

veryone likes a simple answer to a simple question, but if you ever got one from Daniel Patrick Moynihan you’d be missing something.

Last fall, as Moynihan’s final Senatorial term drew short, assessments were aligned in appreciation of his most endearing characteristic, his intellect.

“He brought scholarship to government,” MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell told the AP. In the same treatment, UCLA political scientist James Q. Wilson: “Pat is the finest thinker among politicians since Abraham Lincoln, and the finest politician among thinkers since Thomas Jefferson.”

George Will wrote at the time that Moynihan walks away from the Senate and political life “leaving both better for his having been in them, and leaving all who observe them bereft of the rare example of a public intellectual’s life lived well—adventurously, bravely, and leavened by wit.

“Who will do what he has done for the intellectual nutritiousness of public life?” Will added. “The nation is not apt to see his like again, never having seen it before.”

“He’s influenced the intellectual discourse in Washington in a way few other people have in the history of the Senate,” said Bill Bradley in one of the valedictories.

How the Senator's University Professorship will work. In January, students in a two-week, inter-session P.A. course on policy making were filing into S.U.’s Greenberg House in Washington, D.C., for the day’s sessions. An exceedingly cordial, senior gentleman, who happened to be milling about, held the front door for a few and followed them in. It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had been appointed only days earlier as a University Professor at the Maxwell School. >> read on

The Senator who acted like a professor distinguished himself as the former while exhibiting the best traits of the latter. The conceptual breadth and non-conformity which are de rigueur quirks of any self-respecting faculty member were, for a national politician in the late-20th century, something closer to enigma. He was “a perfectly normal intellectual,” as James Traub once put it in the New York Times,“but a most unusual United States Senator.”

By comparison, his forays into scholarly life—he’s at work on his 19th book, for example—and his present and future role in Maxwell seem straightforwardly appropriate. The interesting thing is the extent to which he’s been a professor all along.

he surest sign of Moynihan’s intellectual vigor has been his philosophical unpredictability. He rarely obeys the rules of partisanship, his stances on the issues often surprise, and his commitment to certain issues has been unfashionably persistent. The May 2 announcement that Moynihan would co-chair George W. Bush’s ad hoc Social Security Commission was the latest example of those tendencies.

He left Maxwell in 1961 to join the Department of Labor. Serving Kennedy and then Johnson, he wrote a report critical of the preparedness of military enlistees, and another on automobile safety that foretold Nader. Beyond the Melting Pot, the ground-breaking study by Harvard social scientist Nathan Glazer which Moynihan co-authored, and Moynihan’s report in 1965 predicting erosion in the black American family structure placed him in the vanguard of Great Society thinkers; yet its implication that black struggles might be, in part, self-inflicted angered many liberals.

In 1969, he joined the Nixon Administration as chief urban affairs advisor, disappointing his Democratic allies. He would serve Gerald Ford as Ambassador to India and then as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. His proclamations against U.N. accommodation of Third World totalitarianism—combined with his widely mis­understood suggestion that the problems of black America might benefit from reduced intervention—branded him a neo-Conservative. He won his first Senate term as a centrist alternative to Bella Abzug. He was viewed as a friend of the Pentagon, and a tepid supporter of Jimmy Carter.

In the Reagan years, Moynihan defended social welfare programs (the Child Welfare Reform Act particularly) and, since, he’s been painted as essentially a liberal. But never simply or conveniently so.

“He was distinctly bipartisan in an era of partisan bickering and he was a statesman-intellectual at a time of blow-dried politicians,” former Reagan aide Marshall Wittmann told the AP’s John Machacek. “. . . He was calling attention to matters that no one else was doing.”

In his ideological independence, he’s been right a lot. His controversial predictions about eroding family structure and government dependence were prescient; his description of ’60s radicalism as pointless chaos ultimately proved out; his early prediction of Soviet implosion seems uncanny; and his understanding of international power relationships, post-Cold War and pre-Iraqi conflict, was sophisticated and precise.

“Politically, what he’s done is tell the rest of us what the issues are going to be,” says Margaret Hermann, professor of political science at Maxwell and director of the Global Affairs Institute. “He doesn’t always get credit for being a prophet. But those kinds of people are very important today, when politicians are so focused on the short term.”

And yet, Hermann says, Moynihan is more than just concepts. “One of the real trademarks of Maxwell,” she says, “is the translation of theory into practice. Moynihan has lived both theory and practice. It helps us to put the lessons we’re teaching into perspective.”

Ever the scholar, Moynihan eschews easy answers. “Beware of certainty where none exists,” he wrote in 1993.“Ideological certainty easily degenerates into insistence upon ignorance.” He once described his ideology as “an avoidance of ideology.”

It’s been said, though, that Moynihan does have one creed: the sanctity of good government. Sincere government. Compassionate and effective government.

“Daniel Patrick Moynihan made us proud of government instead of ashamed of it,” read a January editorial in the Manchester, Ct., Journal Inquirer. “There are damned few of whom that can be said, and none who did it with his style.”

itting in the University Sheraton one recent morning, enjoying continental breakfast, the Senator was being baited by an interviewer—this interviewer—into gauging the state of public political discourse. For example, the seemingly instantaneous discrediting of Bush’s new Social Security Commission by key Democrats certainly typifies the sort of coarse, media-fanned partisanship disheartening the citizenry, yes?

Instead, Moynihan answered about Social Security, describing a 1934 party at which Supreme Court Justice Harlan F. Stone hinted to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins that Social Security could be legally rooted in taxation, and thus the system was born. It was fascinating and vividly rendered, and its main point was that Social Security is old and weathered. “Social Security is entering its long-anticipated and understood crisis.” Reforms suggested today are the most important in its history and deserve debate. He didn’t want to talk about partisan bickering; he wanted to talk about Social Security.

So the interviewer tried again, holding the Senator’s own reputation aloft as an artifact of a nearly extinct tradition, that of considered gentlemanly discourse. Read the recent tributes to Moynihan. The phrase dying breed keeps coming up.

“There are some immensely thoughtful people in the chamber, on both sides,” he said, and then reeled off comparisons with the deliberative systems of other nations, which he regards as no better, often inferior.

But haven’t the past 30 years been especially disruptive, markedly cynical? To which he responded: “John Adams and Thomas Jefferson each died 50 years to the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.” It was another of the Senator’s cunning redirects, evolving into a succinct treatise on the resilience of the American politic way.

Far be it from this great scholar of history, sociology, and politics to dignify the latest volley across the aisle with a commensurate retort. Senator Moynihan—now Professor Moynihan—has bigger things on his mind.

Dana Cooke is the publications manager of the Maxwell School and editor of Maxwell Perspective.

This article appeared in the Spring 2001 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2001 Maxwell School of Syracuse University. To request a copy, e-mail dlcooke@maxwell.syr.edu.