As Jennings had hoped, more was to be said later—by virtually every significant analyst, journalist, and politician on the American scene. Over the next few days, remembrances of “the Senator,” ranging from the reverent to the admiringly bemused, poured into public forums.

We thought it might be best to memorialize Daniel Patrick Moynihan—who, upon his retirement from the Senate in January 2001, had joined the Maxwell faculty—by simply letting you know what others had said:

Maybe I’m too cynical, but after three decades of reporting on political figures, I don’t believe any belong on a pedestal.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the exception. He certainly had his flaws, but by any measure he was special. A giant. He was unique and he cannot and will not be replaced. It wasn’t only the amazing resumé of government service or the towering, penetrating intellect. Or the sense of joy he brought to whatever he did. He saw the big picture, and he thought big thoughts. . . . More than being smart, he was wise.

—James Klurfeld, Newsday

A polymath in a profession of intellectual pygmies; a free thinker in a world of crushing orthodoxies; and a cheerful imbiber in a country that has turned, once again, to Puritanism—Daniel Patrick Moynihan really was one of the most remarkable American politicians of his generation.

There was something of the Oxford don about him. Visitors to his rooms in the Senate were greeted by a glass of dry sherry (Tio Pepe was his preferred brand) and a lengthy tutorial. A discussion of Social Security reform would inevitably include learned digression on the Victorian poor laws. Mr. Moynihan wrote or edited 19 books—more, it was said, than some of his Senate colleagues had read.

—The Economist

At our last meeting, at the large affair at the president’s house at Yale preceding the commencement at which we would receive honorary degrees, he and I were asked by the president to say something after dinner, before the Whiffenpoofs serenaded us. Speaking extemporaneously, his imagination, his memory, and his aptitude for association brought on light references to obscure events. We got his benevolent smile, the pixy-Irish face puckered in apparent inquisitive stress. He had a thought. . . . Perhaps it would be of interest. . . . Perhaps you Yale people would find . . . relevant in some way.

And it was over. And the deans and awardees and professors did smile. I did too, of course, with the special affection I had for the man who took my brother’s seat in the Senate and, now, with prayerful thoughts for his safe passage.

— William F. Buckley, National Review

His was the most penetrating political intellect to come from New York since Alexander Hamilton, who, like Moynihan, saw over the horizon of his time, anticipating the evolving possibilities and problems of a consolidated, urbanized, industrial nation. A liberal who did not flinch from the label, he reminded conservatives that the Constitution’s framers “had more thoughts about power than merely its limitation.”

—George Will, The Washington Post

He anticipated key issues well before anyone else—and defined them articulately, and with informed and prescient insight, well before most other Americans had a clue about them.

More important, Pat Moynihan was not bound by political correctness or received wisdom. On the contrary: He nearly always defied convention, giving life to the phrase “the courage of his convictions.”

—New York Post

Americans in recent years have made it clear we don’t want to elect politicians who are smarter than we are. Rather than pin our national hopes on politicians who are at ease with nuance, most of us seem to crave average thinkers with average ideas. And that’s a shame, because all of us should feel encouraged and comforted, rather than threatened, by the presence of great thinkers in Washington. As Moynihan proved over the course of nearly 40 years in government, great minds are well-used in the messy and essential arena of public service.

—Jessica Reaves, Time

Has there been a recent American politician as complex and contradictory as Pat Moynihan? He was Irish Catholic yet a foppish Anglophile. Certainly he was the only Harvard social scientist who could be greeted with backslapping beer-buying bonhomie in a Buffalo bar. . . .

How colorless the U.S. Senate seems without him. Sure, he blustered, and yes, he compromised, but he was real, not the blow-dried product of a focus group. Pat Moynihan thought up his own ideas and signed his own name, as another independent New Yorker once said.

He is irreplaceable.

—The American Enterprise

He was admired for the breadth of his knowledge about all of New York. [Hillary Rodham] Clinton, who launched her historic campaign to succeed Moynihan in the Senate at his Upstate farm, was the first to pay tribute Wednesday in the Capitol. “Anyone who ever heard him speak knows the experience of learning more than you ever thought possible in a short period of time,” she said on the Senate floor.

Clinton smiled at the memory of riding with Moynihan on a bus through Upstate New York during her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, recalling “the most exquisite disquisition about the history of the Indian nations, the Revolutionary War, the geological formations. The love that he had for New York and America was overwhelming.”

—Mark Libbon, Syracuse Post-Standard

For some unaccountable reason and even though he did guide some very important legislation through the Senate and the House (take 1991’s istea—the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act—for example, which reined in the highway builders, who were prepared to pave over the nation, by shifting funds to mass transit), Moynihan is held deficient in major legislative achievement. “For all the high praise lavished on Moynihan when he announced that he would leave the Senate,” his most recent biographer, Godfrey Hodgson, writes, “the Washington insiders’ view of his performance there was less than flattering. It was conceded that he was an ornament, ‘the kind of person,’ one friend-turned-opponent says, ‘the Founding Fathers would have wanted in the Senate: urbane, witty, scholarly, wise, eloquent. But what will he leave behind?’” Apparently, being urbane, witty, scholarly, wise, and eloquent isn’t enough. . . .

Ideas imaginatively expressed matter; persistence in advancing them matters; ingenuity in spreading them, among elites and bureaucrats, in the newspapers, in journal articles, matters. . . . He gave us the model of a statesman and politician dealing with serious matters, respectful of research, considerate of what the university and academy have to contribute to our understanding, and willing to return again and again to intractable problems. . . .

He would have had much to say about our current circumstances, and, as a former assistant put it, in doing so he would have been “witty, scholarly, wise, eloquent.” There’s not much of that in government today, and would we not be better off if there were? Certainly, some brightness has gone out of the lives of all of us who knew him.

—Nathan Glazer, The New Republic

He had the great ability to transcend partisanship and keep the interests of the nation above everything else. There are a lot of distinguished intellectuals. But Pat was one of the finest human beings I have ever known and I am deeply saddened by his passing.

—Alfonse D’Amato
Former U.S. Senator (R-N.Y.)

This article appeared in the Spring 2003 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2003 Maxwell School of Syracuse University. To request a copy, e-mail dlcooke@maxwell.syr.edu.