The lanky, pink-faced lawmaker, who preferred bow ties and professorialMoynihan, Daniel Patrick, 1927-2003.
former US Senator from New YorkHarvard sociologist who wrote "Beyond the Melting Pot" with Nathan Glaser
Obituaries:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Former Senator From New York, Dies at 76
By ADAM CLYMER
New York Times, March 27, 2003
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Harvard professor and four-term United States senator from New York who brought a scholar's eye for data to politics and a politician's sense of the real world to academia, died yesterday at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. He was 76.
The cause, a spokesman for the family said, was complications of a ruptured appendix, which was removed on March 11 at the hospital, where he remained.
Mr. Moynihan was always more a man of ideas than of legislation or partisan combat. Yet he was enough of a politician to win re-election easily and enough of a maverick with close Republican friends to be an occasional irritant to his Democratic party leaders. Before the Senate, his political home from 1977 to 2001, he served two Democratic presidents and two Republicans, finishing his career in the executive branch as President Richard M. Nixon's ambassador to India and President Gerald R. Ford's ambassador to the United Nations.
For more than 40 years, in and out of government, he became known for being among the first to identify new problems and propose novel, if not easy, solutions, most famously in auto safety and mass transportation; urban decay and the corrosive effects of racism; and the preservation and development of architecturally distinctive federal buildings.
He was a man known for the grand gesture as well as the bon mot, and his style sometimes got more attention than his prescience, displayed notably in 1980 when he labeled the Soviet Union "in decline." Among his last great causes were strengthening Social Security and attacking government secrecy.
In the halls of academe and the corridors of power, he was known for seizing ideas and connections before others noticed. In 1963, for example, he was the co-author of "Beyond the Melting Pot," which shattered the idea that ethnic identities inevitably wear off in the United States. Then, on the day that November when President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, he told every official he could find that the federal government must take custody of Lee Harvey Oswald to keep him alive to learn about the killing. No one listened.
Friends also observed the intense sense of history he connected to immediate events. Bob Packwood, the former Republican senator from Oregon, recalled his Democratic friend's response in 1993 when a reporter on the White House lawn asked what he thought of the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian agreement to share the West Bank. "Well, I think it's the end of World War I," he said, alluding to the mandates that proposed Middle Eastern boundaries in 1920.
Erudite, opinionated and favoring, in season, tweed or seersucker, Mr. Moynihan conveyed an academic personality through a chirpy manner of speech, with occasional pauses between syllables. More than most senators, he could get colleagues to listen to his speeches, though not necessarily to follow his recommendations. He had a knack for the striking phrase, but unease at the controversy it often caused. When other senators used August recesses to travel or raise money for re-election, he spent most of them in an 1854 schoolhouse on his farm in Pindars Corners in Delaware County, about 65 miles west of Albany. He was writing books, 9 as a senator, 18 in all.
Mr. Moynihan was less an original researcher than a bold, often brilliant synthesizer whose works compelled furious debate and further research. In 1965, his foremost work, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," identified the breakup of black families as a major impediment to black advancement. Though savaged by many liberal academics at the time, it is now generally regarded as "an important and prophetic document," in the words of Prof. William Julius Wilson of Harvard.
Five years later, his memo to President Nixon on race relations caused another uproar. Citing the raw feelings provoked by the battles of the civil rights era, Mr. Moynihan suggested a period of rhetorical calm "benign neglect" he called it a proposal widely misinterpreted as a call to abandon federal programs to improve the lives of black families.
Nonetheless, he could also be an effective legislator. In his first term he teamed with Jacob K. Javits, his Republican colleague, to pass legislation guaranteeing $2 billion worth of New York City obligations at a time when the city faced bankruptcy. In a brief turn leading the Environment and Public Works Committee in 1991 and 1992 he successfully pushed to shift highway financing toward mass transit and get New York $5 billion in retroactive reimbursement for building the New York State Thruway before the federal government began the Interstate Highway System.
Although Mr. Moynihan's junior colleague for 18 years, Alfonse M. D'Amato, became known as Senator Pothole for his pork-barrel efforts for New York, Mr. Moynihan held his own in that department.
Monument of Bricks and Marble
Long before he came to the Senate, and until he left, he was building a monument of bricks and marble by making Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue, a dingy street where he came to work for President John F. Kennedy in 1961, into the grand avenue that George Washington foresaw for the boulevard that connects the Capitol and the White House. Nearly 40 years of his effort filled the avenue with new buildings on its north side, including the apartment houses where he lived, restored buildings on the south, and cafes and a sense of life all along.
Wherever he went, Mr. Moynihan explored interesting buildings and worked to preserve architectural distinction, from converting the main post office in Manhattan into the new Pennsylvania Station, to the Customs House at Battery Park and all around Washington. Last year, over lunch and a martini at Washington's Hotel Monaco, an 1842 Robert Mills building that was once the city's main post office, he recalled how he had helped rescue it from decline into a shooting gallery for drugs.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Okla., on March 16, 1927, the son of an itinerant, hard-drinking newspaperman who moved the family to New York later that year to take a job writing advertising copy. They lived comfortably in the city and suburbs until 1937 when his father, John Moynihan, left the family and left it in poverty.
Mr. Moynihan's childhood has been pseudo-glamorized by references to an upbringing in Hell's Kitchen, which in fact he encountered after his mother bought a bar there when he was 20. But there was enough hardship and instability in his early life so that when he later wrote of "social pathology," he knew what he was talking about.
Mr. Moynihan's mother, Margaret Moynihan, moved the family, including a brother, Michael, and a sister, Ellen, into a succession of Manhattan apartments, and Pat shined shoes in Times Square. In 1943 he graduated first in his class at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. He also graduated to work as a stevedore at Piers 48 and 49 on West 11th Street.
He went to City College for a year, enlisted in the Navy, and was trained as an officer at Middlebury College and at Tufts University. Discharged the next spring, he went to work that summer tending bar for his mother, then got his B.A. at Tufts in 1948 and an M.A. at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts in 1949.
In 1950 he went to the London School of Economics on a Fulbright Scholarship, and he lived well on it, the G.I. bill and later a job at an Air Force base. He started wearing a bowler hat. He had a tailor and a bootmaker and traveled widely, including a visit to Moynihan cousins in County Kerry, Ireland.
Work on his dissertation did not consume him. In "Pat," his 1979 biography, Doug Schoen described a 1952 visit by two former Middlebury colleagues: "Impressed at first with his elaborate file cabinet full of index cards, they found that most of the cards were recipes for drinks rather than notes on the International Labor Organization."
Mr. Moynihan came home in 1953 and went to work in the mayoral campaign of Robert F. Wagner. He went on to write speeches for W. Averell Harriman's successful campaign for governor in 1954, joined his administration in Albany and rose to become his chief aide. It was there he learned about traffic safety, which he described in a 1959 article in The Reporter as a public health problem requiring federal action to make automobile design safer.
A Semi-Modest Proposal
Another former campaign worker who came to Albany was Elizabeth Brennan. Her desk and his were in the same room, and they grew friendly. Rather suddenly in early 1955, when they had never dated, Mr. Moynihan did not formally propose but simply told her he was going to marry her.
They married in May 1955, and she often said she married him because he was the funniest man she ever met.
His wife survives him, as do their three children: Timothy, Maura and John, and two grandchildren.
While he was an enthusiastic supporter of John F. Kennedy, work at Syracuse University on a book about the Harriman administration and his Ph.D. kept his role in the campaign sporadic. But Liz Brennan Moynihan organized the campaign efforts in the Syracuse area.
His Ph.D. in international relations finally complete, he left Syracuse in 1961 for Washington and the Labor Department, rising to assistant secretary. One early research assignment on office space for the scattered department gave him an opportunity to assert guiding architectural principles that have endured and produced striking courthouses: that federal buildings "must provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American government." That same report enabled him to raise the Pennsylvania Avenue issue, and he was at work on development plans on Nov. 22, 1963, when the word came that the president had been shot in Dallas.
Beyond his failed efforts to protect Mr. Oswald, Mr. Moynihan marked that grim assassination weekend with a widely remembered remark about the death of the president he barely knew but idolized and eagerly followed.
On Sunday Nov. 24, he said in a television interview: "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 we thought we had a little more time." He added softly, "So did he."
His first book, written jointly with Nathan Glazer, had come out earlier that year. "Beyond the Melting Pot" looked at the different ethnic groups of New York City and scoffed at "the notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product." Ethnicity persisted, they argued.
That concept won praise from the era's leading historian of immigration, Harvard's Oscar Handlin, who called it a "point of departure" in studies of immigrants. But in a foretaste of academic criticism in years to come, he said their methodology was sometimes "flimsy."
"The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," a paper he wrote at the Labor Department early in 1965, argued that despite the Johnson administration's success in passing civil rights laws, statutes could not ensure equality after three centuries of deprivation. He said the disintegration of black families had reached a point of "social pathology." He wrote: "The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow. If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United States for generations."
He cited black unemployment, welfare and illegitimacy rates. His emphasis on families headed by women led him to be accused of blaming the victims for their predicament, but in fact he wrote clearly, "It was by destroying the Negro family under slavery that white America broke the will of the Negro people." Now, he wrote, the federal government must adopt policies, especially in education and employment, "designed to have the effect, directly or indirectly, of enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family."
He left the administration in 1965 as liberals denounced his paper, and then ran for president of the New York City Council. He lost badly in the Democratic primary, but went on to Wesleyan University and, in 1966, to Harvard as director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies and a tenured professor in the Graduate School of Education.
He spoke out against disorder, in urban slums and on select campuses. Speaking to Americans for Democratic Action in 1967, he made it clear he thought liberal pieties would not solve black problems.
And in a passage that came to the eye of the Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon, he said liberals must "see more clearly that their essential interest is in the stability of the social order" and "make alliances with conservatives who share that concern." When Nixon was elected, Mr. Moynihan made his alliance. He joined the White House staff as assistant to the president for urban affairs.
That startled his friends, and his wife refused to move to Washington. Mr. Moynihan, who never developed, even after Watergate, the searing contempt for Mr. Nixon that animated so many contemporary Democrats, explained that when the president of the United States asks, a good citizen agrees to help. Another biographer, Godfrey Hodgson, says that while Mr. Moynihan never stopped thinking of himself as a liberal Democrat, he shared the president's resentment of orthodox liberalism.
While his advice to the president to end the war in Vietnam stayed private, there were two ideas for which his time in the Nixon White House was known.
In 1970 he wrote to the president on race relations, arguing that the issue had been rubbed raw by "hysterics, paranoids and boodlers" on all sides. Now, he wrote, race relations could profit from a period of "benign neglect" in which rhetoric, at least, was toned down. In a rerun of the reaction to his paper on the Negro family, when this paper was leaked it was treated as if Mr. Moynihan wanted to neglect blacks.
He may have invited that interpretation by his quaintly glib language, but in fact Mr. Moynihan was pushing an idea that might have been of vast help to poor blacks, and whites. That other idea for which he was known, the Family Assistance Plan, sought to provide guaranteed income to the unemployed and supplements to the working poor, and together to stop fathers from leaving home so their families could qualify for welfare. The president made a speech for the program, sent it to Capitol Hill and let it die.
Afterward, though he remained on good terms with Mr. Nixon, Mr. Moynihan went back to Harvard in 1970. Resentment over his White House service chilled his welcome back in Cambridge. His interests shifted to foreign affairs perhaps because the charges of racism left him no audience for domestic policy, and made him welcome an appointment as ambassador to India, where he negotiated a deal to end India's huge food aid debt to the United States. He returned to Harvard to protect his tenure in 1975, but moved that year to the United Nations as United States ambassador.
There he answered the United States' third world critics bluntly, often contemptuously.
In his brief tenure he called Idi Amin, the president of Uganda, a "racist murderer," and denounced the General Assembly for passing a resolution equating Zionism with racism: "the abomination of anti-Semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction." After eight months of struggles with Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who wanted a less confrontational approach, he resigned in February 1976.
That made him available for a run for the Democratic nomination for the Senate, and he edged out the very liberal Representative Bella Abzug in the primary before winning the general election easily over the incumbent, James L. Buckley, the Republican-Conservative candidate. With his wife in charge of each campaign, he won three landslide re-elections.
He set one high goal a seat on the Finance Committee as a freshman and reached it, along with a seat on the Intelligence Committee. Early in office he joined Gov. Hugh L. Carey, Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts in a St. Patrick's Day appeal to Irish-Americans to stop sending money to arm the Irish Republican Army, whom he privately described as "a bunch of murderous thugs."
Every year he produced an analysis of federal taxes and federal aid, known as "the fisc," which showed that New York was getting regularly shortchanged by Washington. He worked to reduce that imbalance, both through Medicaid funding on the Finance Committee and public works on the Environment and Public Works Committee.
And his colleagues always knew he was around. Every day of the 2,454-day captivity of Terry Anderson, the Associated Press reporter captured by 1985 by the Hezbollah in Lebanon, he would go to the Senate floor to remind his colleagues, in a sentence, just how many days it had been.
Quarreled With White House
After loyally serving four presidents, he quarreled with those in the White House while he was in the Senate. When he arrived in 1977, he found President Carter too soft in dealing with the Soviet Union and indifferent to its evil nature.
But he quickly came to believe that the Soviet Union was crumbling. In Newsweek in 1979 he focused on its ethnic tensions. In January 1980, he told the Senate: "The Soviet Union is a seriously troubled, even sick society. The indices of economic stagnation and even decline are extraordinary. The indices of social disorder social pathology is not too strong a term are even more so." He added, "The defining event of the decade might well be the breakup of the Soviet empire."
It was against that changed perception that he was sharply critical of vast increases in military spending, which, combined with the Reagan tax cuts, produced deficits that he charged were intended to starve domestic spending. He called a 1983 Reagan proposal for cutting Social Security benefits a "breach of faith" with the elderly, and worked out a rescue package that kept the program solvent for at least a decade into the 21st century.
He also scorned the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the 1984 mining of harbors in Nicaragua and the 1989 invasion of Panama as violations of international law, and voted against authorizing President George H. W. Bush to make war against Iraq. It was not enough, he wrote in his book "On the Law of Nations" in 1990, for the United States to be strong enough to get away with such actions. The American legacy of international legal norms of state behavior, he wrote, is "a legacy not to be frittered away."
But probably his worst relations with a president came when Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton sought passage of national health insurance.
Certainly, the failure of health care legislation was not primarily Mr. Moynihan's responsibility, but he had become chairman of the Finance Committee in 1993, and health care fell within its jurisdiction. He said the administration should take on welfare reform legislation first, and carped on television about their health plan, quickly fixing on the role of teaching hospitals as the biggest issue in health care. But otherwise he waited for Mr. Packwood and Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the Republican leader, to propose a compromise. Mr. Dole had decided all-out opposition was the better course for his party, and they never did.
Mr. Moynihan's career in the Senate was marked not by legislative milestones but by ideas. Even so, Senator Kennedy, the legislative lion, once described him in 1993 as an exemplar "of what the Founding Fathers thought the Senate would be about," because of the New Yorker's breadth of interests, "having read history, and thought about it, and being opinionated."
Former Sen. Patrick Moynihan Dies at 76
Thursday March 27, 2003 10:23 AM
WASHINGTON (AP) - Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York City shoe shine boy who became an iconoclastic scholar-politician and served four terms in the Senate, died Wednesday. He was 76.
The New York Democrat and former U.N. ambassador had been in ill health. He was hospitalized in January for an intestinal disorder, and again soon after for a back injury. His latest setback was an infection after an emergency appendectomy on March 11 at the Washington Hospital Center.
Moynihan served in the Senate from 1977 to 2001. He was succeeded by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who announced her Senate candidacy in a torch-passing news conference at Moynihan's farm in July 1999.
She announced his death Wednesday on the Senate floor
"We have lost a great American, an extraordinary senator, an intellectual and a man of passion and understanding for what really makes the country work," she said.
After retiring from politics, Moynihan became a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Fellow legislators named Manhattan's new federal courthouse in his honor.
Known for his ability to spot emerging issues and trends, Moynihan was
a
leader in welfare reform and transportation initiatives, and an authority
on
Social Security and foreign policy.
After leaving public office, Moynihan stayed active in politics, from
campaigning for Clinton to his recent work as co-chairman of President
Bush's Social Security commission. He also championed a plan to revitalize
Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station.
Moynihan established his academic credentials early, teaching economics
and urban studies at Harvard. He returned to the classroom in spring 2001
as professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School.
During his first hour-long class there, he wondered aloud if something
had
gone wrong with Washington.
"We have lessened our capacity for large national initiatives," he said.
"Something's lacking. Can it be that our energies have run out?"
In his own college days, the 6-foot-5 Moynihan spent one summer tending
bar, and later earned a reputation as gregarious and drink-loving. A 1994
profile in The New York Times Magazine noted, "Reporters and Washington
insiders collect Moynihan drinking stories like baseball cards."
In debates on the Senate floor he was known for a rambling style and a
love
of often obscure academic references.
Moynihan first taught at Maxwell in 1959, and left Syracuse in 1961 to
work
for John F. Kennedy, the first of four presidents he served.
He worked in the Labor Department in the Kennedy administration, and
almost immediately found himself at odds with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI over
an article he'd written about the mafia.
An internal agency memo called Moynihan "an egghead that talks in circles."
At the bottom of the memo, Hoover scrawled, "I am not going to see this
skunk."
Over the next 15 years, Moynihan served as a high-ranking official in the
administrations of both Democrats and Republicans - carving out a
Washington career that sometimes was controversial.
As President Nixon's urban affairs adviser, he proposed a policy of "benign
neglect" toward minorities that drew heavy criticism. A 1965 report to
President Johnson created a major policy flap when he warned that the
rising rate of out-of-wedlock births threatened the stability of black
families.
Moynihan saw himself at the time as a liberal observer warning of future
problems. Rather than hearing praise, he was denounced as promoting
racism. The controversy haunted Moynihan for years and resurfaced as late
as the 1994 elections.
As U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, he beat the drum of
anti-communism and demanded that other countries temper their anti-U.S.
rhetoric if they wanted American help.
His unyielding support of Israel made him popular with New York's Jewish
population and his televised statements at the United Nations elevated
Moynihan to near-celebrity status.
Hoping to win a Senate seat in 1976, Moynihan emerged the winner of a
bitter five-way Democratic primary. In the general election he defeated
incumbent Republican James Buckley by portraying him as out of touch with
New York City's fiscal crisis. Moynihan's own ads proclaimed: "He spoke
up
for America. He'd speak up for New York."
Moynihan's fascination with global affairs never waned, and he continued
to
speak and write about world events, at one point foretelling the collapse
of
the Soviet Union.
"The Soviet Union is a seriously troubled, even sick society," he said
in a
January 1980 speech on the Senate floor. "The defining event of the decade
might well be the break-up of the Soviet empire."
With a staccato delivery that emphasized unexpected syllables, Moynihan's
speaking style was often mimicked. He wrote or edited 19 books - more it
was said, than some of his Senate colleagues had read.
During his years in the Senate, Moynihan became a champion of many of
the liberal Democratic programs he had once questioned, defending public
jobs programs and fighting to increase federal aid to help offset New York's
crushing welfare burden.
In 1988 Moynihan, long one of the nation's foremost authorities on work
and
family, helped bring together conservatives and liberals to enact the Family
Support Act, a major revision of the nation's welfare laws.
Born in Tulsa, Okla., Moynihan was the eldest of three children. He spent
his
early childhood in Indiana, before moving to New York City.
The Moynihan children were raised by their mother after their father
deserted the family when Pat was just 10. To help provide money for the
family, Moynihan became a shoe shine boy. As a teenager, he first heard
of
the attack on Pearl Harbor while working on a customer's shoes outside
Central Park.
Moynihan graduated from high school, worked on the docks and attended
City College. After a stint in the Navy, he went on to college at Tufts
on the
G.I. Bill. He also attended the London School of Economics with a Fulbright
scholarship.
Moynihan and his wife, Elizabeth Brennan Moynihan, had three grown
children, Timothy, Maura and John. They spent summers in an old one-room
schoolhouse in the upstate hamlet of Pindars Corners where he liked to
write.
Mr. Moynihan established his academic credentials early, teaching economics and urban studies at Harvard. He returned to the classroom in spring 2001 as professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School.During his first hour-long class there, he wondered aloud if something had gone wrong with Washington.
"We have lessened our capacity for large national initiatives," he said. "Something's lacking. Can it be that our energies have run out?"
Mr. Moynihan left Syracuse University in 1961 to work for John F. Kennedy, the first of four presidents he served.
He wrote or edited 19 books more it was said, than some of his Senate colleagues had read.
Mr. Moynihan and his wife, Elizabeth Brennan Moynihan, had three grown children, Timothy, Maura and John.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan dies at 76
Was government professor at Harvard from 1966 to 1977Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former Harvard professor of government and a lifelong public servant, died March 26 at age 76. News reports said he developed an infection after undergoing an appendectomy on March 11. Moynihan died in Washington, the city in which he served four terms as a U.S. senator.
Moynihan first came to Harvard in 1966 as director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard and MIT and as a professor of government, serving in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of the Kennedy School of Government.
"Pat Moynihan's career represented an extraordinary combination of intellectual distinction and devotion to public service," said Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers. "He was at the center of national and international debates on some of the most important and difficult issues of our time, and made profound contributions both to the life of the mind and the life of the nation. In 18 books, in 24 years as a senator, and as a onetime member of the Harvard faculty, he focused his mind on an incredible array of complex questions -- from poverty and family structure to secrecy in government, from international law to architectural preservation, from tax policy to the fate of the Soviet Union. He will be missed."
Moynihan's career in government service spanned more than four decades. He worked on Averell Harriman's campaign for New York governor in 1954 and served on his staff until 1958. He began working in the federal government in 1961 as an assistant to the secretary of labor in the Kennedy Administration, eventually rising to assistant secretary of labor for policy planning. He served in the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations in cabinet-level or sub-cabinet-level positions.
Moynihan also served as ambassador to India from 1973 to 1975, and as U.S. representative to the United Nations from 1975 to 1976, taking leaves from his Harvard professorial duties to do so.
Moynihan was first elected to the U.S. Senate from his native New York in 1976. He won re-election in 1982, 1988, and 1994. Throughout his career, Moynihan was a powerful and sometimes controversial voice for social change. Moynihan retired from the Senate in January 2001 after four terms and was succeeded by former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Moynihan most recently spoke on the Harvard campus on Commencement Day 2002, receiving an honorary doctor of laws degree from the University. The citation read "A quintessential scholar-statesman whose capacious learning and independence of mind have shaped our national conversation; to complex questions of consequence his answers are never pat."
Moynihan also spoke at the 1976 Commencement ceremony. He was awarded an honorary master's degree in government by Harvard in 1966, an honor accorded to new Harvard faculty who do not already hold a Harvard degree.
Commencement Address (at Harvard)
June 6th, 2002
Daniel Patrick MoynihanA while back it came as something of a start to find in The New Yorker a reference to an article I had written, and I quote, "In the middle of the last century." Yet persons my age have been thinking back to those times and how, in the end, things turned out so well and so badly. Millions of us returned from the assorted services to find the economic growth that had come with the Second World War had not ended with the peace. The Depression had not resumed. It is not perhaps remembered, but it was widely thought it would.
It would be difficult indeed to summon up the optimism that came with this great surprise. My beloved colleague Nathan Glazer and the revered David Riesman wrote that America was "the land of the second chance" and so indeed it seemed. We had surmounted the depression; the war. We could realistically think of a world of stability, peace above all, a world of law.
Looking back, it is clear we were not nearly so fortunate. Great leaders preserved and in measure extended democracy. But totalitarianism had not been defeated. To the contrary, by 1948 totalitarians controlled most of Eurasia. As we now learn, 11 days after Nagasaki the Soviets established a special committee to create an equivalent weapon. Their first atomic bomb was acquired through espionage, but their hydrogen bomb was their own doing. Now the Cold War was on. From the summer of 1914, the world had been at war, with interludes no more. It finally seemed to end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the changes in China. But now
But now we have to ask if it is once again the summer of 1914.
Small acts of terror in the Middle East, in South Asia, could lead to cataclysm, as they did in Sarajevo. And for which great powers, mindful or not, have been preparing.
The eras are overlapping.
As the United States reacts to the mass murder of 9/11 and prepares for more, it would do well to consider how much terror India endured in the second half of the last century. And its response. It happens I was our man in New Delhi in 1974 when India detonated its first nuclear device. I was sent in to see Prime Minister Indira Gandhi with a statement as much as anything of regret. For there was nothing to be done; it was going to happen. The second most populous nation on earth was not going to leave itself disarmed and disregarded, as non-nuclear powers appeared to be. But leaving, I asked to speak as a friend of India and not as an official. In twenty years time, I opined, there would be a Moghul general in command in Islamabad, and he would have nuclear weapons and would demand Kashmir back, perhaps the Punjab.
The Prime Minister said nothing; I dare to think she half agreed. In time, she would be murdered in her own garden; next, her son and successor was murdered by a suicide bomber. This, while nuclear weapons accumulated which are now poised.
Standing at Trinity Site at Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer pondered an ancient Sanskrit text in which Lord Shiva declares, "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds." Was he right?
At the very least we can come to terms with the limits of our capacity to foresee events.
It happens I had been a Senate observer to the START negotiations in Geneva, and was on the Foreign Relations Committee when the treaty, having been signed, was sent to us for ratification. In a moment of mischief I remarked to our superb negotiators that we had sent them to Geneva to negotiate a treaty with the Soviet Union, but the document before us was a treaty with four countries, only two of which I could confidently locate on a map. I was told they had exchanged letters in Lisbon [the Lisbon Protocol, May 23, 1992]. I said that sounded like a Humphrey Bogart movie.
The hard fact is that American intelligence had not the least anticipated the implosion of the Soviet Union. I cite Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA in Foreign Affairs, 1991. "We should not gloss over the enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis The corporate view missed by a mile."
Russia now faces a near-permanent crisis. By mid-century its population could well decline to as few as 80 million persons. Immigrants will press in; one dares not think what will have happened to the nuclear materials scattered across 11 time zones.
Admiral Turner's 1991 article was entitled "Intelligence for a New World Order." Two years later Samuel Huntington outlined what that new world order or disorder would be in an article in the same journal entitled "The Clash of Civilizations." His subsequent book of that title is a defining text of our time.
Huntington perceives a world of seven or eight major conflicting cultures, the West, Russia, China, India, and Islam. Add Japan, South America, Africa. Most incorporate a major nation-state which typically leads its fellows.
The Cold War on balance suppressed conflict. But the end of the Cold War has brought not universal peace but widespread violence. Some of this has been merely residual proxy conflicts dating back to the earlier era. Some plain ethnic conflict. But the new horrors occur on the fault lines, as Huntington has it, between the different cultures.
For argument's sake one could propose that Marxism was the last nearly successful effort to Westernize the rest of the world. In 1975, I stood in Tiananmen Square, the center of the Middle Kingdom. In an otherwise empty space, there were two towering masts. At the top of one were giant portraits of two hirsute 19th century German gentlemen, Messrs. Marx and Engels. The other displayed a somewhat Mongol-looking Stalin and Mao. That wasn't going to last, and of course, it didn't.
Hence Huntington: "The central problem in the relations between the West and the rest is the discordance between the West's particularly America's - efforts to promote universal Western culture and its declining ability to do so."
Again there seems to be no end of ethnic conflict within civilizations. But it is to the clash of civilizations we must look with a measure of dread. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently noted that "The crisis between India and Pakistan, touched off by a December 13th terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament marks the closest two states have come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis." By 1991, the minute-hand on their doomsday clock had dropped back to 17 minutes to midnight. It has since been moved forward three times and is again seven minutes to midnight, just where it started in 1947.
The terrorist attacks on the United States of last September 11 were not nuclear, but they will be. Again to cite Huntington, "At some point a few terrorists will be able to produce massive violence and massive destruction. Separately, terrorism and nuclear weapons are the weapons of the non-Western weak. If and when they are combined, the non-Western weak will be strong."
This was written in 1996. The first mass murder by terrorists came last September. Just last month the vice president informed Tim Russert that "the prospects of a future attack are almost certain. Not a matter of if, but when." Secretary Rumsfeld has added that the attack will be nuclear.
We are indeed at war and we must act accordingly, with equal measures of audacity and precaution.
As regards precaution, note how readily the clash of civilizations could spread to our own homeland. The Bureau of the Census lists some 68 separate ancestries in the American population. (Military gravestones provide for emblems of 36 religions.) All the major civilizations. Not since 1910 have we had so high a proportion of immigrants. As of 2000, one in five school-age children have at least one foreign-born parent.
This, as ever, has had bounteous rewards. The problem comes when immigrants and their descendants bring with them and even intensify the clashes they left behind. Nothing new, but newly ominous. Last month in Washington an enormous march filled Pennsylvania Avenue on the way to the Capitol grounds. The marchers, in the main, were there to support the Palestinian cause. Fair enough. But every five feet or so there would be a sign proclaiming "Zionism equals Racism" or a placard with a swastika alongside a Star of David. Which is anything but fair, which is poisonous and has no place in our discourse.
This hateful equation first appeared in a two-part series in Pravda in Moscow in 1971. Part of Cold War "agit prop." It has since spread into a murderous attack on the right of the State of Israel to exist the right of Jews to exist! a world in which a hateful Soviet lie has mutated into a new and vicious anti-Semitism. Again, that is the world we live in, but it is all the more chilling when it fills Pennsylvania Avenue.
It is a testament to our First Amendment freedoms that we permit such displays, however obnoxious to our fundamental ideals. But in the wake of 9/11, we confront the fear that such heinous speech can be a precursor to violence, not least here at home, that threatens our existence.
To be sure, we must do what is necessary to meet the threat. We need to better understand what the dangers are. We need to explore how better to organize the agencies of government to detect and prevent calamitous action.
But at the same time, we need take care that whatever we do is consistent with our basic constitutional design. What we do must be commensurate with the threat in ways that do not needlessly undermine the very liberties we seek to protect.
The concern is suspicion and fear within. Does the Park Service really need to photograph every visitor to the Lincoln Memorial? They don't, but they will. It is already done at the Statue of Liberty. In Washington, agencies compete in techniques of intrusion and exclusion. Identity cards and X-ray machines and all the clutter, plus a new life for secrecy. Some necessary; some discouraging. Mary Graham warns of the stultifying effects of secrecy on inquiry. Secrecy, as George Will writes, "renders societies susceptible to epidemics of suspicion."
We are witnessing such an outbreak in Washington just now. Great clamor as to what the different agencies knew in advance of the 9/11 attack; when the President was briefed; what was he told. These are legitimate questions, but there is a prior issue, which is the disposition of closed systems not to share information. By the late 1940s the Army Signal Corps had decoded enough KGB traffic to have a firm grip on the Soviet espionage in the United States and their American agents. No one needed to know about this more than the President of the United States. But Truman was not told. By order, mind, of Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now as then there is police work to be done. But so many forms of secrecy are self-defeating. In 1988, the CIA formally estimated the Gross Domestic Product of East Germany to be higher than West Germany. We should calculate such risks.
The "what-ifs" are intriguing. What if the United States had recognized Soviet weakness earlier and, accordingly, kept its own budget in order, so that upon the breakup of the Soviet Union a momentous economic aid program could have been commenced? What if we had better calculated the forces of the future so that we could have avoided going directly from the "end" of the cold War to a new Balkan war a classic clash of civilizations leaving little attention and far fewer resources for the shattered Soviet empire?
Because we have that second chance Riesman and Glazer wrote about. A chance to define our principles and stay true to them. The more then, to keep our system open as much as possible, with our purposes plain and accessible, so long as we continue to understand what the 20th century has surely taught, which is that open societies have enemies, too. Indeed, they are the greatest threat to closed societies, and, accordingly, the first object of their enmity.
We are committed, as the Constitution states, to "the Law of Nations," but that law as properly understood. Many have come to think that international law prohibits the use of force. To the contrary, like domestic law, it legitimates the use of force to uphold law in a manner that is itself proportional and lawful.
Democracy may not prove to be a universal norm. But decency would do. Our present conflict, as the President says over and again, is not with Islam, but with a malignant growth within Islam defying the teaching of the Q'uran that the struggle to the path of God forbids the deliberate killing of noncombatants. Just how and when Islam will rid itself of current heresies is something no one can say. But not soon. Christianity has been through such heresy and more than once. Other clashes will follow.
Certainly we must not let ourselves be seen as rushing about the world looking for arguments. There are now American armed forces in some 40 countries overseas. Some would say too many. Nor should we let ourselves be seen as ignoring allies, disillusioning friends, thinking only of ourselves in the most narrow terms. That is not how we survived the 20th century.
Nor will it serve in the 21st.
Last February, some 60 academics of the widest range of political persuasion and religious belief, a number from here at Harvard, including Huntington, published a manifesto: "What We're Fighting For: A Letter from America."
It has attracted some attention here; perhaps more abroad, which was our purpose. Our references are wide, Socrates, St. Augustine, Franciscus de Victoria, John Paul II, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
We affirmed "five fundamental truths that pertain to all people without distinction," beginning "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."
We allow for our own shortcomings as a nation, sins, arrogance, failings. But we assert we are no less bound by moral obligation. And finally, ...reason and careful moral reflection ... teach us that there are times when the first and most important reply to evil is to stop it.
But there is more. Forty-seven years ago , on this occasion, General George C. Marshall summoned our nation to restore the countries whose mad regimes had brought the world such horror. It was an act of statesmanship and vision without equal in history. History summons us once more in different ways, but with even greater urgency. Civilization need not die. At this moment, only the United States can save it. As we fight the war against evil, we must also wage peace, guided by the lesson of the Marshall Plan -- vision and generosity can help make the world a safer place.
Thank you.
