Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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When Daniel Patrick Moynihan died in 2003 the Economist described him as a "philosopher-politician-diplomat who two centuries earlier would not have been out of place among the Founding Fathers.” Though Moynihan never wrote an autobiography, he was a gifted author and voluminous correspondent, and in this selection from his letters Steven Weisman has compiled a vivid portrait of Moynihan’s life, in the senator’s own words. Before his four terms as Senator from New York, Moynihan served in key positions under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. His letters offer an extraordinary window into particular moments in history, from his feelings of loss at JFK’s assassination, to his passionate pleas to Nixon not to make Vietnam a Nixon war, to his frustrations over healthcare and welfare reform during the Clinton era.This audiobook showcases the unbridled range of Moynihan’s intellect and interests, his appreciation for his constituents, his renowned wit, and his warmth even for those with whom he profoundly disagreed.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan - Amazon Sales Rank: #8399726 in Books
- Published on: 2015-11-03
- Formats: Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 2
- Dimensions: 6.75" h x .68" w x 5.25" l,
- Running time: 26 Hours
- Binding: MP3 CD
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Weisman, a public policy fellow at the Peterson Institute (The Great Tax Wars) has accomplished an extraordinary feat in assembling this selection from among 10,000 pages of letters bequeathed by Senator Moynihan to the Library of Congress. Weisman provides a short overview of Moynihan's life and an introduction to each of his letters. In a moving epilogue, Maura Moynihan puts it best. Despite an active political life, her father, she says, was first and foremost a writer. "He wrote every day-even at Christmas." Not only was Moynihan's correspondence voluminous (he saved copies of every letter he wrote), he also authored several controversial books (Miles to Go, Secrecy and Family and Nation among them). Although he was a Democrat, and a member of JFK's White House, he also served as an advisor to Richard Nixon, an ambassador to India, a professor at Harvard, and was elected to the senate four times. With correspondence that begins in 1951 when Moynihan, upon finishing college after a stint in the Navy, attended the London School of Economics on a Fulbright scholarship, and ends shortly before his death in 2003, this collection is not only a tremendous resource to scholars, but an invaluable window into the mind and heart of an extraordinary man.
Review
"The Economist," September 18, 2010 "There can be no better bedside collection for anyone who is interested in the history of America and the world in the second half of the 20th century--or in a life lived bravely."
"Chronicle of Higher Education," September 30, 2010 "Unfortunately, Moynihan never wrote [a memoir]. The closest thing we have is his voluminous correspondence, collected for the first time in "Daniel Patrick Moynihan.""Hendrik Hertzberg, "The New Yorker""'"Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary"' (PublicAffairs; $35) will probably be read more widely and for longer, and certainly with greater pleasure, than any of the others on the Moynihan shelf... The Moynihan papers are the largest one-man collection in the Library of Congress--ten thousand pages, enough to lay a paper trail from the White House to the Capitol. From this mother lode of foolscap, the journalist Steven R. Weisman has sculpted a work of coherence and energ
About the Author Steven R. Weisman is editorial director and public policy fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which he joined in 2008 after serving as a correspondent, editor, and editorial writer at the New York Times, based in New York, Washington, India, and Japan. He won the Edward Weintal Prize from Georgetown University for his diplomatic reporting in 2004. His book The Great Tax Wars: How the Income Tax Transformed the Nation received the Sidney Hillman Award in 2003.
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Most helpful customer reviews
90 of 91 people found the following review helpful. This book BEGS to be Read - Understand the last 60 Years of American History!!!! By Richard of Connecticut I approached this book with caution. It is a book of select letters written by the late Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan who served 18 years in the Congress. The Senator also happened to be a Harvard professor, and Presidential adviser to JFK, LBJ, and Nixon before serving in the Congress. He is brilliant, literary, funny, prescient, and perhaps even clairvoyant.This book will have a limited audience because of the subject matter, and although it will not be widely read, it will be read by those who are widely read. Moynihan was a gift to all of us, and our society will sorely miss his wisdom, and his advice. This will be true regardless of what side of the political fence you come from.The book is composed of letters, some 700 of the 10,000 that were available to the editor, Steve Wiseman. It was left to the editor, in his selection process to give us a flavor for who the Senator was, a man who never wrote his own biography. He did however author 18 thought provoking books, and it seems that the core of those books is revealed through these letters.Each letter has a brief sentence or two introduction setting the time and tone of when it was written. Remember, you are reading the exact words that Daniel Moynihan wrote. There's no editing, so he sometimes appears to be years ahead of his time because in fact he was. Some of the words in the letters are not politically correct. The word Negro was in common usage 50 years ago, and everybody including Martin Luther King was comfortable with it then, and not now.The book is a living testament to the POWER OF IDEAS, because that is what Moynihan was all about. I have been told by his fellow Senators that he was the most gifted intellect in the Senate in 50 years. There was no typical political phoniness in this man. You knew where you stood. He was opinionated, firm, and subject to change if you could show him that he was wrong.The Senator demonstrated on page 499 that he was a class act. He and Senator Barry Goldwater were about as far apart politically, as you could be. At a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when Goldwater was absent, the CIA tried to blame Goldwater, and stated that the Committee had been fully informed through Goldwater. Senator Moynihan knew this was not true. He told the CIA in no uncertain terms, "If you are going to brand Barry Goldwater a liar, you're going to have to get yourself another Vice Chairman (meaning he Moynihan would resign). CIA Director Casey apologized. It's all on page 499.Here are just a few of the provoking thoughts you will find in this collection:1) The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of society.2) You might recall that back in 1990, when the Soviet Union was falling, no one in the CIA predicted it. They were all either asleep at the switch, or in denial. Senator Moynihan had predicted it very clearly in 1979, eleven years before. It's in the unedited letters, it couldn't be clearer, and everybody wants to know why he thought the CIA should be dissolved?3) We all believe that Ralph Nader was the man who orchestrated the whole automobile safety movement in this country. It's not so. It's in the letters, Moynihan was there first. At that point Professor Mohnihan was instrumental in bringing Nader to Washington DC, and pushed for safety legislation before Nader got there.4) He coined the term "iron law of emulation", which means he felt that bureaucracies or groups in conflict tend to become more and more like each other over time. He thought the Soviet and American policies on nuclear war were an example of this.5) A month before JFK's death he wrote an amazing letter on October 22, 1963 on organized crime to the President. It is clear to me that he understood the threat of the underworld on our society like nobody else in government except for Robert Kennedy. This was a time when the FBI and Hoover denied that organized crime existed. This letter shocked me, look at page 63.Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an intellectual, diplomat, professor, politician, and statesman. We are all better off for the life he lived, and we are very much enlightened by the energy and time it took Mr. Wiseman to put this collection together. He has done an admirable job. By the end of this book, one develops an extraordinary and in-depth feel for this most remarkable public man. Born dirt poor, shining shoes, the Senator left the planet a high brow intellectual with a deep love for his country. Read it at your leisure by your bedside, and be prepared to be enlightened. Thank you for reading this review.Richard C. Stoyeck
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful. A patriotic liberal By Michael Altenburg In March 2003, the month when he died at age 76, Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a memorandum summed up his credo about society and culture: The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. Thanks to this interaction, we're a better society in nearly all respects than we were."This last piece in Steven R. Weisman's exquisite selection of Moynihan's letters, memoranda, diary entries, etc. says a lot about the man who was obsessed with both politics and ways to change them for the better. His daughter Maura, indeed, saw her father more as a writer than a politician. But he also served four presidents - John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford - as member of their cabinets or sub-cabinets, as ambassador in India and envoy to the United Nations. In addition, he represented New York for 24 years in the United States Senate. But the interaction between culture and politics would not have taken place without him having been a great writer and scholar at the same time.Moynihan, an Irish Roman-Catholic, grew up poor in a single-parent family in New York, collecting cents on coke bottles, shining shoes on Times Square, later working on the piers of the East side as a longshoreman. Bright and ambitious, he attended City College of New York, joined the Navy in 1943, graduated from Tufts University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, studied at the London School of Economics as a Fulbright scholar and later became a professor at Syracuse University, MIT and Harvard. He published 19 books, most of them written in the old abandoned single-room school house next to the small farm he had bought for his family in the Susquehanna Valley in upstate New York following the assassination of JFK.The subjects that fascinated him had much to do with where he came from: poverty, broken families, ghetto violence and organized crime. He was a natural member of the Democratic Party, but remained always deeply obliged and attached to a society which had helped him to overcome the shortcomings of his humble background and enabled him to rise from its bottom to the very top. For the same reason he was an enemy of the radical left which often enough came from privileged and wealthy families.Marxism, so fashionable in New York in the 1930s and 40s, was not for him. From his young days in the New York ghettos he knew first hand that crime and violence often have less to do with class than with ethnicity. In 1963, together with Nathan Glazer, he published the eye opening best-seller "Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City".As an ambassador to India in the mid 1970s he realized that the intricacies of ethnicity also rule international relations and the domestic tensions of many a nation. As US envoy to the United Nations he most violently, but in vain, fought the adoption of the "Zionism is Racism" resolution in 1975, but, at the same time, was more than critical of what he called the messianic radicalism of the Jews. Still, in 1991, "Zionism is Racism" was repealed at the UN - after Moynihan's prompting of President George H.W. Bush senior.As early as 1979 he publicly predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union from internal stresses and had only contempt for the C.I.A which did not get it until much after it already had happened.Strongly believing in the checks and balances of the American Constitution he urged to rein back in the powers of the executive branch after the end of the Cold War and fought for greater transparency and less secrecy.The architectural renewal of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington which JFK had initiated was completed under his auspices more than 25 years later and his efforts to convert the old Post Office building in New York into a new Pennsylvania Station after the previous one, also built by the architects McKim, Mead & White, had been torn down in the mid 60s, is scheduled to be completed in 2016 and to be renamed Moynihan Station.So this extraordinary man of much courage, integrity, judgment, energy and taste will not be forgotten. There remains a lot to be learned from him, both from his books and from his life. An authentic, inspiring glimpse at both offers Stephen Weisman's "Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary".Moynihan, in his time, resented few things worse than to be labeled a "neo-conservative". He saw himself as a liberal and wrote to the Vatican that the Pope had it wrong in denouncing "liberalism" in Centesimus Annus. In a European context, where this review comes from, much confusion remains about liberalism. Ralph Dahrendorf, the eminent German scholar/politician who later became a peer for life and member of the British House of Lords, was in age, stature and thinking somewhat comparable to Moyhnihan. In one of his last publications Dahrendorf suggested an imaginary Societas Erasmiana of great liberals for the cohort 1900 - 1910, including Hannah Arendt, George Kennan, John Kenneth Galbraith and others also close to Moynihan. Had Dahrendorf thought about extending a Societas Erasmiana of great liberals to his own age cohort, he no doubt would have included Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. An Ultimately Flawed and Tragic Character By Joseph C. Kusnan This book is worth reading for Steven Weisman's introduction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan alone. Senator Moynihan is a fascinating self-made figure in American politics and letters and this books makes it clear how much he crafted and shaped his own image and ambition. Ultimately, Moynihan will be remembered as a colorful and decorative figure during some of the most tumultuous years of American history. His letters reveal him as a sometimes petty, thin-skinned sycophant who was often preoccupied with the debate of the day. It may have prevented his ultimate greatness. Tufts was a stepping stone to Europe. Europe was stepping stone to New York politics. New York politics was a stepping stone to Harvard. Harvard was a stepping stone to the White House. The White House was stepping stone to elected office. The New York Times Magazine assessment of him may have been accurate-- in 24 years in the Senate, he only sponsored a single piece of notable legislation-- he enjoyed sparring with his committee members and sharing a sherry after a floor vote. The clubby nature of the Senate suited him. As one observer noted, if you asked Moynihan for help with a passport, you got a long history of the passport. When you asked D'Amato (or Clinton) for passport, you got a passport. Alas, the times have changed. Senator Moynihan's bow tie and self-conscious intellectual persona was always an affectation feeding a large ego and a craving for approbation.
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