Q&A: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a man of 'largish ideas'
For decades he helped to shape the national debate on such key domestic issues as Social Security, welfare reform and the disintegration of the American family.
They don’t make U.S. senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan anymore. Read his Wikipedia bio and the length of his career and scope of his accomplishments at the top levels of the federal government go on forever. He worked for four presidents of both parties and was an important policy-maker in the War on Poverty in the mid-1960s. His warning about the harm being done to poor blacks by Great Society welfare programs that encouraged — and rewarded — mothers to raise their kids without a father in the house was controversial in 1965, but the problem of broken families that he foresaw more than half a century ago is far worse than ever today.
From Wikipedia:
Moynihan issued his research in 1965 under the title The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, now commonly known as The Moynihan Report. Moynihan's report[12] fueled a debate over the proper course for government to take with regard to the economic underclass, especially blacks. Critics on the left attacked it as "blaming the victim",[13] a slogan coined by psychologist William Ryan.[14] Some suggested that Moynihan was propagating the views of racists[15] because much of the press coverage of the report focused on the discussion of children being born out of wedlock. Despite Moynihan's warnings, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program included rules for payments only if no "Man [was] in the house."[16] Critics of the program's structure, including Moynihan, said that the nation was paying poor women to throw their husbands out of the house.
After the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress, Moynihan agreed that correction was needed for a welfare system that possibly encouraged women to raise their children without fathers: "The Republicans are saying we have a hell of a problem, and we do."[17]
I interviewed Moynihan for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2001 two months after he left the Senate and two years before he died at age 76.
April 21, 2001
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a U.S. senator representing New York for 24 years until his retirement this year, is a tough political act to follow. Ask Hillary Clinton.
As a senator and a member of the Cabinets of presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford, Moynihan has for decades helped to shape the national debate on such key domestic issues as Social Security, welfare reform, the disintegration of the American family and fiscal policy.
Moynihan, who'll speak about Social Security reform in Pittsburgh Thursday evening, is an FDR liberal Democrat who morphed — for awhile — into a pioneering neoconservative during the 1960s.
Famous for thinking big, deep and relatively sensible thoughts about the possibilities and limits of federal social policy, he is no conservative and no enemy of big-government activism. Yet his ideas often sounded heretical to his own party and often pleased Republicans. I talked to him by telephone from his office from his office in Washington, D.C.
Q: Do you still wish you were mixing it up in the Senate?
A: Oh, heavens no. I served four terms. Four terms is unusual. In the history of the institution, I was the 120th person to have done that. And that gives you the chance to say what you have on your mind and let others come along and say what they have on theirs.
Q: If somebody met you in a bar and didn't know who you were, how would you describe your politics?
A: Um, a child of my time. Raised in Manhattan. I'm a Democrat of the old party organization, sort of. An Al Smith Democrat, a Franklin Roosevelt Democrat, a Harry Truman Democrat. That's my lineage, that's my genes, and they stay with you.
Q: You are famous for being unique, as being a senator who thought bigger, sensible thoughts. What made you so different among your peers — not that you were better or worse, but different.
A: I came of age in World War II. When I left there were 11 members of the Senate who had been in uniform in World War II. Then followed the Cold War, and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Ford.
I was a Cabinet or sub-Cabinet member for four presidents. I guess that makes me the only person in our history to have done that. We lived in a world of large events, so it was useful to have a few largish ideas.
Q: What's the most important social issue that Congress is confronting now, one that you secretly wish you were still there to try to solve?
A: I think our most pressing social issue is the question of families and the family structures in which children are raised. Some years ago, Samuel Preston at the University of Pennsylvania gave the presidential address to the American Population Association, and he spoke of the earthquake that has shuddered through the American family in the last three decades.
What I have learned, and which I think is important, is that the same thing has happened in Canada, in England and Wales, in France, and now we learn the same thing is happening in Australia and New Zealand.
In 1960, the percentage of births to single parents in the United States was, say, 6 percent; in Canada, 5; in Britain, 7; and in France, 6. You move ahead 40 years and the ratios are 33 percent, 32 percent, 38 percent and 37 percent. In New Zealand, what they call 'ex-nuptial births' are 47 percent. It is estimated by respectable British writers that in two decades the majority of children born in Britain will be to single parents.
Well, how did that happen? I guess I would wish there was a bill you could pass that would change it, but I don't think there is. So not being in the Senate is, in that sense, no loss; I'm still writing about the subject and doing my best to think about it.
Q: People like Charles Murray would argue that government social policy is in large part responsible for those single mothers being able to live on their own.
A: That is a respectable hypothesis. I don't think we have latched on to one set of specifics. I could add three or four other things too. ... But I don't have an answer. I do have a lot of questions and I try to ask them.
Q: When you look back over your career, is there a significant piece of legislation or important policy idea that you are especially proud of? One that would not have existed if you had not been on this planet at that place and at that time?
A: I'm particularly fond of the 1991 legislation called the Intermodal Surface Transportation and Efficiency Act — ISTEA, which said, 'All right, the Interstate Highway System has been built. It is time we moved to concentrate our efforts on mass transit, on high-speed, on other modes of moving about. We've wrecked enough cities with those superhighways.'
They are called 'interstate,' but actually most of the money was spent in urban areas and it's not a very pretty sight. Our Department of Transportation, which was created just to carry out this highway program, had no idea but to build another: 'We built the 44,000 miles, how about building another 44,000?'
We said, 'Nope, nope. Time to stop that.' We had a special provision in that legislation, and in the legislation that followed, called TEA-21, to get ourselves into trying out some maglev systems. Maglev is for 'magnetic levitation’?
Q: Yes, we think here in Pittsburgh that we're going to get one of those two demonstration projects.
A: Yes, from the airport to Downtown. And I think it'll take eight minutes. ... We said, 'The Germans are building, the Japanese are building, Singapore's got one going. What's the matter with us?'
Q: Were you happy with welfare reform enacted in 1996 and are you pleased with the results?
A: I had thought what we did in 1988 with the Family Support Act was a fine measure, in saying that welfare has to be a temporary condition and that the society needs to help the person who needs it and they have to help themselves.
I was very much disturbed by the five-year cutoff (of welfare benefits) in the 1996 legislation. It takes more than five years for a child to grow up. We are just about ready to get to that cliff. I'm sure we'll do something. But I'm sure we're going to have a lot of problems we had not anticipated.
Q: What's the best thing you can say about Richard Nixon — and then the worst?
A: He was the last liberal president in the sequence that begins with Franklin Roosevelt. He sought to greatly expand the social provision in the country. He proposed a guaranteed income, proposed revenue sharing, proposed a national health insurance plan, started things like the environmental protection agency.
Q: And the worst thing?
A: He let his country down. And there was that side to him that most of us didn't see. He destroyed himself. There was no need to.
Q: How about Ronald Reagan? What's the best thing you can say about him?
A: Well, he cheered us all up. ... Once I was asked to give a lecture to a class about political leadership -- 'What are the most important features of political leadership?' I said, 'Well, if I had to rank them, the first thing I'd say would be “be lucky.'''
On the whole Ronald Reagan was lucky. ... The Cold War ended on his watch and he will ever be given credit for it. And that's a pretty good thing on your list.
Q: When you speak at the Heinz Awards lecture, what will be your main message — your theme.
A: I'll talk about a thrift savings component to Social Security as a means to providing a measure of wealth to persons who are leaving the work force, as well as just insuring their pension and health benefits.
Q: This will be something similar to what President Bush has proposed?
A: Well, I'll make the point that I was the one who introduced the legislation in 1997 and again in 1998, and that I'm for whoever president will be for it. ... I'll welcome the idea and I'll welcome the debate.
Moynihan, the featured guest at the annual Heinz Awards Lecture, will speak at 7:30 p.m. in the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. Call (412) 622-8866 for ticket information.