Newly elected presidents, their staffs flush with optimism and bursting with fresh ideas, sometimes invite a member of the opposing party, or at least an adherent of an opposing ideology, to join the administration. Maybe it’s a political gesture; maybe it’s an expression of magnanimity or of confidence that what matters isn’t ideology or party labels.
In any case, it usually ends badly. I think of David Gergen going to work for Bill Clinton in 1993 or John J. DiIulio joining the Bush administration in 2001. Both exited on less than amicable terms. And yet, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan joined the administration of Richard Nixon, somehow it worked.
The impetus behind Nixon’s need for a Democrat on his staff was essentially political—he had only won a plurality in 1968 and felt he needed to convey a disposition of receptivity to other viewpoints. It wasn’t just a ploy, either. On domestic affairs, as Stephen Hess explains in this incisive first-person account of Moynihan’s two-year odyssey in the Nixon White House, the new president didn’t have much of an agenda at all. In 1962, when the former vice president was on the verge of losing the race for California governor to Pat Brown, Hess recalls asking Nixon if he thought he’d lose the race.
“Yes,” he answered, “but at least I’ll never have to talk about crap like dope addiction again.” This was a man who, during his successful campaign for the presidency in 1968, said to a journalist, “I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically without a president. All you need is a competent cabinet to run the country at home. You need a president for foreign policy.”
Moynihan was a liberal, yes; but he had made enemies on the left. Famously, as assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration, he had been the author of a study—The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, commonly known as the Moynihan Report—in which he concluded that generational poverty among black Americans was not, in the first instance, the result of an insufficiently munificent welfare system but, rather, a consequence of the black family’s dissolution. He had been denounced by civil rights leaders and academics, and reproached by commentators and editorialists, for “blaming the victim.”
Nixon’s chief question, in any case, wasn’t whether Moynihan was too liberal but whether “[we] could . . . count on him to be loyal? I don’t mean Republican. I mean—you know—one of us.”
Stephen Hess had known both Nixon and Moynihan for several years, having worked for the Republican and alongside the Democrat in various capacities, and he was of course right to wonder whether they could function together profitably: Nixon the profane, cynical, and attitudinally conservative hardball politician; Moynihan, the urbane and idealistic liberal and fluent Harvard academic.
The president liked Pat, as he was known, immediately. He placed him at the head of the administration’s Council for Urban Affairs, an entity created primarily, it seems, in order to help the president figure out what his policy on urban affairs should be. Immediately, Moynihan began sending the president long, discursive, almost literary memoranda that one might have assumed would irritate or bore Nixon.
“Whatever the urgency of the matters I bring before you,” the first Moynihan memo begins,
“Most staff memos to a president,” writes Hess, “are essentially politician-to-politician or expert-to-CEO. But Pat is writing to Nixon intellectual-to-intellectual, without a bit of patronizing. Nixon has never been treated this way before. He loves it!”
Ordinarily, I am not a fan of present-tense narration, but it makes sense here. It’s hard to read anything about Richard Nixon without thinking about it through the lens of Watergate, but Hess wants to tell the story of these two great men as he experienced it, not as a picture of what the White House was like before scandal swallowed it in 1973-74.
Pundits wrongly guessed that Moynihan would last no more than six months. When he finally left to return to Harvard in late 1970—he had agreed to work for Nixon for only two years—the president almost persuaded him to stay by offering him the United Nations ambassadorship—a position he would accept under President Ford. Not only did Moynihan outlast the predictions, however; he became one of Nixon’s trusted advisers and, despite his boss’s conservative instincts, persuaded him to support a major (and moderately progressive) welfare proposal. The Family Assistance Plan, in essence, promised a guaranteed annual income to families with children. And although it was defeated in the Senate Finance Committee in 1970, a similar proposal, one based instead on Social Security income, passed and was signed into law a few days before Nixon’s reelection in 1972.
Moynihan’s chief adversary in the White House, Hess recalls, was Arthur Burns. Nixon had made Burns chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1970, but during the administration’s first two years, Moynihan and Burns vied for Nixon’s attention on domestic matters. Burns was a conservative economist, Moynihan a liberal sociologist. The crucial difference, though, was simply this: “Burns is boring—a fact recognized by anyone who has to wait for his words to emerge as he pulls on his pipe,” and Moynihan was anything but boring. Indeed, his wit shines through almost every page of Hess’s chronicle. He remembers Moynihan telling a story about taking a cab ride to Brooklyn: “The cabbie looks down at a Daily News headline on the seat. ‘Look at that. Yute rape, yute murder, yute robbery. When my kid grows up he ain’t gonna be no yute!’ ”
Moynihan bested Burns simply by his ability to discuss serious policy problems with charm and in intellectually engaging ways. Indeed, so decisively had Moynihan the intellectual earned the president’s respect that Nixon asked him for a list of 10 books any American president should have read. (It’s hard to criticize Moynihan’s choices, among them Robert Blake’s Disraeli, Lord Charnwood’s Abraham Lincoln—”for my money still the best volume on Lincoln”—and Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand.)
Hess admired Moynihan and still has great affection for his memory. Reading this valuable and frequently delightful account, however, I can’t help regretting Moynihan’s influence and wishing the boring economist Burns had found a way to counteract it. Alas, Burns found it harder and harder to get through the “Berlin Wall” of John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman. At one point, as Burns unavailingly attempted to argue to Nixon that Moynihan’s welfare proposal was antithetical to the president’s philosophy, Ehrlichman responded: “Don’t you realize the president doesn’t have a philosophy?”
Ehrlichman was right, of course; but I wonder if the same could be said of Moynihan. For all his brilliance, and despite his admirable refusal to accept certain tired conventions on welfare policy, there was something muddled about his thinking on that issue. The Moynihan Report created an uproar because its author found, without looking for it, that cultural habits lay behind economic problems as much as (or more than) government policies, and that government policies aimed at solving economic problems were predestined to fail if they neglected to account for cultural habits.
“At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society,” Moynihan wrote, “is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community.” He had concluded that culture, not government policy, determines outcomes. Policy can affect outcomes, but it is secondary and must account for culture. And in the case of postwar welfare policies that mostly disregarded cultural considerations, government policies had consistently worsened outcomes for black Americans: “The steady expansion of [welfare programs] . . . can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.”
Moynihan was right; his critics and accusers were wrong. And Moynihan was pursuing the same line of thought as he began working for Nixon. In one of his first memos to his new boss (included here) he summarized the essence of a lecture he’d read by the Harvard sociologist Paul Weaver.
Once again: culture, not government policy, determines outcomes.
Over the years, Moynihan was not averse to telling the story of how he came to write the Moynihan Report, and how he was denounced by liberals after it was leaked. But how firmly did he grasp the implications of its central insight? In 1996, for instance, just before the Senate passed a welfare reform bill designed to reform or eliminate government welfare policies that encouraged dependency, Senator Moynihan (as he had become in 1977) denounced it in strident terms and expressed his disbelief that President Clinton intended to sign it. But the bill passed, Clinton endorsed it—and within a few years, child poverty rates and welfare caseloads declined significantly.
Reading anything by or about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, I find it impossible to dislike him. Sure, he was full of himself—he could hardly write an essay or review without quoting one of his own pronouncements, and often more than one—but he could poke fun at himself, too. When asked at a cabinet meeting, in 1969, if he could prepare the outlines of a national urban policy, Moynihan replied: “I would be glad to undertake such a task, on the condition that—and I realize that one does not ordinarily impose conditions on the president of the United States—on the condition that no one take it seriously.”
But there was something of the dilettante about Moynihan, too—a failure, or reluctance, to think through his own ideas and principles and their implications. He was a first-rate intellect and lucid writer. But in a position of political power, give me boring philosophical consistency any day.
Barton Swaim is the author, most recently, of The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics.
