The Times of london August 11 2000 FEATURES Senator Pat Moynihan, one of America's most distinguished politicians, is retiring. He tells Roy Hattersley why he thinks Nixon was the greatest President of his time, and reveals his doubts about Hillary Clinton's Senate bid Why Hillary is unlikely to win At the mention of Hillary Clinton's name the temperature in Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's office dropped by at least ten degrees. I had naively assumed that, after 24 years on Capitol Hill and on the point of retirement, the Senior Senator for New York would enthuse about the Democratic Party's choice as his successor. But he was uncharacteristically non-committal. "I'm a Democrat. Of course I support her." That seemed to me a less than enthusiastic endorsement. So I asked him if he had encouraged her to stand. "I was there when she announced that she was standing," he replied in his strange, hard-edged New York-Irish accent. And that was as much enthusiasm as he was prepared to counterfeit. He was equally half-hearted about Mrs Clinton's prospect of success. All he would say about the First Lady's chances of election was "We'll see". And, when he warmed to his theme, his faint praise was even more damning: "Somebody had to run. We took Bobby Kennedy from outside and he won. He got fewer votes than LBJ won in New York that year. But he won." If Moynihan reflects the feeling of bedrock New York Democrats, Hillary Clinton is in deep political trouble. No doubt she will dismiss his misgivings as the reservations of a notorious maverick. But Moynihan stands for something special in US politics. He is the American dream made flesh - a status that he illustrates with an account of how he heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. "There I was, shining shoes at Central Park West subway station. And six years later I was an officer in the US Navy. There's mobility for you. It couldn't happen today." Perhaps it could. There are still 14-year-old boys who, like a young Moynihan, shine shoes and sell papers and then, when college calls, work in the docks for four days a week to pay for the other three days' education. But there will never be another politician to match his record: senator, ambassador - first to the United Nations and then to India - and sometime special counsel to the President. Because, despite the distinction of his record, it is the history of intellectual independence that marks him out. For half a century he has often entranced and frequently infuriated Washington with ideas that explode out of him like machine-gun fire. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Moyhihan describes the Republican Richard Nixon as 'the last liberal' ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Hillary Clinton's ability to brush off his reservations will reveal the extent to which American politics has changed. She is the candidate of scientific management - careful calculation of public opinion and conscious determination to swim with the current of popular prejudice. He has fought a different sort of campaign. Nobody in modern American politics was more joyously engaged in the battle of ideas. Even now, at the age of 73 and in his last few months as a Senator, he is (to the irritation of Vice-President Al Gore, whose pension policy he derides) arguing that workers should be given the right to invest part of the annual social security tax in the stock market. At the same time, he is promoting his highly successful history of the American Government's obsession with secrecy and telling anyone who will listen about the restoration of Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue - a preoccupation that he justifies with a theory built on Thomas Jefferson's belief that architecture and politics are related disciplines. Pat Moynihan has a theory about everything. Back in the early Sixties - as assistant secretary at the Department of Labor - he had so many bright ideas that Time magazine featured him on its cover under the headline "Pat Answers". In those days he believed that welfare dependency and unemployment went hand in hand. "As unemployment fell so did the cost of Aid to Families with Dependent Children." Then, in 1963, the lines diverged to create what social scientists now call "Moynihan's Scissors". The fall in unemployment continued but welfare payments increased. Moynihan describes the cause of the change in a single burst of certainty - "illegitimacy". Political correctness has passed Pat Moynihan by. He has the figures in his head. "In the early Sixties the black illegitimacy rate was 23 per cent, whites 3 to 4 per cent. Now it's 33 per cent overall, and blacks 68 per cent. Most of Europe is moving in the same direction." Yet for years America was not prepared to discuss the new phenomenon. "It became the terrible taboo. People who talked about it were accused of discriminating against blacks: blaming the victims." But Moynihan is not easily intimidated. "Most of the things that go wrong in this country come from this cause: crime, lack of success at school, unemployment. They are caused by, not the result of, illegitimacy." Even when the graph lines crossed, Moynihan's "Scissors" did not sever his faith in old-fashioned solutions. As special counsel to President Nixon he worked on what he calls a "full employment budget". It was a formula in which the balance of outlays to revenue provided enough jobs for the whole working population. "Only our budget had a built-in and permanent deficit because full employment would not happen without it." Moynihan has no doubt about how President Clinton would react to a young special adviser who proposed a permanent budget deficit. "He would kill him." But then Moynihan is not a Clinton Democrat. He supported Bill Bradley, rather than Al Gore, for the Democratic nomination. And it may be that his reservations about his successor are influenced by his opinion of her husband. One thing is certain. Even in America, where party loyalties shift from year to year, Moynihan's cavalier attitude towards his successor will cause offence. But it will not cause surprise. For he is an unusual Democrat. Looking back over his half century in politics, back to his apprenticeship with Averell Harriman, then Governor of New York, he nominates Republican President Nixon, "the last liberal", as the greatest president of his time. It is the sort of statement that provokes a moment of stunned silence, which he brings to an end with a multiple justification of his heresy. "Who wanted to introduce the minimum wage? Nixon. Who persuaded the building trade unions to accept a percentage of workers from the minorities? Nixon." He went on to insist that Nixon "desegregated the Southern schools . . . Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill, but didn't do a thing about it . . . Nixon set up committees for each state, offered money to help and made it clear he was going to do it. Perhaps he wanted to get it out of the way before he stood for re-election. But whatever the reason, he did it." Then came the footnote. "And why was he hated by the so-called progressives? Because he prosecuted Alger Hiss (a State Department official and darling of the liberal establishment) as a spy. And you know what? Hiss was a spy." Moynihan has a profound contempt for bogus liberals who, in his unshakeable opinion, often stand in the way of real improvements because they are more concerned with style than substance. They are the people who, four years ago, lobbied and demonstrated against his Family Support Bill. "They knew welfare had to change. They wanted to get people into work. But they wouldn't have anything to do with it because it sounded like Workfare." Asked who "they" were, he preferred "not to name names". But he offered an institution as an example: "The Children's Defence Fund, of which Hillary Clinton was once chairman." Her husband passed a Bill that limited welfare entitlement to five years. "And we don't know what's going to happen in 2001. But where were all the ranters and the non-negotiable demanders when it was passed? Where were all the people who usually surround the Senate when welfare is being discussed? They were left just too stunned to say a word." The contempt for bogus liberals goes very deep. Pat Moynihan shares with Edward Kennedy the distinction of forming the rearguard of the New Frontier. They are the last survivors of what romantics call the one brief shining moment of John F. Kennedy's Camelot. He has played his own part in creating the legend. On the day of the assassination in Dallas, Mary McGrory, The Washington Post columnist, predicted: "We'll never smile again." Moynihan corrected her. "Sure Mary," he said, "we'll smile again. We'll just never be young again." What he now most vividly recalls about his responses and reactions that day is not the much-quoted McGrory dialogue but a phrase that suddenly came into his head. "Our revels now are ended." It is a line from The Tempest. "Believe me, you could have beaten me with chains the week before and I still wouldn't have come up with it. But somehow, in the emotion of the moment . . ." After Kennedy's death, he chose not to serve President Johnson but to stand for (and be elected as) President of the New York City Council. Then he was enticed away to advise Nixon, to serve as his Ambassador to India and as Permanent Representative at the UN for Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford. There was nothing particularly unusual about a Democrat accepting appointment under a Republican President. It was Moynihan's way of working that raised eyebrows. Sitting outside Henry Kissinger's office in 1975 I was surprised to be greeted by a smiling Moynihan who apologised that I had been kept waiting and proudly told me: "I have been officially rebuked by the Secretary of State before the Senate has even consented to my appointment." Moynihan could have gone to the UN in 1972. Bob Haldeman - the White House chief-of-staff and, later, a convicted Watergate conspirator - told him that the President wanted him to take the job at the beginning of Nixon's second term. Neither Moynihan nor his wife, Elizabeth, was attracted by the idea and there was a Harvard professorship awaiting his convenience. After he declined with thanks, Haldeman asked him to do his best to persuade another reluctant nominee to take the job. "So I went to see this young representative for Texas, sitting in his basement office. He had just lost the Senate election. Lloyd Bentsen (a Democrat who later became Clinton's Treasury Secretary) had gone around the state complaining that this reckless fellow had voted for the Family Assistance Act and wanted to give money to people who didn't deserve it. There wasn't much for a young Congressman to do and I told him: 'It's not a bad job. Suite at the Waldorf and no heavy lifting!' He was called George Bush, and after that he went from strength to strength." Four years later - after Watergate had ended Nixon's presidency and Moynihan had completed a term as Ambassador to India - the UN seemed more appealing. He lasted nine months in the job. First he attacked the Soviet Union for describing Israel's attitudes towards the Palestinians as "racist" - and was rebuked by Britain's Ivor Richard for "not knowing how we behave here". Then, when a resolution was tabled calling for the release of political prisoners in South Africa and Nicaragua, he sought to amend it to include a demand for their release "everywhere". D�tente was the mood of the moment and assaults on the Soviet Union, direct or implied, were not welcome in the State Department. One night when he got home he read in The New York Times: "Ford and Kissinger want to get rid of Moynihan but don't know how to tell him." "It was," says Moynihan, "an obvious plant. More Kissinger than Ford." He resigned the next day. Moynihan could not walk the political line. He went back to Harvard, but there was never much chance of his staying there until retirement. Democrats in New York "warned that all the wrong sort of people were looking for nomination", and suggested that he ran for the Senate. He had his doubts if he should and whether he would win if he did. Then, one day, he was "marking term papers and looking forward to having a drink and a sleep before driving to the farm" when the idea seemed irresistible. So he "flew down to New York and declared". He won with a majority of 10,000 in an electorate of almost six million. In 1988 - a Republican year when Bush won the White House - 3.2 million New Yorkers voted for him. It was the biggest plurality in the history of legislative elections. New York suited him and he suited New York. He became everybody's boyhood vision of a senator - visible, voluble and voracious for publicity. He served on all the senior committees, chairing Armed Services until the Republicans won the Senate in 1996. The only regrets to which he admits - although conceding that "there are dozens of them" - are "things undone". He rejoices that he told Nixon to get out of Vietnam and that US support of Pakistan against India was "crazy as well as wrong". Running for President was "never a serious thought", though "some people tried to make it one. Too many people here live on the memory that they were once candidates". Of course, he would do it all again. Moynihan believes in politics. He has a theory about how they will change and develop over the next 50 years in the way that he has a theory about everything - except what a great senator Hillary Clinton will make. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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