‘American Masters’ recalls Moynihan
“American Masters” (9 p.m., PBS) will dedicate the next two Friday nights to an all but vanished breed: the public intellectual, profiling Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (tonight) and William F. Buckley (April 5).
With his breezy erudition, Moynihan was frequently thought of as a product of elite society. He was anything but. A child of divorce during the Great Depression, he knew the uncertainty of poverty and the emotional anguish of a broken home. He was working as a dockworker when someone suggested that he take the examination to enter New York’s free City College. That institution and the U.S. Navy became Moynihan’s ticket to multiple degrees. For Moynihan, the notion that the government could help lift individuals from poverty and dependency was not a theoretical notion, but firsthand experience.
His ability to blend theoretical brilliance with wisdom gleaned on the sidewalks of New York can often seem like something out of a tall tale. Learning that his mother’s saloon had lost its bartender, he returned from graduate studies at Tufts to tend bar for a few months, and still returned to graduate, as class valedictorian. He can sometimes seem like Matt Damon’s character in “Good Will Hunting.”
Moynihan worked for four consecutive presidential administrations, advising Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon on ways to combat endemic poverty, particularly among urban Black communities.
His ability to digest massive amounts of data and synthesize that process into policy suggestions also inspired countless articles in small thought-provoking magazines and scholarly books. His deft use of the English language would get him into trouble when, on two occasions, memos written for the president’s eyes only were leaked to the press.
Under President Ford, his firebrand oratory as U.N. ambassador earned him praise for his willingness to defend an imperfect American democracy against hypocritical condemnation from unelected thugs and Soviet-allied dictators.
Elected to the Senate in 1976, he would spend nearly the rest of his life there, an intellectual giant who could intimidate and amuse his colleagues. George Will noted that he had written more books than most senators had read.
His ability to glean insight from data could sometimes make him seem like a prophet. He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union nearly a decade before the fact. He warned that the end of the Cold War would bring back ethnic and nationalist-fueled wars that would seem like “something out of the Middle Ages,” and he warned that a culture of government classified secrecy could cause official blindness, a conclusion seconded by the 9/11 Commission.
My favorite Moynihan expression is one that stands up to most of the nonsense passed off as contemporary politics and punditry: “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.”