Before his 24 years representing New York in the Senate, Moynihan had several other storied careers. He was raised from infancy in New York City, the son of a hard-drinking former newspaperman who abandoned his family when Pat was 10. His mother ran a saloon in Hell’s Kitchen, and young Moynihan shined shoes in nearby Times Square, enlisted in the Navy and graduated from Tufts. At 28 he was a top aide to Gov. W. Averell Harriman in Albany, where he met and married Liz Brennan, without whose canny supervision his own later political career would have been impossible. By 1963 he was breaking through as a public personality, remarking after the Kennedy assassination: “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know the world is going to break your heart eventually.”
From the start, Moynihan understood how to create sparks at the intersection of academia (he taught intermittently at Harvard) and policymaking (he served four presidents, from JFK to Gerald Ford). He championed auto safety years before Ralph Nader, and his first of 18 books, “Beyond the Melting Pot” (with Nathan Glazer), challenged the shibboleth that ethnicity was fading in America. At the Labor Department in 1965, he was savaged by liberals for breaking a taboo and presciently pointing out the growing crisis of single-parent black families. Later the critics pounced even harder when he used the term “benign neglect” in a memo to President Nixon on urban problems. Moynihan wasn’t arguing for neglect of blacks; he just wanted a pause in the superheated racial rhetoric of the day. In fact, the failed plan he was hatching for Nixon called for a guaranteed annual income for the poor that looks extremely liberal by today’s standards.
By then Moynihan was increasingly identified as a neoconservative Democrat, especially on cold-war foreign policy. After serving as U.S. ambassador to India he took his tart tongue to the United Nations, where he denounced the U.N.’s notorious resolution equating Zionism with racism. Among Moynihan’s proudest moments was that he was the first leader to predict the demise of the Soviet Union, writing in a NEWSWEEK article in 1979 that the U.S.S.R. was coming under economic and ethnic strain neglected by analysts.
Until the end of the century, Moynihan was ensconced in the Senate, where his milestones included protecting Social Security and teaching hospitals. He moved left, calling for huge cuts in the defense budget, more respect for international law and limits on government secrecy. Despite his early work on welfare dependency, he opposed President Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform, and predicted–wrongly, so far–that it would have disastrous consequences.
But legislative victories are a small gauge of his influence. For nearly 50 years Moynihan’s fingerprints were on every significant social policy–and the critique of that policy. He wrote more books, George F. Will remarked, than most senators have ever read. And he looked deeper. “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” he wrote. “The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
In 2000 Moynihan retired and backed Hillary Clinton for his seat. Columnist Michael Barone described him as “the nation’s best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson.” Had he been a British political intellectual, like Disraeli or Churchill, he might have run the country. But Moynihan was more monumental than most presidents. So it’s fitting that New York’s Pennsylvania Station, slated to move in 2008 into a beautiful old post office across the street (thanks to the senator’s efforts), will be known as Moynihan Station. Perhaps someday a few commuters there will pause, look up for a moment and, in the finest homage, think.
title: “A Man Of Ideas In The Arena” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-08” author: “Renee Lipner”
It may seem strange to cite these familiar notions to affirm his historical significance, but that’s the point. These ideas were wildly out of fashion when Friedman first championed them in the 1950s. Remembering the Great Depression (the 1930s’ unemployment: 18 percent), Americans were suspicious of free markets. In 1962, the appearance of his “Capitalism & Freedom,” which remains in print with nearly 1 million copies sold, was a seminal event. It began to change the conversation. Its big theme was that economic freedom was not just good economics; it was “a necessary condition for political freedom.” Of course, it wasn’t enough, Friedman added, citing prewar fascist Germany.
Free markets favored individual choice and creativity. “The great advances of civilization,” he wrote, “have never come from centralized government.” But Friedman was not indifferent to societies’ hopes to improve themselves through government, and his ideas often aimed to reconcile these goals with maximum individual choice. We have adopted–or are still debating–many of his plans: school vouchers (he believed public schools perform poorly because they are monopolies); the negative income tax (Friedman proposed substituting direct payments to the poor for the “rag bag” of existing government services–the idea partially inspired today’s “earned income tax credit,” providing subsidies for low-income workers); the all-volunteer military, created in 1973; and personal accounts for Social Security.
Friedman, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics, made three huge scholarly contributions. First, he helped explain the Great Depression. Until the pub-lication in 1963 of “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960,” co-written with Anna Schwartz, the Depression was cast as an extreme example of capitalism’s instability. Not so, Friedman and Schwartz said. The Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression through mistakenly tight money policies that led 40 per-cent of U.S. banks to fail. Though this story has been amended and extended, it remains the central explanation for the Depression.
The second contribution, made in 1967, was to show that there was no permanent “trade off” between inflation and unemployment: governments could not, as many economists then believed, choose a slightly higher inflation rate (say, 5 percent) for a slightly lower jobless rate (say, 3 percent). Trying to hold unemployment at unrealistically low levels would produce ever-higher inflation. That’s what happened. Inflation went from 1 percent in 1960 to 13 percent in 1979. Finally, Friedman debunked the theory that as nations got wealthier people would spend less and less of their incomes; that was once thought to doom affluent societies to stagnation.
All these findings qualified or contradicted Keynes, and Friedman was effectively the anti-Keynes. Whereas Keynes and his disciples relied on “fiscal policy” (government spending and taxes) to stabilize the economy, Friedman emphasized the importance of “monetary policy” (interest rates and the money supply as set by the Fed). Friedman was an anti-inflation hawk before it was fashionable. His tutorial of Ronald Reagan that inflation resulted from excessive money creation–too much money chasing too few goods –helped explain Reagan’s patience in allowing Paul Volcker’s Fed to crush double-digit inflation with the brutal 1981-82 recession (peak monthly unemployment: 10.8 percent). Following Friedman and not Keynes, most governments now rely on monetary policy as their main tool for economic stabilization.
Above all, Friedman believed in the power of ideas. Some of his were wrong. He thought cutting taxes would restrain government spending (“starve the beast”); it didn’t. His faith in “privatization” for the old Soviet Union was overdone. He wanted the Fed to limit growth of the money supply; unfortunately, the money supply proved hard to define. But these are footnotes. For decades, Friedman cheerfully and relentlessly pushed his main ideas, although they were outside the political and intellectual mainstream. With his wife, Rose, he became a best-selling author (“Free to Choose,” in 1980, a pro-market manifesto). Time was on their side. Competing ideas proved unworkable, inferior or wrong. Friedman never joined the mainstream, but the mainstream joined him.
