Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan Dies at 76

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the cerebral four-term United States Senator from New York who brought lofty philosophical considerations to everyday legislative debates, died last week in Washington, D.C. from complications of a ruptured spleen. He was 76.

As a professor at Harvard and author of 18 books--nine written while representing New York in Congress--he was the Senate's resident historian, often clad in the tweeds and loafers that went with the part.

He was also a constant advocate for his state and in particular its educational institutions.

"He was always there for Columbia in I can't even begin to tell you how many different ways," said Ellen Smith, Columbia's director of government relations. "We counted on him as our professor in Congress. He understood the complexity of universities and how they function."

In an era when senators are frequently criticized for predictable grandstanding, instead of slow deliberating, Moynihan deplored speedy decisions on complex issues and, in his early career, defied easy political classification.

"He proved that in the Senate, brains and effectiveness may not be mutually exclusive," said Mark Green, a former New York City public advocate and a candidate for mayor in 2001. "Pat was from the old school. He was probably the smartest senator since Webster."

In a statement made to Spectator, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch proposed naming several landmarks after Moynihan, including Governor's Island, whose return to the city he helped broker after 200 years as a federal garrison.

"Pat Moynihan was a man universally perceived as using every brain cell in his cranium," Koch said.

Moynihan's reputation as a grand thinker stems from his work as a transportation safety expert, a social researcher, and the author of Beyond the Melting Pot and The Negro Family. The former alleged that ethnic groups did not always assimilate into mainstream American culture, and the latter argued that black advancement in the U.S. would continue at an agonizingly slow pace as long as black families continued to break up at high rates.

He applied his theories about the American body politic in his service for two Democratic and two Republican presidents before being elected to the Senate in 1976. During the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations, he held several posts in the Labor Department, where he became assistant secretary, then in the White House, where he served as Nixon's domestic political advisor, and finally as an ambassador to India and the United Nations.

Although many liberals and Democrats saw his service in Republican administrations as disloyal--he once denounced "the liberal orthodoxy"--it may have helped him win his Senate seat, as it led The New York Times to endorse him in his primary race.

"The basic story is that The New York Times then as now rarely endorses anyone in a primary," said Susan Tifft, author of The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times. "But in 1976, Punch Sulzberger, the publisher, decided he wanted the paper to endorse Moynihan over [Bella] Abzug in the Democratic primary. This meant going against the wishes--and over the head--of the paper's editorial page editor, John Oakes."

Sulzberger liked Moynihan's contrary politics more than Abzug's dogmatic liberalism, and knew that the victor in the Democratic primary would win the general election, Tifft said. So Sulzberger wrote the editorial endorsing the maverick Moynihan himself.

Oakes resigned and Moynihan beat Abzug by a narrow margin.

Moynihan's reputation as a legislator, however, was less than impressive. For his lengthy and academic discourses on the Senate floor, he was often thought to have a case of analysis paralysis. In fact, in his 24 years as Senator, he put his stamp on very few pieces of legislation outside of transportation safety and New York state pork projects. A New York Times Magazine profile before he retired in 2000 accused Moynihan--albeit admiringly--of accomplishing next to nothing as a lawmaker because of his predilection for grandiose theorizing.

"I remember a long delightful dinner that Pat was having with my wife and I," Green said. "Pat had been so steeped in New York and Washington history that a dinner was a tutorial, especially in the second or third hour, if you know what I mean."

But, Smith said, Moynihan would also go to bat for what he believed in. "I saw him as both an intellectual senator, but also an academic street fighter. If he thought something was important for New York, he would not let it go. He understood institutions like universities the best of anybody when we dealt with him because he had been a professor."

Former President George Rupp said that Moynihan's legacy would not be in his policy agenda but in his ability to bring scholarly debate to bear on real issues.

"I found him a consistently stimulating and helpful conversation partner," Rupp said. "Obviously as an intellectual and even an academic, he was in the most elite possible plain ... He clearly was not centrally a legislator focused on getting lots of individually authored bills, but he was an emblem of a very smart person who is also engaged in real issues."

Ross Frommer, the deputy vice president for government and community affairs for the Health Sciences campus, still saw Moynihan's imprint on important legislation.

"He fought to remove the bond cap," Frommer said. "Under IRS law, non-profit institutions could only issue $50 million worth of tax-exempt financing. Moynihan got that cap removed, thus allowing Columbia and other institutions to have better financing."

But Frommer, who worked in Moynihan's offices for nearly five years, also saw him as more of an intellectual than a policymaker.

"He was just a wonderful man and a wonderful boss. He could be very difficult to work for, and he had his idiosyncrasies, but he truly took an interest in what was important. He was very demanding, and your work had to be done well and done on time. He did not suffer fools gladly, but he was a wonderful man to work for because you learned so much, and he believed it was his mission to teach you things."

Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Okla. on March 16, 1927. He is survived by his wife and chief political strategist, Elizabeth Brennan Moynihan, as well as three children, Timothy, Maura, and John, and two grandchildren.