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Daniel Patrick Moynihan--In His Own Words

Moynihan Looks Back
TTBW 1220 PBS feed date 7/8/2004

Funding for Think Tank is provided by

At Pfizer we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work.

Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

(opening animation)

Ben Wattenberg: This is Ben Wattenberg. When former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan died on March 26th, 2003 at the age of 76, the nation lost one of its most original and controversial voices He has been called one of the great intellectuals of our time; a probing social scientist; and a canny politician. He served in the administrations of four presidents and as the Democratic Senator from New York for four terms. In his 18 books, he often challenged political orthodoxy with inconvenient data. His unflinching opinions brought ire and admiration from both liberals and conservatives. Over the past decade, Think Tank was pleased to have Senator Moynihan as a frequent guest. In February 2000, as part of our PBS special The First Measured Century, we interviewed Moynihan at length, but were only able to use a small portion for the final documentary. Accordingly, almost all of this interview is aired publicly for the first time. The topic before the House: Daniel Patrick Moynihan-In his own Words.

(musical break)

Ben Wattenberg: Senator Moynihan -- Pat, thank you so much for joining us -- I wonder if we could begin with a short autobiography from you; where you were born, what the circumstances were. You grew up in what is now called a female-headed household. Is that correct?

Pat Moynihan: Well, from about age 9, yes.

Ben Wattenberg: Was that particularly difficult for you?

Pat Moynihan: Sure; difficult for any child. I think the later it comes, the easier it is. But among other things, you don’t even have any money, which makes a difference. And, yeah, I was out shining shoes when I was, oh, 12, 13 years old, or worked on the piers; worked four days a week on the piers and three days a week at City College. I have no complaints, but it was not the same world that you’d expect your grandchildren to live in.

Ben Wattenberg: Right. And then you enlisted in the United States Navy, is that correct?

Pat Moynihan: Yes, at age 17.

Ben Wattenberg: So you were not in danger of being drafted yet -- ’danger’ -- you were not subject to the draft?

Pat Moynihan: Yes...but you want to get in the Navy.

Ben Wattenberg: Right.

Pat Moynihan: And it was late. I never saw any action at sea. I was a gunnery officer on a sort of smallish vessel; officer of the deck, as we say. But I am one of those people whose perspective on the 20th century was very much infected by the realization that, if it hadn’t been for the atom bomb, I would not be here. I mean, we were on a part of the landing-ship flotilla. And we’re going to be in Honshu pretty soon. And they handled arrangements for a lot of us to get over there and not many to get back. And people of our generation remember that.

Ben Wattenberg: And then you come out of the Navy in, what, 1947?

Pat Moynihan: Yes. I got the GI bill, so I went off to Tufts.

Ben Wattenberg: Oh, oh; I see.

Pat Moynihan: And then I had a Fulbright and went off to the London School of Economics with a GI bill alongside me. And something I realize is how different that experience is from those of most young people today. I got through four advanced degrees or -- I got to a Ph.D. and so forth -- went to universities, colleges, great places. I never saw a tuition bill in my life, and I don’t know what it is. And I have young people who come working for me as an intern. And when I first settled in here, every so often I’d call one of them in and say: ’I know you have been here for two years, and you are doing very well. Why don’t you take a year off and just wander around Europe and see what that feels like?’ And they’ll say: ’Oh, golly, Senator, I couldn’t do that. I still owe $30,000 in tuition.’ (Chuckles.) I fear we’re raising a generation of Republicans, when you think about it. (Laughs.)

Ben Wattenberg: And then you graduate, and you get into the political life.

Pat Moynihan: Right.

Ben Wattenberg: Why don’t you pick up.

Pat Moynihan: Well, I’m just two years shy of a half-century in New York politics. I came back from the London School and all that in early September 1953, went right to work in the campaign of Robert F. Wagner, Jr., for mayor of New York City. That moved over into the next year’s campaign of Averell Harriman to be governor. And both were successful. I then went up to Albany with Governor Harriman, as did my wife-to-be, Elizabeth Brennan. We were married there. I was involved with the Kennedy presidential campaign in 1960 and went down to Washington with Kennedy in 1961. I went into the Labor Department as an assistant to that great man Arthur Goldberg, later Justice Goldberg.

Ben Wattenberg: And your title at the Department of Labor was?

Pat Moynihan: I had a new position, which was sort of being colonized, if you will, from the Department of State. I was Assistant Secretary for Policy Planning and Research. And everybody was getting into policy planning, and so did we. It was a wonderful job, and I had -- I was briefly -- this experiment was only tried once with me -

Ben Wattenberg: (Laughs.) Tell us now about ’The Report on the Negro Family.’ How does that come about? What are the circumstances of it? What does it say?

Pat Moynihan: Let me go back just a bit, in terms of what has happened in this century. When the Kennedy people came in, we were getting a feel of what to do, but we weren’t sure and unemployment was the big issue domestically. The attention was focused on places like Appalachia, and we were beginning to be very much aware of the problems of black Americans, especially in cities. I’ll give you an example here, Ben. In 1946, we did, in fact, produce an unemployment rate. Didn’t publish it; weren’t sure enough. But in that unemployment rate, black unemployment was well below white unemployment, because blacks were on farms, and on a farm you may have, you know, scarcely enough to live on, but you are employed. When them movement north came and into cities came, black unemployment became a problem. And I began to see how we could track the rise and fall of unemployment rates with other indices of social well-being, such as married woman, husband absent, and such as the newly rising number of persons who were getting Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a program that was begun under the Social Security Act of 1935, which was supposed to have disappeared by now -- because you’d have survivors’ insurance, and that will take of mother and children. But it wasn’t disappearing; it was growing. Now, what’s this all about? Well, I was -- to make it short -- I was able to show a striking correlation between the rise and fall of unemployment and the rise and fall of things like married woman/husband absent; a number of new welfare cases, as we would come to call them. And it was just dramatic in the 1950s; the correlations were up in the 90s. I mean, you don’t get correlations in the 90s. Then, in the late ’50s, it began to weaken, and in 1963 that correlation had disappeared. Suddenly, the unemployment rate for minorities, as well as everybody else, was going down; and the dependency rate, if you want to put it that way, was going up. The lines crossed.

Ben Wattenberg: This is what James Q. Rosen calls ’Moynihan’s scissors.’

Pat Moynihan: It meant that we had something bigger and more complex than we knew, and we still have.

Ben Wattenberg : ’The Report on the Negro Family: The Case for National Action’ soon became known as the Moynihan Report, and still is. Can you describe the general reaction that got in the public press? Because I know it -- (chuckling) -- I know it was major.

Pat Moynihan: Well, let me put the context in which I became associated with this. In the summer of 1965, we had had some wonderful things in Washington as regards race by that time. In 1964 the great Civil Rights Act was passed. In 1965 the great Voting Rights Act was passed. Then, without any notice or warning or heads-up, the rioting broke out in Watts, in Los Angeles. And it was fierce. And nothing that intense had ever occurred in our modern time. And the reporters in the White House -- a group you know well -- were saying to Bill Moyers, the secretary -- the press secretary, saying, ’Mr. Moyers, Bill, what’s going on? What happened? We thought we had all these things being taken care of, and now this? What’s going on?’ And he said, ’Oh, you know, we know all about these things. Let me just show you.’ And he handed out this report, saying, ’Pat Moynihan did this for the president last June, and we’re on to these things.’ Next morning Bob Novak and Rowland Evans, in their wonderful column, their headline was ’The Moynihan Report.’ And it linked up, in effect, the behavior at Watts with this other matter, and people got very upset. It was rejected. The president had called for a conference to fulfill these rights, and to make it not just equality of opportunity, but equality of results. Well, the opening line by the White House director of the conference said, ’I’m here to assure you that there’s no such person as Daniel Patrick Moynihan.’

Ben Wattenberg: (Laughs.)

Pat Moynihan: I had become a non-person. And with some exceptions, you know, there were people -- the older civil rights people, leaders, understood this. Martin Luther King said to me, ’Thank you for your report.’ But there were not -- never going to be--many Martin Luther Kings, are there? And so that subject was put aside.

Ben Wattenberg: I mean -- and just to dot the ’i’ -- I mean, in the popular press it was regarded as something that was anti-black or whatever, you know, like that.

Pat Moynihan: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hm. Mm-hm.

Ben Wattenberg: And I assume your view is that it turned out to be prescient and correct?

Pat Moynihan: My view is we had stumbled onto a major social change in the circumstances of modern -- or post-modern society. It was not long ago in this past century that an anthropologist working in London, a very famous man at the time, Malinowski, postulated what he called the first rule of anthropology: That in all known societies, all male children have an acknowledged male parent. That’s what we found out everywhere. It’s true in Glasgow, it’s true in Buenos Aires, it’s true in Hyderabad. And well, maybe it’s not true anymore. Human societies change.

Ben Wattenberg: Let’s just pursue this track for a moment. Some years later, as you pointed out, this high illegitimacy rate goes -

Pat Moynihan: Ratio.

Ben Wattenberg: Right. Excuse me. The high illegitimacy ratio that you saw in the black community in the early 1960s climbs enormously within the black community, but also climbs in the white community to a point where it is higher than the so-called crisis that you pointed out. A few years go by, and it’s not just out-of-wedlock birth, it’s an increase in crime, it’s an increase in welfare. There’s a lot of things going on. There’s drug usage. And you write an essay called, ’Defining Deviancy Down.’

Pat Moynihan: Yes.

Ben Wattenberg: Can you -- it seems to me that there’s a linkage there as well, and if you could, describe to me what’s happening in the world, what’s happening in your mind as you see this evolution.

Pat Mpynihan: I found myself thinking about all of the previous 30 years -- now, this is the mid-’90s -- and how information would come up which was at first shocking to people and then they had to deal with it in ways that made it less so. And there was a -- one of the founders of sociology, a Frenchman named Emile Durkheim, wrote a book about the turn of the century in which he said that crime was normal. He said that you have to have a certain amount of deviant behavior such that you can establish what is correct behavior and acceptable behavior. It occurred to me that what we had been doing in the last 30 years was that, as we got too much deviant behavior, we began to define it down. So you say, ’Well, there weren’t that many murders in that many schools last month’ -- you know, compared to? The idea came to me in 1992, as Liz and I were leaving the New York City Democratic National Convention and driving to upstate. My good wife was driving, and I had plenty of time to read the New York Times full. There on page B-14 was a story, not a big one, about seven people having been found shot dead in a Bronx apartment building. That was a notable event because the mother, a mother, before she was shot, managed to shove her infant child under a bed. And when finally people noticed, the police got in, they found the child and she was alive. And that was sort of interesting. The fact that seven people had been shot in the back of the head was not interesting at all. And I thought of that wonderful example of gangland violence, the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago, when Al Capone’s men rubbed out seven of Bugs Moran’s men. Well, it became the subject of national legend. And so the idea clicked. We could no longer deal with the amount of murder going on in Manhattan and the Bronx, so we had to sort of say, well, only special murders get attention. And you can take this pattern of avoidance and defining deviancy down all across the society.

Ben Wattenberg: What would some of the other examples be?

Pat Moynihan: Well, out-of-wedlock births. Drug use of very serious kinds. Very poor performance in school. School violence. An interesting thing. My Democratic Party, became very much into this denial mode. In 1993 I was asked to come to speak to a breakfast group in New York called the Association for a Better New York. And I thought I’d pursue this subject, which I had just published as an article in the American Scholar, which is the journal of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. And the then-police commissioner of the then-mayor had given a talk at an FBI conference, which I thought was just great -- Ray Kelly, hell of a cop. He described what was getting to be common in Manhattan and other parts of the city, where a car would be parked, and there would be a little sign on the dashboard that said, ’No radio.’ And the driver would leave that when he got out of the car. And Kelly said, ’You know, that sign says, ’Don’t break into my car. Break into the car behind me.’ And that’s not good enough.’ Well, I thought: Boy, about time! And I compared the city I had grown up in, come of age in. You know, we had 82 murders, and they were mostly husband-and-wife and a few people in the waterfront. Welfare -- 50 years -- I went back 50 years -- almost disappeared. The wartime economy picked up, and things like that. And well, my party, I fear, was scandalized. Many of them walked out of there -- (makes growling sound). And then --
Ben Wattenberg: Blaming the victim.

Pat Moynihan: (Chuckles.) But then something happened, which I do think had probably not happened before. I would be bold enough to assert this. An essay on Emile Durkheim in the American Scholar became a central subject of a mayoralty campaign in New York City, by which I mean that Rudolph Giuliani picked it up and said, ’Yeah, that’s what’s going on, and I’m going to stop it.’ And the rest is a certain amount of local history.

Ben Wattenberg: So you have these apparently contradictory, huge trends that a lot of people have written about. I mean, Frank Fukuyama’s new book, basically, called ’The Great Disruption’ -- and we’ve talked to Frank. How do you put that apparent anomaly and contradiction together into a unified field theory? Where do you -- and the third piece of it is -- the case is made -- both of those things happened, this great disruption on the social side happened, and starting in the late 1980s or the early 1990s, we have rebounded on the socials -- not far enough, but crime is down, welfare is down. You and I could argue about out-of-wedlock births. But there’s a lot of positive social indicators now in the last 10 years. So how do you put that all together?

Pat Moynihan: I think we may be stabilizing at a much higher level than we’d known before, and we’re beginning to congratulate ourselves on circumstances that would have been thought horrendous two generations past.

Ben Wattenberg: Tell me about the Liberty Party. That was a phrase I think you came up with when you were the U.N. ambassador. And again, talking about trends, both in the United States and around the world, are we seeing -- have we seen -- and you’ve mentioned it, picked it up again in this pre-1914 situation -- are we seeing in the United States and around the world a movement toward ever greater liberty?

Pat Moynihan: Oh, yes, Ben. For the first time in the history of the species, you can say that the majority of people today live under democratically elected governments -- just -- and not all of them stable, but so many for which stability just is a given.

Ben Wattenberg: Is it possible that, getting back to this dilemma we were talking about before this, the economic surge and the defining deviancy down, is possible that they are, both the good and the bad, caused by this surge of liberty? We have more economic freedom, and we do in a lot of ways, and that sort of puts the economy into boost phase and some time in this ancient fight of balance between liberty and order you go too far towards liberty and you end up with just the sort of things that lead you to write ’Defining Deviancy Down’ -- out-of-wedlock birth, drugs, crime?

Pat Moynihan: No, no. There’s nothing like the prospect of starvation to keep people behaving when the costs of misbehavior were so personal and immediate and devastating. That’s something we have to work on. How do you get well-to-do people to behave well? But Ben, I have to tell you I have to get out....

Ben Wattenberg: Pat, this was fascinating. It was really great. I really am much in your debt for it.

(credits)

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Funding for Think Tank is provided by

At Pfizer we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work.

Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

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