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« Back to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in Perspective main page    Transcript for: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in PerspectiveThink Tank With Ben Wattenberg TTBW 521 Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Perspective PBS Feed Date: 4/17/97 Daniel Patrick Moynihan ANNOUNCER: Think Tank is made possible by AMGEN, recipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. AMGEN: helping cancer patients through cellular and molecular biology. Improving lives today and bringing hope for tomorrow. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. UNKNOWN: To show you what miracles they are in Graham Rugman (?), we have on one side of here, one of the strongest supporters of national defense in the country and one of the weakest. MR. MOYNIHAN: I’m not going to allow my voting record to be misrepresented. You’re one year in the senate, fella, you don’t do that to another senator. I have voted with one exception for every defense appropriation bill since I’ve come to the senate, and this year, under Graham Rugman (?), for the first time in 15 years the dollar amount of defense spending is going down. First time, 15 years, under your bill. I would not misrepresent you, don’t you misrepresent me. MR. WATTNEBERG: On the occasion of Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 70th birthday, we took an unusual look at this most unusual of American politicians. MR. MOYNIHAN: I have a great many friends and a good family and a great country and that’s joy enough for anybody at 70. MR. WATTENBERG: On St. Patrick’s day of 1997, scholars, journalists, and politicians gathered at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC to celebrate Senator Moynihan’s long and complex career. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in perspective, this week on Think Tank. MR. WATTENBERG: Daniel Patrick Moynihan has been a central figure in American political and intellectual life for almost four decades as an author, bureaucrat, aide to 4 presidents, ambassador, and US senator. MR. MOYNIHAN: I had no idea, Mr. President, how profound what used to be known as liberalism was shaken by the last election. MR. WATTENBERG: Steven Hess (?) was Moynihan’s deputy in the Nixon White House. Today he is a scholar at the Brookings Institution. MR. HESS (?): Even a Nixon needed relief from the grayness of a Haldeman- created staff. And as the president said when Pat returned to Harvard, ’I disagreed with a lot of what he said, but he certainly did light up the place.’ MR. WATTNEBERG: Susanne Garment (?) was an aide to Moynihan when he was America’s ambassador to the United Nations. MS. GARMENT (?): Moynihan knew. He also, actually, possessed at US UN a Xerox machine that broke down mysteriously and frequently and thus delayed transmission of speech drafts to the state department. MR. WATTNENBERG: Tim Russert was a senior aide to Senator Moynihan in the 1980s. Today he is the host of NBC’s Meet the Press. MR. RUSSERT: As we went through our Meet the Press archives it is just so amazing to see how prescient and how persuasive he was serving four presidents. MR. WATTENBERG: Moynihan on the black family. MR. MOYNIHAN: There are a great many Negro Americans, perhaps half of the population is securely in the middle class, doing very well, taking care of itself, needing no help from anybody, thank you very much. But the some are also filling up with a lower class people, unemployed, ill-educated, ill-housed, of whom the cycle of no jobs and bad education and bad housing just reproduces itself and takes its most poignant personal form in the great tragedy of the family lives of these men and women and of their children. MR. WATTNEBERG: Moynihan on North Korea. MR. RUSSERT: One, should we continue to press for sanctions while there is talk of a summit; two, should be we be beefing up our military troops in Korea in the event of a war? MR. MOYNIHAN: Oh, no, neither. We should make clear to the North Koreans that they can – there’s a reward for abiding by their treaties. And if they go ahead with what they have been doing in defiance of the world and the clear understanding of what is going on, you bomb them. MR. WATTENBERG: On death and taxes. MR. RUSSERT: Is the energy tax a fight until death, or are you willing to compromise a little bit with Senator Boren (?): modify it a bit? MR. MOYNIHAN: Fight until death over taxes? Oh, no. Women, country, god, things like that. Taxes, no. MR. WATTENBERG: Moynihan is a prolific writer. His most recent book is ’Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy’. And now a conversation with Daniel Patrick Moynihan. MR. WATTENBERG: Tell us about the new book, ’Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy’. MR. MOYNIHAN: The horrid press asked if I would put together a series of essays that have a certain continuum, in that they speak to matters that I’ve been going on about for 50 years. In which nothing seems to get better. We don’t seem to have any capacity for social learning or else we forget what we have learned. Might just take the first success issue, which is that the great achievement of our lives, Ben, and we’ve known each other almost half a century, is learning to manage the business cycle. I’m a little beyond you in these things, but I was raised in New York in the late 30’s, went to City College for a year before the Navy, things like that. There was only one real question around. It was understood that free-enterprise market capitalism had failed. And indeed, if you look at the data, the alternation of boom and bust and boom and crash and boom and wrump had seemed to be amplified from the late 1890s. MR. WATTENBERG: I saw the chart in the book. These incredible swings. MR. MOYNIHAM: Yeah, it’s in there, and they said, that’s it, it’s over. That’s over. Now the question is what comes next, and that’s what you’ve argued about. And then in 1946, having absorbed some of the Keynesian doctrine understandings during WWII, in a situation of excess demand as against insufficient demand, we passed the Employment Act of 1946. And in a half-century we’ve had four quarters of negative economic growth. Nothing like it in the history of the species, would have thought impossible…. MR. WATTENBERG: Negative in a very minor way. MR. MOYNIHAN: Very minor. MR. WATTENBERG: One percent below, two percent… MR. MOYNIHAN: The Bureau of Economic Analysis hadn’t -- and Commerce Department didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t know. And yet, we just, by one tiny vote, escaped a constitutional amendment to put us back onto a 12 month agricultural cycle. Every economist in the nation pleading, don’t do this. MR. WATTENBERG: Not every economy – not every economist. I mean, just for the record, instead of 50 senators having to do something it would be 60 senators. Whatever the malign effects of that might be… MR. MOYNIHAN: It would be 67. There were 66 senators voting. MR. WATTENBERG: No, no, but the balanced budget amendment would require a 60 senators to waive it. MR. MOYNIHAN: Right. MR. WATTENBERG: So in the case of a national emergency of some sort, isn’t it plausible that 60 of your colleagues… MR. MOYNIHAN: It’s possible that 40 wouldn’t – 41 wouldn’t. Try to get 60 votes around here. I’ve tried. MR. WATTENBERG: Now, that’s one of the great success stories in social policy and social sciences. We are all deeply engaged in this idea of welfare reform, or as you sometimes refer to it, as welfare repeal. What happened? MR. MOYNIHAN: One of our largest social changes ever in this sort of modern era, which you might say – call it 300 years period of industrialism – was the breaking down, yeah, simply erosion of traditional family structures by which children were reared with two parents. Well, that happened, but which way does the causal arrow point? Did the program create the social condition or did the social condition take over and change the program? The assumption grew that the program caused the program and so we abolished it. And in a very short order -- MR. WATTENBERG: Wait a minute. We abolished that specific entitlement. We did not abolish federal aid to poor people. We turned over large sums of money to the states to do that. MR. MOYNIHAN: That’s right. But with this condition that for a – no one can receive benefits for more than five years. And the average recipient receives them for 13. So we shall shortly - and I hope we keep in mind what we did – if as I fear we’re going to find millions of children unsupported and possibly even abandoned. I don’t predict it; I don’t have any joy in talking about it. But it could be - it’s the biggest gamble we have ever taken with social policy. MR. WATTENBERG: Just as that caused homelessness… MR. MOYNIHAN: I do predict it. I just don’t look forward to it. MR. WATTENBERG: No, I understand. There is some - and I would grant that it’s premature - but there is some very dramatic data in very recently that in the last two years welfare case load has gone down substantially, that that’s when the waiver started coming in, squeezing the states. Is it possible that, like the economy, as you pointed out before, that this thing could really work? MR. MOYNIHAN: It is. You won’t mind my saying that everybody standing around the senate floor bragging about what their state had done and the way the (inaudible) declining and the White House going on the same way, they’re talking about the number of people on welfare declining under the Family Support Act of 1998, which I picked to support and to get through, and that was working very well. But suddenly events came galloping up and we had to abolish everything. That bill went out the senate floor 97 to 1. We had a real consensus here in 1988, which vanished by 1996. 8 years and gone. MR. WATTENBERG: Let’s go into some labels for a moment. It is said of you that you are as an intellectual and a thinker a neo-conservative, and as a senator a liberal. Is there a pretty good reason for that, if it’s so? MR. MOYNIHAN: There’s a history, which is that in the 1960’s the time – and you remember it, you were in the Johnson White House - a certain kind of liberalism seemed ebulliently triumphant. For years there had been no real opposition, or none that anybody had noticed. Then in the middle of the 1960’s, time that the ’Journal of the Public Interest’ began - wholly liberal… MR. WATTENBERG: You were one of the co-editors – board of editors… MR. MOYNIHAN: I was on the board of publication and I wrote the first article in the first issue. We began to come up with some social science findings that were very troubling. Things weren’t going to be anywhere as easy as we thought. This is harder than we knew. One of the great examples is the Coleman Report – James S. Coleman. The 1964 Civil Rights Act provided a little section that there would be a study of the quality of educational opportunity around the country, but mainly the south. So Jim Coleman went through the largest social science project in history, saying, what makes a difference between the actual achievement of the child? And I’ll never forget – a spring morning there was a little reception at the - spring afternoon reception at the Harvard Faculty Club and Seymour Martin Lipset walks in and says – he comes over to me and – ’You know what Coleman is finding, don’t you?’ And I said, ’No.’ ’All family.’ Schools had relatively little impact as between - most differences were in schools and family explained most of those differences. Well, that was not doctrine. Andrew Realy (?), a catholic priest and Peter Rosley (?) at the University of Chicago found that going to a Catholic school did not have any great relation whatever to subsequent practice of religion. The reach of social institutions all around seemed much more limited than we knew. Well, this was not good news it was not welcomed and it was rejected. Then a great radicalism came on with the Vietnam War, and at one point the old traditional socialists in a journal called ’Dissent’ were under attack as being not left enough. Somebody started attacking us. In a celebrated article it was decreed that people like (inaudible) and Moynihan and so forth were not liberals, we were neo-conservatives. And then some people said, no, that’s not so. And others said, oh, it doesn’t matter. But like Irving Kristol said, well, if you say so I’m going to be so. MR. WATTNEBERG: He’s proud of it. MR. MOYNIHAN: But we hadn’t changed. It was the debate that changed. Where I think I was – were it was decreed that I was no longer a neo-conservative took place about the time I came to the senate and it was on a pretty crucial issue know well which was the issue of the Soviet Union. By the mid 1970s, I had come to the conclusion that the Soviet Union was going to break up and soon. I said it, wrote it, nobody paid much heed, but I did say it, did write it. And I was kind of worried about this because it seemed to me all those nuclear weapons - I was wrong in thinking they were more wide in the Soviet Union than in fact they were. They were only in four provinces. Four countries – four separate countries. But in any event I thought the Soviet Union was coming apart and that was going to be a real problem. Not that it was going to (inaudible) the gap and not have enough gasoline. And that was a point of misunderstanding and seeming not worth arguing, because I wasn’t going to change the minds of my friends who continued to see a very serious Soviet menace. MR. WATTENBERG: But they did have all those nuclear weapons. MR. MOYNIHAN: So we might all go up in flames. MR. WATTENBERG: Point it at Chevy Chase, or something. MR. MOYNIHAN: Watch out. And they start pointing them at each other and wouldn’t make much different. This goes back to my early ideas which my life was shaped by and here I owe it all to Nathan Glazer. In 1963 I was in the Kennedy administration. He was actually in Japan that year. We published our book, ’Beyond the Melting Pot’, which was a study of the ethnic groups of New York City. And there had been this idea that, you know, we’d all come over here, we were all different, we go into a melting pot, which is… MR. WATTENBERG: Israel Zangwell. MR. MOYNIHAN: Israel Zangwell. MR. WATTENBERG: The play. ’Beyond the Melting Pot’ MR. MOYNIHAN: Right. MR. WATTENBERG: I recently re-read it. It’s a hell of a play. MR. MOYNIHAN: It was set in Staton Island and there’s – the Jewish girl’s a violinist and the Russian boy who’s a singer, or something like that, and his father is a general and he carried out a pode graden (?) and they all fled and in Russia there should be no chance of them coming together but love conquers all on Staton Island. MR. WATTENBERG: Right. MR. MOYNIHAN: And building the new American – building the new American man. And so that was our creed and our hope, and it was sort of a security blanket: don’t worry, it will all work out. What we looked at was a city in which that hadn’t happened at all and what we saw as the test of the Marxist hypothesis that industrialization will wipe out these pre-industrial remnants and you’ll have - social class will determine everything. There will be workers and bourgeois and capitalists. And the red flag is our flag because of all – the blood of all men is red. And there will be no Estonian and Lithuanian and Ukrainian and Dane, and such like. When we checked it out it wasn’t there. If it wasn’t going to be there in New York it wasn’t going to be anywhere. So if you have the idea that Marxism is fundamentally wrong about the power of ethnicity and you see a multi-ethnic empire sprawling from the Baltic to the Pacific, you say - and all the others have collapsed – you say, this isn’t going to last either. You can’t prove it, but you can predict it. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, let me put that in a non-Marxist ideological way. The – I mean, thirty years have gone by since the publication of ’Beyond the Melting Pot’. The rates of exogamy in America are Zangwillian right now. I mean, you are seeing more than half of Asian-Americans out-marrying and about a third of Latinos out- marrying. Jews, as you know, are above 50% exogamic. You have now for the first time a serious out-marriage among blacks in America at a much lower level, but having gone from about 2 or 3 percent to 10 or 11 or 12 percent, depending on whose numbers you believe. At precisely the time when people are talking about, sometimes more gleefully I think than you and Matt Glazer, talk about balkanization and separatism, and all kinds… And yet it seems to me that the people who count, who are making these demographic decisions, which is Joe and Jane in the privacy of their bedroom, are going toward a melting pot. MR. MOYNIHAN: Both things are so, or such it seems to me. We noted the exogamy event at the time, but more and more this society identifies people by race, religion, national origin… MR. WATTENBERG: The government does. MR. MOYNIHAN: The government does. Okay, we can make a distinction. MR. WATTNEBERG: Right. I don’t know that the society does. The government is race crazy. I mean, every form in the world… MR. MOYNIHAN: Government is race crazy. I’m in… MR. WATTENBERG: You’re in government; it must be your fault. MR. MOYNIHAN: Well, yes, whoever’s to blame ought to be found out. You can’t – you know -- Every appointment is a question of race, religion, gender. It is just the very opposite of the American creed, which is we’re all equal. Uh-uh, we’re all classified. And both things I think are so, but for the moment ethnicity is much more assertive here than it was. It’s more open in our national politics than it has been ever, and in the world. You get little else. MR. WATTENBERG: Are you having fun? MR. MOYNIHAN: I have a great many friends and a good family and a great country and that’s joy enough for anyone at 70. To say that government right now is exhilarating; it’s not. Challenging only in the sense of challenging you not to despair, which is one of the 7 deadly sins. MR. WATTENBERG: If you were a historian in the year 2097 looking back at the 50 years, say, post World War II to now, how would you weave those strands together in sort of a brief… MR. MOYNIHAN: No problem whatever. The United States became the most powerful nation in the world and the first nation ever nearly so powerful. We did it because in the main our values were right and our system worked. In the end the great challenge of totalitarianism which has arisen – you want to go back to French Revolution or the 19th century, it was sure there at the beginning of the 20th century, by the end of the 20th century it was over. American values, which were not American necessarily in origin but which we embodied as a major nation, had triumphed. And we were left with a lot of aftermath but if you look around at our adversaries wouldn’t you say how fortunate the century had been for us. And the only question that historian will really ask himself – herself – itself - is did that make them overconfident? MR. WATTNEBERG: Thank you for what you did in this half century to make that possible. MR. MOYNIHAN: Thank you, Ben. MR. WATTENBERG: For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. MR. SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: I would say Moynihan has introduced probably more new ideas into the senate independently of… MR. TIM RUSSERT: When Ronald Reagan was criticized for being an actor, he responded by saying, I don’t know how you can be president without being an actor. You have to capture people’s attention, hopefully their imagination. And what Pat Moynihan can do on a whole variety of issues is take a very complicated subject and talk about it in language that is respectful and understandable… MR. JAMES Q. WILSON: He is not a distinguished athlete, he is not a great mechanic, and he can’t drive a car. And all of these things have to be added to the balance. It’s nice for people to know that Pat Moynihan, in light of all the testimony that has been given to him – about him today, he’s actually a human being. One that I love dearly, but I can’t resist poking fun at some of his weaknesses. ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1150 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036 or e-mail us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank visit PBS Online at www.pbs.org and please let us know where you watch Think Tank. UNKNOWN: This is a wonderful day of remembrance of a remarkable career. But it also one of the most ingenious ways I have ever heard of to get out of the Saint Patrick’s day parade. ANNOUNCER: Think Tank is made possible by AMGEN, recipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. AMGEN: helping cancer patients through cellular and molecular biology. Improving lives today and bringing hope for tomorrow. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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