MOYNIHAN, Daniel Patrick

(b. 16 March 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma), scholar and political adviser whose work on the problems of the inner city and the African-American family sparked controversy in the mid-1960s.

Despite the fact that he is commonly associated with the northeastern United States, Moynihan was actually born in Oklahoma, the first of three children of John Henry Moynihan, a journalist and advertising copywriter for RKO Pictures, and Margaret Ann Phipps, a homemaker. The family made its way to New York City when Moynihan was still a small child, and by 1937 Moynihan was living in a middle-class suburb. In that year, however, Moynihan's father deserted the family. Suddenly in poverty, the family drifted from one bad neighborhood to another, living for a time above a bar in Hell's Kitchen, one of the seedier neighborhoods in midtown Manhattan.

After graduating first in his class from Benjamin Franklin High School in 1943, Moynihan enrolled at City College (now City College of the City University of New York). A year later he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and enrolled in the navy's V-12 program at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he underwent officer training. The navy then sent him to Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where he earned four degrees: a bachelor of naval science (1946), a bachelor of arts (1948, cum laude), a master of arts (1949), and a Ph.D. Though he began work on the latter degree in 1949, two years after leaving the navy, Moynihan did not actually earn his doctorate until 1961.

In the meantime, Moynihan spent two years (1950–1951) at the London School of Economics and Political Science on a Fulbright scholarship; gained his first practical political experience by volunteering in the New York mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns of Robert Wagner and Averell Harriman, respectively, in 1953; and, on 29 May 1955, married the painter and sculptor Elizabeth Brennan. Brennan, with whom he had three children, later served as his adviser during his campaigns for the U.S. Senate.

After serving the city and state of New York in various capacities during the late 1950s, Moynihan went to Washington, D.C., with the administration of the newly inaugurated president, John F. Kennedy, in 1961. He served in the office of the secretary of labor from that year until 1965, first as special assistant (1961–1962) to Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg; then as executive assistant (1962–1963) to Goldberg and W. Willard Wirtz, who became the new secretary in 1962; and, finally, as Wirtz's assistant secretary of labor for policy planning and research (1963–1965).

Moynihan's own experience with poverty gave him a deep sense of compassion for the poor, while his Irish Catholic background instilled in him an awareness of ethnicity and ethnic marginalization not common among most Americans of white western European extraction. Furthermore, his father's absence had given him firsthand experience with the connection between poverty and the breakdown of the family. These concerns motivated not only his work with the labor department but also his writing as a scholar on policy issues.

A prolific author with more than two dozen books to his name by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Moynihan first established a reputation as a writer and commentator in the 1960s. Among the books he wrote or co-wrote during that decade were Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963, with Nathan Glazer; second edition, 1970); The Negro Challenge to the Business Community (1964, with Eli Ginzberg and others); The Assault on Poverty (1965); Poverty in America (1965, with Margaret S. Gordon and others); The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965, with Paul Barton and Ellen Broderick); and Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (1969).

One of these books, The Negro Family, would bring upon Moynihan a firestorm of disapprobation that constituted the greatest crisis of his career. The book was actually a Department of Labor pamphlet published at a time when the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson was poised to launch the "Great Society," a set of government programs by which Johnson intended to declare "war on poverty." It is hard to imagine two approaches more different.

The war on poverty and its attendant programs, which had the enthusiastic support of many, if not most, white liberals, African-American leaders, and social scientists, were based on the implicit assumption that problems in the black community, such as poverty, drug abuse, crime, and out-of-wedlock births, could be solved by providing members of that community with the things they had hitherto lacked. These deficits included the opportunity for an education, effective political participation through the vote, an end to discrimination, and an infusion of funds to close the economic gap between blacks and other groups within the nation.

The Negro Family, on the other hand, treated poverty as a symptom rather than a cause of problems within the black community. The real issue, Moynihan and his coauthors maintained, was the disintegration of the black family: without solid two-parent homes, their research indicated, no amount of money, jobs, and other cosmetic cures could save the black underclass. These conclusions were based not on preconceptions but on analysis of data. In studying Labor Department statistics, for instance, Moynihan had discovered a predictable pattern: when unemployment was high, the welfare rolls swelled, but when unemployment dropped, so did the number of people on the dole. Beginning in 1963, however, the unemployment rate had gone down, but the number of people on the welfare rolls was increasing. Obviously, then, the problem was not a lack of jobs but what Moynihan called a "tangle of pathologies."

Black leaders reacted to Moynihan's book by calling him a racist, while white detractors accused him of "blaming the victim." However, The Negro Family actually places much of the blame for the "tangle of pathologies" on slavery and the Jim Crow laws, though in the final analysis it is not a book directed so much toward placing blame as toward identifying the problem. This did not stop a harsh reaction to the report, even on the part of such figures as James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality or Bayard Rustin of the A. Philip Randolph Institute—men of such stature that their good faith is not a matter of question.

Perhaps as an outgrowth of the response to The Negro Family, Moynihan left Washington and the Johnson administration in 1965. Later that year he conducted an unsuccessful campaign for president of the New York City Council and served as codirector of policy and planning for the mayoral campaign of Abraham Beame. After a stint as fellow at the Wesleyan University Center for Advanced Studies in Middletown, Connecticut (1965–1966), Moynihan served as director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University Joint Center for Urban Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1966–1969). He was also a professor of education and urban politics at Harvard from 1966 to 1973.

As a conservative Democrat, Moynihan was not necessarily averse to Republicans, nor they to him, and so it was that President-elect Richard M. Nixon asked him to join the administration in 1968. Nixon had been reading Moynihan's work, which, as he later recalled in his R.N.: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978), he found "refreshing and stimulating." Nixon invited him to serve in a number of capacities: assistant to the president for urban affairs, counselor to the president, and executive secretary of the newly created Urban Affairs Council. Moynihan held these positions from 1969 to 1970, during which time another politically incorrect observation brought him into the cross-hairs once again. Maintaining that the government should quit interfering in the black community and should allow African Americans more of a free hand to work out their problems, he coined the unfortunate phrase "benign neglect." Opponents of both Moynihan and Nixon seized on this expression as supposed evidence of a declining commitment to civil rights.

Following his reelection in 1972 Nixon appointed Moynihan ambassador to India, and in 1975 President Gerald R. Ford named him ambassador to the United Nations. Late in the following year, Moynihan won the first of four elections to the U.S. Senate. In Washington he soon made a name for himself as a Democrat capable of working with Republicans, while his sharp criticism of President Bill Clinton's sexual and ethical peccadilloes showed him as a leader unwilling simply to maintain the party line. Moynihan retired from the Senate at the end of his fourth term, in 2001.

White-haired and known for quirky speech patterns, Moynihan has remained a public figure of wide renown, and respect for his work has only increased with time. This is particularly the case with regard to his observations on family, poverty, welfare, and social problems expressed in The Negro Family. The enthusiasm driving the War on Poverty has long ago evaporated, and poverty is far worse than it was when Johnson launched the Great Society in 1965. Not surprising, from the perspective of Moynihan's report, is the concurrent disintegration of the underclass black family—and this despite the trillions of dollars that have been directed toward solving the problem. By the mid- 1990s all but the most committed demagogues had come to recognize that the old ways of solving the problem of poverty were not working, and they were forced to admit (however grudgingly) that Moynihan had been right all along.

Insights on Moynihan's work in the late 1960s and early 1970s may be found in Richard Nixon, R.N.: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978). Robert A. Katzmann, Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life (1998), offers a view of the subject from the perspective of numerous colleagues. Moynihan's own A Dangerous Place (1975), written with Suzanne Weaver, chronicles his time at the United Nations. Also of note are Douglas Schoen, Pat (1979), and Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York (2000).