The Gentleman from New York (2000) by Godfrey Hodgson.
GoodReads meta-data is 452 pages, rated 3.58 by 40 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: Well written and insightful.
Tagline: He did it his way.
Born into an ethnic minority in New York City, as a boy he shined shoes in Time Square for eating, not pocket, money. He went to high school in Harlem, while living with his mother and two siblings but no father, above a saloon in Hell’s Kitchen. He went to a modest college thanks to a stint in the US Navy 1944-1946 and the GI Bill. Those experiences etched onto his soul the belief that government could improve the lives of citizens. And that it should do so, else what is it for. This is Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003).
In later life he would be a cabinet official, an Ivy League professor, an ambassador twice, and for twenty-four years a US Senator where he master-minded several important acts without the glory of attaching his name to them, in part, because his name had become a lightning rod for cheap shots.
Of firm principle though not an ideologue, he was able and willing to work with everyone and anyone to advance a purpose. Indeed he often found it easier to work with his opponents than his brethren in a time less polarised than today.
A birthright Democrat he did things his way, much to the irritation of many of those brethren. With opponents the dealing was face-to-face and more likely to be honoured than with one’s own who were given to back stabbing and weaselling. He put it this way, an agreement sealed by a public handshake with a Republican always stood, but not with a Democrat for whom the handshake was only the beginning not the end.
Faults, he had a few and a few more, not all of which are given space in these pages. There was a temper that burned. When inactive he spent far too much time with the Mexican ambassador (code for drinking bottle after bottle of dry sherry in his private office). He had blindsides about some people. His prose could be so florid that the meaning was obscured by the foliage. An intellectual bully, he quoted Shakespeare or Coleridge in reply to questions without relevance to intimidate interlocutors.
His career-long commitment to social welfare conjures Michel Foucault. Moynihan opposed the welfare professionals (bureaucrats, policy makers, social workers, community counsellors, special needs educators, applied psychologists, and hordes more) for siphoning off the money. What poor people needed was money, not counselling and all that. To get money and keep getting it, they needed jobs. More and better jobs meant more and better citizens. When possible he worked on finance not welfare to reduce the need for welfare.
His arguments with and against the welfare industry lobby certainly echo Foucault and vice versa. Moynihan valued data and on those finance committees he concluded that at least 25% of the welfare allocations went to administration, paying all those specialists as indicated above. Bigger programs were even more top heavy with management and compliance costs added. In one case he documented (thanks to his unthanked research staff) more than 50% of the funds went in salaries to the middle class professionals who ran it. He concluded and said that the achieved purpose of the program(s) was not to deliver benefits to those in need but to make interesting and rewarding careers for the professionals who serviced them. (Those with ranch experience will note the use of that word ‘service’ with a smile. Others will not. So be it.)
Earlier he had used data to argue that unemployment and poverty together with the scars of slavery and racism had eroded the family among black Americans. To address this problem two things would help, one, stop the rhetorical fanning of the racial flames and, two, a productive economy based on a sound educational system. Incentives for businesses to locate in areas where a black population needed work made more sense to him than parachuting in community organisers, social workers, and so on. The organisers would certainly not stay but the businesses just might.
He always thought and said that the nuclear family was the foundation of a stable society. Imagine all the stones thrown at that contention today. The self-serving ideologues (equivalent to those welfare professionals) would be lining up to hurl abuse at him. The line forms at the right and left.
For these liberal sacrileges he was excommunicated from the tribe.
There are many details about legislation: I particularly liked the analysis of impeachment. Also interesting was his dissection of the Clinton Health care fiasco. Although it avoids the intriguing the prior question of why and how citizen Hillary Clinton could devise and propose legislation in the first place. (The second question is off page, but why did such an insider as Hillary offer such detailed legislation, having in it real or imaged targets for everyone looking for a shot, cheap or not.) Among the other tidbits was the size of a Senator’s office with committee assignments, at times he had a staff nearing 500. I suppose it is more now just to monitor the social media. He once won nearly 70% of the statewide popular vote. He became more patrician than a lord, but, unlike others, he did know when and how to quit and he did.
The book is well written and thoroughly researched, and focused on his public career. Even so there are omissions like campaign finance. At no time did he seem to have troubled to mentor others onto the path. He always seemed to do the talking. There is little, very little, about his private life as husband, father, son, churchman, or neighbour.
He loomed large on the distant horizon when I was a budding social scientist, and I wondered about him. He was both more and less than he seemed in those days. More because of his unusual background for a US Senator and Harvard professor, and less for his one-eyed focus on welfare so that he could ignore the Vietnam War, Watergate, and much else.