Happy 220th birthday to the nation's 10th president, John Tyler!

John Tyler: thank you for serving as the 10th president of the United States from 1841-1845,and also thank you being part of Staten Island's history also. happy 220th birthday!

John Tyler

Birth:
Mar. 29, 1790Charles CityVirginia, USA
Death:
Jan. 18, 1862RichmondVirginia, USA

John Tyler, Jr. (March 29, 1790 – January 18, 1862) was the tenth President of the United States (1841–1845) and the first to succeed to the office following the death of a predecessor.
A longtime Democratic-Republican, Tyler was nonetheless elected Vice President on the Whig ticket. Upon the death of President William Henry Harrison on April 4, 1841, only a month after his inauguration, the nation was briefly in a state of confusion regarding the process of succession. Ultimately the situation was settled with Tyler becoming President both in name and in fact.

Tyler took the oath of office on April 6, 1841, setting a precedent that would govern future successions and eventually be codified in the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
Once he became president, he stood against his party's platform and vetoed several of their proposals. In result, most of his cabinet resigned and the Whigs expelled him from their party.
Arguably the most famous and significant achievement of Tyler's administration was the annexation of the Republic of Texas in 1845.

Tyler was the first president born after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the only president to have held the office of President pro tempore of the Senate, and the only former president elected to office in the government of the Confederacy during the Civil War (though he died before he assumed said office).

Early life:
John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790 in Charles City County, Virginia (the same county where William Henry Harrison was born). Tyler's father was John Tyler, Sr., and his mother was Mary Armistead Tyler. Tyler was raised, along with seven siblings, to be a part of the region's elite gentry, receiving a very good education. Tyler was brought up believing that the Constitution of the United States was to be strictly interpreted, and reportedly never lost this conviction.

While Tyler was growing up, Tyler Sr., a friend of Thomas Jefferson, owned a tobacco plantation of over 1,000 acres (4 km2) served by dozens of slaves, and worked as a judge at the U.S. Circuit Court at Richmond, Virginia; Tyler Sr.'s advocacy of states' rights maintained his power.

When Tyler was seven years old, his mother died from a stroke, and when he was twelve he entered the preparatory branch of the College of William and Mary, enrolling into the collegiate program there three years later. Tyler graduated from the college in 1807, at age seventeen.

Concise Biography & Facts About John TylerTenth President - John TylerLifespan - 1788 - 1824Place of Birth - March 29, 1790 in Charles City County, Virginia Term as President - 1841-1845 Political Party - WhigVice President / Vice Presidents - NoneReligion - EpiscopalianEducation - William and Mary graduate John Tyler, Military Experience - Second Seminole War - ended 1842 Name of Wife - John Tyler was married to Letitia Christian Tyler and to Julia Gardiner Tyler Career of John Tyler - Politician, StatesmanMember of Virginia House of Delegates, 1811-16 Member of U.S. House of Representatives, 1816-21 Virginia State Legislator, 1823-25 Governor of Virginia, 1825-26 United States Senator, 1827-36 Vice President, 1841 (under W. H. Harrison) Member of Confederate States Congress, 1861-62 Place of Death - John Tyler died on January 18, 1862 in Richmond, Virginia
Major events in the biography of President John TylerSecond Seminole War ends (1842). Florida admitted (1845) In 1845 U.S. annexes Texas by joint resolution of Congress (March 1st). Webster-Ashburton Treaty with Britain.Facts and History in the biography of President John Tyler John Tyler served in the House of Representatives (1817–21), as governor of Virginia (1825–27), and as senator (1827–36). John Tyler didn't have a Vice President. He had been William Henry Harrison's VP, and the position was not filled when Tyler assumed the presidency. He joined the Confederacy when the Civil War started. Tyler was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives. He lived in retirement in Virginia until the outbreak of the Civil War, when he emerged as chairman of a peace convention and then as delegate to the provisional Congress of the Confederacy.
Presidential Facts and Trivia about President John Tyler
Description of President John Tyler - Height 5 feet 8 inches
He was always very thin
Age at Inauguration - 51 years old
He was playing marbles when informed that he had become president upon the death of Harrison
He suffered from the following illnesses : symmetric paralysis, dysentery, frequent colds, stroke
Tyler had 15 children
Tyler was the first president to have his veto overridden by Congress on March 3, 1845
Age at Death - 71 years old, ignored by the government as a sworn enemy of the U.S.
He died of a stroke
Presidential Facts and Trivia about John Tyler!
President Coin or President Dollar BillPresidential Money. The United States has placed likenesses of the Presidents on many types of coins and currency. John Tyler has not appeared on US currency.

Maladies and Conditions
thin
Tyler was very thin all of his life.
While a 30 year old Congressman in Washington, Tyler developed an illness that remains difficult to diagnose. Based on Tyler's clear description of the illness, it would today be described as a symmetric, generalized, subacute paralysis. His recovery was so slow and prolonged that he resigned from Congress for two years.
Possible diagnoses include Guillain-Barre syndrome, myasthenia gravis, tick paralysis, diphtheritic paralysis, and botulism.
dysentery
Tyler retired to his Virginia estate after leaving the White House. He suffered repeated attacks of dysentery in the summer , the causes of which are unknown.
Tyler had little faith in doctors. He regularly "took the waters" at various spas in Virginia. He became a believer in sulfur hydrotherapy. He also took "massive" doses of calomel regularly, which may have contributed to his gastrointestinal problems.
frequent colds
Tyler frequently suffered from respiratory infections in the winter.

During the last 8 years of his life, Tyler was afflicted with numerous unspecified aches and pains. He was prone to colds, arthritis, and kidney problems. He wrote: "I have many aches and pains. They will attend on a sexogenarian, however, so be it, for I am convinced that it is all wisely ordained by providence"

Death:stroke
In January 1862, while serving in the Congress of the Confederacy, Tyler became dizzy and vomited, as he had in numerous previous episodes. He complained of a chill, and went downstairs for a cup of tea. He then slumped to the floor, unconscious, but revived.
Tyler was ordered to bed the next day, and the day following complained of a suffocating feeling. He was treated with mustard plasters, brandy, and a morphine-containing cough medicine. He died soon afterwards.
Most likely, Tyler died of a stroke. The episodes of dizziness beforehand were probably transient ischemic attacks.

Odds & Ends
When an influenza epidemic swept the nation during Tyler's term, it was called the "Tyler grippe."
Tyler's first wife died in the White House. While President, he married a woman 30 years his junior. Tyler had eight children by his first wife, and seven by his second.

Julia Gardiner Tyler (1820-1889) First Lady of the United States became President John Tyler's second wife in a secret ceremony in 1844. She moved to Staten Island in 1862 after the death of the former president. A Southern sympathizer, she flew the Confederate flag on her West Brighton lawn until it was removed by angry Unionists.

Streetscapes /The Gardiner-Tyler House, West New Brighton, Staten Island; Where a President's Widow Backed the Confederacy
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
Correction Appended
DURING the Civil War, the elegant Greek revival Gardiner-Tyler House, in West New Brighton, Staten Island, sheltered one of New York's most conspicuous rebel sympathizers, Julia Gardiner Tyler, widow of President John Tyler. When she was not involved in pro-Confederate activities, she was busy trying to reunite her family, scattered by the war. Now another family is reuniting in this grand temple-fronted house, as a new addition brings together three generations under one roof.
Now on a small plot surrounded by modest houses, the Gardiner-Tyler house was built around 1837 as a much larger country estate, apparently by an Eliza Racey, about whom little is known.
The main entrance -- under the temple front -- faces south across a wide valley, and the house is of simple plan, with a front to back center hall.
The precisely carved Corinthian capitals on the four double-height columns seem more sophisticated than the heavy scrolled brackets that connect the portico to the house, but it is difficult to tell if they are later alterations -- the earliest good photographs of the house are from the turn of the century.
Early occupancy of the house is sketchy, but Robert Seager's 1963 book, ''And Tyler Too,'' says that, according to Gardiner and Tyler family correspondence, Juliana Gardiner, Julia Gardiner Tyler's mother, bought the house in 1852.
Juliana Gardiner was the widow of David Gardiner -- a member of the Long Island family that owned Gardiner's Island. Gardiner had died in February 1844 after a cannon exploded during testing on a ship in the Potomac River. President Tyler had also been aboard.
Already friendly with the Gardiner family, Tyler became even more friendly with Julia and married her in New York City in June 1844.
Tyler had been elected Vice President in 1840 under William Henry Harrison and became President in April 1841 when Harrison died after only a month in office. Weakened in a dispute over tariff bills with his own Whig Party, Tyler withdrew from the 1844 presidential election.
The Tylers lived at their James River estate, Sherwood Forest, in Virginia. After 1852, Juliana Gardiner lived in the Staten Island house, called Castleton Hill. Tyler was generally identified with pro-slavery, pro-Southern policies -- he had about 70 slaves at Sherwood Forest.
In 1853 The New York Herald and other papers carried an article by Julia Tyler defending slavery, which aroused much comment. She said that the Southern slave ''lives sumptuously'' compared to workers in modern industrial economies. She was also an intimate of Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina.
AT least as early as 1857 Julia and John Tyler visited Juliana Gardiner at Staten Island, and when the former President died in 1862, Julia crossed Civil War battle lines to live at the Staten Island estate, despite her own Southern sympathies.
On Staten Island, Julia Tyler worked for the release of Southern prisoners, for the relief of occupied Southern cities and for various peace efforts.
Julia Tyler went back and forth to her Virginia estate with a regularity that Northern patriots found suspicious. Her Southern sympathies brought conflict to the house, where she often violently quarreled with her uncle, David Lyon Gardiner, who was finally sent away by Juliana Gardiner, his sister.
During this time Julia Tyler was also trying to keep up Sherwood Forest, look after other children in the family, and come up with a way to live in the safety of her mother's house while safeguarding her teen-age sons, David and John, who were in military service -- on the Confederate side.
In April 1865, just hours after Lincoln's assassination, three Staten Islanders forced their way into the house to retrieve and destroy what one claimed in a letter in The New York Herald was a Confederate flag, describing Julia Tyler as the ''widow of the deceased rebel ex-President.''
In a letter to The New York Mail, Julia Tyler denounced the ''outrage committed at my house'' and said the flag was only an ornamental bunting, without political significance.
A June 1, 1865, census recorded Julia Tyler in the house with five of her children, as well as a tutor, an Irish-born coachman and two English-born servants. Juliana Gardiner died in 1868, and Julia got the Staten Island house after a venomous court fight with David Lyon Gardiner.
Her lawyer in the litigation, William M. Evarts, was also a family friend and lent her money, taking the house as security. Julia Tyler left New York in 1871 for Washington and then Virginia, and later in the decade Evarts, who was also prominent in politics, took ownership of the house, although it is not clear if he lived there.
IN the 1880's and 1890's the house was occupied by Douglas M. A. Brown, a wallpaper manufacturer, and in 1898 the land was divided into 157 building lots styled as ''Tyler Park'' in anticipation of a public auction to be accompanied by music and lunch. Included in the sale was to be the ''fine house'' occupied ''by President Tyler,'' although it appears he was never more than an intermittent seasonal guest.
After 1900 the house and most of the lots were purchased by Thaddeus J. Carlin; the 1920 census shows him in occupancy with an English servant and his 15-year-old son, Arthur. Arthur Carlin's granddaughter, Arlene Gillen McGinley, says that when her mother, Arlene Carlin, married Arthur Gillen, ''the house was so large they asked the Gillens to move in with them.''
The family gradually sold off the surrounding lots, and now the grand house is surrounded by low ranch houses, like Gulliver encircled by Lilliputians.
Mrs. McGinley moved out herself when she married Terrance McGinley in 1977, but now that Mr. and Mrs. Gillen are aging, she and Mr. McGinley have purchased the Gardiner-Tyler house from them and are adding a side wing in complementary style, designed by the architect Timothy Boyland, working with the preservation consultant Mary Dierickx. Mrs. McGinley, her husband and their three children are planning to move in next month.
The new wing will be accessible for people with disabilities, to make living there easier for her parents, and will also permit her older brother, Kevin, to visit more frequently -- he has multiple sclerosis and lives in a nursing home.
''When people hear I'm moving into that house they say, 'My gosh, that's a mansion,' '' and then I have to tell them I grew up in it,'' Mrs. McGinley says. ''I'm the fourth generation here, and my children, God willing, will live here in the future also.''

John Tyler Quote: "If the tide of defamation and abuse shall turn, and my administration come to be praised, future Vice Presidents who may succeed to the presidency may feel some slight encouragement to pursue an independent course."

Post-Presidency
Tyler retired to a Virginia plantation located on the James River in Charles City County, Virginia and originally named "Walnut Grove." He renamed it "Sherwood Forest" to signify that he had been "outlawed" by the Whig party. He withdrew from electoral politics, though his advice continued to be sought by states-rights Democrats.


Tyler and the Civil War:
On the eve of the Civil War, Tyler reentered public life to sponsor and chair the Virginia Peace Convention, held in Washington, D.C in February 1861 as an effort to devise means to prevent a war. Tyler had long been an advocate of states' rights, believing that the question of a state's "free" or "slave" status ought to be decided at the state level, with no input from federal government. The convention sought a compromise to avoid civil war while the Confederate Constitution was being drawn up at the Montgomery Convention. When war broke out, Tyler unhesitatingly sided with the Confederacy, and became a delegate to the Provisional Confederate Congress in 1861.

He was then elected to the House of Representatives of the Confederate Congress, but died in Richmond, Virginia before he could assume office.
Tyler's death was the only one in presidential history not to be officially mourned in Washington, because of his allegiance to the Confederacy.

Tyler is also sometimes considered the only president to die outside the United States because his place of death, Richmond, Virginia, was part of the Confederate States at the time. Tyler's favorite horse named "The General" is buried at his Sherwood Forest Plantation with a gravestone which reads, "Here lies the body of my good horse 'The General.' For twenty years he bore me around the circuit of my practice and in all that time he never made a blunder. Would that his master could say the same."

Happy Palm Sunday everyone!

Pope Benedict XVI attends Palm Sunday Mass on March 28, 2010 in Vatican City, Vatican.

Palm Sunday: is a Christian moveable feast that always falls on the Sunday before Easter Sunday. The feast commemorates an event mentioned by all four Canonical Gospels (Mark 11:1-11, Matthew 21:1-11, Luke 19:28-44, and John 12:12-19): the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem in the days before his Passion. It is also called Passion Sunday or Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion.
In many Christian churches, Palm Sunday is marked by the distribution of palm leaves (often tied into crosses) to the assembled worshipers. The difficulty of procuring palms for that day's ceremonies in unfavorable climates for palms led to the substitution of boughs of box, yew, willow or other native trees. The Sunday was often designated by the names of these trees, as Yew Sunday or by the general term Branch Sunday.
According to the Gospels, before entering Jerusalem, Jesus was staying at Bethany and Bethphage, and the Gospel of John adds that he had dinner with Lazarus, and his sisters Mary and Martha. While there, Jesus sent two disciples to the village over against them, in order to retrieve a donkey that had been tied up but never been ridden, and to say, if questioned, that the donkey was needed by the Lord but would be returned. Jesus then rode the donkey into Jerusalem, with the Synoptics adding that the disciples had first put their cloaks on it, so as to make it more comfortable. The Gospels go on to recount how Jesus rode into Jerusalem, and how the people there lay down their cloaks in front of him, and also lay down small branches of trees. The people sang part of Psalm 118 - ...Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father, David. ... (Psalms 118:25-26). Where this entry took place is unspecified; some scholars argue that the Golden Gate is the likely location, since that was where it was believed the Jewish messiah would enter Jerusalem; other scholars think that an entrance to the south, which had stairs leading directly to the Temple, would be more likely. A Day to Reflect:for Catholics,Palm Sunday is the day to reflect, commemorate, and ask for the forgiveness of sins.

Remembering a great Senator of New York after 7 years

I really like this picture it shows 2 of my personal heroes in the United States Senate history. Ted Kennedy (D-Ma) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY)

Daniel Patrick Moynihan:You will always be missed in the state of New York and even to all the Irish Americans who live in the state of New York. God Bless You Senator! And thanks for the years that you have served as the Senator of a fine state called New York! remembering you 7 years later, may you rest in peace!

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Born: Mar. 16, 1927

Died: Mar. 26, 2003

Daniel Patrick “Pat” Moynihan was an American politician and sociologist. A member of the Democratic Party, he was first elected to the United States Senate for New York in 1976, and was re-elected three times (in 1982, 1988, and 1994). He declined to run for re-election in 2000. Prior to his years in the Senate, Moynihan was the United States' ambassador to the United Nations and to India, and was a member of four successive presidential administrations, beginning with the administration of John F. Kennedy, and continuing through Gerald Ford.

Career in the Senate
In 1976, Moynihan was elected to the U.S. Senate from the State of New York, defeating U.S. Representative Bella Abzug, Ramsey Clark, Paul O'Dwyer and Abraham Hirschfeld in the Democratic primary, and Conservative Party incumbent James L. Buckley in the general election. Shortly after election, Moynihan analyzed the State of New York's budget to determine whether it was paying out more in federal taxes than it received in spending. Finding that it was, he produced a yearly report known as the FISC. Moynihan's strong support for Israel while U.N. Ambassador may have increased support for him among the state's Jewish population.
Moynihan continued to be interested in foreign policy as a Senator, sitting on the Select Committee on Intelligence.

His strongly anti-Soviet views became far more moderate, as he emerged as a critic of the Ronald Reagan Administration's hawkish Cold War policies, such as support for the Contras in Nicaragua. Moynihan argued there was no active Soviet-backed conspiracy in Latin America, or anywhere. He suggested the U.S.S.R. was suffering from massive internal problems, such as rising ethnic nationalism and a collapsing economy. In a December 21, 1986 editorial in the New York Times, Moynihan predicted the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. He blasted the Reagan Administration's "consuming obsession with the expansion of Communism— which is not in fact going on."

As part of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, Moynihan introduced Section 1706, which cost technical consultants (e.g., computer programmers, engineers) their self-employed tax status, while exempting other professionals such as accountants and lawyers. This change in the tax code offset the tax revenue losses of other legislation Moynihan proposed that changed the law of foreign taxes of Americans working abroad. Joseph Stack who flew his airplane into a building housing IRS offices on February 18, 2010, traced his problems with the government to the Section 1706 change in the Internal Revenue Code.

In the mid-1990s, Moynihan was one of the Democrats to support the ban on the procedure known as partial-birth abortion. He said of the procedure: "I think this is just too close to infanticide. A child has been born and it has exited the uterus. What on Earth is this procedure?" Earlier in his career in the Senate, Moynihan had expressed his annoyance with the adamantly pro-choice interest groups petitioning him and others on the issue. He challenged them saying, "you women are ruining the Democratic Party with your insistence on abortion"

Moynihan broke with orthodox liberal positions of his party on numerous occasions. As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, in the 1990s, he strongly opposed President Bill Clinton's proposal to expand health care coverage to all Americans. Seeking to focus the debate over health insurance on the financing of health care, Moynihan garnered controversy by stating, "There is no health care crisis in this country."

A liberal, he voted against the death penalty, the flag desecration amendment, the balanced budget amendment, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, the Defense of Marriage Act, the Communications Decency Act, and the North American Free Trade Agreement. He was critical of proposals to replace the progressive income tax with a flat tax. Moynihan surprised many in 1991 when he voted against authorization of the Gulf War. Despite his earlier writings on the negative effects of the welfare state, he surprised many people again by voting against welfare reform in 1996. He was sharply critical of the bill and certain Democrats who crossed party lines to support it.

On August 9, 2000, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton.

Death and posthumous honors
In 2003, Moynihan died at the age of 76 after complications suffered from an emergency appendectomy about a month earlier. He was survived by his wife of 39 years, Elizabeth Brennan Moynihan, three grown children: Timothy Patrick Moynihan, Maura Russell Moynihan, and John McCloskey Moynihan; and two grandchildren, Michael Patrick and Zora Olea.
Moynihan was honored posthumously as well.

In 2004, Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City, announced plans to replace Penn Station as the city's railroad hub. Built a block away within the historic landmark James Farley Post Office building, the new station would be named for Moynihan, as he had long proposed the project and worked to secure federal approvals and financing for it.

In 2005, the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs renamed its Global Affairs Institute as the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.
The federal courthouse in New York's Foley Square was named in his honor.


Daniel Patrick Moynihan: on reacting on that tragic day in November 22, 1963-
"I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought we had a little more time."

Moynihan, Senator and Veteran, Is Buried in Arlington Cemetery
By ADAM CLYMER
ARLINGTON, Va., March 31— Daniel Patrick Moynihan, naval gunnery officer and four-term United States senator, was buried today at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
The graveside ceremony followed a funeral mass at St. Patrick's Church, the oldest Roman Catholic church in Washington and the parish where Mr. Moynihan worshiped before his death last Wednesday at 76.
''Pat Moynihan was a man of quiet faith,'' Msgr. Peter J. Vaghi told the mourners. ''For him, this found expression in his long commitment to the body politic, the pursuit of the common good and his special care for the poor, the family structure and the most needy in our midst.''
The several hundred mourners included dozens of former aides, senators past and present, including Robert Dole, Charles E. Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and one prominent Bush administration figure, Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense. Before they entered the sanctuary, mourners crossed a green marble shamrock embedded in the floor of the church vestibule.
After the mass, the hearse carrying Mr. Moynihan's coffin made its way to the Russell Senate Office Building and then down Pennsylvania Avenue, whose revitalization he championed for four decades as an aide to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford and then in 24 years as a senator from New York.
His burial place at Arlington was earned by his Navy service from 1944 to 1947. At the cemetery, a band played the ''Navy Hymn'' and led a horse-drawn caisson that was followed on foot by his widow, Elizabeth Brennan Moynihan, and their children, Maura, John and Timothy.
Seven sailors fired three rifle volleys. A bugler sounded ''Taps.'' The Navy Band played ''America the Beautiful.''
Maura Moynihan read from Dylan Thomas:
''Do not go gentle into that good night,
''Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
''Rage, rage against the dying of the light. . . .''
She explained later that she chose the verse because her father knew Mr. Thomas and sometimes drank with him at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village.
Photo: After the funeral yesterday for Senator Daniel P. Moynihan in Washington, his coffin was taken from St. Patrick's Church to Arlington National Cemetery, where he was buried with military honors.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan Is Dead; Senator From Academia Was 76
By ADAM CLYMER
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Harvard professor and four-term United States senator from New York who brought a scholar's eye for data to politics and a politician's sense of the real world to academia, died yesterday at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. He was 76.
The cause, a spokesman for the family said, was complications of a ruptured appendix, which was removed on March 11 at the hospital, where he remained.
Mr. Moynihan was always more a man of ideas than of legislation or partisan combat. Yet he was enough of a politician to win re-election easily -- and enough of a maverick with close Republican friends to be an occasional irritant to his Democratic party leaders. Before the Senate, his political home from 1977 to 2001, he served two Democratic presidents and two Republicans, finishing his career in the executive branch as President Richard M. Nixon's ambassador to India and President Gerald R. Ford's ambassador to the United Nations.
For more than 40 years, in and out of government, he became known for being among the first to identify new problems and propose novel, if not easy, solutions, most famously in auto safety and mass transportation; urban decay and the corrosive effects of racism; and the preservation and development of architecturally distinctive federal buildings.
He was a man known for the grand gesture as well as the bon mot, and his style sometimes got more attention than his prescience, displayed notably in 1980 when he labeled the Soviet Union ''in decline.'' Among his last great causes were strengthening Social Security and attacking government secrecy.
In the halls of academe and the corridors of power, he was known for seizing ideas and connections before others noticed. In 1963, for example, he was the co-author of ''Beyond the Melting Pot,'' which shattered the idea that ethnic identities inevitably wear off in the United States. Then, on the day that November when President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, he told every official he could find that the federal government must take custody of Lee Harvey Oswald to keep him alive to learn about the killing. No one listened.
Friends also observed the intense sense of history he connected to immediate events. Bob Packwood, the former Republican senator from Oregon, recalled his Democratic friend's response in 1993 when a reporter on the White House lawn asked what he thought of the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian agreement to share the West Bank. ''Well, I think it's the end of World War I,'' he said, alluding to the mandates that proposed Middle Eastern boundaries in 1920.
Erudite, opinionated and favoring, in season, tweed or seersucker, Mr. Moynihan conveyed an academic personality through a chirpy manner of speech, with occasional pauses between syllables. More than most senators, he could get colleagues to listen to his speeches, though not necessarily to follow his recommendations. He had a knack for the striking phrase, but unease at the controversy it often caused. When other senators used August recesses to travel or raise money for re-election, he spent most of them in an 1854 schoolhouse on his farm in Pindars Corners in Delaware County, about 65 miles west of Albany. He was writing books, 9 as a senator, 18 in all.
Mr. Moynihan was less an original researcher than a bold, often brilliant synthesizer whose works compelled furious debate and further research. In 1965, his foremost work, ''The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,'' identified the breakup of black families as a major impediment to black advancement. Though savaged by many liberal academics at the time, it is now generally regarded as ''an important and prophetic document,'' in the words of Prof. William Julius Wilson of Harvard.
Five years later, his memo to President Nixon on race relations caused another uproar. Citing the raw feelings provoked by the battles of the civil rights era, Mr. Moynihan suggested a period of rhetorical calm -- ''benign neglect'' he called it -- a proposal widely misinterpreted as a call to abandon federal programs to improve the lives of black families.
Nonetheless, he could also be an effective legislator. In his first term he teamed with Jacob K. Javits, his Republican colleague, to pass legislation guaranteeing $2 billion worth of New York City obligations at a time when the city faced bankruptcy. In a brief turn leading the Environment and Public Works Committee in 1991 and 1992 he successfully pushed to shift highway financing toward mass transit -- and get New York $5 billion in retroactive reimbursement for building the New York State Thruway before the federal government began the Interstate Highway System.
Although Mr. Moynihan's junior colleague for 18 years, Alfonse M. D'Amato, became known as Senator Pothole for his pork-barrel efforts for New York, Mr. Moynihan held his own in that department.
Monument of Bricks and Marble
Long before he came to the Senate, and until he left, he was building a monument of bricks and marble by making Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue, a dingy street where he came to work for President John F. Kennedy in 1961, into the grand avenue that George Washington foresaw for the boulevard that connects the Capitol and the White House. Nearly 40 years of his effort filled the avenue with new buildings on its north side, including the apartment houses where he lived, restored buildings on the south, and cafes and a sense of life all along.
Wherever he went, Mr. Moynihan explored interesting buildings and worked to preserve architectural distinction, from converting the main post office in Manhattan into the new Pennsylvania Station, to the Customs House at Battery Park and all around Washington. Last year, over lunch and a martini at Washington's Hotel Monaco, an 1842 Robert Mills building that was once the city's main post office, he recalled how he had helped rescue it from decline into a shooting gallery for drugs.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Okla., on March 16, 1927, the son of an itinerant, hard-drinking newspaperman who moved the family to New York later that year to take a job writing advertising copy. They lived comfortably in the city and suburbs until 1937 when his father, John Moynihan, left the family and left it in poverty.
Mr. Moynihan's childhood has been pseudo-glamorized by references to an upbringing in Hell's Kitchen, which in fact he encountered after his mother bought a bar there when he was 20. But there was enough hardship and instability in his early life so that when he later wrote of ''social pathology,'' he knew what he was talking about.
Mr. Moynihan's mother, Margaret Moynihan, moved the family, including a brother, Michael, and a sister, Ellen, into a succession of Manhattan apartments, and Pat shined shoes in Times Square. In 1943 he graduated first in his class at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. He also graduated to work as a stevedore at Piers 48 and 49 on West 11th Street.
He went to City College for a year, enlisted in the Navy, and was trained as an officer at Middlebury College and at Tufts University. Discharged the next spring, he went to work that summer tending bar for his mother, then got his B.A. at Tufts in 1948 and an M.A. at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts in 1949.
In 1950 he went to the London School of Economics on a Fulbright Scholarship, and he lived well on it, the G.I. bill and later a job at an Air Force base. He started wearing a bowler hat. He had a tailor and a bootmaker and traveled widely, including a visit to Moynihan cousins in County Kerry, Ireland.
Work on his dissertation did not consume him. In ''Pat,'' his 1979 biography, Doug Schoen described a 1952 visit by two former Middlebury colleagues: ''Impressed at first with his elaborate file cabinet full of index cards, they found that most of the cards were recipes for drinks rather than notes on the International Labor Organization.''
Mr. Moynihan came home in 1953 and went to work in the mayoral campaign of Robert F. Wagner. He went on to write speeches for W. Averell Harriman's successful campaign for governor in 1954, joined his administration in Albany and rose to become his chief aide. It was there he learned about traffic safety, which he described in a 1959 article in The Reporter as a public health problem requiring federal action to make automobile design safer.
A Semi-Modest Proposal
Another former campaign worker who came to Albany was Elizabeth Brennan. Her desk and his were in the same room, and they grew friendly. Rather suddenly in early 1955, when they had never dated, Mr. Moynihan did not formally propose but simply told her he was going to marry her.
They married in May 1955, and she often said she married him because he was the funniest man she ever met.
His wife survives him, as do their three children: Timothy, Maura and John, and two grandchildren.
While he was an enthusiastic supporter of John F. Kennedy, work at Syracuse University on a book about the Harriman administration and his Ph.D. kept his role in the campaign sporadic. But Liz Brennan Moynihan organized the campaign efforts in the Syracuse area.
His Ph.D. in international relations finally complete, he left Syracuse in 1961 for Washington and the Labor Department, rising to assistant secretary. One early research assignment on office space for the scattered department gave him an opportunity to assert guiding architectural principles that have endured and produced striking courthouses: that federal buildings ''must provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American government.'' That same report enabled him to raise the Pennsylvania Avenue issue, and he was at work on development plans on Nov. 22, 1963, when the word came that the president had been shot in Dallas.
Beyond his failed efforts to protect Mr. Oswald, Mr. Moynihan marked that grim assassination weekend with a widely remembered remark about the death of the president he barely knew but idolized and eagerly followed.
On Sunday Nov. 24, he said in a television interview: ''I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess we thought we had a little more time.'' He added softly, ''So did he.''
His first book, written jointly with Nathan Glazer, had come out earlier that year. ''Beyond the Melting Pot'' looked at the different ethnic groups of New York City and scoffed at ''the notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product.'' Ethnicity persisted, they argued.
That concept won praise from the era's leading historian of immigration, Harvard's Oscar Handlin, who called it a ''point of departure'' in studies of immigrants. But in a foretaste of academic criticism in years to come, he said their methodology was sometimes ''flimsy.''
''The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,'' a paper he wrote at the Labor Department early in 1965, argued that despite the Johnson administration's success in passing civil rights laws, statutes could not ensure equality after three centuries of deprivation. He said the disintegration of black families had reached a point of ''social pathology.'' He wrote: ''The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow. If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United States for generations.''
He cited black unemployment, welfare and illegitimacy rates. His emphasis on families headed by women led him to be accused of blaming the victims for their predicament, but in fact he wrote clearly, ''It was by destroying the Negro family under slavery that white America broke the will of the Negro people.'' Now, he wrote, the federal government must adopt policies, especially in education and employment, ''designed to have the effect, directly or indirectly, of enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.''
He left the administration in 1965 as liberals denounced his paper, and then ran for president of the New York City Council. He lost badly in the Democratic primary, but went on to Wesleyan University and, in 1966, to Harvard as director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies and a tenured professor in the Graduate School of Education.
He spoke out against disorder, in urban slums and on select campuses. Speaking to Americans for Democratic Action in 1967, he made it clear he thought liberal pieties would not solve black problems.
And in a passage that came to the eye of the Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon, he said liberals must ''see more clearly that their essential interest is in the stability of the social order'' and ''make alliances with conservatives who share that concern.'' When Nixon was elected, Mr. Moynihan made his alliance. He joined the White House staff as assistant to the president for urban affairs.
That startled his friends, and his wife refused to move to Washington. Mr. Moynihan, who never developed, even after Watergate, the searing contempt for Mr. Nixon that animated so many contemporary Democrats, explained that when the president of the United States asks, a good citizen agrees to help. Another biographer, Godfrey Hodgson, says that while Mr. Moynihan never stopped thinking of himself as a liberal Democrat, he shared the president's resentment of orthodox liberalism.
While his advice to the president to end the war in Vietnam stayed private, there were two ideas for which his time in the Nixon White House was known.
In 1970 he wrote to the president on race relations, arguing that the issue had been rubbed raw by ''hysterics, paranoids and boodlers'' on all sides. Now, he wrote, race relations could profit from a period of ''benign neglect'' in which rhetoric, at least, was toned down. In a rerun of the reaction to his paper on the Negro family, when this paper was leaked it was treated as if Mr. Moynihan wanted to neglect blacks.
He may have invited that interpretation by his quaintly glib language, but in fact Mr. Moynihan was pushing an idea that might have been of vast help to poor blacks, and whites. That other idea for which he was known, the Family Assistance Plan, sought to provide guaranteed income to the unemployed and supplements to the working poor, and together to stop fathers from leaving home so their families could qualify for welfare. The president made a speech for the program, sent it to Capitol Hill and let it die.
Afterward, though he remained on good terms with Mr. Nixon, Mr. Moynihan went back to Harvard in 1970. Resentment over his White House service chilled his welcome back in Cambridge. His interests shifted to foreign affairs -- perhaps because the charges of racism left him no audience for domestic policy, and made him welcome an appointment as ambassador to India, where he negotiated a deal to end India's huge food aid debt to the United States. He returned to Harvard to protect his tenure in 1975, but moved that year to the United Nations as United States ambassador.
There he answered the United States' third world critics bluntly, often contemptuously.
In his brief tenure he called Idi Amin, the president of Uganda, a ''racist murderer,'' and denounced the General Assembly for passing a resolution equating Zionism with racism: ''the abomination of anti-Semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.'' After eight months of struggles with Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who wanted a less confrontational approach, he resigned in February 1976.
That made him available for a run for the Democratic nomination for the Senate, and he edged out the very liberal Representative Bella Abzug in the primary before winning the general election easily over the incumbent, James L. Buckley, the Republican-Conservative candidate. With his wife in charge of each campaign, he won three landslide re-elections.
He set one high goal -- a seat on the Finance Committee as a freshman -- and reached it, along with a seat on the Intelligence Committee. Early in office he joined Gov. Hugh L. Carey, Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts in a St. Patrick's Day appeal to Irish-Americans to stop sending money to arm the Irish Republican Army, whom he privately described as ''a bunch of murderous thugs.''
Every year he produced an analysis of federal taxes and federal aid, known as ''the fisc,'' which showed that New York was getting regularly shortchanged by Washington. He worked to reduce that imbalance, both through Medicaid funding on the Finance Committee and public works on the Environment and Public Works Committee.
And his colleagues always knew he was around. Every day of the 2,454-day captivity of Terry Anderson, the Associated Press reporter captured by 1985 by the Hezbollah in Lebanon, he would go to the Senate floor to remind his colleagues, in a sentence, just how many days it had been.
Quarreled With White House
After loyally serving four presidents, he quarreled with those in the White House while he was in the Senate. When he arrived in 1977, he found President Carter too soft in dealing with the Soviet Union and indifferent to its evil nature.
But he quickly came to believe that the Soviet Union was crumbling. In Newsweek in 1979 he focused on its ethnic tensions. In January 1980, he told the Senate: ''The Soviet Union is a seriously troubled, even sick society. The indices of economic stagnation and even decline are extraordinary. The indices of social disorder -- social pathology is not too strong a term -- are even more so.'' He added, ''The defining event of the decade might well be the breakup of the Soviet empire.''
It was against that changed perception that he was sharply critical of vast increases in military spending, which, combined with the Reagan tax cuts, produced deficits that he charged were intended to starve domestic spending. He called a 1983 Reagan proposal for cutting Social Security benefits a ''breach of faith'' with the elderly, and worked out a rescue package that kept the program solvent for at least a decade into the 21st century.
He also scorned the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the 1984 mining of harbors in Nicaragua and the 1989 invasion of Panama as violations of international law, and voted against authorizing President George H. W. Bush to make war against Iraq. It was not enough, he wrote in his book ''On the Law of Nations'' in 1990, for the United States to be strong enough to get away with such actions. The American legacy of international legal norms of state behavior, he wrote, is ''a legacy not to be frittered away.''
But probably his worst relations with a president came when Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton sought passage of national health insurance.
Certainly, the failure of health care legislation was not primarily Mr. Moynihan's responsibility, but he had become chairman of the Finance Committee in 1993, and health care fell within its jurisdiction. He said the administration should take on welfare reform legislation first, and carped on television about their health plan, quickly fixing on the role of teaching hospitals as the biggest issue in health care. But otherwise he waited for Mr. Packwood and Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the Republican leader, to propose a compromise. Mr. Dole had decided all-out opposition was the better course for his party, and they never did.
Mr. Moynihan's career in the Senate was marked not by legislative milestones but by ideas. Even so, Senator Kennedy, the legislative lion, once described him in 1993 as an exemplar ''of what the Founding Fathers thought the Senate would be about,'' because of the New Yorker's breadth of interests, ''having read history, and thought about it, and being opinionated.''

Daniel Patrick Moynihan Is Dead; Senator From Academia Was 76
By ADAM CLYMER
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Harvard professor and four-term United States senator from New York who brought a scholar's eye for data to politics and a politician's sense of the real world to academia, died yesterday at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. He was 76.
The cause, a spokesman for the family said, was complications of a ruptured appendix, which was removed on March 11 at the hospital, where he remained.
Mr. Moynihan was always more a man of ideas than of legislation or partisan combat. Yet he was enough of a politician to win re-election easily -- and enough of a maverick with close Republican friends to be an occasional irritant to his Democratic party leaders. Before the Senate, his political home from 1977 to 2001, he served two Democratic presidents and two Republicans, finishing his career in the executive branch as President Richard M. Nixon's ambassador to India and President Gerald R. Ford's ambassador to the United Nations.
For more than 40 years, in and out of government, he became known for being among the first to identify new problems and propose novel, if not easy, solutions, most famously in auto safety and mass transportation; urban decay and the corrosive effects of racism; and the preservation and development of architecturally distinctive federal buildings.
He was a man known for the grand gesture as well as the bon mot, and his style sometimes got more attention than his prescience, displayed notably in 1980 when he labeled the Soviet Union ''in decline.'' Among his last great causes were strengthening Social Security and attacking government secrecy.
In the halls of academe and the corridors of power, he was known for seizing ideas and connections before others noticed. In 1963, for example, he was the co-author of ''Beyond the Melting Pot,'' which shattered the idea that ethnic identities inevitably wear off in the United States. Then, on the day that November when President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, he told every official he could find that the federal government must take custody of Lee Harvey Oswald to keep him alive to learn about the killing. No one listened.
Friends also observed the intense sense of history he connected to immediate events. Bob Packwood, the former Republican senator from Oregon, recalled his Democratic friend's response in 1993 when a reporter on the White House lawn asked what he thought of the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian agreement to share the West Bank. ''Well, I think it's the end of World War I,'' he said, alluding to the mandates that proposed Middle Eastern boundaries in 1920.
Erudite, opinionated and favoring, in season, tweed or seersucker, Mr. Moynihan conveyed an academic personality through a chirpy manner of speech, with occasional pauses between syllables. More than most senators, he could get colleagues to listen to his speeches, though not necessarily to follow his recommendations. He had a knack for the striking phrase, but unease at the controversy it often caused. When other senators used August recesses to travel or raise money for re-election, he spent most of them in an 1854 schoolhouse on his farm in Pindars Corners in Delaware County, about 65 miles west of Albany. He was writing books, 9 as a senator, 18 in all.
Mr. Moynihan was less an original researcher than a bold, often brilliant synthesizer whose works compelled furious debate and further research. In 1965, his foremost work, ''The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,'' identified the breakup of black families as a major impediment to black advancement. Though savaged by many liberal academics at the time, it is now generally regarded as ''an important and prophetic document,'' in the words of Prof. William Julius Wilson of Harvard.
Five years later, his memo to President Nixon on race relations caused another uproar. Citing the raw feelings provoked by the battles of the civil rights era, Mr. Moynihan suggested a period of rhetorical calm -- ''benign neglect'' he called it -- a proposal widely misinterpreted as a call to abandon federal programs to improve the lives of black families.
Nonetheless, he could also be an effective legislator. In his first term he teamed with Jacob K. Javits, his Republican colleague, to pass legislation guaranteeing $2 billion worth of New York City obligations at a time when the city faced bankruptcy. In a brief turn leading the Environment and Public Works Committee in 1991 and 1992 he successfully pushed to shift highway financing toward mass transit -- and get New York $5 billion in retroactive reimbursement for building the New York State Thruway before the federal government began the Interstate Highway System.
Although Mr. Moynihan's junior colleague for 18 years, Alfonse M. D'Amato, became known as Senator Pothole for his pork-barrel efforts for New York, Mr. Moynihan held his own in that department.
Monument of Bricks and Marble
Long before he came to the Senate, and until he left, he was building a monument of bricks and marble by making Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue, a dingy street where he came to work for President John F. Kennedy in 1961, into the grand avenue that George Washington foresaw for the boulevard that connects the Capitol and the White House. Nearly 40 years of his effort filled the avenue with new buildings on its north side, including the apartment houses where he lived, restored buildings on the south, and cafes and a sense of life all along.
Wherever he went, Mr. Moynihan explored interesting buildings and worked to preserve architectural distinction, from converting the main post office in Manhattan into the new Pennsylvania Station, to the Customs House at Battery Park and all around Washington. Last year, over lunch and a martini at Washington's Hotel Monaco, an 1842 Robert Mills building that was once the city's main post office, he recalled how he had helped rescue it from decline into a shooting gallery for drugs.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Okla., on March 16, 1927, the son of an itinerant, hard-drinking newspaperman who moved the family to New York later that year to take a job writing advertising copy. They lived comfortably in the city and suburbs until 1937 when his father, John Moynihan, left the family and left it in poverty.
Mr. Moynihan's childhood has been pseudo-glamorized by references to an upbringing in Hell's Kitchen, which in fact he encountered after his mother bought a bar there when he was 20. But there was enough hardship and instability in his early life so that when he later wrote of ''social pathology,'' he knew what he was talking about.
Mr. Moynihan's mother, Margaret Moynihan, moved the family, including a brother, Michael, and a sister, Ellen, into a succession of Manhattan apartments, and Pat shined shoes in Times Square. In 1943 he graduated first in his class at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. He also graduated to work as a stevedore at Piers 48 and 49 on West 11th Street.
He went to City College for a year, enlisted in the Navy, and was trained as an officer at Middlebury College and at Tufts University. Discharged the next spring, he went to work that summer tending bar for his mother, then got his B.A. at Tufts in 1948 and an M.A. at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts in 1949.
In 1950 he went to the London School of Economics on a Fulbright Scholarship, and he lived well on it, the G.I. bill and later a job at an Air Force base. He started wearing a bowler hat. He had a tailor and a bootmaker and traveled widely, including a visit to Moynihan cousins in County Kerry, Ireland.
Work on his dissertation did not consume him. In ''Pat,'' his 1979 biography, Doug Schoen described a 1952 visit by two former Middlebury colleagues: ''Impressed at first with his elaborate file cabinet full of index cards, they found that most of the cards were recipes for drinks rather than notes on the International Labor Organization.''
Mr. Moynihan came home in 1953 and went to work in the mayoral campaign of Robert F. Wagner. He went on to write speeches for W. Averell Harriman's successful campaign for governor in 1954, joined his administration in Albany and rose to become his chief aide. It was there he learned about traffic safety, which he described in a 1959 article in The Reporter as a public health problem requiring federal action to make automobile design safer.
A Semi-Modest Proposal
Another former campaign worker who came to Albany was Elizabeth Brennan. Her desk and his were in the same room, and they grew friendly. Rather suddenly in early 1955, when they had never dated, Mr. Moynihan did not formally propose but simply told her he was going to marry her.
They married in May 1955, and she often said she married him because he was the funniest man she ever met.
His wife survives him, as do their three children: Timothy, Maura and John, and two grandchildren.
While he was an enthusiastic supporter of John F. Kennedy, work at Syracuse University on a book about the Harriman administration and his Ph.D. kept his role in the campaign sporadic. But Liz Brennan Moynihan organized the campaign efforts in the Syracuse area.
His Ph.D. in international relations finally complete, he left Syracuse in 1961 for Washington and the Labor Department, rising to assistant secretary. One early research assignment on office space for the scattered department gave him an opportunity to assert guiding architectural principles that have endured and produced striking courthouses: that federal buildings ''must provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American government.'' That same report enabled him to raise the Pennsylvania Avenue issue, and he was at work on development plans on Nov. 22, 1963, when the word came that the president had been shot in Dallas.
Beyond his failed efforts to protect Mr. Oswald, Mr. Moynihan marked that grim assassination weekend with a widely remembered remark about the death of the president he barely knew but idolized and eagerly followed.
On Sunday Nov. 24, he said in a television interview: ''I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess we thought we had a little more time.'' He added softly, ''So did he.''
His first book, written jointly with Nathan Glazer, had come out earlier that year. ''Beyond the Melting Pot'' looked at the different ethnic groups of New York City and scoffed at ''the notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product.'' Ethnicity persisted, they argued.
That concept won praise from the era's leading historian of immigration, Harvard's Oscar Handlin, who called it a ''point of departure'' in studies of immigrants. But in a foretaste of academic criticism in years to come, he said their methodology was sometimes ''flimsy.''
''The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,'' a paper he wrote at the Labor Department early in 1965, argued that despite the Johnson administration's success in passing civil rights laws, statutes could not ensure equality after three centuries of deprivation. He said the disintegration of black families had reached a point of ''social pathology.'' He wrote: ''The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow. If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United States for generations.''
He cited black unemployment, welfare and illegitimacy rates. His emphasis on families headed by women led him to be accused of blaming the victims for their predicament, but in fact he wrote clearly, ''It was by destroying the Negro family under slavery that white America broke the will of the Negro people.'' Now, he wrote, the federal government must adopt policies, especially in education and employment, ''designed to have the effect, directly or indirectly, of enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.''
He left the administration in 1965 as liberals denounced his paper, and then ran for president of the New York City Council. He lost badly in the Democratic primary, but went on to Wesleyan University and, in 1966, to Harvard as director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies and a tenured professor in the Graduate School of Education.
He spoke out against disorder, in urban slums and on select campuses. Speaking to Americans for Democratic Action in 1967, he made it clear he thought liberal pieties would not solve black problems.
And in a passage that came to the eye of the Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon, he said liberals must ''see more clearly that their essential interest is in the stability of the social order'' and ''make alliances with conservatives who share that concern.'' When Nixon was elected, Mr. Moynihan made his alliance. He joined the White House staff as assistant to the president for urban affairs.
That startled his friends, and his wife refused to move to Washington. Mr. Moynihan, who never developed, even after Watergate, the searing contempt for Mr. Nixon that animated so many contemporary Democrats, explained that when the president of the United States asks, a good citizen agrees to help. Another biographer, Godfrey Hodgson, says that while Mr. Moynihan never stopped thinking of himself as a liberal Democrat, he shared the president's resentment of orthodox liberalism.
While his advice to the president to end the war in Vietnam stayed private, there were two ideas for which his time in the Nixon White House was known.
In 1970 he wrote to the president on race relations, arguing that the issue had been rubbed raw by ''hysterics, paranoids and boodlers'' on all sides. Now, he wrote, race relations could profit from a period of ''benign neglect'' in which rhetoric, at least, was toned down. In a rerun of the reaction to his paper on the Negro family, when this paper was leaked it was treated as if Mr. Moynihan wanted to neglect blacks.
He may have invited that interpretation by his quaintly glib language, but in fact Mr. Moynihan was pushing an idea that might have been of vast help to poor blacks, and whites. That other idea for which he was known, the Family Assistance Plan, sought to provide guaranteed income to the unemployed and supplements to the working poor, and together to stop fathers from leaving home so their families could qualify for welfare. The president made a speech for the program, sent it to Capitol Hill and let it die.
Afterward, though he remained on good terms with Mr. Nixon, Mr. Moynihan went back to Harvard in 1970. Resentment over his White House service chilled his welcome back in Cambridge. His interests shifted to foreign affairs -- perhaps because the charges of racism left him no audience for domestic policy, and made him welcome an appointment as ambassador to India, where he negotiated a deal to end India's huge food aid debt to the United States. He returned to Harvard to protect his tenure in 1975, but moved that year to the United Nations as United States ambassador.
There he answered the United States' third world critics bluntly, often contemptuously.
In his brief tenure he called Idi Amin, the president of Uganda, a ''racist murderer,'' and denounced the General Assembly for passing a resolution equating Zionism with racism: ''the abomination of anti-Semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.'' After eight months of struggles with Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who wanted a less confrontational approach, he resigned in February 1976.
That made him available for a run for the Democratic nomination for the Senate, and he edged out the very liberal Representative Bella Abzug in the primary before winning the general election easily over the incumbent, James L. Buckley, the Republican-Conservative candidate. With his wife in charge of each campaign, he won three landslide re-elections.
He set one high goal -- a seat on the Finance Committee as a freshman -- and reached it, along with a seat on the Intelligence Committee. Early in office he joined Gov. Hugh L. Carey, Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts in a St. Patrick's Day appeal to Irish-Americans to stop sending money to arm the Irish Republican Army, whom he privately described as ''a bunch of murderous thugs.''
Every year he produced an analysis of federal taxes and federal aid, known as ''the fisc,'' which showed that New York was getting regularly shortchanged by Washington. He worked to reduce that imbalance, both through Medicaid funding on the Finance Committee and public works on the Environment and Public Works Committee.
And his colleagues always knew he was around. Every day of the 2,454-day captivity of Terry Anderson, the Associated Press reporter captured by 1985 by the Hezbollah in Lebanon, he would go to the Senate floor to remind his colleagues, in a sentence, just how many days it had been.
Quarreled With White House
After loyally serving four presidents, he quarreled with those in the White House while he was in the Senate. When he arrived in 1977, he found President Carter too soft in dealing with the Soviet Union and indifferent to its evil nature.
But he quickly came to believe that the Soviet Union was crumbling. In Newsweek in 1979 he focused on its ethnic tensions. In January 1980, he told the Senate: ''The Soviet Union is a seriously troubled, even sick society. The indices of economic stagnation and even decline are extraordinary. The indices of social disorder -- social pathology is not too strong a term -- are even more so.'' He added, ''The defining event of the decade might well be the breakup of the Soviet empire.''
It was against that changed perception that he was sharply critical of vast increases in military spending, which, combined with the Reagan tax cuts, produced deficits that he charged were intended to starve domestic spending. He called a 1983 Reagan proposal for cutting Social Security benefits a ''breach of faith'' with the elderly, and worked out a rescue package that kept the program solvent for at least a decade into the 21st century.
He also scorned the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the 1984 mining of harbors in Nicaragua and the 1989 invasion of Panama as violations of international law, and voted against authorizing President George H. W. Bush to make war against Iraq. It was not enough, he wrote in his book ''On the Law of Nations'' in 1990, for the United States to be strong enough to get away with such actions. The American legacy of international legal norms of state behavior, he wrote, is ''a legacy not to be frittered away.''
But probably his worst relations with a president came when Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton sought passage of national health insurance.
Certainly, the failure of health care legislation was not primarily Mr. Moynihan's responsibility, but he had become chairman of the Finance Committee in 1993, and health care fell within its jurisdiction. He said the administration should take on welfare reform legislation first, and carped on television about their health plan, quickly fixing on the role of teaching hospitals as the biggest issue in health care. But otherwise he waited for Mr. Packwood and Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the Republican leader, to propose a compromise. Mr. Dole had decided all-out opposition was the better course for his party, and they never did.
Mr. Moynihan's career in the Senate was marked not by legislative milestones but by ideas. Even so, Senator Kennedy, the legislative lion, once described him in 1993 as an exemplar ''of what the Founding Fathers thought the Senate would be about,'' because of the New Yorker's breadth of interests, ''having read history, and thought about it, and being opinionated.''

Remembering Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez after 30 years ago today!

Servant of God Archbishop Romero, you were truly a man with words,remembering you 30 years later Archbishop and I hope someday that the Vatican will recoginzed your words and make you the patron saint of El Salvador!

The first 2 pictures of Archbishop Oscar Romero with Pope Paul VI!

This is an Aug. 1977 photo of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. The outspoken church leader who was killed in 1980 as he celebrated Mass, has become as polarizing in death as he was in life. The campaign to make him a Roman Catholic saint appears to be languishing, as Vatican officials privately debate whether Romero was a martyr for the faith or for the political left.

Remembering Oscar Romero, 30 Years Later:

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Romero. As a bishop in El Salvador, he regularly denounced the brutal violence and oppression sponsored by the military-led right-wing government during the nation's civil war. Originally Romero made it a point to stay out of politics. However after Jesuit priest and friend Rutilio Grande was killed for calling for land reform on behalf of peasant farmers, Romero was motivated to take action. He was the only one to speak out and demand an investigation of Grande's death. The government predictably did nothing, but Romero continued to be vocal in his defense of the poor, speaking out against poverty, violence, terror tactics and overall injustices that were routinely being committed by the state. He gained international fame, which he used to argue that supporting the Salvadoran government was to support violence.

On March 24, Romero proclaimed in his last homily, "One must not love oneself so much, as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and those that fend off danger will lose their lives." Moments later, he was gunned down by a death squad. Citizens and civil organizations have commemorated Romero's death over the years, but this year is the first time in history that the Salvadoran government has recognized the tragedy. In fact on March 4 the Salvadoran National Assembly declared March 24 to be Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo Romero Day. President Mauricio Funes issued a public apology on behalf of the Salvadoran state for the assassination of Romero. Ironically President Funes is the nation's first leftist president and sided with Romero during the war. There is a strong campaign for Romero to be canonized and he is often referred to as San Romero. He has not become a saint yet, but the late Pope John Paul II did bestow upon him the title of Servant of God. Regardless, his legacy lives on for the people of El Salvador and for the marginalized and voiceless who struggle for justice.

Days before his murder Archbishop Romero told a reporter, "You can tell the people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish."
"The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being . . . a defender of the rights of the poor . . . a humanizer of every legitimate struggle to achieve a more just society . . . that prepares the way for the true reign of God in history."

'While it is clear that our Church has been the victim of persecution during the last three years, it is even more important to observe the reason for the persecution. ...The persecution comes about because of the Church's defense of the poor, for assuming the destiny of the poor."
From a letter to President Carter: "You say that you are Christian. If you are really Christian, please stop sending military aid to the military here, because they use it only to kill my people."

"A church that suffers no persecution but enjoys the privileges and support of the things of the earth - beware! - is not the true church of Jesus Christ. A preaching that does not point out sin is not the preaching of the gospel. A preaching that makes sinners feel good, so that they are secured in their sinful state, betrays the gospel's call."

"When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises."

March 26th, 1980 The Washington Post
From News Services Wednesday, March 26, 1980 ; Page A26
The United States yesterday accused Cuba of directly contributing to violence in El Salvador by sending weapons and leftist insurgents into the country to try to topple the civilian-military junta backed by the United States.
The charge was made by Carter administration officials who sought congressional approval to supply military equipment worth $5.7 million to El Salvador's ruling junta.
The accusation of direct Cuban involvement came one day after the assassination in El Salvador or Archbishop Oscar Romero, a popular figure and nominee for the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. There was no suggestion that Cubans were involved in the killing of the archbishop.
Romero himself had recently written President Carter asking him not to supply more military aid to the ruling junta until it succeeded in stopping the violence that has racked El Salvador for many months.
However, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance said yesterday that the United States still plans to give military and economic aid to El Salvador, noting that the country's rulers recently have taken steps aimed at "healing" the country's wounds and divisions, and that "the junta has been making progress . . . especially in land reform."
Vance condemned the assassination as "appalling, saddening and tragic."
Administration officials testified yesterday that American intelligence believes Cuba is using the territory of Honduras, neighbor of El Salvador, to ship men and arms for use against the Salvadoran junta. The United States also has evidence that Cuba has been training Salvadoran guerrillas for a matter of years, and is sending them back to fight through Honduras, officials said.
"The Hondurans believe, our intelligence agrees, that their territory is being used as a conduit for men and weapons into El Salvador by insurgents with Cuban support," said Franklin Kramer, deputy assistant secretary of defense.
"Cuban influence on El Salvadoran and Honduran leftist organizations is long-standing, and there are clear indications the Cubans are assisting these groups in their attempt to overthrow the current government of El Salyador," Kramer told a House subcommittee.
His charges were echoed by John Bushnell, deputy assistant secretary of state. Both appeared before the House foreign operations subcommitee to request $46 million in military and economic aid for Honduras and El Salvador.
El Salvador's civilian-military junta has enacted a series of sweeping economic and land reforms with U.S. support and about $50 million in American economic aid.
"There is evidence that mountainous and sparsely populated areas of Honduran territory are being used for the illegal smuggling with Cuban support of insurgents and weapons into El Salvador," said Bushnell.
Both officials notes the close ties between Castro and Central American communist leaders, and said Cuba has most to gain from political violence and instability in that region.
Bushnell stressed that, in the wake of Romero's murder, Washington will continue supporting the ruling junta, "which is committed to basic economic and social reforms and to the improvement of human rights."
Bushnell told the subcomittee that the United States will not become military involved in El Salvador. "We will not use military force in situations where only domestic groups are in contention," he said.

Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez (August 15, 1917 – March 24, 1980) was a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church in El Salvador. He became the fourth Archbishop of San Salvador, succeeding Luis Chávez. He was assassinated on March 24, 1980.
As an archbishop who witnessed ongoing violations of human rights, Romero initiated and gave his status to a group which spoke out on behalf of the poor and the victims of the Salvadoran civil war. In many ways Romero was closely associated with Liberation Theology and openly condemned both Marxism and Capitalism.

In 1980, as he finished giving his homily during Mass, Romero was assassinated by a group headed by former major Roberto D'Aubuisson. This provoked an international outcry for reform in El Salvador. After his assassination, Romero was succeeded by Monsignor Arturo Rivera. In 1997, a cause for beatification and canonization into sainthood was opened for Romero, and Pope John Paul II bestowed upon him the title of Servant of God.

The process continues. He is considered by some the unofficial patron saint of the Americas and El Salvador and is often referred to as "San Romero" by Catholics in El Salvador. Outside of Catholicism, Romero is honored by other religious denominations of Christendom, including the Church of England through the Calendar in Common Worship. He is one of the ten 20th century martyrs who are depicted in statues above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey in London. In 2008, he was chosen as one of the 15 Champions of World Democracy by the Europe-based magazine A Different View.

Assassination and funeral

Romero was shot by an M-16 assault rifle on March 24, 1980, while celebrating Mass at a small chapel located in a hospital called "La Divina Providencia", one day after a sermon where he had called on Salvadoran soldiers, as Christians, to obey God's higher order and to stop carrying out the government's repression and violations of basic human rights. According to an audio-recording of the Mass, he was shot while elevating the chalice at the end of the Eucharistic rite. When he was shot, his blood spilled over the altar.

It is believed that the assassins were members of a death squad. This view was supported in 1993 by an official U.N. report, which identified the man who ordered the killing as former Major and School of the Americas graduate Roberto D'Aubuisson.

He had also planned to overthrow the government in a coup. Later he founded the political party Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), and organized death squads that systematically carried out politically-motivated assassinations and other human rights abuses in El Salvador. Álvaro Rafael Saravia, a former captain in the Salvadoran Air Force, was chief of security for Roberto D'Aubuisson and an active member of these death squads.

In 2003, a U.S. human rights organization, the Center for Justice and Accountability, filed a civil action against Saravia. In 2004, he was found liable by a US District Court under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) for aiding, conspiring, and participating in the assassination of Archbishop Romero. Saravia was ordered to pay $10 million dollars for extrajudicial killing and crimes against humanity pursuant to the ATCA.

Romero is buried in the Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador (Catedral Metropolitana de San Salvador).

The funeral mass (rite of visitation and requiem) on March 30, 1980, in San Salvador was attended by more than 250,000 mourners from all over the world. Viewing this attendance as a protest, Jesuit priest John Dear has said, "Romero’s funeral was the largest demonstration in Salvadoran history, some say in the history of Latin America."

During the ceremony, a smoke bomb exploded on the Cathedral square and subsequently there were rifle-fire shots that came from surrounding buildings, including the National Palace. Many people were killed by gunfire and during the following mass panic; official sources talk of 31 overall casualties, journalists indicated between 30 and 50 dead.

Some witnesses claimed it was government security forces that threw bombs into the crowd, and army sharpshooters, dressed as civilians, that fired into the chaos from the balcony or roof of the National Palace. However, there are contradictory accounts as to the course of the events and "probably, one will never know the truth about the interrupted funeral."

This proved to be a turning point in the history of the Salvadoran conflict, a peak in the power of popular organizations aligned with the left, whose popularity declined after this event under the suspicion that they attempted to capitalize on this tragic event for political gain.
Twenty-five years later, the BBC recalled the horror:
"Tens of thousands of mourners who had gathered for Romero's funeral Mass in front of the cathedral in San Salvador were filmed fleeing in terror as army gunners on the rooftops around the square opened fire.... One person who was there told us he remembered the piles of shoes left behind by those who escaped with their lives."
As the gunfire continued, the body was buried in a crypt beneath the sanctuary. Even after the burial, people continued to line up to pay homage to their martyred prelate.

Canonization proposal and Spiritual life:
Romero noted in his diary on February 4, 1943: "In recent days the Lord has inspired in me a great desire for holiness.... I have been thinking of how far a soul can ascend if it lets itself be possessed entirely by God." Commenting on this passage, James R. Brockman, S.J., Romero's biographer and author of Romero: A Life, said that "All the evidence available indicates that he continued on his quest for holiness until the end of his life. But he also matured in that quest."

Martyred Roman Catholic Archbishop of El Salvador (1977-1980); first archbishop killed at the altar since St. Thomas Becket in 1170. Archbishop Romero was assassinated in 1980 by agents of the military dictatorship then in power in El Salvador, after the cleric denounced human rights abuses by the government. For his courageous stances, Romero became an international hero, whose statute now graces the facade of Westminster Abbey. Raul Julia portrayed the archbishop in the 1989 film, ROMERO. Archbishop Romero's life is currently under study at the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints, in the Vatican -- which means that the Catholic Church has begun a process that may lead to Romero being declared an official Saint of Roman Catholicism.

Burial:Divine Savior of the World Cathedral in San Salvador Department, El SalvadorPlot: Cathedral Crypt

Servant of God Archbishop Romero, you were truly a man with words,remembering you 30 years later Archbishop and I hope someday that the Vatican will recoginzed your words and make you the patron saint of El Salvador!

Remembering a great historian after 5 years

Dr. George Frost Kennan, Sir you have a great resume, you were an advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian. You are considered to be the father of "containment" and a key figure in the Cold War, its been a pleasure to read your books, I truly admired them, you are a great mind and thanks for being part in American History, remembering you after 5 years, may you rest in peace!

George Frost Kennan:

(February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American advisor, diplomat, political scientist, and historian, best known as "the father of containment" and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War. He later wrote standard histories of the relations between Russia and the Western powers.

In the late 1940s, his writings inspired the Truman Doctrine and the U.S. foreign policy of "containing" the Soviet Union, thrusting him into a lifelong role as a leading authority on the Cold War. His "Long Telegram" from Moscow in 1946, and the subsequent 1947 article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be "contained" in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States.

These texts quickly emerged as foundational texts of the Cold War, expressing the Truman administration's new anti-Soviet Union policy. Kennan also played a leading role in the development of definitive Cold War programs and institutions, most notably the Marshall Plan.

Shortly after the diploma had been enshrined as official U.S. policy, Kennan began to criticize the policies that he had seemingly helped launch. By mid-1948, he was convinced that the situation in Western Europe had improved to the point where negotiations could be initiated with Moscow. The suggestion did not resonate within the Truman administration, and Kennan's influence was increasingly marginalized—particularly after Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State in 1949.

As U.S. Cold War strategy assumed a more aggressive and militaristic tone, Kennan bemoaned what he called a misinterpretation of his thinking.
In 1950, Kennan left the Department of State, except for two brief ambassadorial stints in Moscow and Yugoslavia, and became a leading realist critic of U.S. foreign policy. He continued to be a leading thinker in international affairs as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1956 until his death at age 101 in March 2005.

Academic career and later life
After the end of his brief ambassadorial post in Yugoslavia in 1963, Kennan spent the rest of his life in academia, becoming a leading realist critic of U.S. foreign policy. Having spent 18 months as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study between 1950 and 1952, Kennan permanently joined the faculty of the Institute's School of Historical Studies in 1956.

During his career there, Kennan wrote seventeen books and scores of articles on international relations. He won the Pulitzer Prize for history, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize for Russia Leaves the War, published in 1956. He again won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1968 for Memoirs, 1925–1950.

A second volume, taking his reminiscences up to 1963, was published in 1972. Among his other works were American Diplomacy 1900–1950, Sketches from a Life, published in 1989, and Around the Cragged Hill in 1993.

His properly historical works amount to a six-volume account of the relations between Russia (whether the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union) and the West from 1875 to his own time; the period from 1894 to 1914 was planned, but never completed.

He was chiefly concerned with: the folly of the First World War as a choice of policy; he argues that the costs of modern war, direct and indirect, predictably exceeded the benefits of removing the Hohenzollerns. The ineffectiveness of summit diplomacy, with the Conference of Versailles as a type-case. National leaders have, and had, too much to do to give any single matter the constant and flexible attention which diplomatic problems require.

The Allied intervention in Russia of 1918–19. He was indignant with Soviet accounts of a vast capitalist conspiracy against the world's first worker's state, some of which do not even mention the World War; he was equally indignant with the decision to intervene, as costly, harmful, and counterproductive. He argues that the interventions may in fact, by arousing Russian nationalism, have ensured the survival of the Bolshevik state.

Kennan's historical writings, and his memoirs, lament in great detail the failings of democratic foreign policymakers and those of the United States in particular. According to Kennan, when American policymakers suddenly confronted the Cold War, they had inherited little more than rationale and rhetoric "utopian in expectations, legalistic in concept, moralistic in [the] demand it seemed to place on others, and self-righteous in the degree of high-mindedness and rectitude... to ourselves".

The source of the problem, according to Kennan, is the force of public opinion, a force that is inevitably unstable, unserious, subjective, emotional, and simplistic. As a result, Kennan has insisted that the U.S. public can only be united behind a foreign policy goal on the "primitive level of slogans and jingoistic ideological inspiration".

Containment, to George Kennan in 1967, when he published the first volume of his memoirs, involved something other than the use of military "counterforce". He was never pleased that the policy he influenced was associated with the arms build-up of the Cold War. In his memoirs, Kennan argued that containment did not demand a militarized U.S. foreign policy. Instead, "counterforce" implied the political and economic defense of Western Europe against the disruptive effect of the war on European society.

Exhausted by war, the Soviet Union posed no serious military threat to the United States or its allies at the beginning of the Cold War, Kennan argued, but rather a strong ideological and political rival. In the 1960s, Kennan criticized U.S. involvement in Indochina, arguing that the United States had little vital interest in the region.

In Kennan's view, the Soviet Union, Britain, Germany, Japan, and North America remained the arenas of vital U.S. interests. In the 1970s and 1980s, he emerged as a leading critic of the renewed arms race as détente was breaking down. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush awarded Kennan the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Yet, he remained a realist critic of recent U.S. presidents, urging, in particular, the U.S. government to "withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights". "This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious and undesirable", he said in an interview with the New York Review of Books in 1999. "I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights. I submit that governments should deal with other governments as such, and should avoid unnecessary involvement, particularly personal involvement, with their leaders."

These ideas were particularly applicable, he said, to U.S. relations with China and Russia. Kennan opposed the Clinton administration's war in Kosovo as well as its expansion of NATO (the establishment of which he had also opposed half a century earlier), expressing largely unrealized fears that both policies would worsen relations with Russia. He described NATO enlargement as a "strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions".

Kennan remained vigorous and alert in the last years of his life, although arthritis had him confined to a wheelchair. In his later years, Kennan concluded that "the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union".

At age 98, he warned of the unforeseen consequences of waging war against Iraq. He warned that launching an attack on Iraq would amount to waging a second war that "bears no relation to the first war against terrorism" and declared efforts by the Bush administration to link al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein "pathetically unsupportive and unreliable". Kennan went on to warn:

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before... In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

In February 2004, scholars, diplomats, and Princeton alumni gathered at the university's campus to celebrate Kennan's 100th birthday. Among those in attendance was then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, international relations theorist John Mearsheimer, journalist Chris Hedges, former ambassador and career Foreign Service Officer Jack F. Matlock, Jr., and Kennan's official biographer, John Lewis Gaddis.

Death and legacy
Kennan died on March 17, 2005 at age 101 at his home in Princeton. He was survived by his wife, Annelise, whom he married in 1931, and his four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

In an obituary in The New York Times, Kennan was described as "the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war," to whom "the White House and the Pentagon turned when they sought to understand the Soviet Union after World War II".

Of Kennan, historian Wilson D. Miscamble remarked that "[o]ne can only hope that present and future makers of foreign policy might share something of his integrity and intelligence".

Foreign Policy described Kennan as "the most influential diplomat of the 20th century". Henry Kissinger said that Kennan "came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history", while Colin Powell called Kennan "our best tutor" in dealing with the foreign policy issues of the 21st century.

During his career, Kennan received a number of awards and honors. As a scholar and writer, Kennan was a two-time recipient of both the Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award, and had also received the Francis Parkman Prize, the Ambassador Book Award and the Bancroft Prize.

Among Kennan's numerous other awards and distinctions were the Testimonial of Loyal and Meritorious Service from the Department of State (1953), Princeton's Woodrow Wilson Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Nation's Service (1976), the Order of the Pour le Mérite (1976), the Albert Einstein Peace Prize (1981), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade(1982), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal (1984), the Franklin D. Roosevelt Foundation Freedom from Fear Medal (1987), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1989), the Distinguished Service Award from the Department of State (1994), and the Library of Congress Living Legend (2000). Kennan had also received 29 honorary degrees and was honored in his name with the George F. Kennan Chair in National Security Strategy at the National War College and the George F. Kennan Professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Historian Wilson D. Miscamble argues that Kennan played a critical role in shaping the foreign policies of the Truman administration. He also states that Kennan did not hold a vision for either global or strongpoint containment; he simply wanted to restore the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Like historian John Lewis Gaddis, Miscamble concedes that although Kennan personally preferred political containment, his recommendations ultimately resulted in a policy directed more towards strongpoint than to global containment