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.
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 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."
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.
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.''
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.''
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.''
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