# Posted 7:15 PM by Patrick Belton  

A MAN OF IDEAS AND OF ACTION: Senator Moynihan deserves more expansive commemorating. For now, simply several greatest hits:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan reaffirmed our ideas of the worth of a life in politics and the academy, and showed it was possible not to fall prey to the short-sightedness endemic in either. Instead - scholarly, gutsy, opinionated, eloquent, and an idealist - he bettered everything he touched, and in all his numerous incarnations - and here one can't help thinking of Vishnu and the other country he so loved - he touched pretty much everything. Whether the subject was international affairs, urban development, public architecture, or civil rights, he brought to it trademark intellectual creativity, a determined and stubborn willingness to follow his own best lights, and a sense of national loyalty surpassing the narrow dictates of the logic of party or ideology. I heard him speak several times on the floor of the Senate. I remember thinking that, as a politician, he showed us the Senate could be a place for dignified, erudite debate worthy of the parliamentary tradition of Tulius Cicero, Burke, and his own chamber's Daniel Webster - a place where equally public-spirited men and women could argue different sides of issues, without impugning their interlocutors' virtue or motives, with eloquent speeches and searching intellects, and with loyalty to a Republic rather than to a faction. Personally, I also thought then that as a coethnic, he gave a dignified public face to an ethnicity too often associated on these shores with the philistinisms of green beer and mediocre midwestern colleges' football teams. When Moynihan spoke, though, it was Parnell and O'Connell who came to mind, and sometimes even Joyce and Muldoon.

He used the eloquence of the Senate well: every day of Terry Anderson's captivity at the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon, he went to the Senate floor to remind his fellow senators, in a quiet sentence, just how many days it had been. He was a patriot: explaining to his aghast friends and wife why he, a Democrat, had accepted a position in the Nixon administration as assistant to the president for urban affairs, he explained when the president of the United States asks, a good citizen agrees to help. Yet he had no truck with the culture of government secrecy, which he saw as antithetical to a vibrant democracy. When he saw, at the close of his life, barriers and metal detectors proliferating around what for him had to be an open city, he dedicated his last op-ed for the Post to decrying it.

Particularly comforting, for those of us writing theses, is the anecdote the NYT lifted from a 1979 biography, where two college friends caught a dissertation-writing Pat in his room in 1952: "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." It was indeed often over a lifted glass that the prolific author Moynihan poured out his best stories. His eloquence, though, could also be spontaneous and respond perfectly to the needs of a moment. The NYT caught a quote by Moynihan from the television coverage of President Kennedy's assassination: "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."

The Washington Post's editorial page calls Daniel Patrick Moynihan "a man of large ideas in a city of tacticians." In a time in which they are in alarmingly short supply in both politics and the academy, this decent, good man brooks no hesitation in standing up for us as that rare quantity, a role model. Godspeed ye, Senator.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion