Hendrik Hertzberg: The Prose and Politics of Daniel Patrick Moynihan
[Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker, where he frequently writes the Comment, in The Talk of the Town.]
This week, after years of false starts and bureaucratic tangles, a modest groundbreaking ceremony will be held for a project that will go some distance to righting this great wrong. The reincarnation of Penn Station will occupy and transform the body of the monumental Farley Post Office, across Eighth Avenue from the original station and, like the original, a creation of McKim, Mead & White, the heroic architectural firm of a century ago. When the place opens for business, it will carry the name of a writer—the writer quoted above. It will be called Moynihan Station.
To be sure, this honor is not being bestowed upon the shade of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) because he was a writer. It is bestowed because he was a politician—in this instance, a highly effective, bring-home-the-bacon, jobs-for-the-boys politician. He originated the project and, as a senator from New York, used the powers of his office to push for it relentlessly, year after year. True, he might never have had the idea were it not for his contemplative, professorial side—he was, after all, a former director of the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies. But his success in bringing it off was due rather more to his professional kinship with Big Tom Foley. Or with James A. Farley, F.D.R.’s patronage chief, whose name will be displaced by his own on the repurposed building’s façade....
Nevertheless, Pat Moynihan was, first, last, and always, a writer. “When I was five years old, I asked my mother, what does Dad do?” his daughter, Maura, recalls in a charming afterword to a splendid new book. “She replied, he’s a writer. And he was: he wrote every day—even at Christmas—articles, books, speeches, and, in great abundance, letters.” You might say he wrote his way to power. Without the writing, no foot-in-the-door job in John F. Kennedy’s Labor Department (and no influence once he was there), no high domestic-policy post in Richard Nixon’s White House, no ambassadorships to India and the United Nations, no twenty-four years in the Senate—and no Moynihan Station....
“Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary” (PublicAffairs; $35) will probably be read more widely and for longer, and certainly with greater pleasure, than any of the others on the Moynihan shelf. Besides the letters (to a range of correspondents stretching from John Lennon and John Updike to Rajiv Gandhi and the socks department at Brooks Brothers), there are memorandums (many to the four Presidents he served, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford being the others), notes to himself summarizing conversations he considered important, and entries from his private journal, which include some delightful travel writing.
Apart from the periodic “Dear New Yorker” letters he franked to a mailing list of constituents, none of this material was written explicitly for publication. But nearly all of it suggests an awareness, sometimes a hope, that it might sooner or later find readers beyond those to whom it was addressed—a category that may or may not include a 1989 “MOST CONFIDENTIAL” letter to the admissions committee of his beloved Century Club. In a bid to blackball Pamela Harriman, the socially active widow of an early political patron of his, Averell Harriman, Moynihan wrote, “It is depressing to say this, but I would find it difficult to enter the Century were there any prospect of this person being there.” The person got in anyway; the Senator remained a club fixture. Not for the first time, Moynihan’s advice was rejected; not for the last, he carried on regardless....
Read entire article at The New Yorker
This week, after years of false starts and bureaucratic tangles, a modest groundbreaking ceremony will be held for a project that will go some distance to righting this great wrong. The reincarnation of Penn Station will occupy and transform the body of the monumental Farley Post Office, across Eighth Avenue from the original station and, like the original, a creation of McKim, Mead & White, the heroic architectural firm of a century ago. When the place opens for business, it will carry the name of a writer—the writer quoted above. It will be called Moynihan Station.
To be sure, this honor is not being bestowed upon the shade of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) because he was a writer. It is bestowed because he was a politician—in this instance, a highly effective, bring-home-the-bacon, jobs-for-the-boys politician. He originated the project and, as a senator from New York, used the powers of his office to push for it relentlessly, year after year. True, he might never have had the idea were it not for his contemplative, professorial side—he was, after all, a former director of the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies. But his success in bringing it off was due rather more to his professional kinship with Big Tom Foley. Or with James A. Farley, F.D.R.’s patronage chief, whose name will be displaced by his own on the repurposed building’s façade....
Nevertheless, Pat Moynihan was, first, last, and always, a writer. “When I was five years old, I asked my mother, what does Dad do?” his daughter, Maura, recalls in a charming afterword to a splendid new book. “She replied, he’s a writer. And he was: he wrote every day—even at Christmas—articles, books, speeches, and, in great abundance, letters.” You might say he wrote his way to power. Without the writing, no foot-in-the-door job in John F. Kennedy’s Labor Department (and no influence once he was there), no high domestic-policy post in Richard Nixon’s White House, no ambassadorships to India and the United Nations, no twenty-four years in the Senate—and no Moynihan Station....
“Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary” (PublicAffairs; $35) will probably be read more widely and for longer, and certainly with greater pleasure, than any of the others on the Moynihan shelf. Besides the letters (to a range of correspondents stretching from John Lennon and John Updike to Rajiv Gandhi and the socks department at Brooks Brothers), there are memorandums (many to the four Presidents he served, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford being the others), notes to himself summarizing conversations he considered important, and entries from his private journal, which include some delightful travel writing.
Apart from the periodic “Dear New Yorker” letters he franked to a mailing list of constituents, none of this material was written explicitly for publication. But nearly all of it suggests an awareness, sometimes a hope, that it might sooner or later find readers beyond those to whom it was addressed—a category that may or may not include a 1989 “MOST CONFIDENTIAL” letter to the admissions committee of his beloved Century Club. In a bid to blackball Pamela Harriman, the socially active widow of an early political patron of his, Averell Harriman, Moynihan wrote, “It is depressing to say this, but I would find it difficult to enter the Century were there any prospect of this person being there.” The person got in anyway; the Senator remained a club fixture. Not for the first time, Moynihan’s advice was rejected; not for the last, he carried on regardless....