I am a biographer of Pat’s, but first and foremost I think of myself as a friend. Over the years we talked a great deal, and drank quite a deal too: often in the bar of the Hay Adams hotel, and latterly in the hideaway office he had as a senior senator in the dome of the Capitol building. Mrs. Moynihan, Liz, had persuaded Pat not to drink whisky and he moved onto sherry, a brand called Tio Pepe. So when he was closeted with me or any other friend in the hideaway, he asked his staff to tell callers that he was “with the Mexican ambassador!”

Pennsylvania Avenue, the great boulevard that symbolizes the divided American government, with the White House at one end and the Capitol at the other, played a great part in Pat’s life. He lived there for the last decade and more of his life. But when he was a young official in the Labor Department, he was asked to write a short paper about office space. He turned it into a sonorous essay called “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture.” Pennsylvania Avenue, he suggested, should be a pleasant place to walk: he mentioned “benches, arcades, sculpture, planting and fountains.” But above all, he wrote, it should “reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American national government.”

That was one element in Pat’s emotional chemistry: a simple, non-pompous but passionate American patriotism. Unlike later generations, he saw government, not as an impediment, but proudly, as the essential precondition of a good society. The Moynihans’ last apartment, on Pennsylvania Avenue, looked down onto the naval war memorial. In the evenings, the Navy band sometimes played there, and when the sounds of patriotic brass playing Anchors Aweigh floated up to his windows, Pat used to go out onto a little balcony, come to attention and salute.

There is not space enough in this essay to do full justice to all the facets of this remarkable man. He was big and strong, so his appearance could belie the fact that he was very clever, sometimes in a fine, Florentine way. He was verbally funny, and spectacularly knowledgeable, about surprising things, including British politics and world architecture. He was, he said, “christened a Catholic and born a Democrat.” Both party and Christian faith were important to him, and are important to understanding him.

He was also Irish. One of his proudest possessions was a painting by Jack Yeats of a boy—such a boy as his grandfather Cornelius would have been when he left for America, as Pat said, “to dig his way from New York to Indiana”—in a red coat in a poor Irish town. Pat told me that he could actually remember being inducted into the Irish Republican Army one hot day at Far Rockaway when he was ten years old. At the same time, he loved Britain. As a student, he was supposed go to the LSE for a year. He stayed for three years. There is an old joke about the Moynihans in India when he was ambassador there: Liz fell in love with Muslim India—she wrote a biography of Babur and articles about Muslim gardening; their daughter Maura fell in love with Hindu India and with Tibet; Pat fell in love with British India. He played a quiet but important role in the work that led to the Anglo-Irish agreement. He was very brave, in many ways: when he was granted an audience by the Pope, long before he was a famous senator, he piped up and asked, “What about the Jews?”

There is only space here to focus on three matters of some substance: Pat’s own youth and early experience; his report on The Negro Family and its impact on his life; and the nature of his attitude to political liberalism.

Pat, like many of us, created a myth about his early life. Not lies, a myth: a story of his life that was not untrue, but which gave many a misleading impression. Many a profile has recited how he had grown up in dire poverty in Hell’s Kitchen, that he shone shoes for a living, that he worked as a bartender. None of these things are untrue, but be careful. For example, yes, his father was a drinker and a gambler, and did leave his mother, but the father was not a tragic derelict: he ended up as the editor of the Sunday edition of a major paper, the San Jose Mercury, and as a Catholic in good standing. Yes, Pat’s mother was indeed seriously poor for a time, but not forever; she later married a man who was comfortably off. Pat did shine shoes, but for pocket money, not out of hard necessity. He did work as a bartender in Hell’s Kitchen. But it was as a naval officer on leave, and his mother owned the joint. What is true, and I think it enriched his political imagination, is that he had known poverty and the fear and shame of poverty. He was also, always, deeply concerned, as a human being and as a politician, with children: he did not want them, as he once famously said, “sleeping on grates.”

Pat wrote his famous report on The Negro Family when he was a middle-level official in the Labor Department. He set out to look at the relationship between African Americans and unemployment. The crucial insight was not that black family life had been damaged by slavery and Jim Crow: that was already widely acknowledged. It was not that there was a correlation between employment and family breakdown: that, too was obvious. Pat observed that the number of mothers on welfare went up even after unemployment had stopped rising. That was the point: a new culture of dependency, a hereditary under-class, was coming into existence. And the report was the case, as indeed it was sub-titled, not for “benign neglect,” but for national action.

Pat wrote the report in the summer of 1965: I was one of the people to whom he gave copies when it was printed. The furore exploded, months later, after the Watts riot had alerted the entire nation to the head of steam that was building up in the black ghettos. A column in the Wall Street Journal by Bob Novak interpreted the report as predicting racial conflict.

The Moynihan Report was very much part of the political logic behind Lyndon Johnson’s greatest speech, at Howard University on June 4, 1965. Johnson argued that “We seek not just … equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.” That was the high-water mark of 1960s liberalism. It was drafted by Richard Goodwin. (I have checked with the speaking copy in Austin.) But it was based on the argument of the Moynihan report, and Moynihan, through the influence in the White House of his and my friend Harry McPherson, was very much part of the case for making such a speech.

The way that column was read by others was a political and personal disaster for him. The Report was interpreted as a racist exercise in “blaming the victim.” Pat was emotionally shattered by this response. He blamed “the liberals,” sometimes in private with a qualifying adjective not used in polite society. In my opinion, it was the gross injustice of this response to what he knew was an honest and highly original analysis of what should be done to help poor blacks that was the key to Pat’s political behavior over the next decade. I think it largely explains his decision go to work for Richard Nixon as his domestic counselor in the White House.

I have a personal anecdote that illustrates how deeply he felt the injustice of those who saw him as advocating the exact opposite of what he had meant. He told me that he didn’t begin to recover emotionally until two things happened. He received a wise letter from Reinhold Niebuhr, and he became friends with the Irish writer Sean O’Faoláin. In particular Pat told me that he had been comforted by a short story of O’Faoláin’s. This is what he wrote me:

I naturally tried to track down this story. I asked my research assistant to find it. No luck. I checked with Professor Roy Foster, an authority on twentieth century Irish writing. He’d never heard of such a story by O’Faoláin. I asked the writer’s daughter. She had never heard of it either. I was forced to conclude that Pat invented an imaginary story as a way of telling an old friend that he was not as bad a man as he feared his old friend might think he was.

Christened a Catholic and born a Democrat, Pat did go to work for Richard Nixon in the White House in 1969. His friends, including me, were gob-smacked. There is no doubt in my mind that part of Pat’s motivation was a kind of pique: ‘so my beloved Democratic Party doesn’t want me? Very well, I’ll show you that there are some who do appreciate what I have to offer.’ Another part was honourable ambition: which inhabitant of the Washington political world would turn down an opportunity for high office within the White House? But this was a very subtle man. He hoped to persuade Nixon that, as he put it, Tory men could and should carry out Whig measures. In the end, he did Nixon too much justice.

The middle years are swiftly sketched, though they were not short of incident. In 1973 he went to Delhi as American ambassador. He didn’t like the heat, and he didn’t much like Indira Gandhi. But his historical imagination could not fail to be excited by Indians, their cultures, and their history. And he found a clever way to liberate the Indian government from massive debt to the United States.

In 1973 Henry Kissinger sent him to the United Nations as the American ambassador there. At the time, the Arab nations were trying to recruit—some said bribe—the recently independent African nations to vote for a resolution that stated that Zionism was a form of racism. Pat was viscerally disgusted by that. He was also locked into a strange, reciprocally paranoid tussle with Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, himself a Jew faced daily with an anti-Semitic president, was made nervous by what he saw as Pat’s undiplomatic indignation on behalf of Israel; Pat admired, but never trusted Kissinger.

In the 1970s, Pat was close to the first generation of neo-conservatives: for example, to Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and James Q. Wilson. He was one of the early contributors to, indeed one of editors of their journal, The Public Interest. That brought him close to a group of right-wing Democrats, such as Ben Wattenberg, who were backing Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson of Washington for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. Pat campaigned for Scoop, then, I think, asked himself, ‘Why not campaign for myself?’

His only attempt at running for office, as president of the City Council in New York in 1966, had fizzled out. Rather suddenly, I think, in 1976 it occurred to him that he might run for senator from New York. He did; he beat Bella Abzug, a fierce liberal feminist with a taste for huge hats; and then rather easily defeated James Buckley, brother of the more famous Bill, in the general election.

Pat was elected as a senator from New York four times. In the second of the four elections and again in the third, he was elected by bigger margins than anyone before or since.

Pat was a political man, fascinated since his youth by the raucous history of New York politics. He had an emotional sympathy with the rambunctious side of politics; he even defended Tammany as having helped immigrants. (He once asked me what the leaders of the five boroughs drank to celebrate the merger into New York City in 1898. “Irish whiskey?” I suggested. No, Pat said, they all drank Apollinaris water and other soft drinks. (They were saloon keepers, and knew the advantages of being sober among men who were not.) His own spectacularly successful campaigns were models of simplicity. They were managed by his wife, out of her kitchen. They raised enough money, but only enough: around $3 million in 1976. No expensive advertising campaigns, no lush rented offices on 57^th Street, a staff of just eleven in 1982. Pat once told me that he campaigned essentially on the New York Times op-ed page and the NBC Today Show. That was an exaggeration. But it is true that he was a master, not of “media,” but of journalism. Indeed I have often thought that that was one part of his avocation: temperamentally he was a journalist, intellectually inquisitive and gifted at reporting and analyzing the ideas that govern society.

Once he had got into the Senate, his peace of mind and his self-confidence returned. The simple way of describing his political orientation in the Senate is to say that he became once again an orthodox liberal Democrat, and that is true. But there is a good deal more to say about it than that: the Democrats themselves, after all, were not unchanged. Also, he sometimes found that there were Republicans who would work with him when Democrats wouldn’t. Pat knew that many senators were conventional and some corrupt, but he had a vast respect for the Senate as an institution. He went on two invaluable committees, Finance and Public Works. Pat mocked the Washington obsession with power, which he satirically pronounced “pow-ah,” and preferred influence. But he knew that Finance gave a senator willing to master the details real power over things that mattered and specifically over tax, welfare and public finance, three lifelong concerns.

Public Works, later called Environment and Public Works, had jurisdiction over what Washington politicians call ‘pork’: public appropriations. He was, in fact, more than many nationally prominent senators, concerned with his own state’s economic interests. New York, everyone thought, was rich. But if there was fabulous wealth in Manhattan, New York City was in dire financial trouble. Parts of upstate were in Appalachian rural poverty, others becoming part of the rust belt. Pat showed that, contrary to public repute, New York State was quite poor. He found out that federal accounting recorded New York State as receiving money, such as interest on the federal debt and much foreign aid, simply because it passed through “money center” banks on Wall Street: it paid the Feds $33.7 billion in tax, and got back only $25.7 billion in federal expenditure.

Another such Moynihan operation was the clumsily named Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, known as Iced Tea. This provided for the future of the interstate highway system; but it also, at Pat’s insistence, provided for five high speed rail links in different parts of the country. His intention was strategic. For decades highly populated states like New York, Illinois, and California had been deprived of funds for mass transit and high speed rail while billions went to provide superhighways for states where few people actually lived. Pat said he wanted to “tilt the continent backwards.” He did get the act passed, but high speed rail only began to come along 20 years later.

Another crusade, perhaps conceptually the most original of all, was his concern with secrecy and specifically with reducing the over-classification of information by government. That arose out of a later committee assignment, as a member and in effect acting chairman, because of the laid-back attitude of the nominal chairman, Barry Goldwater, of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That led to one of his best books, On Secrecy. He went back to the classics of social science, to Durkheim and to Max Weber, to argue that secrecy is a form of government regulation: especially in relation to foreign affairs, government controls what the citizen may know. It was also an example of his unwillingness to be intimidated into leaving political hot potatoes alone.

It was a remarkable journey. Politically, there were enduring concerns: with public finance, with welfare, with children, with architecture, and with the “dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability” of the American government. The central one, I believe—and it is a yardstick that allows us to measure how political assumptions have changed over the last two generations—was his faith in democratic government.

It is true that he was skeptical of the efficacy of much that is claimed for government action. He shared the neo-conservative belief that social science should be, not a guide to policy, but a tool for assessing its success or failure. But this was not because of any ideological distaste for government, still less a preference for private or corporate action. His skepticism was part of a pessimism, almost a melancholy, about human affairs, which was I think in part religious in its origins. He will be remembered as a man who, in the face of a generation which thought it had abolished the need for much government, had the courage to restate the faith of the American political creed in the redemptive power of republican government.