Sen. Moynihan, Wet and Dry.

• Author: Pitney, John J., Jr.
• Position: Review

The Gentleman From New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, by Godfrey Hodgson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 480 pages, $35

I once poured for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And poured. And poured. The year was 1984, and I was a low-level aide for another lawmaker. Moynihan and my boss were on a charter flight to Albany to attend a conference on acid rain. My job was to sit in the jump seat behind Moynihan and keep his glass full of champagne. Moynihan kept me busy. When the flight landed, the senator darted toward a nest of reporters waiting in the terminal. "This will be a lively press conference," I thought.

It was, though not for the reason I thought. Moynihan's answers were as florid as his face, but they were utterly lucid and knowledgeable. This brief encounter left me with the suspicion that, like Winston Churchill and Frank Sinatra, Moynihan actually works better with some adult beverages in his bloodstream.

That's smart-alecky speculation, of course, but it may just solve a mystery. In his new biography of Moynihan, British journalist Godfrey Hodgson aspires to describe "the interplay between ideas and action" throughout Moynihan's life. In the light of the senator's much-vaunted public record, however, a careful analysis of the book reveals that the story is not about "interplay" at all. Moynihan's words have often diverged from his deeds. In fact, there are really two Moynihans: one with great insight into the limits of government and the booby traps of social policy, the other with an unstinting devotion to federal power and a lockstep liberal voting record.

Apropos of nothing in particular, I will call them Moynihan Wet and Moynihan Dry.

Hodgson prefers narrative to intellectual history and thus provides little insight into the dual nature of Moynihan's intellectual character. After a placid early childhood, Hodgson tells us, Moynihan went through a painful period when his father abandoned his family to troubled circumstances in New York City. Moynihan Dry has often cited this experience in explaining his support for social programs.

Hodgson's narrative suggests that Moynihan Wet may have sprouted in the unlikely soil of the London School of Economics. In spite of its reputation as a nursery for Third World socialism, he says, the LSE actually employed some free market thinkers when Moynihan did graduate work there in the early 1950s. The account of the LSE influence is sketchy, however. Hodgson even quotes Moynihan as saying, "Nothing and no one at LSE ever disposed me to be anything but a New York...