Academic and politician, born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. He studied at the City College of New York and Tufts University, then taught at Syracuse, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served in the administrations of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, acquiring notoriety as the author of The Negro Family: the Case for National Action (1965), which held that many of the educational problems of African Americans could be traced to the instability of black urban families, and urged a programme of reform. He was ambassador to India (19734), and won a seat in the US Senate as a Democrat in 1976. Widely regarded as an important senator and influential policy thinker, he is the only person in American history to have served in four successive administrations. He retired from the Senate in 2001.
| Daniel Patrick Moynihan | |
| U.S. Senator, New York | |
|
Term of office: January, 1977–January, 2001 |
|
| Political party: | Democratic |
|---|---|
| Preceded by: | James L. Buckley |
| Succeeded by: | Hillary Rodham Clinton |
| Born: |
March 16, 1927 Tulsa, Oklahoma |
| Died: |
March 26, 2003 New York City |
| Spouse: | Liza Moynihan |
| Religion: | Roman Catholic |
Daniel Patrick "Pat" Moynihan (March 16, 1927 – March 26, 2003) was a United States Senator, Ambassador, and eminent sociologist. Prior to his years in the Senate, Moynihan was a member of four successive presidential administrations, beginning with the administration of John F. It was often said of the scholarly Moynihan that he had written more books than most of his colleagues had read.
Education
Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and was brought by his family to New York City at the age of six.
Public service
Moynihan was a member of Averell Harriman's New York gubernatorial campaign in 1954 and thereafter served 4 years on the Governor's staff, in positions including acting secretary to the Governor. controversy over the War on Poverty
Moynihan was an Assistant Secretary of Labor for policy in the Kennedy administration and in the early part of the Johnson administration.
They took inspiration from the book Slavery written by Stanley Elkins.
Moynihan found data at the Labor Department that showed that even as fewer people were unemployed, more people were joining the welfare rolls — these recipients were families with children, but only one parent (almost invariably the mother).
Moynihan's report was seen by people on the left as "Blaming the Victim", a slogan coined by William Ryan. Despite Moynihan's warnings, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program had the "Man out of the house rule." Moynihan supported Richard Nixon's idea of a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI).
Local New York City and academic career
By 1964, Moynihan was supporting Robert F.
Nixon Administration
Connecting with President-elect Richard Nixon in 1968, he joined Nixon's White House Staff as an urban affairs advisor.
He once wrote in a memo to President Nixon that "the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect". Ambassador
He later served as the ambassador to India from 1973 to 1975, and as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, serving a rotation as President of the United Nations Security Council in 1976.
Perhaps the most controversial action of Moynihan's career was his response, as ambassador to the UN, to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Moynihan ensured that the UN Security Council took no action against the clearly illegal annexiation of a small country by a larger one, nor at the subsequent massacres that killed over 200,000 Timorese. As he put it in his memoirs:
"The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about.
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 in the Democratic primary, and Conservative Party incumbent James L.
While considered by many to be a liberal, Moynihan did break with the orthodox positions of his party on numerous occasions.
In the mid-1990s, Moynihan was one of the few liberal Democrats to support the controversial ban on partial-birth abortions. 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.
Commission on Government Secrecy
In the post-Cold War era, the 103rd Congress enacted legislation directing an inquiry into the uses of government secrecy.
The Committee's findings and recommendations were presented to the President in 1997. As part of the effort, Moynihan secured release from the Federal Bureau of Investigation of its classified Venona file.
After release of the information, Moynihan authored Secrecy: The American Experience where he discussed the impact government secrecy has had on the domestic politics of America for the past half century, and how myths and suspicion created an unnecessary partisan chasm.
Academe and authorship
In addition to his distinguished career as a politician and diplomat, Moynihan was a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Wesleyan University, and Syracuse University. He authored some 19 books, including Beyond the Melting Pot, an influential study of American ethnicity which he co-authored with Nathan Glazer in 1963, followed by The Negro Family: The Case for National Action otherwise known as the Moynihan Report in 1965, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (1973), Family and Nation (1986), Came the Revolution (1988), On the Law of Nations (1990), and Secrecy (1998). posthumous honors
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.
In 2004, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, announced plans to replace Penn Station as the city's railroad hub.
In 2005, the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs renamed their Global Affairs Institute to the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.
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