Daniel Patrick Moynihan

New York Senator and diplomat

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, politician and diplomat: born Tulsa, Oklahoma 16 March 1927; Assistant Secretary of Labor 1963-65; Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs 1969, Counsellor to the President 1969-73; US Ambassador to India 1973-74; US Ambassador to the UN 1975-76; US Senator for New York 1977-2001; married 1955 Elizabeth Brennan (two sons, one daughter); died Washington DC 26 March 2003.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an American original. He was a philosopher-politician-diplomat who two centuries earlier would not have been out of place among the Founding Fathers. He was a character and he knew it: a tall, stooped figure with a taste in bow ties and an oddly staccato rhetorical style, whose stage effect was heightened by a judiciously timed stammer.

He also liked a drink. A biographer wrote how his Senate staffers would say he was "with the Mexican ambassador" to explain that he was enjoying a glass or two of Tio Pepe, his favourite sherry. Above all however he was a thinker, on the front line of the battle of social ideas as no other American politican of his age. No other has shared Moynihan's distinction of serving in senior positions in the administrations of four different Presidents, two Democrats and two Republicans. Nor in the last 50 years has anyone – politician or academic – enjoyed the distinction of delivering the prestigious commencement address at Harvard on two separate occasions.

By background, this extraordinary figure was a Democrat. Born in Oklahoma, he spent some of his early years in poor neighbourhoods of Manhattan. He was brought up by his mother after his heavy-drinking father abandoned the family when Pat was just 10. He earned money as a shoeshine boy, and then as a bartender at his mother's tavern in Times Square.

But there was no holding back the brilliant student with the omnivorous mind. In 1950 he went to England to spend three years as a Fulbright fellow at the London School of Economics. After a chance encounter on the voyage home with a fellow passenger and Democratic activist, he went to work for the campaign, and later the administration of Governor Averell Harriman. There he met and married another of the governor's aides, Elizabeth Brennan, who would later run three of his four successful Democratic campaigns for the Senate.

But his politics were never easily pigeonholed. Transcending everything was a restless mind, and the ability to spot an emerging issue in advance. Many were the causes Moynihan adopted well before they became popular. He championed safer car design alongside Ralph Nader, and was calling for welfare reform as early as the 1960s.

He was among the first to recognise the looming financial crisis in the US Social Security system. Almost as a sidethought, he spent two decades fighting for the clean-up and reconstruction of Pennsylvania Avenue through the heart of official Washington, from the Capitol to the White House.

Moynihan also foresaw sooner than most the demise of the Soviet Union; as he put it with typical tartness in 1991, "For 25 years the CIA told the President everything there was to know about the Russians except that they were about to collapse." Over the years the CIA had few sterner critics.

In 1963, Moynihan first attracted wide notice when he co-authored with Nathan Glazer Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), a study of American ethnicity, in which he argued that ethnic loyalties and rivalries weighed heavier in politics than economic differences. Under Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson he worked in the Labor Department, where in 1965 he produced The Negro Family: the case for national action, known ever since as "The Moynihan Report".

The book was an early example of Moynihan's iconoclastic thinking, and his absorbing interest in welfare reform, the cause with which he would be most identified throughout his career. At the time, civil-rights activists were outraged at the conclusion that black poverty was due in part to fatherlessness, and the collapse of the black family structure. Later it would become the conventional wisdom, espoused among others by the NAACP and Louis Farrakhan.

In the late 1960s Moynihan was back in academia at Harvard, teaching urban affairs, before returning to government as a special adviser to President Nixon. He later served as ambassador to India from 1973 to 1975 and then for 18 months as the permanent representative to the United Nations, where he is still remembered for his powerful speech against a resolution equating Zionism with racism.

In 1976, Moynihan was first elected from New York to the Senate, an institution he would grace for 24 years. But, though he was a consistent critic of the Reagan and Bush administrations, he was never entirely predictable. Under Bill Clinton he chaired the Senate Finance Committee from 1993 to 1995. The bright young things in the White House thought he would be a curmudgeonly old mule. In fact Moynihan proved surprisingly effective.

Clinton in turn learnt that the senior Senator from New York (who would later be succeeded by Clinton's own wife, Hillary) was never entirely to be counted upon. He was a bitter foe of Clinton's welfare reform: "The premiss of this legislation is that the behaviour of certain adults can be changed by making the lives of their children as wretched as possible," Moynihan declared as he vainly opposed the measure in 1996. Two years later, he was one of the President's fiercest Democratic critics over the Monica Lewinsky affair.

But he was never anything less than stimulating, whether as teacher, boss, or political colleague. As few others in 20th-century American history, he straddled the often mutually exclusive worlds of scholarship, politics and government. Not for him the detached ivory tower world of academia; nor could he ever be a party hack, the Washington equivalent of lobby fodder.

Someone once described Moynihan as "America's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln, and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson". That may be pushing it a trifle. But he personified much that was best about the Senate: a certain cussedness, an ability to think "outside the box" and outside partisan lines. He also had a polymath's mind and an acute sense of history. Unarguably, the place has been much the poorer since he left in 2001.

But Moynihan cannot be compared with Lyndon Johnson and other Senate giants of the century in terms of achievement. For all his length of service, and breadth of knowledge, he left no legislative record. Perhaps it could not be otherwise, given his extravagant political journey, which carried him from liberalism in the 1950s to flirt with neoconservatism in the 1960s and 1970s, back to more familiar Democratic causes in the 1980s and 1990s.

In his 2000 biography of Moynihan, The Gentleman from New York, the British writer Godfrey Hodgson (who knew Moynihan for four decades) said of him, "In contact with both liberalism and conservatism, he belongs to neither. Supported by both, he seems to link them, and to transcend them." Another longstanding friend, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, once described him in similar point. "You will never understand Pat in terms of commitment to Left or Right. He has a mind wholly free of ideological commitments. His long-term commitment is to the cities, to the poor, and especially to poor children."

A prolific writer, Moynihan produced more than a dozen books, including Family and Nation (1986), Came the Revolution (1988), On the Law of Nations (1990), and Miles to Go: a personal history of social policy (1993). After leaving the Senate, he became a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

Rupert Cornwell