He
was a New Deal Democrat, but he was also one of the Ford Administration’s best appointees,
from a conservative perspective. As America’s UN Ambassador, Daniel Patrick
Moynihan’s plain-spoken defense of the American democracy and our shared values
rattled Turtle Bay, especially his withering rebuke of the notorious resolution
equating Zionism with racism. The political career and scholarship of the “neoliberal”
Nixon advisor and longtime New York senator are chronicled in Joseph Dorman
& Toby Perl Freilich’s Moynihan (trailer here), which opens this
Wednesday at Film Forum.
We
can’t have politicians like Moynihan anymore, because he was smart, flamboyant,
and capable of working with the other party. His first major government stint
came under Johnson, helping shape the initial conception of the “War on
Poverty.” Much to people’s surprise, especially his wife’s, Moynihan also served
as Nixon’s domestic policy advisor (and later ambassador to India).
Dornan
& Freilich’s many interview subjects make it pretty clear the
administrations changed, but Moynihan and his commitment to fight poverty never
wavered. However, his passionate term at the UN made Moynihan a folk hero at
the time, even earning praise from then Governor Ronald Reagan.
It
is rather refreshing to watch Moynihan at
a time of such partisan polarization, because a healthy percentage the talking
heads are politicians and commentators associated with the conservative
movement (or at least they were in the pre-Trump era), including Norman
Podhoretz, George Will, Michael Barone, Trent Lott, and Suzanne Garment. It is
fitting, because much of Moynihan’s work, particularly his influential and
maligned “Moynihan Report” on persistent unemployment in the African American
community, often cut both ways.
Moynihan the documentary
also reminds us of a time when the less extreme candidate could still win a
party primary, although in the case of Moynihan’s “whopping one-percent”
victory over New Left firebrand Bella Abzug, it certainly was close. Yet, New York
and the nation were incalculably better off with his representation.
Of
course, the filmmakers and their interview subjects spend a good deal of time
on Moynihan’s dry wit and his way with words. That also includes “benign
neglect,” a turn of phrase that rather got away from him. That from-the-hip outspokenness
could lead to misunderstanding, but it certainly made Moynihan an interesting
figure on the national political stage. It is hard to find any politician on
the scene today who us remotely unfiltered, except, rather awkwardly, Trump
himself.
