BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : OCTOBER 16, 2000 ISSUE
BOOKS Idea Guy THE GENTLEMAN FROM NEW YORK Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Biography By Godfrey Hodgson Houghton Mifflin -- 452pp -- $38 Things perk up whenever Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan enters a Capitol Hill hearing room or moves toward the luncheon podium. Always entertaining, Moynihan--the Senate's resident intellectual--can captivate an audience by turning a political speech into a history lesson filled with I-was-there details. Besides, with his foppish bow ties, professorial bearing, expansive gestures, and lanky frame, Moynihan looks the part of the wise lawmaker whose wit can both entertain and inform. He's a relic of the era when oratory, more than campaign cash or polls, influenced debates. Unfortunately, those days are gone, and so soon will be the 73-year-old senior Senator from New York: He's retiring at the end of this term after 24 years. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democrat, and Representative Rick Lazio, a Republican, are competing for his seat. But was Moynihan too much the intellectual? In The Gentleman from New York, biographer Godfrey Hodgson, a former Moynihan staffer, suggests that he may have been too cerebral for the Senate. No major legislation bears Moynihan's name, after all. The detail work of fighting for federal dollars for New York State wasn't Moynihan's strong suit, either. But the ex-Harvard University professor's intellectual pursuits--his ideas on race and ethnicity, urban planning, poverty, foreign affairs, and labor rights--are what make Moynihan's life and times, and this book, so intriguing. Democrat Moynihan's focus on ideas rather than partisan politics led him to cross party lines and serve as a domestic policy aide in the Nixon White House and as U.N. Ambassador in the Ford Administration. It also got him into trouble with his natural allies. After Moynihan wrote a fateful 1965 essay, while working in the Johnson Administration, on the breakdown of black family structure because of illegitimacy, he was ostracized by liberals and bitterly attacked by civil-rights leaders. Later, he got into more hot water with his observation that race relations could benefit from a period of ''benign neglect,'' by which he really meant lowered voices. (Only lately have Moynihan's warnings about the importance of family stability and the need for affirmative action gained currency.) A World War II Navy veteran, Moynihan nevertheless strongly opposed the Vietnam War, but his work for Nixon won him the enmity of antiwar students at Harvard, who threatened to destroy his on-campus house. A restless mind led Moynihan to adopt other causes long before they became popular. He championed auto safety alongside Ralph Nader and advocated welfare reform in the 1960s. He was among the first to recognize Social Security's financial problems. He spent two decades helping to get Pennsylvania Avenue, from the Capitol to the White House, cleaned up and reconstructed. Appropriately, Hodgson describes his biography as ''a history of ideas.'' And that's why the volume works so well. Whenever it threatens to bog down in the kind of minutiae that ruin most biographies, Moynihan is shown seizing on some new idea, dissecting and then reconstructing it with his unique gift of expression. The U.S. Senate will be a diminished place without him. By PAUL MAGNUSSON _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS Idea Guy PHOTO: Cover, ``The Gentleman from New York'' INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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