Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senior U.S. senator from New York, has decided to grab lunch in his office. He orders a tuna fish sandwich on white toast and two small cartons of milk, then pulls up a chair in front of his desk.
He has removed the jacket of his cotton-cord suit, and he`s preparing to tell a political war story about an episode that occurred during the heyday of the civil rights movement.
It`s a tale that illustrates the complexities and emotions that surround race, class and poverty, issues that have engaged Moynihan for more than two decades.
It reminds us of how unwilling we can be to hear what we don`t want to hear and how we tend to reject what is unpleasant or threatening. And it`s a lesson in the consequences of doing so.
”You have to go back to 1964 and 1965,” he begins. ”This was an immensely optimistic time, when things that had taken so long were at last coming through.”
Moynihan was a hot-shot young assistant secretary of labor who had come to Washington with John F. Kennedy in 1961 and had stayed on, after the assassination, in the same job with the Johnson administration.
”If you recall, President Kennedy couldn`t get anything through Congress,” he says. ”He`d proposed the Civil Rights Act and other important legislation, but nothing began moving until after his death.”
Lyndon Johnson, the new president, had seized the moment brilliantly, using the nation`s grief to stir Congress to action. ”The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act the next year,” Moynihan says. ”And remember, this was a Southern White House. These were Texans who were doing what the Kennedys and all the Yankees and Harvard boys couldn`t do. They thought of themselves in the White House as giant killers. Nothing was impossible. And in that process I`d come along with this study. . . .”
It was titled ”The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” and it would prove to be a landmark document, prophetic and controversial.
There may not have been a study at all if the economy hadn`t rebounded from the recession of 1960-61 and Moynihan hadn`t then been forced to search for something else to do. ”When the Kennedy administration came in,” he explains, ”unemployment was perhaps its principal domestic issue, and those of us in the Department of Labor would have the president`s attention in every speech he made.
”But as economic growth picked up, the White House kind of lost interest in unemployment. We found ourselves looking around and saying, `Hey, we weren`t the first paragraph in the State of the Union message this year.`
”So I began looking at things like welfare dependency, male unemployment, broken families with the husband absent, new AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) cases. These were rather new issues; welfare was looked on as something we had during the Depression and hadn`t had since. ”Well, as I pursued this, the day came when something happened that excites people who work with statistics. Two sets of figures suddenly went kablooey, and I made the bet that we had a problem coming that would be very different from civil rights.”
The cause for excitement–and foreboding–was what would later be called the ”Moynihan scissors.”
He had noticed that since the 1930s the new AFDC cases seemed to rise and fall with the unemployment rate, suggesting that unemployment had a significant effect on the break-up of families.
To test the assumption, he and his staff began to compare unemployment with other indicators of family dysfunction, finding an uncommonly strong correlation. ”Plotted on a graph,” he would write, ”the various rates would go up and down as if chained together. . . .”
Until the early 1960s. Then kablooey. ”Without exception, the indicators of social stress–separation, welfare–would now go up while the economic indicator–unemployment–would now go down.” The two crossed, like scissors. Moynihan began to ask some troubling questions: ”What if unemployment had lost its power to determine social arrangements? What if deprivation, discrimination, had gone on too long? What if disorganization now sustained itself?”
The study, which was intended to be read by only a few government officials and policy-makers, was completed in early 1965. Warning about the growth of an urban minority underclass, it began with these words: ”The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations.”
While great progress was being made in overcoming segregation in the largely rural South, it said, there were danger signs in the ghettos of the North. The black family in the inner cities was in serious trouble; a symptom was the dramatic rise in single-parent households on public assistance, practically all of them headed by females.
Unstable families, it said, were contributing to the high rates of crime and illegitimacy, the low I.Q.`s and poor scholastic performance and the sense of despair and defeat that pervaded the poorest communities. The study concluded by calling for a national effort to halt and reverse this trend.
The White House received the report on May 4 with the alacrity of those who believe they can do anything, and soon Moynihan got a phone call from Bill Moyers, Johnson`s press secretary. ”Moyers said the President was going to make a commencement address at Howard University, and they wanted me to write a speech based on the study.
”Dick Goodwin (a Johnson aide) and I would stay up all night writing it because Johnson was to give it the next day. There was very little time for review, which gave it a lucky life as a presidential speech. The President got it around 9:30 in the morning, and he started bellowing and shouting and screaming. He had told everybody that no speech was to be more than 5,000 words in length, and this speech was 5,800 words and he was yelling, `That`s the end of you, Goodwin, if you go over the limit one more time!”`
Eight hundred words were quickly chopped, and that afternoon Johnson delivered what he would later call his greatest civil rights speech. ”White America,” he would declare, ”must accept responsibility” for the
”centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man” and ”the long years of degradation and discrimination” that were undermining the black family.
A White House conference, he said, would be convened to find a strategy for the ”next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.”
”The speech was on June 4,” Moynihan says. ”Two months later, on Aug. 6, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, and five days after that the rioting broke out in Watts.”
The violence that erupted in the Watts section of Los Angeles was the first in the series of black urban riots of the late `60s. A shaken White House, to show it had not been totally taken by surprise, would release Moynihan`s 70-page study to the press, a newspaper columnist would dub it
”The Moynihan Report,” and suddenly, Moynihan was a target.
He makes a wonderfully conspicuous one. He`s 6 feet 4, he has a snooty-sounding sort of Back Bay accent, he`s intelligent and self-assured, he speaks his mind and he often wears bow ties. Comb the clippings of past articles, and you discover that his critics, who tend to insist on anonymity, tend to call him arrogant.
Surprisingly, the attacks came from his own ranks, from black leaders and white liberals, people he had considered allies. He would be denounced, vilified; his figures were wrong, some would say; he was engaging, as another said, in ”a new form of subtle racism.”
It was worse than being a prophet without honor in your own country; it was like being mugged by members of your own family. ”Watts was profoundly upsetting to these people,” he says, ”because the images of blacks setting fires and looting liquor stores had replaced those of nonviolent demonstrators being beaten by police and attacked by dogs.
”This was the first encounter of the civil rights leadership with a very different reality, one they did not know!” Moynihan booms out the last three words. ”The black leaders were Southerners. They were sons of ministers of God. They all had Jr.`s after their names. They were raised in the parsonage of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.”
While it seems that he`s drawing a perfect likeness of Martin Luther King, he says he`s not. ”The better ones never had anything hard to say, and King made a very supportive speech about the report the following February.” But for others, the Moynihan Report and its author became scapegoats; the fear, to use King`s words, was that what were perceived as black weaknesses would be used ”to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.”
Pressure was brought to bear. Johnson`s White House conference, held in 1966, struck the family issue from its agenda, and for years afterward, the uproar discouraged academic inquiry. ”For the two decades about which we would most wish to be enlightened,” Moynihan would write, ”the subject was all but banished from the universities and institutes where such research is done.”
Everything he warned about, of course, has come true; the underclass has increased, for white and black, and the disintegration of the poor black family continues at a cruel, disheartening pace.
Pat Moynihan has gone on to become, at age 59, one of the more remarkable figures in American politics.
As a scholar–he has a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and has taught at Harvard University–he can make sense out of the most obtuse statistical data, as he did with his study of 21 years ago, and he has written or edited 13 books.
Yet he`s sufficiently down-to-earth to distinguish himself in the roiling skirmishes of the political arena; elected to the Senate in 1976 and easily re-elected in `82, he has become one of its most influential members.
He was ranked among the 10 most powerful leaders of the Senate in ”The Ultimate Insiders,” a study published this year by the Brookings Institution, an independent Washington research organization.
The dust jacket of his most recent book describes him as the only person in U.S. history to have served in the cabinet or subcabinet of four successive administrations. What`s most noteworthy is that two of them were Republican;
he was a counselor for urban affairs and ambassador to India under Richard Nixon and ambassador to the United Nations under Gerald Ford.
He has never ceased working to change the welfare system so that it subscribes to what has become the centerpiece of his domestic political philosophy–a coherent government policy ”designed specifically to support the stability and viability of the family.”
On this day, he has just returned from a press conference in a typically ornate room in the Senate wing of the Capitol, the kind that has oil paintings of deceased politicians on the walls and a crystal chandelier hanging from the high ceiling, a grand setting in which to discuss poverty and unemployment.
The purpose was to announce the introduction of a ”welfare reform package” called the Work Opportunities and Retraining Compact or, to use its acronym, WORC.
The legislation is sponsored by several of the Democratic Party`s leading liberals from both houses of Congress. The Senate sponsors are Moynihan, Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Edward Kennedy and John Kerry of Massachusetts.
It has not been the best of times for the Democratic left or welfare programs. The term liberal is something between unfashionable and stigmatic, and there`s a decided lack of enthusiasm for maintaining the nation`s social welfare safety net.
For Moynihan, it`s a difficult phase in a continuing campaign. Ours is one of the few industrial democracies that directs its social policy toward the individual, he has repeatedly said; the unintentional result has been to undermine the interests of the American family.
”Our unemployment statistics count as equally unemployed a father of nine children, a housewife coming back into the labor market in her 40s and a teenager looking for a part-time job after school. The minimum wage required by law to be paid to any of these persons is exactly the same.”
While paying homage to the family, he says, we have taxed between 7 and 8 million families into poverty and ignored remedies that other Western countries routinely provide–family allowances, for example, or special tax considerations. One of our rare family programs–AFDC–amounts to an
”allowance program for broken families.”
The change in the direction of political winds has prompted Moynihan to address the subject once more. His ”Family and Nation” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $12.95), published this year, is a collection of the Godkin Lectures he gave in 1985 at Harvard.
The book is a statement of principle, a review of our social welfare programs and a reply to Charles Murray`s ”Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980,” which was published in 1984, becoming an instant hit in the White House.
Murray contends that federal programs designed to help the poor only make things worse, have actually created poverty instead of reducing it. He recommends junking the whole system and turning over the responsibility for the needy to private groups.
”Losing Ground,” Moynihan says, has been interpreted by the Reagan administration ”as a kind of court order enjoining the pursuit of social policy in the precincts of the U.S. Capitol.”
Moynihan felt especially suited to refute Murray. ”After all,” he says, ”I`m one person who can go back to the beginning, when all those programs were in place.”
His answer is detailed and deft. ”Murray`s work is concerned primarily with the growth of an urban minority underclass,” he writes. ”But that is precisely what I did predict in 1965, using data series that ended in 1964, before any of the events that he asserts have brought about these `turns for the worse.”` (Moynihan`s italics.)
A family policy would focus on the outcomes of other policies. ”We need to monitor the effects on the family of all programs that are assumed to bring about desirable social results,” he says.
The new tax reform bill, for example, by increasing personal exemptions and deductions, takes thousands of poor families off the tax rolls.
There`s cause for hope. ”It`s pretty normal for a generation to pass before certain kinds of social issues find a place on the national agenda. The argument starts up, and it doesn`t get settled until the next generation. That`s what could be happening now.”
The tuna fish sandwiches have arrived. ”Watch out for the toothpicks,”
Moynihan says.
Judging by his past record, it`s probably a good idea to watch out for the toothpicks.
