Milestones Apr. 7, 2003

• Share

A quarter-century ago, two young aides to Senator DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN went to collect their boss at the Carlyle, the hotel where the Senator would stay when he was in New York City. As they approached his room, distinctive laughter could be heard: "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah." Peals of laughter, gales of it: "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah." With some trepidation, they knocked on the door. More laughter, and finally Moynihan appeared in robe and underwear--and behind him, Jackie Gleason playing the working-class hero-bozo Ralph Cramden in The Honeymooners on television. "It's an important part of American culture," the somewhat embarrassed Senator insisted. It was also part of his life.

Moynihan, who died last week at 76 of complications after abdominal surgery, was working-class New York's most exquisite son. He was raised by his mother, on and off the dole. He shined shoes after school near the New York Public Library on 42nd Street (in the winter of 1940, he sometimes shared the sidewalk with folk singer Woody Guthrie). He was a New York classic, the book-hungry street genius, his intellect so fresh, so vital--and so much fun--because it had been built from the pavement up.

Moynihan was an inconvenient man. He managed to infuriate everyone sooner or later. He was a Harvard professor who saw himself as the last vestige of Tammany Hall, a machine politician without a machine but with an ancient mandate to care for working stiffs, widows and orphans. He believed ethnicity was a more potent predictor of political behavior than social class. He outraged liberals by insisting that too many black children were being raised without fathers; he outraged conservatives by opposing Clinton's welfare reform because he didn't want to see those children hurt. He was an avid patriot and anticommunist, especially when he served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. He drank like a fish, wrote like a dream and stood in the Senate like Cicero. He is irreplaceable. --By Joe Klein