Daniel Moynihan
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (March 16, 1927 - March 26, 2003) was a four-term U.S. Senator, ambassador, administration official, and academic. He was first elected to the United States Senate in 1976 by the citizens of New York as the nominee of the Democratic Party and re-elected three times, in 1982, 1988, and 1994. He declined to run for re-election in 2000 and was succeeded by another Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
Prior to his years in the Senate, Moynihan was a member of four successive presidential administrations, beginning with the administration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and continuing through the administrations of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Milhous Nixon, and Gerald Rudolph Ford, serving in various cabinet and sub-cabinet-level posts, as the United States Ambassador to India from 1973 to 1975, and as the United States Representative to the United Nations from 1975 to 1976; in February 1976, Moynihan served as President of the United Nations Security Council.
In addition to his distinguished career as a politician and diplomat, Moynihan was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Wesleyan University, and Syracuse University. After completing a tour of duty in the United States Navy in 1947 which he began in 1944 during World War II when he was 17 years old, Moynihan used his GI Bill benefits to attend Tufts University. He then received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the London School of Economics. He authored some 19 books, including Beyond the Melting Pot, an influential study of American ethnicity which he co-authored with Nathan Glazer in 1963, Family and Nation (1986), Came the Revolution (1988), On the Law of Nations (1990), and Secrecy (1998).
Moynihan died at the age of 76 after complications suffered from an emergency appendectomy about a month earlier. He is survived by his wife of 39 years, Elizabeth Brennan Moynihan, three grown children, Timothy Patrick Moynihan, Maura Russell Moynihan, and John McCloskey Moynihan, and two grandchildren, Michael Patrick and Zora Olea.
Quotes
- "From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos." (1965)
- "The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook [with regard to East Timor]. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with not inconsiderable success." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan, American Ambassor to the UN 1975 -76
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