Moynihan's Farewell

As he prepared to leave the White House staff for a teaching post at Harvard, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was brooding about the morale and the reputation of the Nixon Administration. Somehow, Moynihan thought, the President and his men were dispirited, and sometimes almost half believed their worst press notices--about lack of accomplishment, a certain institutional Republican grayness. an obtuseness and even a repressive urge.

With the instinct of a buoyant Irish priest, Moynihan decided to part on an inspirational note. He rose in the White House to speak at a year-end meeting of Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officers, and when he had finished some of the assembled Nixon men were wiping away tears as they stood to applaud.

Moynihan began by discussing the problems that the Administration faced as it took office two years ago. He described what had been done--the diminishing war, governmental reform, "racial rhetoric calmed, the great symbol of racial subjugation--the dual school system of the South--quietly and finally dismantled." He worried about the excessive moralism of the nation and the rhetoric of crisis it has developed. "As a result," he said, "we have acquired bad habits of speech and worse patterns of behavior, lurching from crisis to crisis with the attention span of a five-year-old. For all our achievements elsewhere, and for all the durability of the American democracy, we have somehow never learned to be sufficiently thoughtful about the tasks of running a complex society."

Great Simplifiers. Moynihan gave his audience several exhortations and some rather thick flattery: "The first is to be of good cheer and good conscience. Depressing, even frightening things are being said about the Administration. They are not true. This has been a company of honorable and able men, led by a President of singular courage and compassion in the face of a sometimes awful knowledge of the problems and the probabilities that confront him."

The second point was aimed as much at men like Spiro Agnew as at critics from the left: "Resist the temptation to respond in kind to the untruths and the half-truths that begin to fill the air. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt foresaw that ours would be the age of 'the great simplifiers,' and that the essence of tyranny was the denial of complexity. What we need are great complexifiers--men who will not only seek to understand what it is they are about but who will also dare to share that understanding with those for whom they act."

Moynihan concluded: "It is necessary for members of the Administration to be far more attentive to what it is the President has said and proposed. Time and again the President has said things of startling insight, taken positions of great political courage and intellectual daring, only to be greeted with silence or incomprehension even within our own ranks."

The President was obviously delighted and moved as he continued the farewell ceremony, presenting to Moynihan a replica of his Cabinet chair as a souvenir. Nixon reached into his own pocket for the $500 to buy the chair.

Later in the week, as he walked through Lafayette Park with TIME'S Hugh Sidey, Moynihan talked about the Administration mood that in part prompted his warm valedictory: "Look what they have been told: liberals get more women than they do, make more money, are smarter, are better looking. Their art is the best, their books are better. These fellows here are told that constantly, and what's worse, they have begun to believe it."

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