Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Daniel Patrick Moynihan (76), the scholar and senator, orator and author, whose intellectual and political leadership did much to shape US national policy on the major issues of his time, died on Wednesday in Washington, where he was recovering from an infection after an emergency appendectomy.
A maverick Democrat, he represented New York in the Senate for four terms, deciding not to seek re-election in 2000. Throughout his 24 years on Capitol Hill, he was one of the most trenchant and memorable voices in the national debates on such issues as national security and social security, as well as on welfare reform and family matters.
Beyond that, he gained honour, recognition - and often ignited controversy - in many roles: Harvard teacher and lecturer, ambassador to India and to the United Nations, adviser to presidents.
Of Irish stock, he was also an important voice on Irish affairs, not least in helping to establish the US reputation of the former SDLP leader, Mr John Hume. He had an abiding distrust of the physical force tradition, referring in private to the IRA as "a bunch of murderous thugs". Early in his Senate career he joined the New York Governor, Hugh Carey, Speaker Tip O'Neill and Senator Edward Kennedy - known as "the Four Horsemen" - in a St Patrick's Day appeal to Irish-Americans to stop sending money to the IRA.
In 1994 he joined Kennedy and others in appealing to Clinton to grant the Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams, a visa to enter the US. A short while later, as Irish-Americans waited in expectation for a ceasefire, the Provisional IRA launched a mortar attack on Heathrow airport. Moynihan wrote angrily to Kennedy asking, "Have we been had?"
He was an advocate of renewing and preserving cities and their downtown buildings, winning renown in Washington as a champion of restoring Pennsylvania Avenue.
His use of the phrase "benign neglect" to characterise an approach to racial policy that he was advocating set off a firestorm that smouldered for years.
A 1965 report to President Johnson created a major policy flap when he warned that the rising rate of out-of-wedlock births threatened the stability of black families.
A blend of the ivory tower and the big-city streets, he combined gifts and qualities that were in many ways unique in American public life: a propensity to lecture fellow senators on sometimes abstruse topics and a proven ability to win the votes of an often fractious and fragmented constituency on election day. He concluded his final senatorial press conference in 2001 famously with the words "on that note, class concluded."
An orator with an easy mastery of statistical fact and telling anecdote, he was a pungent phrasemaker, formidable in debate. In diagnosing the nation's social ills, he warned in an oft-repeated phrase, that America was "defining deviancy down".
During Clinton administration debates over health-care reform, he described a threat to the teaching hospitals as "a sin against the Holy Ghost".
He was a spokesman for the nation's mass transportation systems and for high culture.
In searching for parallels to his career's combination of intellectual virtuosity and political leadership, many cited the names of Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Jefferson. Often seen as a politician ahead of his time, he was a liberal Democrat who was also a dedicated foe of communism, a combination that led commentators to characterise him as one of the first and most prominent of the so-called neo-conservatives.
In 1980 he warned that the "Soviet empire" had begun again to expand its influence into Central America while bolstering its nuclear forces in a way that was "mad and relentless". He was also one of the first to foresee the collapse of the communist system.
Throughout his career he maintained a vigorous interest in protecting the long-term vitality of American society by shoring up social security and reforming welfare.
But he was also notable for his opposition to aspects of the welfare reform measures passed during the Clinton administration.
He expressed the fear that it penalised helpless children, and when it was signed he said: "Shame on the President."
Peering owlishly through horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a bow tie, a lock of hair tumbling across his forehead, he often had a slightly dishevelled look that many considered distinctively professorial.
Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a father who was in journalism and advertising. When he was 10 his father deserted the family and he grew up in Indiana and later New York, where there were years during this childhood when keeping the family afloat was a difficult struggle for his mother.
After New York public and parochial schools, the future senator enrolled at City College of New York in 1943, worked for a time as a docker, and served in the Navy during the second World War.
As part of officer training, the Navy sent him to Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where he received a BA in 1948. He received master's and doctoral degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. He held a Fulbright fellowship at the London School of Economics and in the 1950s became an aide to New York Governor W. Averell Harriman.
From 1959 to 1961 he was the director of Syracuse University's New York State Government Research Project. At one time he ran in the Democratic primary for the post of chairman of the New York City Council.
At the start of the Kennedy Administration in 1961, he joined the Labour Department, rising to assistant secretary for policy planning, serving through the early years of the Johnson administration. Kennedy's assassination prompted him to reflect that "I guess there's no point in being Irish if you don't know that the world will break your heart one day. I guess we thought we had a little more time. So did he."
After a sojourn in the academic world, he returned to Washington as an urban affairs adviser in the Nixon administration, and later served presidents Nixon and Ford as ambassador to India and then the UN, a body he viewed with deep scepticism and where he served through 1976. While there, he denounced Soviet intransigence and expansionism, and challenged Third World policies that he viewed as motivated less by morality than by greed. He brushed aside criticisms of the US, defying listeners to "find its equal".
He also impressed his future New York constituents with his vigorous defence of Israel.
In office from 1976, he staked out the positions that came to be characterised as neo-conservative: hostility to Soviet imperialism, compassion for the American poor. Speaking in August 1980 at the Democratic National Convention that renominated Jimmy Carter, he warned that the "Soviet empire" had begun again to expand.
The next year, the first year of the Reagan administration, he expressed his opposition to cuts passed by the Senate Budget Committee. "We have undone 30 years of social legislation in three days," he complained.
He was author, co-author or contributor to many books, including Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, on which he collaborated with Nathan Glazer. He wrote on international law, on the role of ethnicity in international politics, on secrecy in government.
The Godkin lectures he gave at Harvard University in 1985 were published as Family and a Nation.
A reviewer described it as "a tale of the inability of politicians and social scientists to do something about the continuing destruction of the two-parent family," and the catastrophic consequences for the nation's social fabric. A review of another of his books said that it went far towards showing that "the story of modern American social policy and the story of Daniel Patrick Moynihan are one and the same."
In 2000, President Clinton awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honour. After leaving public office, Moynihan stayed active in politics, from campaigning on behalf of Hillary Rodham Clinton in her successful bid to succeed him in the Senate, to his recent work as co-chairman of President Bush's Social Security commission. He also championed a plan to revitalise Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station.
While living in Washington, he and his wife, Elizabeth Brennan Moynihan, kept an apartment in one of the new buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue, which he found shockingly shabby when he came to the city in the Kennedy days, and which he had a major role in reviving.
They had three grown children, Timothy, Maura and John. They spent summers in an old one-room schoolhouse in the upstate New York hamlet of Pindars Corners, where he liked to write.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: born March 16th, 1927; died March 26th, 2003.