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Hall & Oates song for the day:
"Rich Girl"
play it from You Tube! ♫ ♪
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---------------- [excerpt from Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary. Introduction by Steven R. Weisman]
Daniel Patrick Moynihan led a singularly American life, but it was a life unlike any other in modern America.
As a youth in New York, Pat Moynihan struggled with poverty in a family devastated by the disappearance of his father at the height of the Great Depression. Young Pat shined shoes, tended bar, worked the piers as a longshoreman, and stole rides by clinging spread-eagled to the back of the crosstown bus to get to high school in Harlem.
He briefly attended City College of New York before joining the Navy as a teenager during World War II. He served as a gunnery officer, traveled the world, returned to complete an undergraduate degree from Tufts, and studied in London....
Moynihan was a pathfinder in John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, a commander in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and Great Society, and an enabler in many greater and lesser moments of Richard Nixon. He was a renowned professor at Harvard well before becoming a successful politician.
...Determined that a nation's public spaces should reflect the legacy of its ideals, he was instrumental in the effort to revive some of America's greatest urban environments, from the Custom House in Lower Manhattan to Union Station and Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation's capital.
The span of his history was such that upon Moynihan's retirement in 2000, President Clinton bestowed on him the Presidential Medal of Freedom--the very honor that Moynihan had himself recommended be established under President Kennedy.
Above all, Moynihan, who died in 2003, was the originator of powerful ideas that were also powerfully argued--ideas that actually helped transform how Americans think about their country, its internal fissures and its place in the world.
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