https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-senator-who-will-be-sorely-missed-at-trumps-impeachment-trial



By Jeffrey Toobin December 22, 2019

As the nation contemplates the first impeachment trial of a President in a generation, my own thoughts turn to covering the last one, in 1999, and to someone whom I trailed during those tumultuous days: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York. Under the peculiar rules that govern such trials, the senators are required to sit silently at their desks during the daily sessions. This is a kind of torture for the members, whose presence on the Senate floor generally consists of schmoozing and talking. No one hated the process more than Moynihan. The senator was, above all, a public-policy intellectual, someone who had devoted his life to the study and implementation of government action to improve the life of its citizens. The tawdry evidence at the trial—about President Clinton’s liaisons with Monica Lewinsky and his subsequent lies about it—interested Moynihan not at all.

So it was a relief for the senator to retreat to his Capitol hideaway office after each day’s session, and I was often fortunate enough to join him there. Seated beneath a portrait of one of his heroes—Lorenzo Da Ponte, who wrote librettos for Mozart’s operas and then moved to, of all places, New York City—Moynihan would ritually inquire whether I thought it was an appropriate time for sherry. I would dutifully agree that it was, and he would break the seal on a fresh bottle of Tio Pepe. As its contents dwindled, he talked about his astonishingly wide interests. Government secrecy. The fate of teaching hospitals. Urban planning, especially rail travel and his dream of converting the magnificent General Post Office on Thirty-third Street into a new Pennsylvania Station. (Moynihan Train Hall, as it is to be called, seems finally to be happening.)

Moynihan led an epic twentieth-century life. Raised in poverty in East Harlem after his father abandoned the family. Second World War Navy vet. Tufts Ph.D. L.B.J. adviser who wrote a controversial report about African-American families. Nixon adviser and voice of progressive change within that Administration. Gerald Ford’s Ambassador to the United Nations, where he famously defended Israel against charges of racism. Elected to the Senate, following a fierce battle with Representative Bella Abzug in the Democratic primary, in 1976. In his early days in public life, especially in the Senate, Moynihan was regarded as a neoconservative, but he evolved into a more conventional liberal in later years. In reviewing a book of Moynihan’s letters, Hendrik Hertzberg untangled the competing strands of his ideology.

In our days together, Moynihan, who was then completing his fourth and final term, said that he had never much cared for Clinton. He told me that George H. W. Bush was his favorite of the Presidents whose tenure coincided with his own. Still, by that point, Moynihan’s voting record was pretty much that of a progressive Democrat, and he did vote to acquit Clinton of the charges against him. But, in the current polarized moment, Moynihan’s curious political trajectory looks even more anomalous than it did then. A full exploration of Moynihan’s mind and record awaits the full biography he deserves, but what occurs to me now is how his addiction to complexity seems so out of place, and sorely missed, in the politics of today.

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