Playboy Interview: Pat Moynihan

A brilliant, retentive intellect, an Irish gift of gab and wit, a 24-carat ego, a quick sense of outrage and a habit of telling the truth don't always lead a person to the U.S. Senate. And the fact is, they didn't lead Daniel Patrick Moynihan there, either--at least not directly. The stops that Moynihan made along the way make him a human touchstone of Government service throughout the Sixties and Seventies: Assistant Secretary of Labor under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, an urban-affairs Cabinet member and Ambassador to India under Richard Nixon, Ambassador to the United Nations under Gerald Ford. As widely resented as he is liked, Moynihan is expected to be no less colorful and outspoken in the Senate seat he won in November than as a valued counselor to four Presidents.

Moynihan was also a professor of government at Harvard University; and while some of his academic colleagues dismissed him as a papier-mâché scholar, some politicians sneered at him as a double-domed intellectual. His liberal positions infuriate the right wing and his conservative ideas incense the left. One liberal critic asked during Moynihan's campaign against incumbent Senator James Buckley, "Why would the voters of New York State want an Irish hawk who apes the manners of the English gentry--when they already have one?" Today, no less than in the past, the press continues to find him an inviting target.

Moynihan, who was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1927, considers himself an activist intellectual who, right or wrong, feels obliged to work for his convictions in the real and dangerous world of Government. Admittedly, Moynihan always advanced under the aegis of admiring and ever more powerful patrons--Averell Harriman, Arthur Goldberg, Jack Kennedy, Richard Nixon. But his "Moynihan Report" written in 1965, raised a national furor. It still inflames black leaders with its thesis that Negro problems are rooted in unstable family life, which he described with such nettling phrases as "tangle of pathology." Nevertheless, he stayed on at Labor to help draft Johnson's antipoverty program, and he was appointed by Nixon to direct the Urban Affairs Council. He achieved Cabinet rank and in 1970 another uproar, when somebody leaked his famous "benign neglect" memo to Nixon on racial tension. But from 1969 to 1970, Moynihan designed and very nearly engineered passage of the Family Assistance Plan, a guaranteed-income program that would have been a first attack on the nation's welfare mess.

After two low-profile years as Ambassador to India, Moynihan exploded into the public consciousness again as a one-man tempest. Appointed Ambassador to the United Nations by Gerald Ford, Moynihan quickly dubbed it the "theater of the absurd" and began following his own dictum--"The U.S. spokesman should be feared for the truths he might tell." With fists pounding and voice angry, he publicly dished up unvarnished truths to Third World nations who denounced America while taking generous U.S. aid. Such unconventionally rip-roaring diplomacy enraged foreign delegates, journalists and the Department of Stale; everybody, that is, except American taxpayers, who thought it was high time somebody told off suppliant nations who acted like enemies. Moynihan became something of a national hero. In the last seven months before he finally quit, irretrievably undermined by Henry Kissinger, Moynihan received 26,000 letters. Only 190 were hostile.

While Moynihan, back at Harvard, was considering whether or not he should give in to pressure to run for the Senate, Playboy asked writer Richard Meryman to explore Ambassador Moynihan's remarkable range of experience. Meryman and Moynihan had known each other well during their Navy and postgraduate years, and they talked with the freedom of two old friends. The opening portions of the interview represent their most recent conversations, which took place after Moynihan's election to the Senate. The rest of the interview was taped at various times and locations throughout 1976. Meryman's report:

"I met Pat Moynihan in 1945 in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps at Tufts College and soon regarded him as one of my best friends. Pat was the ultimate companion, radiating energy and interest and a sense of the ironies of life. There was always a gala air about Pat, as though he were on his way to a circus. I remember a great deal of conversation and laughter at back tables in hazy bars, while Betty Hutton's radio voice screamed, 'Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief,' and we husbanded our beer because nobody had any money.

"Even then, Pat was not one to go quietly when he thought he was being imposed upon. Our group once overflowed onto the summer sidewalk, beer bottles in hand, and a police car stopped. The cops ordered us sailors indoors. Pat asserted his right, to drink anywhere he wanted. The police arrested him, threw him into the back of a paddy wagon and beat him with night sticks all the way to the police station. One of his knees was seriously damaged.

"When we were commissioned--two callow ensigns--Pat and I were assigned to sister repair ships near Norfolk, Virginia. On Pat's ship, the captain was a hated man, who forced the repair crew to build him a sailing dinghy. Just as it was finished--and while the ship was in the Norfolk Naval Shipyard--the captain was transferred. The sailboat was immediately given to Pat to get rid of and he drafted me to sail it miles up the Elizabeth River to a yacht club. Becalmed in one of the Coast's busiest harbors, we rowed upriver in the dark, shoulder to shoulder; the greasy bow waves from passing ships raised and dropped us--two thoughtless, optimistic young guys on an adventure in the night. After the Navy, Pat was back on the Tufts campus in the Fletcher School and I was in graduate school at Harvard. Then, as always before in our friendship, we made trips to New York and stayed with Pat's mother, brother and sister over the saloon they owned. I helped him clean the place, dragging the wooden flooring from behind the bar to hose, it down on the sidewalk in the sun. And in the family, there was the unspoken information that by right of class and culture, they were better than their Hell's Kitchen life.

"Hearing rumors of inflated wages in Alaska, four of us, including Pat, decided to work there in the summer of 1949. With the cheerful insensitivity of youth, we bought for our expedition a 1935 Packard hearse, which we outfitted with a bed where the casket usually rested. It seemed like a good joke. The trip was a succession of mechanical disasters; we ran low on money and detoured to Hungry Horse, Montana, where jobs were reportedly available on the dam then under construction. It took three weeks to get work. Pat was to clear brush in the basin behind the dam. I delivered him by hearse to the logging camp back in the rugged mountain valley--and remember his tall, loose-jointed figure trudging toward a long barracks building. The next day, at the work site, the field boss, smacking a switch against his leg, patrolled the long line of men. He kept them working at a pace that only the Indians and Canadian lumberjacks could endure. Pat lasted one day.

"I myself was fired the same week when I blew a fuse that idled the entire night shift at work building a cement-mixing tower. Pat and I decided to ride the freights back to Chicago. We rattled through dusty towns and caught rides in boxcars filthy with empty coalbags and luxuriated in the air-conditioned comfort of empty refrigerator cars. We half starved. We were kicked off cars by trainmen and chased by yard cops.

"In Chicago, we separated, pretty much for good. Pat went on to higher education and areas of interest we did not share. That year, I went to work as a reporter for Life. The irresponsible part of our youth was finished.

"In 1963, on an impulse, I called Pat at the Labor Department and we had lunch. By accident, I had picked the day he was to be interviewed by the Senate for his confirmation as Assistant Secretary of Labor. And I found that Pat's face was now turned fully to the future. And, the past about which I was so nostalgic had become for him, I guessed, just a long scramble out of Hell's Kitchen. I have always felt that the humiliation of that poverty was deep and definitive. At our lunch, Pat mused that the job at Labor would guarantee him at least a college professorship. 'I'll never have to worry again,' he said, a faraway look in his eyes.

"I accepted the Playboy assignment in part because of the extraordinary, full-circle symmetry. When I arrived at Pat's house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he carried my bag indoors. Our hair was gray. The leanness in our faces was gone. His hearty flow of ironic commentary was still there--but heavier, like our waistlines.

"During our talks, many of them on airplanes as Pat flew to lecture dates, I began to see a special gift, one reason for his value to all those Presidents. He could jab through, bewildering complexities to the core and pull out a single insight, surprising in its simplicity, that illuminated an entire problem.

"But, like all men who reach the top of their profession, Moynihan had the quality of obsession. I admire it and wish I could muster some myself. But there is a loss. Our last trip together, curiously, was to a speaking engagement in Norfolk. That night, after our last interview, we stepped together onto the small balcony outside his hotel room. To our surprise, we were looking toward the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. Below us flowed the Elizabeth River, along which we had so lightheartedly rowed that little sailboat a millennium ago. I felt a little sad at the thought of what age and advancement do to us. But I was also glad that this man, my old friend, was a U.S. Senator. At the very least, I knew he was sure to strike some sparks, by the force of his personality, in an old institution."

[Q] Playboy: Let's start with this burning issue: You are often referred to in the press as flamboyant. Is there any truth to these rumors of flamboyance?

[A] Moynihan: None. Oh, I raised a lot of hell when I was Ambassador to the United Nations, dealing with people I felt were adversaries of ours or enemies of ours. But it depends on what you're doing. As Ambassador to India, I kept a very low profile. And now that I'll be in the Senate, I have to say I don't regard anyone in Washington as an enemy of ours. Them's us. Besides, there's no more certain way of failing in your objectives than to come storming in and announce that anything that happens you're going to take credit for. No need for that. No desire for it.

[Q] Playboy: Still, you've used what people see as a certain flair in your personality to become politically prominent. Couldn't that have an effectiveness for you in the Senate?

[A] Moynihan: Perhaps, if it puts enough people on notice that there really are things we have to do, claims we have to make. As a newspaper editorial put it, New York has some due bills it has to present to Washington. No concern about unpleasantness or controversy will deter me from making those claims. The only thing that could make me controversial--aside from a major foreign-policy issue--would be that there were no other way to get attention to New York's economic needs except by becoming that.

[Q] Playboy: After all your years in Government service, how does it feel to be a freshman Senator, a new boy?

[A] Moynihan: Well, I've begun thinking of myself as a man who has been around a long time, which is new to me. Being a freshman Senator suggests a certain deference to people who have been around longer--but not where the interests of New York State are concerned. There's no one else in the Senate who knows more about them than you and your colleague, so in that sense, there is no deference. When I first went to talk with retiring Majority Leader Mike Mansfield a few days after the election, I was deferential as hell. But as he walked me down the hall to a meeting, he said, "Just remember, Pat, we're all equal here."

[A] And in that sense, I have the same power any other Senator has--a vote. I've talked to Senators in the past and, without exception, they will tell you that what moves the Senate is the genuine judgment of the individual Senators. It's not to say that they're beyond helping one another out or trying to make sense of one another's interests, and so forth, but in the end, the system is just what it was meant to be: In the end, Senators stand up and vote as they think.

[Q] Playboy: You sound almost lyrical about the U.S. Senate. What are your general thoughts about it, as an institution?

[A] Moynihan: The Senate is, has always been, the alternative authority in Government to the Presidency. The House is too large and diffuse. The Senate has always been able to produce persons, symbols of the institution, who can embody a necessary alternative to the authority of the President. That's the constitutional role of the Senate, and it has worked extraordinarily. It has never failed to generate the tension it was intended to.

[Q] Playboy: Tension? What do you mean?

[A] Moynihan: The constitutional idea is that concentration of power is a danger in a society. Therefore, you separate it and build tensions into the different branches. Freedom lives in the interstices of these arrangements. On the other hand, when there is too much conflict in the system, you get the imperial Presidency--which tries to avoid the system altogether. Which is what I think happened in that sequence of Presidents who found the Congress so frustrating they just wished it weren't there. The real art of the Constitution is to use the tensions but make them cooperative enough so that no one branch tries to escape. And the Senate has a special place in this dynamic. It's just--it's the highest honor you can get in this republic other than the Presidency. It has a quality of class of persons about it and it imposes that condition on your behavior. The Presidency is something singular and in no way something people can calculate; nobody can think in terms of what it means to be in that office. But there are 100 Senators, and you can ask and get close to what it means to be a Senator. It means that you must be just absolutely fearless and try to be intelligent. I expect to be a good Senator.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you decide to run for the Senate, especially after vowing when you quit as UN Ambassador not to do so?

[A] Moynihan: I got up one spring morning and they had closed the City University of New York. I was seething. There was always one unique thing about New York: It was the first city to establish a free college for the children of working people. Through ups and downs, for a century and a quarter, the college endured. I went to City College myself. It was opened again, but the closing of it was sacrilegious--it meant symbolically, My God, what have we come to? Have we handled our affairs so badly?

[Q] Playboy: Surely, your reasons were more complicated than that.

[A] Moynihan: Well, yes. I had said I wouldn't run. I knew quite a bit about politics. Politics gets so personal and harsh. It seemed too much to impose on ones family--or on oneself. And I like to teach. Even now, I feel very bad about leaving Harvard. That's a life now that will not be lived, one I really expected to live ... a path not taken ... or a path taken and then abandoned. But, quite simply, I hated to feel, late in life, that I had a chance to be a U.S. Senator and passed it up.

[Q] Playboy: Late in life? You're 49.

[A] Moynihan: Yes, and I suppose, in a way, that's an advantage, a consolation, considering the nature of campaigning. If I had run 15 years ago, it would have been a great shock to the system to find out how much can be alleged about your character. And there's not much I haven't been accused of, either. But what is that line from A. E. Housman--"Mithridates, he died old." You can take poisons in small doses.

[Q] Playboy: First you sounded lyrical; now you're sounding old and cynical.

[A] Moynihan: About the campaign process, not the office. But to the degree that we all go through it, yes. There's a certain insensitivity to untruth that politicians acquire. Even to genuinely villainous distortion. They start saying, "Well, it's part of the game," and it should never be part of the game. You shouldn't become, as some do, amiable about it. It's wrong, because your capacity for indignation atrophies. If you become tolerant of distortion when it is done by other people, you become tolerant about doing it yourself. I really do think that happens.

[Q] Playboy: Were you the object of villainous distortion during your campaign?

[A] Moynihan: Oh, it went on, but I don't want to talk about it. But I can say this: My opponent, Jim Buckley, was personally an altogether decent and genuinely conservative person. But he was talked into making some snarling accusations during the campaign. And if you're going to vote for a person, it's not because he makes snarling accusations. I have a very strong feeling that the public becomes quite punishing to politicians who are vicious in campaigns. They vote against them.

[A] But the press can get to you. For example, Women's Wear Daily reported that I stormed into a meeting with a torn shirt and terrorized secretaries and staff for not catering to my whims--which included, the newspaper reported, bloody marys "early and often." There you are. That's what public life is all about. That particular incident happened while you were interviewing me for Playboy. Would you care to give your version?

[Q] Playboy: Glad to. It was we who ordered the bloody marys; you had a beer. We witnessed no terror tactics. But we do have to point out, in the interest of journalistic accuracy, that you did, indeed, have a hole in your shirt. Now, about your victory over Buckley--how, briefly, do you account for it?

[A] Moynihan: The debates we had opened up quite a gap between our views. I was running, for instance, against a man who had virtually never voted a penny for health, education or welfare. The question was clear: What kind of role did each of us want the national Government to play in the state of New York? His answer was, "As little as possible." Mine was, "As much as we can get that will help."

[Q] Playboy: What about your earlier primary victory over Congresswoman Bella Abzug? Were the differences in ideology as clear? They didn't seem to be to people who followed the race from outside New York.

[A] Moynihan: Of course, we were both liberal Democrats, but there again, on the issues, I was running against someone who had never voted a penny for American defense. She was so secure in her West Side enclave that it never occurred to her it might be an issue. No one had ever faced her with it and I did. I raised the defense issue and, while all four of my primary opponents called for cuts in defense--30 billion dollars was the preferred figure--I said, "What is this all about? I mean, the U.S. Navy costs 28 billion dollars; you can't cut defense like that. The Soviet budget keeps going up, our budget can't continue to plateau or go down." Well, that got through to people.

[A] Actually, when I refused to call for cuts, Mrs. Abzug's people first thought, That's it, we've got him. They assumed it would be a disaster for me in New York. But. as it turned out, perhaps there was something I knew about the stale that they didn't know. I was also able to point out that as far as Mrs. Abzug's support of Israel was concerned, here was this lady who was against the things without which Israel cannot survive.

[Q] Playboy: Aside from the name-calling, was the campaign an unpleasant, exhausting chore?

[A] Moynihan: To the contrary. Campaigning is Antaeuslike. You take strength from the American citizens. They may absolutely intend to vote against you, but they always say, "Good luck," and smile at you. In eight months of campaigning--beginning with my work for Senator Henry Jackson--I don't think I had three unpleasant words. The only bad moment I can remember was talking with a fellow about Northern Ireland. I couldn't satisfy him about my views. And I said, "What is your name, sir?" And he said, "My name is Dooley." And I said, "I've got a dog named Mr. Dooley." And he said, "You really know how to get to a fellow, don't you?"--and stormed away.

[A] It is the fund raising in a campaign that is agony. There were times when I was sort of let out onto the streets as if. "You've earned it, now that you've raised $6000 today. For that you can go out and campaign." But there's no way of avoiding the fact that the real campaign takes place on television; you can't talk to 15,000,000 people on the streets.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think your effect was on the national campaign? Some people say if you hadn't carried New York by as large a margin as you did, Carter might have lost the state.

[A] Moynihan: Well, there came a time when we definitely needed at least a 600,000- vote lead. And it's probable that if I hadn't made that target, Carter would have gone down. We might have had a great constitutional crisis, a theoretical case. Carter would have lost 41 electoral votes here, lost the election, but would have had a slight plurality of the popular vote.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of the national campaign, there's something interesting about the fact that Carter's Playboy Interview became a national issue, and here you are. the first political figure since then to appear in the same format. Do you have any thoughts about that?

[A] Moynihan: I think what happened with Jimmy Carter's Playboy Interview is that it produced a dissonance between the image he'd projected up to then and the one that came out in all that publicity. He probably failed to observe certain political conventions regarding personal expressions--though, to anticipate your next question, that is the politician's responsibility, not the publication's. But. obviously, a lot of people who voted for him weren't as upset as the press made out in the heat of the campaign. As far as I'm concerned, the interview helped those who read it with open minds see that Carter was a man of more complexity than the one who'd been presented before.

[Q] Playboy: What made you decide to agree to do the interview?

[A] Moynihan: Last spring, I was meeting with some very bright young people around a table at Harvard. I was asking about Presidential preferences, and several of the best-informed people said they were for Jerry Brown. When I asked why, they said, "Because of the Playboy Interview." So I've thought of this as a perfectly good way to get your ideas across to people. The personalities featured in this format are presented in a complex, often absorbing way.

[Q] Playboy: You've known a number of complex personalities in your political life, among them five Presidents. You served four of them in very high positions, which is a remarkable, if not unique, record. Would you tell us your opinions of the five men;

[A] Moynihan: Well, Eisenhower was a great politician. In a long and successful life, when things went wrong, some one of his subordinates was always to blame. He never exposed the Presidency, never exposed his military leadership to damage it couldn't sustain. This is not a question of being devious; it's a question of knowing how to maintain an effective power position.

[A] He was an immensely intuitive man. I used to try to get the Nixon Administration to follow his lead on things. I wanted to get up a memorial to him--establish an institute for the study of the military-industrial complex ... that was very shocking. All the vast analysis that McNamara's people put into Vietnam never equaled the import of Eisenhower's two-sentence forecast in his farewell address. Eisenhower also said, "When Lee was down in Virginia, nobody could touch him: the minute he got up into Pennsylvania, he was in trouble." And that's the essence of the Vietnam war.

[Q] Playboy: Yes. but what made him such a good politician?

[A] Moynihan: His devastating capacity to make his enemies underestimate him. The popular view of Eisenhower among educated Eastern people was that he was a boob. He talked in convoluted, involuted sentences that didn't parse when transcribed, unlike the rest of us, who like to think we come out in lapidary prose. It was very agreeable to think, He's not as smart as I am; that's what's the matter with him. It was probably a very agreeable thought to Eisenhower. That's the way people got their balls cut off.

[A] Eisenhower--he was born in Texas--and Kennedy illustrate a South/North distinction between politicians. The Southerner is that kind of good ole boy who will just sit there and scratch his bottom and pick his ears and say, "My golly, you shore must be smart. You say you're from New York City? Well, I hear there are some awful smart people up there and you tell me you're one of them and I guess you must be, because you talk so good."

[Q] Playboy: Is that a description of Jimmy Carter?

[A] Moynihan: No. President Carter is more of a transition Southerner. He was introduced to audiences correctly as a nuclear physicist and a peanut farmer--and obviously more of a nuclear physicist. You have to have known the Congress that John F. Kennedy dealt with, dominated by Southerners before the advent of a standard accent, before everybody watched the Today show, before people got John Chancellor's nice, Midwestern voice. There were committee chairmen in Congress whose manners and accents were absolutely removed from metropolitan America. What's that line from My Fair Lady? "There even are places where English completely disappears."

[Q] Playboy: We were talking about the Southern-style politician who allows you to underestimate him. What about the Northern, the Kennedy style?

[A] Moynihan: Kennedy was confident. Eisenhower had left the Presidency intact and, at the start, anybody could look good. Kennedy's style was to tell you how smart he was, how many degrees he had. If you didn't know that the Southerners were, in fact, concealing and that the Northerners maybe weren't as smart as they pretended, you made great miscalculations. Then you thought the village-pacification campaign in the Mekong Delta could be programed to where any Deputy Secretary could simply punch out the number of pacified villages each week.

[Q] Playboy: Did Kennedy fall into Eisenhower's trap?

[A] Moynihan: I think maybe. His estimate of Eisenhower perhaps made him and his people feel their abilities were worth more than they were. We forget that the confidence was running out of the Kennedy Administration by the third year. Our program was dead in the water. The Southerners could still block everything. Congress felt no sense of urgency. Dick Donahue, his legislative liaison man with Congress, described Kennedy's relationship with Congress as "a mutuality of contempt." When Kennedy died, the only measure of any consequence that had passed the Congress was a four-year extension of the draft--which was debated for only ten minutes in the Senate.

[A] And maybe your luck is running out when ... you see, the Cuban Missile Crisis was actually a defeat. It left the Russians permanently installed in a regime 90 miles off the coast of the United States and we agreed to do nothing to interfere with that regime. That's what they wanted. They agreed to take their missiles out. OK. But when anybody puts missiles into a situation like that, he should expect to have a lot of trouble with the United States, and real trouble--and all that happened was the agreement: "OK. you can have your man down there--permanently."

[Q] Playboy: What was your impression of Kennedy the first time you met him?

[A] Moynihan: Oh, magic. Charisma is the word, but often less than satisfactory in its actual.... The first time we met, he was arriving at the 1960 convention. I had been arguing with Averell Harriman to be for Kennedy. Harriman couldn't forgive the old man, the Ambassador. He kept going on about Joe Kennedy. And Kennedy said hello to the governor and then the governor introduced me and said I was at Syracuse University. Kennedy said. "Oh, I have an honorary degree from Syracuse University."

[A] A perfectly sensible thing to say but rather disappointing to me. I wanted him to say something brilliant, never to be forgotten. An exchange of incomparable lucidity and prophetic clairvoyance, instead of "Guy from Syracuse, I'll stick him with this, press the flesh and get on with it." So there was a disparity between the aura of the man and what he could produce at any given moment.

[Q] Playboy: When you looked into his eyes, what did you see?

[A] Moynihan: You saw devilment. And behind it was: "It's a ball." He was watching it all. And enjoying it.

[A] At the first meeting I ever had with Kennedy in the Cabinet room, we came over with a proposed program that I had helped put together under the direction of then-Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg. It was to provide for union recognition in the Federal service. And in the history of labor and industrial relations, it was an important event.

[A] We went in and presented this thing. And obviously the President hadn't been waiting six months, as we had assumed, for us to get this work done. And he really scarcely remembered that he had made this agreement. So before we were quite able to tell him about all the wonderful parts of this perpetual-motion machine we had put together, he said, "Well, great." And out he went.

[A] Suddenly, he reappeared. You go right through the door to the little secretarial room and then the Oval Office, and suddenly he came ripping out and at the end of the Cabinet table, he put down this open paper and it was The Dallas Morning News. Ted Dealey had written: "We need a man on horseback to lead this nation and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline's tricycle." And there on the editorial page of the first edition was a poem. President Kennedy said, "Listen to this." And he read the poem and we all said. "Uh-huh." And he said, "Don't you get it? The first letter of every line: S-H-I-T-O-N-T-E-D. Shit on Ted." And he turned to me and he said, "You know, it's a...." He wanted the word. And all I could say was, "Yeah, it's a...." I still block on the word.

[Q] Playboy: Acrostic.

[A] Moynihan: Yes, if I had only said, "Mr. President, it's an acrostic," he'd have said, "You're right. Henceforth, you're Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs." On the spot. Field promotion. "Rise, Sir Patrick, you are Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs." But all I could say was, "Ah...."

[A] He was so pleased. "Shit on Ted." That was his idea of a good joke. And. of course, Dealey Plaza in Dallas was where he was murdered several months later.

[Q] Playboy: Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?

[A] Moynihan: I was in the White House at the moment the word came that he was dead. We were just a small group down in the southwest corner office, which had been Sherman Adams' and became Bob Haldeman's--just three doors from the Oval Office. That day. they were changing the rug in the Oval Office. All the furniture was piled out in the hallway and on top of the furniture was Kennedy's rocking chair--as if the President were leaving.

[Q] Playboy: What was your reaction to the assassination?

[A] Moynihan: Shock, of course. Grief. But there was something else not usually mentioned. People found that, in a particular way, it enlarged their lives. They felt relations with other people they didn't normally feel. It was an event that people do not remember as a terrible event. They remember it as a sad one, a rich, emotional one.

[A] That was a very good moment for me in terms of my wits. I was driving in the afternoon and I remember hearing on the radio that the police had arrested a man and he had been involved in Fair Play for Cuba. And it flashed to me that the Dallas police would kill that man, that we had to get physical custody of that man. And I went out to meet the Cabinet plane, which arrived around midnight at Andrews, and I went up and clown the line of people who came off, saying we had to get custody of Oswald. Nobody could hear me. For two days, I went to everybody in Washington. There was almost nobody of importance I did not have access to. Bobby Kennedy was just zonked, some were stunned, some were already maneuvering. None of them had ever been in a police station in unfriendly circumstances. If you were raised in the streets, you have a sense of this.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the murder of Jack Kennedy was the result of a plot?

[A] Moynihan: No. I thought it was purely a random act. But after Oswald was killed, I went around Washington saying, "Look, we have to investigate the murder of Kennedy as if it were, in fact, a plot. Because if we don't, if the Warren Commission doesn't do its job, if it doesn't look into the jaws of hell on this thing, we will be living with a conspiracy plot for the rest of our political lives." There was a book I used to carry around that showed that the Jesuits had assassinated Lincoln. And all I got for my troubles, I'm afraid, was that Lyndon Johnson thought I was saying there was a conspiracy. And Johnson never forgave me.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't the Warren Commission look into "the jaws of hell"?

[A] Moynihan: It did not. My friend Ed Epstein was up in Cornell, doing a master's thesis for the government department, and he wanted to do a study on how a Presidential commission works. He went down to study the Warren Commission, and the first thing he saw was how it did not work. The commissioners never went to the meetings. They started sending deputies and deputies started sending deputies. And Warren, at that point, had become a man of vast self-importance and rather small competence. So around Harvard today, you see kids with stickers on their notebooks that say, Who Killed J.F.K.?

[A] It's what Thorstein Veblen called trained incapacity. When I was standing with the Cabinet at Andrews Air Force Base, saying we had to get custody of Oswald, I was talking to overeducated people who had learned the word paranoid and who had been taught that people who go around being suspicious are crazy. Because awful things don't happen. As a matter of fact, awful things do happen. And ordinary people know that. And right now, in this country, for example, it's perfectly clear that sophisticated people know there's no danger from the Soviet Union. Because the notion of being threatened has acquired an almost class connotation. If you're not very educated, you're easily frightened. And not ever being frightened can be a formula for self-destruction.

[Q] Playboy: You remained in the Johnson Administration for 20 months. How was it different from Kennedy's reign?

[A] Moynihan: The Johnson people were in a kind of tension with Kennedy's people--which was not bad. Everybody was trying to show, "We are as good as they were." Standards of achievement were being asserted by everybody. And Johnson knew more about the Federal Government than any President in history. He knew it because he had mastered it. The war spoiled all that. Johnson got more and more beleaguered, more and more conscious of the Presidency under siege--that people were trying to hurt, not help, that people betrayed him and nobody could be trusted. Lyndon Johnson ended up giving speeches on the flight decks of aircraft carriers off the coast of Southern California--the only way he could get a safe audience.

[Q] Playboy: In private, he talked like a human blast furnace, didn't he?

[A] Moynihan: Yes, but remember that Lyndon Johnson was a schoolteacher, really the only job he ever had outside Government. But you can't get elected in Texas, or couldn't in those days, by being a schoolteacher. You had to be a cowboy, so, naturally. L.B.J. made a great thing of all that colorful, earthy cowboy talk. But actually, my hunch is that deep down, he was not a cowboy except in language. He wasn't macho. He didn't want to go to war; he tried everything he could to keep the war from getting bigger, but once he was locked into it. he accepted McNamara's strategy of slowly increasing the pressure by little increments, which meant that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong never had to expect anything but a little bit more of what they were getting. They sensed that Johnson was not a destructive man; and this was his undoing with them. I think.

[A] This was a very different message than Nixon sent to people. He, I think, communicated the possibility that he could, in fact, go crazy and do something incredible, if he just got mad enough. And that you had to treat him very carefully. And you'd better not risk finding out whether it was so or wasn't so. In a sense, it was Nixon who played the cowboy and Johnson who played the Quaker.

[Q] Playboy: We'll get to Nixon in a moment, but wasn't L.B.J., whom you describe as a gentle man, pretty ruthless toward a lot of people?

[A] Moynihan: He could be absolutely, devastatingly indifferent. Sargent Shriver, Adam Yarmolinsky and I went over to present the poverty program to the Cabinet. And none of us had been to a Cabinet meeting. We were all pretty full of beans about this program. We wanted to pay for a big employment program by raising cigarette taxes. But Johnson was cutting taxes that year and he must have known ahead of time what we were going to say.

[A] Anyway, we got to the Cabinet meeting. This would be spring of '64. And Johnson came in and sat down. Carl Rowan had just become director of the U.S. Information Agency and didn't sit with the rest. Johnson said to Carl, "Come on up here and sit at the table, Carl. What's the matter with you?" Rowan, of course, was acting correctly. He was not a member of the Cabinet.

[A] Then Johnson got everybody started. "The first tiling we're going to do is we're going to hear a report from the Secretary of State on the conditions in the Far East, South Asia and Vietnam." So Rusk starts talking. And I'm thinking. My God, we're really going to see how the Government works. And Rusk had got into his fourth sentence when Johnson reached down, picked up a telephone and said, "Get me So-and-so." And then he turned around and spent the rest of the Cabinet meeting talking on the telephone!

[A] Every so often, he'd realize there was silence and. he'd turn around and say, "You, Sarge, you go right ahead and tell us about this poverty program." And people would pretend they were talking to the President. Well, who are you talking to in that setting? You are talking 10 yourself. And when it was all over and we were walking out, Shriver said, "You know, I wish now I'd never been to a Cabinet meeting. He had every guy in the room in his pocket and he was working on some guy be didn't have."

[Q] Playboy: When did you first meet Lyndon Johnson?

[A] Moynihan: He was Vice-president then. I remember looking into his eyes and thinking. This is a bull castrated very late in life. But he didn't make a great impression on me one way or the other. I shared the Kennedy attitude of who in the hell is this guy, anyway? It just seemed to me that everything for him was all over. We had beaten Lyndon Johnson. Now who were we going to beat next? Well, we found out different, didn't we?

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to Nixon, whom you mentioned earlier, what were your first impressions of him?

[A] Moynihan: There was one thing I had always resented about Lyndon Johnson--that shortly after he took over in the White House, he ordered the floodlights that illuminate it turned off. He said it was an economy measure. And everybody thought this was very clever. Half the fathers in the country go around telling the children, "Will you turn out the goddamn lights in the closet?" I resented it bitterly. I took it as a sort of symbolic action of the lights going out. And I don't like governments where the lights are off. So when Nixon asked me to go to work for him. I'd never met him before and I said, "All right, but there's one condition, a very mild one, but I'd like to ask that you turn the lights on in the White House." "Done," he said. The lights were turned on again. But the next morning, I read that Nixon had announced it was done as an anticrime measure. Damn. Right away, I felt, No class.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever hear Kenneth venture an opinion about Nixon?

[A] Moynihan: Sure, the expression I just used myself: His great remark made after their first debate was, "No class." But those two guys did have a relationship. They had been through so many things together. Kennedy went to see Nixon down in Key Biscayne just after the election and there was a great opening line that Bob Finch told me about. Kennedy walked in and said, "How the hell did you carry Ohio?" Couple of friends. Win some, lose some.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you, a Democrat, go to work for Nixon?

[A] Moynihan: Because he asked me. I was director of the Joint Center of Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard and had been running around saying that this country was in an awful, awful fix--that the rioting was threatening the stability of liberal institutions in this country. I felt I knew more about it than most of the people who were then advising Nixon. And I did. I was willing to take the bet that we could turn this around, because we had to.

[A] Since then, I've heard a lot of complaining that I worked for a Republican, but nobody ever says that there never was another riot. By God, if a dozen cities had exploded the next summer, you'd have heard how I screwed up.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have any qualms about working for Nixon?

[A] Moynihan: No, I felt there was one thing he had done that did have class. Whatever the facts are, Nixon thought the 1960 election had been stolen from him. And certainly at the level at which we write history, you can make that case. I'm not saying it's true in the least. But Nixon was urged to contest it and he didn't. Because all he could have done was to diminish the Presidency. He couldn't have gotten it. Eisenhower wasn't going to call out the troops and disallow the election.

[Q] Playboy: When you worked for Nixon, did you admire him?

[A] Moynihan: Yes. Yes. But not unreservedly, by any means. I resigned at the lime of Cambodia. I thought there was probably a strong military case but no political case of any kind. I went in to the President and said, "Look, I just have to leave." And he was very nice. He said, "I know what you're going through, and I know you have to leave. But would you slick around and get Family Assistance through Congress?" And I agreed to stay a few more months. But I stayed six.

[Q] Playboy: Shouldn't you have publicly expressed moral outrage against the Cambodia invasion instead of staying on?

[A] Moynihan: That is the hardest question a person in Government faces. None of us faces it very well. Remember, when you leave, you lose your influence. And point one: I had resigned. And the war was not my area.

[A] Point two: I really did believe the Administration when it said it was going to get in and get out of Cambodia. And within three weeks of my staying on, they had gotten out and there was only the record left.

[A] And I had a certain relationship with Nixon. He had trusted me. Kissinger had told me Nixon expected me to leave early and denounce him, and I kind of didn't want to do that. It would have been easier to denounce somebody from your own party than someone who kind of expected you to.

[Q] Playboy: But. at that time. Nixon was also bombing the hell out of South Vietnam and, some people think, actually destroying the country we were trying lo save.

[A] Moynihan: I guess I didn't think that. I was working on domestic things. I was appalled by the war in Vietnam. Everybody knew my views. In the first memorandum I ever sent to Nixon--in January 1969--I said. "The war is lost. Don't identify yourself with it or you will be crushed."

[A] I was national cochairman of Negotiation Now. And I guess my feelings were with Bob Kennedy. The war was over and we were abandoning the Vietnamese. They would be taken over by the Communists. Regardless of who was President in 1969, 1970. we'd made that decision. The disproportion of the American effort had been outrageous. But the effort itself was not. That's my view. And I dare to suggest that had the war been won, it would not be regarded now as having been so evil.

[Q] Playboy: But the war dragged on for four more years.

[A] Moynihan: I guess I think Nixon never could admit that we had lost the war. Anyway. I stayed and worked through the summer on school desegregation in the South, and then in the fall--he had already asked me and I had said no--I finally agreed to become Ambassador to the UN. And one evening in December, I went out to dinner and asked Steve Hess to be my deputy. I went home and between the time I got into the elevator on the first floor and got out on the fifth floor. I decided, I don't want to be around this Administration anymore. And I called up my wife, Liz, who was miserable about the prospect of the UN. and I said. "I'm not going to stay. I'm going."

[Q] Playboy: Still, you're doing something most politicians--especially Democrats--wouldn't do: You're defending Richard Nixon, to an extent.

[A] Moynihan: During those first few years of Nixon, there was some damn good government. But Nixon couldn't get any credit for it. The press and others just kept denying it, denying it, and he gave up. He gave up trying.

[A] For example, when Nixon took office, 68 percent of black children in the old South were in all-black schools. By 1970, the figure had gone down to 14 percent. The public schools in the South ended up more integrated than the public schools in Michigan. And they still are. But at the time, nobody would say Nixon had clone it. And, of course, he wouldn't say he had done it.

[Q] Playboy: Why not? Modesty is not a politician's trait.

[A] Moynihan: He didn't want credit for it. He wanted to carry South Carolina. He wanted Strom Thurmond to say this is a good ole boy. And Strom Thurmond had trouble saying he was a good ole boy.

[Q] Playboy: In The Final Days, the authors say Patrick Moynihan was shocked when he read the White House tapes, that this was a Nixon he never knew or heard.

[A] Moynihan: Yes. Arthur Burns and George Schultz and I all had this reaction. Nixon obviously had two personae. If you knew one, you didn't know the other. I used to titillate the President, if you will, by my foul language. Early in my two years there, we had a meeting of big-city mayors to talk about urban things. It was a successful meeting and the President, having used up his hour, said. "Now. look, everything's going well and Vice-President Agnew will carry on this discussion with you." But Agnew then began to get into useless arguments and everything was getting heated and the meeting broke up. Later, the President asked me. "How did that go?" And, describing what Agnew had done to the meeting. I used a good old Anglo-Saxon verb. Well, they all laughed and giggled--this terrible word had been used. This fellow uses naughty words. But then you find out that an hour later he's in there....

[Q] Playboy: Why did Nixon make the tapes in the first place?

[A] Moynihan: I'd heard in the White House that he bugged the Oval Office because he wanted to have a better Presidential library than Lyndon Johnson. You know: This will really grab them when they come through generations from now and hear President Nixon say to Secretary Kissinger, "Very well, Henry, I want you to go to Peking."

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't he destroy the tapes?

[A] Moynihan: You have to start from the fact that the Watergate break-in itself was a small event. A crime, but not a massive one. Nobody was hurt. Unimportant. Nixon was a man who had put up with much more serious things. For example, his assumption that the 1960 election had been stolen. This time, he had been elected--49 states.

[A] I can just imagine him not believing that anybody cold take the Presidency away from him now, because three horse's asses he'd never met had broken into Larry O'Brien's files to get a copy of the letters to the creditors of the Democratic National Committee. "Didn't you receive our check? Well, we're very surprised. We sent that check out last week. If that check doesn't clear, you'll get a check in the next mail. We promise. Don't you worry. As always. Faithfully yours, Larry."

[Q] Playboy: Yes, but why didn't Nixon destroy the tapes?

[A] Moynihan: You can't understand Nixon if you don't understand that he could not destroy the tapes. It was a combination of. one. being--at that level--an honest man. And, two, being a self-destructive one. He did not destroy the tapes and he did not blow up the-- world. He went peacefully from office. And I thought he left well.

[A] And a case could be made--which I would not make--that Nixon was the victim of a coup. In which he collaborated. At first, all he had had to say was, "Look here, I didn't know anything about it at the time, and later I thought it better not to rock the Presidency; but, in point of fact, there was a break-in at Watergate, and I did use bad judgment, and that certainly isn't going to happen again." There would have been a furor. but it would have passed. But he didn't do that. Nixon did not see it develop into a question of character. But it did. And. in the end. it was not the crime of Watergate but the crime of concealment that destroyed him.

[A] Actually. I have the theory that I am responsible for Watergate.

[Q] Playboy: Please elaborate. You're thickening the plot.

[A] Moynihan: I got President Nixon involved in the idea that we had to do something about the international heroin traffic. When I left, John Ehrlichman took over the drug program and he passed it on to his assistant, Egil Krogh. who took it up with a passion, and he looked for aides who would really believe in this case.

[A] Now. G. Gordon Liddy had been brought into the Treasury Department for the same sort of thing. But Treasury realized that he was crazy and was getting rid of him. So he was hired at the White House because he was a shoot-'em-up, mow-'em-down, get-those-monsters-who-are-pouring-poison-into-the-veins-of-Amer-ican-youth type. In the name of fighting the heroin traffic, a vicious criminal activity, a lot of things might be justified. But then they moved those methods over into politics. And it was Liddy who began telling those rather simple Christian Science lawyers, "I'll show 'em. I'll get those mafiosi, those sons of bitches. I'll get Larry O'Brien."

[A] He was the loose cannon on the gun deck. Absent Liddy and what would there have been? The enemies list? Well, what the hell was that? A list of who not to ask to dinner at the White House. The enemies list was one thing; taping Martin Luther King, Jr., in bed with other women and revealing the details to reporters, which was done under a previous Administration, was surely of a greater order.

[A] Actually, the violations by the Federal Government of civil liberties were much greater in magnitude under Johnson than under Nixon. The Church Committee has chapter after chapter on this. In a sense. Nixon paid for Johnson's transgressions as well as his own. God help the man who has done small things at the end of a long sequence of big things--when the people are finally sick of it.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you lose all your previous respect for Nixon after Watergate?

[A] Moynihan: Not really, if you accept the idea of tragic Haws in people, if you accept the idea of sin. if you accept a tragic view of life. He chose not to tell just one truth, in a dramatic context. It was a struggle of character and morality. Read William Shakespeare. That's what it's all about. The event of Nixon's destruction was. in some ways, no less a tragedy of character than was Lyndon Johnson's.

[Q] Playboy: What was Johnson's flaw?

[A] Moynihan: Johnson had spent his whole life learning to manipulate adversaries. His entire life had been spent making people who didn't like or trust him do so. One dazzling triumph alter another. And then, at the pinnacle of his career, he lost this ability. Events led up to a point where he had no option but to resign. In 3O years in Washington. Lyndon Johnson never got himself into that situation; he got other people into that situation. But probably he felt he had to lose his ability to manipulate at this time. Finally, something ultimately honorable was at stake--the American obligation, as he saw it, to struggle against communism.

[Q] Playboy: And Nixon's flaw?

[A] Moynihan: A conviction that the people who were opposed to him were opposed for dishonorable purposes. And that they had no claim on him in consequence of their own failings. Which was not so. They had every claim in the world on him. They had the claim that everybody had. He was the President: they weren't. And it was required and expected of him that he be truthful. He wasn't.

[Q] Playboy: Did you see Nixon during Watergate? You were in India then.

[A] Moynihan: Well, I knew that the settlement of India's rupee debt to the U.S. was going to be the biggest thing I would do in India. And I just had to get to the President to do so. But first I would have to see Kissinger. He was going to go out to see Nixon at San Clemente and said I could see him there. I knew if I hung around there long enough, I would eventually see Nixon. And, as it turned out, I just happened to spot him coming in on a golf cart and I rushed out and ran after him into his office. Nobody shot me. People certainly saw this guy chasing in the door after him. And I said, "I'd like to see you." "Oh, how are you?" "I'd like to talk with you a moment, if I could." "Fine, come in at 11 o'clock."

[A] So I went in at 11 o'clock with Kissinger and there was talk about Brezhnev's visit that week. It was also the week in which young John Dean was testifying.

[A] We did our business and all that and I said to the President, "Will you do me one favor?" "Yes, what is that?" "Will you turn that goddamn flag right side up?" His flag was upside down on his lapel, and that's a naval distress signal. He said, "Oh, goodness, yes, you're a Navy man, too, aren't you?" His cuff links were upside down. too. There were signs of internal disorder.

[Q] Playboy: What was your perception of Ehrlichman and Haldeman?

[A] Moynihan: Pretty good men. Very representative of the men who come to the White House with any President. People who had been working with the man in other situations, acquired his trust before he acquired his power. But they didn't know great deal. They got caught up in things they could not handle.

[Q] Playboy: You once wrote that the Nixon men began to think of themselves as better than they were.

[A] Moynihan: Well, they found themselves so excoriated for things they knew they hadn't done that they began to think they were doing more, indeed, than they were. I mean, there was such an antinomian atmosphere in Washington.

[Q] Playboy: Meaning what?

[A] Moynihan: It means the celebration of wrongdoing, the discrediting of institutions and people. It is the idea that if you believe the law is bad, then you can do anything. Many people who had been Cold Warriors and had been delivered from all that, then said none of their previous vows, obligations, standards had any claim on them. The more precious the secret, the more important it was to give it out. It's a very powerful recurrent aspect of culture.

[Q] Playboy: Relate that to Ehrlichman and Haldeman.

[A] Moynihan: When they did something that their critics, in fact, thought was the right thing to do, they wouldn't get credit for it--it was claimed that they had done the opposite. Every time they increased food-stamp allowance, the press would say they had cut it. I began to get nervous and I talked to friends in the press, saying, "You're disorienting those fellows. They know that what you say is not so. They're going to think nothing you say matters." And that is what happened. They were released from any feeling that any criticism was valid.

[Q] Playboy: Weren't Ehrlichman and Haldeman just reflecting Nixon's hate relationship with the press?

[A] Moynihan: When they stopped being new boys from the Coast, yes. For Nixon, the press was just one protracted, nonnegotiable stalemate, an enmity of a permanent kind never, never to be misread for signs of change. I remember once sending him a complimentary column that New York Times columnist James Reston had written, and I said, "Isn't this very impressive?" And the answer came back from Nixon through Haldeman: "Look, if you ever let yourself take any satisfaction, any pleasure in what Reston writes, on that day you just open yourself to pain about what he writes the next day. So you don't have any reaction except record the information."

[Q] Playboy: Since you haven't been shy about defending what you saw as Nixon's good points, what does a good Democrat like you have to say about Gerald Ford's Administration?

[A] Moynihan: I think Gerald Ford will be remembered as the President who bumped his head, had a wonderful wife and left Americans more at peace with themselves and the rest of the world than at any time since the United States became a world power. He got us out of the Watergate nightmare and got us back some pride and self-reliance.

[A] Ford's Cabinet table talk was perhaps the best I've ever heard in Washington. When you had Ed Levi and John Dunlop and Bill Coleman triangulating a complex constitutional issue--"What does the Federalist Paper number 59 have to say about this?"--and you had Jim Schlesinger participating and Henry Kissinger listening--when he was there, which wasn't often--well, you had pretty high-quality conversation. And Ford was very good, presiding but not interfering. Not a bad Administration.

[Q] Playboy: Let's turn to the subject of India, since you spent a term as Ambassador to that country. What is your view of Mrs. Gandhi?

[A] Moynihan: The culture of India is so extraordinarily complex that wrong notions can be as plausible as right notions. In the Thirties, at Oxford, Mrs. Gandhi acquired a very, very vague left view of the world in which the United States was seen as an ominous power acting out of capitalist, imperialist, racist motives. A caricature. And she just trundled all that junk home with her and nothing much was added later.

[A] But she combined that with an intense and tactical knowledge of how individuals can be manipulated, frightened, enticed, intimidated. And she has the great sense that she gets from her father of her right to rule India. She is the spokesman of the masses. They are hers and she is theirs. You have to be born with that.

[Q] Playboy: What was her effect on how the U.S. sees India today?

[A] Moynihan: While the second most populous nation in the world was a democracy, the United States had an enormous ideological interest in the prosperity and the success of that country. We want the world to know that democracies do well. So they've given up the one claim they had on us. When India ceased to be a democracy, our actual interest there just plummeted. I mean, what does it export but communicable disease?

[Q] Playboy: After your two tours of duty as an Ambassador, what is your primary criticism of the U.S. State Department?

[A] Moynihan: In the past 30 years, there has been a high politics and a low politics in the Department of State. High politics was security politics. Those were the guys who were on the fast track, who got the important jobs. They were Ambassadors by 50 or moved up to Assistant Secretary rank. You knew they were moving from the minute they got started. Hard-nosed, tough, they dealt with real things--guns, bullets, bombs, tanks, planes.

[A] Then there was low politics--what Averell Harriman would call drip. And drips would be people who deal with drip: all that ideological talk about freedom and liberty and totalitarianism, the free world and other worlds, capitalism, socialism.

[A] Well, we've found out those ideological issues are not drip. They are profoundly serious. And when you get on the losing side of them--when the symbols of progress are captured by the other side--well, you are in trouble. And you're likely to stay that way.

[Q] Playboy: Did Kissinger involve himself in ideological issues--in what you call drip--and did he share your view that the U.S. got on the wrong side of those issues?

[A] Moynihan: He did not himself encourage oilier people lo concern themselves with drip, but he himself was very concerned. And you will not understand him at all if you do not know that he really felt--and this we share--that the decline of the West was a reality. And he felt the United States' behavior in recent years was accelerating that.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying that both you and Kissinger feel that American democracy is the wave of the past?

[A] Moynihan: I have said that democracy is beginning to look like monarchy in the 19th Century. It is the place where the world was, not where it is going. This is the one thing I've been trying lo say to this country. There are about three dozen democracies left. Since 1946, there have been 78 new nations formed out of former colonial possessions; 70 of them began as full-blown constitutional democracies. Of the 70, there are only 11 left. And of those 11, seven are small islands--Granada, the Bahamas, Barbados, Mauritius, Fiji. I mean, I'm glad they're democracies, but it wouldn't make much difference if Fiji should become a small despotism. The land masses of Asia wouldn't shake!

[A] So America is not what countries are going to be like. The chaos of Lebanon may be more of a model. Now, for the rest of our natural lives, we will be in a world in which there are very few of us and a great many of them.

[Q] Playboy: Is that behind your advocacy of Israel?

[A] Moynihan: Israel is the democracy under attack just now. We don't know when it will be Canada, the United States or whoever. There aren't too many of us in the world and we've got to hang together.

[A] Schlesinger came out and said what I've been saying privately--that Kissinger, probably without even knowing it, treated the Israelis like the South Vietnamese. The more you weaken their reputation, the more they'll give in and let you run things for them. He let the Israelis be discredited in the world.

[Q] Playboy: What do you see as the main danger of that?

[A] Moynihan: We are not military allies of Israel. We are political allies. But a threat to any constitutional democracy is a threat to our national interests. And I think the chances of something really awful happening in Israel are high, including using an atomic bomb if they have one or develop one.

[Q] Playboy: Why, in your view, is democracy eroding around the world?

[A] Moynihan: It's a hard discipline. It's easy to persuade yourself, as Mrs. Gandhi did, that your political opponents are a conspiracy of your enemies and democracy (continued on page 138)Playboy Interview(continued from page 79) is not in the country's best interests. Mrs. Gandhi was told she had to leave office and she didn't. President Nixon was told the same thing and he did. How would you like to sit out in San Clemente and read all the books about yourself and hear about the movies?

[A] The American Revolution didn't happen in 1776. It happened in 1801, when John Adams got the returns from South Carolina and said, "Well, that's it; the Republicans have won." And he turned over the Army and the Treasury and the Great Seal to Thomas Jefferson, went back to Quincy and felt a failure the rest of his life. But he had ensured that America would be a democracy. He did not shoot Jefferson; he did not arrest him. That's the event.

[A] And if you corrupt and suborn a democracy, it is usually done in the name of totalitarian virtue. When you say we are going to have a higher, purer, more demanding discipline, in a funny way, that will be excused. That will earn you more credit in this country than admitting you don't want to deal with your opposition or saying you want to put more money in your Swiss bank account. So the language of totalitarianism appears very quickly in all these countries. And the world is turning against us pretty rapidly.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the Communist nations make America the scapegoat?

[A] Moynihan: Yes, propagating the idea that America is what is wrong with the world. But, of course, the underdeveloped nations are more and more a source of their own sorrows. And nobody dares say this. The government leaders have assumed all the entrepreneurship and profits--and ride around in Mercedes, while the people in the bush walk around in bare feet. They call their government socialism, but it's not. It's not at all distributive. It's stale capitalism, and the least efficient kind of capitalism.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't there a great deal of generalized animosity against you in the hallways of the UN?

[A] Moynihan: You're damn right there was--from those people who had been having a free ride. They'd vote against the United States 100 percent and nobody ever said a word to them, and suddenly I was saying, "You're sitting here, asking us for bread; you're sitting here, asking us for food; you're sitting here, asking us to help you against your traditional and mortal enemies, the mugwumps on the other side of the border; and there's your guy back there voting against us. How can we help you if you're not going to help us out?"

[A] And suddenly, these ambassadors were getting cables from home, saying, "What in the hell are you doing? We need help against those mugwumps." Damn right they were standing around the bar in the diplomatic lounge, asking, "What the hell is this guy doing?" That is exactly what I intended them to be asking.

[A] New York City has a tremendous sort of industry that is a social world built around the ambience of the UN. And they give you dinners and you give them dinners, and then they give you dinners and you go to receptions. And for anybody involved in that ambience to face up to those countries----

[Q] Playboy: What is the State Department's attitude toward Third World countries?

[A] Moynihan: It has a fall-back position that goes: "They're not really quite grown up and you have to deal with them the way you deal with adolescent children." You know, like juvenile delinquents whose names must not be released to the public. I felt that was a shocking condescension. I was holding them accountable as mature, independent countries. They'd say they'd voted against us without really wishing to. I said no, you vote the way you desire to vote. That wonderful English line, "You may have the right to dissemble your love, but why did you kick me downstairs?"

[Q] Playboy: Did you and Kissinger fight as much while you were at the UN as has been reported?

[A] Moynihan: As a matter of fact, though we had fierce arguments while I was in India, we had none in the UN. Not one. The fact is that Moynihan, Kissinger and Schlesinger all shared the same view--that the balance of forces in the world is shifting against us and we are in mortal peril. My judgment of Henry Kissinger's view of the world was one of profound respect. Our disagreement was over what to do. Kissinger believed that America no longer had any fight left. Schlesinger and I thought we did. Our disagreements could be very bitter, but, you might say, they partook of that quality that Sigmund Freud described as the narcissism of small differences.

[Q] Playboy: Your resignation from the UN, however, involved some pretty rough infighting with Kissinger, didn't it?

[A] Moynihan: Here's what happened: When my leave of absence was up at Harvard, I told President Ford I was willing to give up my tenure at Harvard and stay on at least through the end of the primaries. Then there would be no way that Reagan could assault him for my departure. I had told Kissinger this earlier. And the President said, "Fine. Good of you."

[A] Two days later, Reston comes out with this column saying that the President and the Secretary of State deplore my conduct in private but have to support it in public. Someone had gone right at my belly the minute it was clear I would give up Harvard.

[A] If you are the UN Ambassador, people have to be pretty sure that when you say such and such, that's what the Secretary of State and the President think, or that the President will back you up. So when dealing with me, one is dealing with the President of the United States. I'm his policy. Take on me, take on the President. Now, once the senior political correspondent of the U.S. has said, "You don't, in fact, speak for his private views, and he's stuck with you," you're naked. I read Reston in the midnight edition. I carried it into the bedroom and told my wife, "Back to Harvard." Because, as it happened, my tenure did not expire for five more days.

[Q] Playboy: Did Kissinger ever speak to you about it?

[A] Moynihan: No, we never talked. But he put out nice statements, wrote me a nice letter, and was a little nervous, a little scared. About two months earlier, I went through a strange week. On Monday morning, I met Kissinger at the airport, as one does, and drove into town with him. A news magazine had an item that he had taken me to the woodshed the previous week over something. There had been a meeting, but, in point of fact, no woodshed. And he was saying to me, "Did you see that magazine piece? Goddamn those people. How dare they say things like that?" Kissinger was wondering who had leaked, the story. Well, I hadn't and there were only two of us in the room.

[A] So, the next day, there's another attack on me, and this one from the mouth of Britain's UN ambassador, Ivor Richard, who compared me to a trigger-happy Wyatt Earp, a vengeful Savonarola and a demented King Lear "raging amidst the storm on the blasted heath." Never in history has a British ambassador denounced an American Ambassador. I'm asked about it by the press and I say, "Look, I know these are the views of Ambassador Richard and I feel he has every right to express them. We're the best of friends." That's Wednesday. On Thursday, at lunchtime, at the Russian Embassy, Ivor comes up to me and says, "Say, you know, people are interpreting your statement to mean you think, these are my personal views and not the views (continued on page 150)Playboy Interview(continued from page 138) of the British government." I said, "Ho, ho, people will think anything, huh, Ivor?" Anil then I walked off. And about two minutes later, being the brilliant man I am, I say, "What the hell did he say? You mean they aren't his personal ...?" That night. I asked him point-blank if they were the official views of the British government. And he said, "Quite right."

[Q] Playboy: You're saying that Kissinger was out to get you and arranged this with the British foreign secretary?

[A] Moynihan: Well, unless you choose to think that the British government for reasons of its own decided for the first time in history to publicly demolish a United States Ambassador.

[Q] Playboy: You were just saying that you and Kissinger had no real disagreement. . So why was he trying to torpedo you?

[A] Moynihan: Well, that will remain forever a mystery. Kissinger couldn't help himself. He couldn't help himself. It's a kind of nervousness in his character that will do this one day and say "My God. that was absurd" the next day. You don't let it bother you until it gets into a situation where you can't recoup. It could just as easily not have happened. There were all sorts of personal problems.

[Q] Playboy: What were they?

[A] Moynihan: No. No. That's not fair.

[Q] Playboy: What impression does Kissinger give personally?

[A] Moynihan: Oh, a man of enormous energy and power--and a larger command of the facts than you have.

[Q] Playboy: What's his wit like?

[A] Moynihan: Aggressive. It diminishes somebody, usually you.

[Q] Playboy: When you mentioned the Reston column about you and the UN, you were talking about the use of leaks to influence government. Would you discuss that?

[A] Moynihan: I think it's one of the big problems the press has today. The great fundamental principle of the press is to report what's going on. There was a big story last spring about the purported intent of Attorney General Levi to put before the Supreme Court an amicus curiae brief against busing. That was clearly a leak to kill it by revealing it. And if one side of the Justice Department is in a fierce fight with the other side of the Justice Department, that's one of the things that's going on. But if you can't say that because you are, in fact, printing something given to you by one side, well, then, the primal purpose of the press is being faulted. But I see progress. During this past campaign, Leslie Gelb in a news story about the Carter camp noted, "This document was given to The New York Times by a person in the State Department who is interested in advancing the cause of Governor Carter." That's what I've been asking for let the press identify whose ox is being gored and for what purpose.

[Q] Playboy: Is there another such example from your own experience?

[A] Moynihan: Oh, sure. That "benign neglect" memorandum of mine. Here I am. in the middle of a Republican Administration, the advisor on urban affairs; we have got through one summer without the resumption of the riots of the Sixties, which had reached epidemic proportions by '69; we'd had one summer without any at all and I'm worried about the next summer. Wallace was getting stronger and stronger. You had the Black Panthers and people like that getting more strident. And you had people at the Justice Department goading the FBI to get involved and to get the Panthers to start fighting one another and fighting the FBI. We were polarizing.

[A] I sent a long memorandum to the President that was basically about an argument I was having with Attorney General John Mitchell: "Stay away from that business of getting into confrontations with the Panthers." The United States Army, at one point, had surrounded New Haven. And the whole war room at the Pentagon was covered with maps of New Haven streets. All these initiatives came out of the FBI. I was trying to say "Cool it," and I wrote this memorandum. I said the time had come for a period when Negro progress continued and racial rhetoric faded--a time when the issue of race could do with the theory of benign neglect. That's a phrase from Canadian constitutional history. And about three months after I wrote that thing, out the memorandum came, and it was presented as a proposal to neglect blacks.

[Q] Playboy: Who leaked it?

[A] Moynihan: Who knows?

[Q] Playboy: Somebody trying to do you in?

[A] Moynihan: Probably, but not necessarily. But there you find yourself represented as saying the very opposite of what you said. And the desire to think the worst is usually very powerful in public things. So there you are.

[Q] Playboy: How did that affect you and your career?

[A] Moynihan: It vastly affected the credence with which I could talk about those issues. But in a very subtle but pervasive way, it warned people away from this whole area. Because everybody in Washington knew that I was someone who absolutely believed in racial equality and was desperately trying to figure out how to get a guaranteed income. Maybe it was not a good idea, but certainly it was problack. They saw what happened to me and, boy, I think in Washington you could just feel them saying, "I see, just stay away from that subject. Nothing but loss."

[Q] Playboy: Your election to the Senate must have measured, once and for all, your relationship with blacks.

[A] Moynihan: I carried the black vote by a five-to-one margin.

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to the political game of selective leaking, don't you think President Carter will face the same sort of problem within his Administration--especially when he tries to reorganize Government bureaucracy?

[A] Moynihan: Absolutely. The bureaucracy will reveal the President's iniquitous intentions to the press constantly, constantly, constantly.... Actually, it's inevitable. The Civil Service has a vested interest in someone who wants to make the Civil Service more powerful. What happens to an Administration that wants to make it smaller, less powerful? Can it be done? I am telling you there is a lot of evidence that the answer is no.

[Q] Playboy: So you think President Carter will be frustrated?

[A] Moynihan: President Carter is absolutely right that there is confusion in the bureaucracy, but it's confusion rising out of confused public policy. Congressional directives are often conflicting; national concerns are often ambivalent. The President will soon direct himself to where the problem is.

[A] To my mind, the biggest of our problems in the period ahead is that nobody is confidently--much less passionately--bringing new ideas to Government. President Carter has undertaken to do a lot of very reasonable things. But no one should suppose there is any doctrine on how to go about it.

[Q] Playboy: How about you? Will you, as Senator, be passionately advocating new ideas?

[A] Moynihan: I think so. I'm part of a movement in American history to assert the needs of the Northeast with respect to the national economy, which is a new idea. The needs have been there for a quarter of a century, but we haven't seen them. What has always been the richest part of the country, with obligations to the rest of the country, is no longer that; but because of what it still provides to the general health of the country, a decline in this region becomes a decline for (continued on page 152)Playboy Interview(continued from page 150) everyone. Imagine this country without New York City--or imagine New York City becoming just a large Philadelphia.

[A] I have an idea that this subject is related to the separation of power; it has a nice kind of constitutional quality to it. It originates with the struggle between Hamilton and Jefferson. Remember that when the Constitution was drafted, the capital was New York City, which is where Washington was inaugurated. This troubled Jefferson enormously. He'd lived in Europe and had this great dread of nations that had one capital for everything--government, finance, industry, the intellectual and cultural life. That was Paris, that was London, that was Europe. So it was important to him that the capital be moved out of New York City.

[A] Hamilton felt differently and wanted the capital to be an important, central city. But there was something he needed from Jefferson: his support in getting the Federal Government to assume the Revolutionary War debt. So he and Jefferson struck this bargain in a tavern in Broad Street, whereby Jefferson agreed to support Hamilton's position on the war debt ill return for getting the capital moved to a malarial, miasmal swamp by the Potomac--that's where the term Foggy Bottom, for the State Department, later came from.

[A] That produced a separation of power that was visible, only no one noticed it: The political capital went to Washington, while the capital in every other respect stayed in New York. So you never had that tremendous focusing of total power in one city that so many other countries have had.

[Q] Playboy: But why should New York City feel it has the right to be the only alternative to power concentration in Washington?

[A] Moynihan: It doesn't. As time went on, you had the railroads meeting in Chicago, the river trade in St. Louis, the auto industry in Detroit. But the point is to think of it as a basic constitutional idea--to prevent all the power from gravitating to Washington. If we lose New York as the main capital of all those other things it represents, you'll be surprised at how much we lose. You won't recognize this country a half century hence, when the most important newspaper is The Washington Post and all the broadcasting is done out of buildings along Connecticut Avenue, and Time and "Newsweek are published in Washington. There will be so much power at the center.

[A] And this is what's beginning to happen. Time-Life Books has moved down there. The major financial houses have their computers down there. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will have all the money it needs, forever, while the Metropolitan Opera will have to fight its deficit every year. Same goes for the museums. And someday a President might sit down and figure it was his right to consider what kinds of paintings were good, politically, for the country. I'm telling you, it's a serious thing.

[Q] Playboy: It's pretty well known that New York City owes at least part of its present financial crisis to the staggering costs of welfare. You want Federal help, of course, but what are your thoughts beyond that?

[A] Moynihan: That the present system is madness. And it's not just the cities anymore; the suburbs are hurting, too. Probably most counties in New York State pay over half their budgets for welfare. The more you learn about the subject, the more you realize how deeply embedded it is in our system.

[A] In the fall of 1965, newly elected mayor John Lindsay asked me to join a task force on poverty. I told the task force that welfare, specifically, and not poverty, generally, was the problem. I told them the numbers of welfare clients were going to zoom astronomically. They rejected my assertions unanimously. The fundamental belief was--they said it over and over again in various guises--"No, that's all over. That was due to the Tammany Hall types who put all these people on welfare to get votes. But now we've got good men, Yale men. It won't happen anymore." Well, the number of people on welfare in New York City went from 345,000 to 1,165,000 under Lindsay.

[Q] Playboy: You expect help from Carter. Can he solve the welfare problem?

[A] Moynihan:Sure he can.... There are two ways of solving it. Either you admit welfare is a national problem and get the Federal Government to pay for it or you try to change the existing system somehow. President Carter is committed to the latter. Obviously, there's a question as to whether Congress will go halfway or all the way. That's part of the politics of the next two years.

[Q] Playboy: Considering your crack about Yale men, you're something of a Harvard elitist who doesn't believe in the moral certitude of solutions worked out by elitists.

[A] Moynihan: Right. The president of Yale, Kingman Brewster, a notably fatuous man, once asked a faculty group, "What has happened to American morality?" Alexander Bickel, the law professor, replied, "We are drowning in it." Our capacity for moral judgments is being overloaded by a certain kind of moralist who makes too many activities into issues of right and wrong.

[A] Hell, I'm a good example. I'm sitting aboard a plane as I talk to you. I've just had a drink of the cheapest orange juice I've ever had--and been badly served. And I'm investing it with moral significance. There is a degree of dereliction of duty that attains to moral infraction.... My God, there's an epigram!

[Q] Playboy: We're following you, Senator, but just barely. Didn't you once write that it is hard for Government to appear to have succeeded?

[A] Moynihan: It is in the nature of democracy to promise that things will keep changing for the better. These promises translate into the realization that what exists is not satisfactory. It's what economist Joseph Schumpeter called the creative destruction of capitalism. After 10,000 years of plowing in the sun, using your back, using your wife, using your ox, along comes a Model T and farmers are out of the mud. But within 20 short years, the Model T isn't enough and has become an adjective for something out of date. When, with great difficulty, Government pulls off something pretty good, the sensation doesn't last.

[Q] Playboy: You mean people saying, "If we can land a man on the moon, why can't we cure the common cold?"

[A] Moynihan: You've got it. In India, that is the first and primal condition and fact of life: All water is poison. Well! If you live in a world where a man like me develops an atavistic attachment for Coca-Cola, well.... Why is Coca-Cola the most indomitable, irresistible ...? Because you don't get dysentery from it.

[A] But try to tell people who live in Manhattan, "You're successful. You've got pure water." They'll ask, "What else have we got? Can you cure the common cold?" Creative destruction is part of our discontent.

[Q] Playboy: Is built-in obsolescence of success related to our loss of national morale?

[A] Moynihan: We have been on a great S curve of progress. Once we could only shout across the street. Now we have the dial telephone. The miracle has happened; you can talk to anybody in the world. I mean, phonovision isn't really much to add. And that is what is happening in urban programs and things like that. We are on the flat curve at the top of the S. We can't budge. There's no place to go. And conditions of life are not going to improve so very much.

[Q] Playboy: The social scientists aren't going to be happy to hear that news.

[A] Moynihan: Oh, they can do a lot of things. The most useful, maybe, is to tell us what we can't do. There is just one social program of which its sponsors have said, "That works." And that is castration, as a treatment of sexual offenders. And you know where they practice that? Denmark.

[A] Greeley and Rossi in 1964 did a great study on how well the Catholic parochial schools did what they purposed to do--influence the religious practices of the children who went there. And this was the rather depressing conclusion: They don't.

[A] The first results came in on Head Start and, "My God, it's marvelous! These four-year-olds from Head Start know twice as much as these four-year-olds who haven't been." But by the time they were all six, everybody knew about the same amount. Our assumption about how much you can influence behavior through manipulating this institution or this institution--more money here, less there or whatever--turns out to be wrong. The Safe Streets Act was a disaster. You spend four billion dollars and you don't get anything. Because you don't know anything about that. You've got to face up to what you haven't been able to do.

[Q] Playboy: Where does that leave us?

[A] Moynihan: No happier, but with fewer illusions--and illusions produce expectations. And when illusions are not delivered on, that is easily interpreted as bad faith. You said you could do such and such, but you didn't. Therefore, it meant you didn't intend to. That's not good for anybody. You set out to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese and you don't know how to do that. And the next tiling you know, you're calling one another names in the most awful way.

[Q] Playboy: Earlier, you sounded optimistic, even excited about the possibilities of shaping Government in the Senate. Now you're sounding a bit more realistic about what can be changed. What do you think you'll affect in the Senate?

[A] Moynihan: Let me give you an example. I had a family-assistance plan before the Senate for three years. It was essentially a negative-income-tax plan, but at the end of the three years, I doubt there were a dozen Senators who really understood the principle of a negative income tax any more than I understand nuclear fission. The question I have come to be preoccupied with is that of collective intelligence. There isn't a lot of it in Government, compounding the troubles we already have. The intelligence of a democracy is easily strained. One last question on a topic we discussed earlier: Do you expect criticism for appearing in Playboy?

[A] Moynihan: No, not at all. I expect that people will read this to see what I have to say, to agree or disagree. It should serve to get people to think a bit more seriously about our form of Government. Doing something like this in depth has gotten me to reflect a bit on the past few years and on the future. I look forward myself to seeing it in print--and to the photography as well.

"Being in the Senate means you must be absolutely fearless and try to be intelligent. I expect to be a good Senator."

"If I hadn't made my target of a 600,000 vote lead in New York, it's probable that Carter would have gone down. We might have, had a great constitutional crisis."

"The popular view of Eisenhower was that he was a boob. It was very agreeable to think, He's not as smart as I am. That's the way people got their balls cut off."

"After Oswald was killed, I went around Washington saying, 'Look, we have to investigate the murder of Kennedy as if it were, in fact, a plot.'"

"Absent Liddy and what would there have been? An enemies list? What the hell was that? Who not, to ask to dinner at the White House."

"When India ceased to be a democracy, our actual interest there plummeted. I mean, what does it export but communicable disease?"

"Nobody dares say this. The leaders of underdeveloped nations ride around in Mercedes, while the people in the bush walk around in bare feet."

"The biggest problem in the period ahead is that nobody is confidently--much less passionately--bringing new ideas to Government."