Playboy Interview: Daniel Patrick Moynihan

a candid conversation with the washington legend about the danger posed by a wounded president, kenneth starr's "police state" and why richard nixon was really a liberal

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, senior senator from New York, is a man with clout. He is not a Washington media superstar, perhaps because he hardly ever gets called to testify to grand juries about hanky-panky. Moynihan gets in the papers regularly, however, and has been doing so for nearly four decades, by sticking to the important stuff such as where your money goes.

"He's a very honest man, which means everything," says Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). "You know he's going to tell you how he really feels, sometimes to his disadvantage. People like him. He's truly one of the icons around here." According to conservative columnist George Will, "Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the finest senator ever. Period!" Will noted that the 17 books Moynihan has written or edited are "more books than most senators have read."

Pat Moynihan makes news the way civics books would have every senator do it--by taking strong, well-informed positions on important issues. He has been mentioned in recent dispatches from battles over Social Security reform, the expansion of NATO, the dangers of the line-item veto, public transportation for the 21st century, the revived menace of nuclear war--even the architecture of Washington

Moynihan is the ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee, a body that oversees half of all federal expenditures. He also serves on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Joint Committee on Taxation. He once explained why he wanted to work on the Finance Committee by quoting bank robber Willie Sutton: "That's where the money is." It's fair to say that Moynihan's business is very often your business.

Part of his clout comes from an extraordinary Washington résumé. He served four consecutive presidents--Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford--in cabinet or subcabinet posts, the only person in American history to have done so. He has been a senator since 1977 and a key player in shaping important domestic and international issues, from welfare to arms control.

In a tawdry capital, Moynihan's charisma is striking. His candor makes him unpredictable, and often surprising. He had been reticent, for example--at least until he talked to us--about Washington's long-running sexual witch-hunt and the damage anti-Clinton zealots may do to the nation. He is more than entitled to that opinion--in 1994 he was the first Democratic senator to call for an independent prosecutor to investigate Whitewater.

His history with the president reveals a romance gone sour. The beginning was a honeymoon of sorts, during which Hillary Clinton sent Moynihan her college thesis and Moynihan returned it graded A. But when President Clinton conspicuously spurned Moynihan's advice about the reform of the welfare system, Moynihan in turn gave the first lady's health care plans a failing grade. Moynihan chided the White House for "the clatter of campaign promises being tossed out the window. " And he described a Clinton initiative on welfare as "boob bait for the bubbas."

Moynihan's style is distinctive. Just ask Tim Russert, host of "Meet the Press," who served as Moynihan's press aide between 1977 and 1982. One day Moynihan elected to return a reporter's call himself and spoke at length in his trademark cultured and patrician tones. Finally the reporter spoke up to the senator.

"Fuck off, Russert," the reporter said, assuming he was hearing one of Russert's quietly famous imitations of his boss.

Russert is just one of many staffers, including younger senators, who enjoy mimicking Moynihan's manner, of which the college professor's voice is just one part. Moynihan favors pinstripes and an Irish tweed hat. He is tall (6'4") and lanky, famously uncoordinated yet courtly. His hair is snowy and his rosy face unlined. His manner is often flamboyant. He can pound his desk in anger or clap his hands in delight at someone's clever turn of phrase.

Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1927 and grew up with a younger brother and sister just outside New York City, where the family enjoyed a suburban, middle-class life--for a while. His father was a hard-drinking advertising copywriter for RKO who made extra money during the early years of the Depression by concocting movie titles. In 1937, when Pat was ten, his father walked away from the family, never to be seen again. Margaret Moynihan moved her children through a series of worn apartments in New York City. Eventually, Pat's mother opened a saloon on 42nd Street near the Hudson.

Pat shined shoes in Times Square, graduated first in his class at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem and worked as a stevedore on the Hudson River piers. He enrolled in City College and, after a year of study, enlisted in the Navy's officer training program. He received an ensign's commission in 1946 and was assigned to a repair ship in Norfolk, Virginia. After receiving his discharge in 1947, Moynihan went on to earn a B.A. and M.A. from Tufts University.

In the early Fifties he studied at the London School of Economics on a Fulbright Scholarship. Moynihan returned to the States in 1953 and worked for Robert Wagner's mayoral campaign. From 1955 to 1958 he served as an aide to New York Governor Averell Harriman. After a stint as an assistant professor at Syracuse University he received his Ph.D. in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.

In 1961 Moynihan took a job in the Labor Department, and two years later was appointed an assistant secretary of labor. He helped develop President Johnson's war on poverty and became widely known after preparing a Labor Department paper, subsequently dubbed the "Moynihan Report," which warned of the threat posed to the black family by the increasing number of out-of-wedlock births. When the report was made public, it aroused a furor. Moynihan was roundly vilified and accused of inflaming racial tensions.

After an unsuccessful bid for New York City Council president, Moynihan took a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University. Between 1966 and 1969 he served as director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at MIT and Harvard. He returned to Washington in 1969 and served as President Nixon's chief urban policy advisor. Nixon and Moynihan almost engineered passage of the Family Assistance Plan, which would have guaranteed an income for all Americans. In 1972 Nixon named Moynihan ambassador to India, where he served until 1975 when President Ford named him ambassador to the United Nations. Playing "the U.S. spokesman feared for the truths he might tell," Moynihan warned the UN was becoming "a theater of the absurd."

When he was elected to the Senate in 1976, Moynihan toned down his flamboyance. "You don't get anywhere in the Senate by being a smartass from New York," he explained. Every day for his first ten years he ate lunch with other senators at the common table in the Senate dining room, where he forged powerful friendships. Along the way he and his wife of 43 years, Elizabeth, raised two sons and one daughter.

With all that clout, Moynihan seemed just the person to reveal what is really going on in Washington these days. We turned to writer Richard Meryman, an old friend of Moynihan's who first interviewed him for Playboy more than 20 years ago. Meryman's report:

"I began this interview nearly a year ago and met the senator in his New York office, at the Carlyle bar, at restaurants in New York and Washington--and most productively in his sanctum in the Russell Senate Office Building. His office has the feel of a Victorian parlor, with muted lighting, dark wood and 19th century American art. There are two walls of books, a fireplace, an antique desk, a manual typewriter on a small table and an enormous, open dictionary. One table holds nearly 60 honorary degree citations. In one corner is a life-size papier-mâché statue, done by his son Timothy, of Thomas Jefferson in a shirt and vest, britches, long stockings and buckle shoes, holding a roll of paper and a quill pen. Framed letters adorn a wall. One of them begins, 'With respect and admiration from one who hopes to learn half as much as you know about what bedevils us and what to do about it.' It's signed Bill Clinton. The president's current problems seemed like a good place to start."

[Q] Playboy: Is Kenneth Starr playing fair?

[A] Moynihan: It appears to me that Starr has politicized a process created to take an inquiry out of politics. This thing began in Arkansas in the Seventies, and suddenly they're talking about what book Miss Lewinsky bought at which bookstore in Washington last year. What is that?

[Q] Playboy: Do you disapprove of what's happening?

[A] Moynihan: Yes, of course. A Frenchman whose name I don't recall said, "The Americans have this beautiful democracy and then every so often they lapse into this police state." You start taping people in conversations at a bar or in a hotel, wiring people.

[Q] Playboy: What does it all mean?

[A] Moynihan: I'll leave that to you. But we want to be careful with the institution of the presidency. A wounded president cannot govern well. I think we are being much too casual about this matter. Even though he's a lame-duck president, popularity and prestige can make him a formidable negotiator. But if he's diminished, he will not have the influence he needs with Congress. Legislators won't be afraid of him, won't want to help resolve a problem. They might act like they are, but they're not: "I don't want you to succeed, friend. I want your job. I know I've got two years, but I can wait."

[Q] Playboy: What's different about the behavior of a wounded president?

[A] Moynihan: The damage becomes a hurt as well as an injury. He would say to himself, Why is this happening to me? I don't deserve this. That's the mood in which he gets up in the morning, and he starts thinking about Saddam Hussein or what to do in Bosnia, or how to get that Start II treaty ratified. You have to watch that you don't paralyze the government.

[Q] Playboy: Has the legal process itself been a factor?

[A] Moynihan: The Supreme Court was very casual in a 9--0 decision, saying a president can be sued in a civil case. There will never be a president who someone isn't going to want to take to court. If he has to defend himself while he's president, he will spend his time thinking about that. It is outrageous that the president should have to respond to these questions, such horrible questions, while he's the president.

[Q] Playboy: So Clinton's zipper problems could virtually immobilize him?

[A] Moynihan: Yes. And needlessly and wantonly, but it will have had nothing to do with his performance as president. I saw it happen to Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam war. Distraction. Obsessed with leaks and flailing about looking for the leaker, which in turn narrowed his circle of advisors. He became preoccupied with what his enemies were doing, and spotted more enemies than there probably were, and in the end said, "There are too many enemies. I have to leave."

[Q] Playboy: Any advice for Clinton?

[A] Moynihan: Politically right now, it might be good for him to become interested in education.

[Q] Playboy: How would you vote on renewing the Independent Counsel Act?

[A] Moynihan: I think I would vote no. If there's a problem, let it be solved in the courts after a president is out of office.

[Q] Playboy: But you were the first Democratic senator to recommend an independent counsel for the Whitewater investigation.

[A] Moynihan: That was on television and I was being a little glib. The office of independent prosecutor was created to clean everything up, to take politics out of investigations. Starr has put politics into it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think this sort of sexual witch-hunt will become permanent?

[A] Moynihan: No, no. It will pass. I mean, we have a moment in which the U.S. is the preeminent nation in the world and has the finest economy and the greatest armed services. Perhaps there's nothing else to do.

[Q] Playboy: Have any investigators knocked on your door?

[A] Moynihan: In 1995 I got word that some people from the FBI would like to see me. They said, "We have reason to believe that Chinese forces may be interested in giving you money." And I said, "I thank you very much for that." I'm old enough by now not to say, "Why do you have reason to believe?" because they fucking well have wiretaps or satellites pick it up. The FBI never came to see me [laughs]. I think there is evidence of a Chinese attack on our political system, in the campaign finances of 1996. And I think there should have been an independent counsel investigating that.

[Q] Playboy: But the Chinese never gave you any money?

[A] Moynihan: Not a fortune cookie, much less a fortune.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of a guy is Clinton?

[A] Moynihan: It may not be generally understood how wide-ranging his interests are. He's always asking people down for seminars. He loves policy stuff. He reads everything. He may read too much. There can be a tendency when you're president to take on more things than you can have any serious impact on. Give Ronald Reagan credit. He wasn't always listening, but he cared deeply about a few ideas and he stuck with them. He didn't bother with anything else. And that's not the worst kind of president. If you focus more, you will get more.

[Q] Playboy: When Clinton makes a commitment to you, do you trust him?

[A] Moynihan: Oh yeah, sure. He doesn't overpromise in personal relationships.

[Q] Playboy: But Clinton signed the welfare bill in 1996 that repealed Aid to Families with Dependent Children. You were disappointed and surprised. What happened?

[A] Moynihan: Well, Mr. Dick Morris was doing his polling and telling Clinton, "Sign the bill and win the election." This administration came into the White House with views exactly the opposite of everything they are now doing. When we lost the midterm election, getting re-elected became everything. Welfare policy became welfare politics.

[Q] Playboy: During the debate The Washington Post ran a story saying that you, a lifelong authority on welfare policy, had stayed on the sidelines.

[A] Moynihan: But day after day they were running stories on what I was doing and saying about the bill.

[Q] Playboy: Such as?

[A] Moynihan: That the bill does not "reform" anything, but simply abolishes aid to families; that it ignores research on the problem; that the bill will increase poverty and destitution, especially among "the least among us"--and that the evidence proving all this is plentiful.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us why you were surprised when the bill passed.

[A] Moynihan: The Senate was going to send the president a welfare bill that repealed AFDC and that made some real changes in Medicaid. But one morning in July 1996 a rumor rumbled around the capital that House Republicans had said, "Dole isn't going to win this election, and without him in the White House, we'll lose on this bill. So we'll split off Medicaid and send the president a welfare bill he can sign--and we can all say we did this." We passed the two bills out of the Finance Committee, and I walked out thinking, My God, we made it. Clinton will veto this bad welfare bill and then the election will come and it won't happen again.

[Q] Playboy: When did you know you were wrong?

[A] Moynihan: That afternoon we met in Dick Gephardt's conference room on the House side, and I said, "Surely this Democratic Party is not going to preside over the dismantling of the Social Security Act of 1935? That's our great achievement." Leon Panetta turned to me and said, "Pat, we've already made our decision." OK. So I got up and left.

[Q] Playboy: What's wrong with the new welfare law?

[A] Moynihan: The premise of the legislation is that you can change the behavior of certain adults by making the lives of their children as wretched as possible. I think the current batch in the White House had and have only the flimsiest grasp of social reality. They think from the perspective of those who have never had the experience of helplessness and who don't have a very good grounding in social conviction. They have no idea how bad a problem we could have in four years--a million people in New York City with no support. They just have a gut feeling that if you don't make this lifestyle possible, it won't occur. It will stop. Well, that's a big bet. I think it's wrong. It's a social risk that no sane person would take.

[Q] Playboy: It seemed that Clinton hinted he was running against the bill, right after he signed the bill.

[A] Moynihan: Yes. We have to reelect President Clinton so he can undo the welfare bill. But you know, he could have done it by vetoing it. There's been no suggestion in this second administration that we are changing the bill. Not one suggestion.

[Q] Playboy: Social Security reform has been in the headlines and you've been called controversial--as well as quite courageous--just for talking about a sensitive subject. Would you agree?

[A] Moynihan: It's not courageous at all. We're ready for a conversation about Social Security. I came up with a proposal and put it in a bill. It's been said since then that I broke the taboo, if that's the word--that I touched what used to be called "the third rail of politics."

[Q] Playboy: What is your recommendation for Social Security?

[A] Moynihan: I said, "Look, you have to do several things and you'll be OK. You have to get a correct cost-of-living adjustment, which means cutting the Consumer Price Index, which is not a cost-of-living index. You have to increase the amount of income that is taxable. You have to extend the years you calculate benefits on from 35 to 37. You can cut down, take two points off--two percentage points of the present payroll tax. Bring it down from 12.4 to 10.4. Then let people put the other 2 percent into a thrift savings plan.

[Q] Playboy: Will Congress really do something to reform the IRS?

[A] Moynihan: We recently sent an IRS-re-form bill out of the Finance Committee, 20--0. It will be hell's own time before it becomes law, but it will be signed.

[Q] Playboy: It will be signed?

[A] Moynihan: Yeah. The president said that he is outraged about the way things are. So anything you can get on that bill will become law too.

[Q] Playboy: Clinton surprised you on welfare. Are you sure about him this time?

[A] Moynihan: He wants this bill but he may not want some of the things that get added to it. But he can't not sign it, because he's already made a speech saying what's going on at the IRS is outrageous. one Republican said, "It must be a pretty good idea, because Clinton's already stolen it."

[Q] Playboy: You have sponsored legislation--with Senator Jesse Helms--that would greatly reduce the number of official government secrets. What's your problem with secrecy?

[A] Moynihan: Secrecy dulls the senses. It cuts off criticism. The number of secrets created by the federal government in 1996 went up 62 percent from 1995. We now have 3 million civil servants and military officers with the right to classify information--stamp, stamp, stamp--keeping things from one another. They have created roughly 400,000 top-secret documents whose revelation would supposedly create "exceptionally grave damage to the national security." Extremely improbable!

[Q] Playboy: Where did the problem come from?

[A] Moynihan: Secrecy is the normal behavior of a bureaucracy. It's a way to hide mistakes and decisions from criticism-- and to write regulations that are pernicious because you don't even know you're being regulated. The M.O. is to present the worst case possible--that's the ticket. Operating from that false belief, we wasted trillions building up our defenses. In 1982 we were the world's leading creditor nation. By 1988 we were its largest debtor. That's the way the Cold War ended. The Iran-contra operation could function in the National Security Council because only a few people knew about it. That operation could have been a true constitutional crisis. In any other circumstance, it would have been an impeachable offense. But Reagan was liked. Nobody hated him. And he was leaving office anyway.

[Q] Playboy: Does President Clinton share your concerns about secrecy?

[A] Moynihan: He's been good about this, but it's not a priority. Unless the president decides to open up government, secrecy will go on indefinitely and cause trouble. The public begins to think that maybe government is the source of the conspiracies directed against us. And how do you know, if you can't find out? And so you get the Timothy McVeighs--people who really think that this government is not theirs: "They don't represent me!" You have to trust government. That's so fundamental. The CIA has the mentality that it's an important agency because it knows things others don't know. "Take away my secrets, you take away my status. But I'll trade secrets with other agencies--I'll give you my secret if you give me yours." They don't care about what the American public needs to know.

[Q] Playboy: The line-item veto sounds like a good way to help balance the budget by stopping Congress from wasting money. Do you agree?

[A] Moynihan: If you think that, then you know nothing about the presidency and little about Congress. In effect, the way it works is that the president does not veto many things. He just lets you know he can. He says, "Dick, I know how much this radiation lab means to you and how much it means to New York and I want it for you. But Dick, you know, I just have to have NATO expansion and you can help me there, can't you?" So if you don't vote for expanded NATO, you won't get your lab.

[Q] Playboy: We'll get to NATO in a minute--but how does the line-item veto affect your work?

[A] Moynihan: When you put together a tax bill, for example, you often do it one vote at a time. This fellow wants this, and that lady wants that, and eventually you have 50 votes, or 52 or 53 or 54. And that's the way it was meant to be. You put together this interest and that interest and that interest. If the president can take out four or five of those provisions, you will have a bill that never would have passed otherwise.

[Q] Playboy: What is the line-item veto's historical significance?

[A] Moynihan: When a president can go through a bill and take out this and take out that--and what's left becomes law--that is a profound change of power that was not contemplated by the men who wrote the Constitution. If the Supreme Court upholds it, it will cause the greatest change in executive-legislative relations, the balance between the president and Congress, in the history of the nation. [In a 6--3 decision on June 25 the Supreme Court found the Line Item Veto Act unconstitutional.]

[Q] Playboy: You're not exaggerating this a bit?

[A] Moynihan: A respected lawyer here in town who's been counsel to the president said to me, "If Lyndon Johnson had had this power, we'd have had a Nero."

[Q] Playboy: Could our government have prevented the nuclear saber rattling now going on between India and Pakistan?

[A] Moynihan: We could have paid more attention earlier. Their plans were not secret; they were asserted. Now, we must somehow keep the Islamic bomb from spreading to the Middle East.

[Q] Playboy: Let's turn to another controversial subject--the plan to expand NATO to include Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. Do you think that's a good idea?

[A] Moynihan: I think it's a disaster. NATO is an alliance put together to oppose the expansion of the Soviet Union. And there is no Soviet Union.

[Q] Playboy: What could go wrong?

[A] Moynihan: We could get ourselves back into a nuclear standoff with the Russians because all Russia has now is its nuclear weapons. Its army has disintegrated. Its air force--it doesn't have one. Its navy is rusting in a Ukrainian port in the Black Sea. I jolted some people recently when I gave a speech and said, "We're asking for nuclear war." This is now, once again, the subject. Today, after half a century of nuclear terror that we thought we had negotiated away, the nuclear threat is in the hands of a desperate, angry, beleaguered, irrational, besieged country that feels it's being cast down. Now our principal ideological adversary has been succeeded by a nationalist adversary armed in the same manner--and scared, and angry. That situation could become far more unstable. But this idea doesn't seem to sink in with anyone. In the meantime the White House is pressing for the expansion of NATO, which will make Russians refuse to ratify any arms treaty. The whole triumph of the West could collapse because we failed to finish up a program of arms control. The Soviet Union entered the post-Cold War era shattered. We entered it broke--self-inflicted. We are not paying our dues to the United Nations, for God's sake. Come on, grown-up countries do not do that. We should be buying the Russian warheads and dismantling them. Surely we can seize the chance to avoid Armageddon.

[Q] Playboy: If expanding NATO is such a bad idea, why does it have so much support?

[A] Moynihan: Ignorance and domestic politics. We think of Russia as the Soviet Union and we see it as an aggressive force, always ready to conquer somebody. Then there's the power of ethnicity in U.S. domestic politics.

[Q] Playboy: You make NATO expansion sound as dangerous as Iraq is.

[A] Moynihan: The biggest danger in the Iraq situation is that it could break up the seemingly promising relationship between Russia--which views the Persian Gulf as its part of the world--and the U.S. That would be a huge loss. The cost of losing an improved U.S.-Russian relationship could be beyond belief. Welcome to the 21st century.

[Q] Playboy: You were among the first to predict the Soviet Union's collapse. What tipped you off?

[A] Moynihan: In 1979 I wrote an article for Newsweek arguing that the Soviet Union was almost certainly going to break up in the Eighties and we better watch out. Having been ambassador to India, I saw that all around me the great European empires--British, Dutch, French, Portuguese--had disappeared. So what made us think that this wouldn't happen in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and so on? Ethnicity is far more powerful than anybody understood. And the life expectancy of males had begun to decline in the Soviet Union, and that doesn't decline anywhere. So you ask yourself, What's that? But nobody heard.

[Q] Playboy: Fundamentalism is a big problem at home and abroad. Are you lobbied by the Christian right?

[A] Moynihan: I will say this to you and if you can print it, do. Once a year the anti-abortion people come to Washington. They are the only people who come to see me. I shouldn't say "only," but they are the one group that comes to see me that doesn't want anything other than to discuss a moral issue it's concerned with. I might meet three or four other people a year like that, but not many. They're the only working people I ever see. They come down by bus. They don't go out to lunch at the mall. They just want to say they have a view of something. I've always voted against them.

[Q] Playboy: But the Christian right has other issues besides abortion. Some members say every word of the Bible is literally true and they want to impose their views on everyone else. The movement seems pretty important. Do you agree?

[A] Moynihan: It is hugely important. And there's nothing new about this. At different times in our history there have been very important political movements that were basically religious or concerned with matters of conscience. Abolition was one, out of which came the Republican Party. Prohibition was another. And abortion is a third. Roe vs. Wade just shook the conscience of a large segment of the American population, particularly the fundamentalist Protestants, who were quite content to live a life that didn't have much politics in it. They didn't have politics, they had their own religious concerns. Suddenly a matter of true import to them became the law of the land by a decision of the Supreme Court. And they thought, What is this? This has to change. And gradually they became a political force.

[Q] Playboy: Do you consider the Christian right dangerous?

[A] Moynihan: No, good God. They're the nicest people in the world if you leave their consciences alone. And if you don't, it's not the first time in history you get resentment. The Catholic Church is just as involved, but the Catholic Church has a wider agenda. In the way we are now using the word, the Catholic social doctrine is liberal. If you're talking about minimum wage or something like that, they're with you all the time.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel you have to take the Christian right, creationism and all, into account?

[A] Moynihan: Well, you'd better if you're thinking to run for president.

[Q] Playboy: That makes them sound very powerful.

[A] Moynihan: They are. We may lose our voting rights in the General Assembly because we passed a bill that would pay almost $1 billion in UN dues, but it included a provision that no money will go to any organization that performs abortions. The president has said he will veto the bill over that issue. If you go two years without paying your dues--which may happen if this impasse is not resolved--you can lose your voting rights in the General Assembly.

[Q] Playboy: This is bizarre.

[A] Moynihan: Yeah. And it's a big thing for us to lose our voting rights over something--over what?

[Q] Playboy: So a minority can make international policy?

[A] Moynihan: The Southern Baptists aren't exactly a minority. The Supreme Court is. And if nine people can say that something they find absolutely morally unacceptable is the law of the land, well, that makes people think.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned running for president. Did you ever consider it?

[A] Moynihan: No. I just never for a moment imagined myself doing it. I don't have any executive abilities. My wife, Liz, keeps the checkbook.

[Q] Playboy: You started working in Washington in the Kennedy administration in 1961. How different are things now?

[A] Moynihan: In the early days of the Clinton administration, I found myself in a meeting in the Oval Office with the president, the vice president and the committee chairmen from the Senate. And I found myself thinking that when I was first in that room, I was the youngest person present. And I looked around and realized, my God, now I'm the second oldest--only Robert Byrd was older. Without your ever having noticed it, things creep up on you.

[Q] Playboy: Any other indelible memories of the Oval Office?

[A] Moynihan: The cleat marks on the floor made by Eisenhower's golf shoes. Would it help you to know that Dwight Eisenhower never learned how to use a dial telephone? He just picked up the phone and there was an operator. It didn't mean he couldn't invade Europe.

[Q] Playboy: Are you technologically savvy?

[A] Moynihan: I still type letters.

[Q] Playboy: What else strikes you as a big change over the years?

[A] Moynihan: Since Watergate, Washington has become a dangerous place to work. The least little allegation can be catastrophic to one's reputation or destroy a person's finances. There are people in the White House who, quite literally, will almost certainly die in debt. Secretaries, for instance. All those lawyers you see hanging around outside the grand jury room typically charge $300 to $500 an hour. In short order you can find yourself owing $200,000 to your lawyers, just to explain that you haven't done anything.

[Q] Playboy: You worked in the administrations of four presidents. Does one of them stand out?

[A] Moynihan: Well, the one you had to love was Gerald Ford. He's just such a good man. And talk about how life isn't fair! Remember when he was running for reelection and he kept seemingly bumping his head on airplanes? I mean, here's a man who's a genuine athlete. It looked like he stumbled around. He didn't stumble at all.

[Q] Playboy: What was Kennedy's greatest strength?

[A] Moynihan: His generation came into office. He was a special man in his own right. He spoke about the enormous optimism with which America came out of World War Two. Kennedy thought he would prevail. And he did very odd things. He gave a speech in which he said, "I think America, in this decade, should send a man to the moon and bring him back safely." Wow! In the same speech he said we should go to Vietnam.

[Q] Playboy: But in terms of intellectual prowess, accomplishment, who was best?

[A] Moynihan: They all had their qualities. Lyndon Johnson had the best knowledge of the way Congress works. That's knowledge not every president has.

[Q] Playboy: Was LBJ an idealist?

[A] Moynihan: He was as much an idealist as anybody who's lived his life in the Senate will be. He would say to people, "You think I'm going to fire you and send you home? No, no, no. I'm going to keep you here and make you wish you never came to Washington" [laughs].

[Q] Playboy: What was your first impression of Richard Nixon?

[A] Moynihan: Very proper in cabinet meetings and respectful of form. He was someone who knew a great deal about government and was interested in it and was not at all the person people said he was. He was perhaps basically a liberal.

[Q] Playboy: Nixon a liberal? Why do you say that?

[A] Moynihan: Nixon was part of the politics that came out of World War Two, in which the role of government was assumed to be proper and necessary and successful. He was surrounded by the most active government in domestic life since the Thirties. I mean, there was the Environmental Protection Agency, the end of the dual school system in the South--Nixon did all sorts of things. He had a most explicitly Keynesian budget. They built in a deficit, which was the difference between what revenues at full employment would be and what revenues would in fact be. As a stimulus. I can't imagine anybody doing things like that today. And then the federal government started sharing revenue with states and cities. Nixon had a very active urban policy.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe he was bipolar.

[A] Moynihan: Well, he was that.

[Q] Playboy: What was it like to talk to him outside a big meeting?

[A] Moynihan: He once asked me if I would give him a list of books that I thought a president ought to have read. He was absolutely captured by Blake's biography of Disraeli, the British prime minister. Disraeli said it's been Tory men with liberal principles who have changed the world. Nixon liked the idea that he was a Republican who could do things Democrats could never get done. That's what going to China was for him.

[Q] Playboy: Did Nixon mind disagreement?

[A] Moynihan: No, he was perfectly happy with a White House that had three entirely different points of view. It didn't trouble him. He didn't need uniformity. He didn't mind arguments. He kind of liked them.

[Q] Playboy: Did Nixon make the correct decisions?

[A] Moynihan: I think in the main he did, until he went crazy over Watergate.

[Q] Playboy: How do you square your rather admiring picture of Nixon with the image of a paranoid in the Oval Office raging against his enemies?

[A] Moynihan: By the time Nixon became president, he had been so beat up in various media that his level of trust was very low. He confronted this world of people who thought he was vaguely dishonest, who called him Tricky Dick and thought they were better than he was. They attacked him as a red-baiter, as this and as that. Well, Nixon must have thought they all hated him. That can be a traumatizing and twisting experience. In situations of crisis he became unstable. That's why he handled Watergate the way he did. He thought nobody would impeach him for a little slip like that. He didn't imagine it would develop into a question of his own character and the crime of concealment. At one point, when some of the Watergate tapes were coming out, The Wall Street Journal ran a nice editorial which said, "You can't imagine anything like that being said with Arthur Burns or Pat Moynihan in the room." Nixon segmented his life.

[Q] Playboy: Is there a hidden agenda that drives politics in Washington?

[A] Moynihan: There's a background drama going on in Washington at all times, and that is: Who's going to be the next president? Senators have an extraordinary disposition to hear Hail to the Chief from under their beds every morning. By and large they don't succeed in reaching the White House, but boy, they do try!

[Q] Playboy: So a lot of the congressional hyperbole and hypocrisy, the breast-beating and righteous indignation, is simply a way to get press coverage and seem presidential. Isn't that extremely divisive?

[A] Moynihan: You would be surprised how everything is done with a smile, and those are the rules. There's no point in getting mad in the Senate. It doesn't get you anywhere. I was too young for indignation when I arrived in Washington and I'm too old for it now.

[Q] Playboy: What does the smile mean?

[A] Moynihan: That I'm going to be asking you to cooperate with me in four hours. And you will need me to help pass your bill. You always refer to your "distinguished colleague." "Tell my distinguished colleague that I think he's a lying bastard!"

[Q] Playboy: Is courage a plentiful commodity in Washington these days?

[A] Moynihan: Well, presidents are elected. They can't be elected indefinitely. Just how often are you willing to do something that would jeopardize your reelection? We're not talking about battlefield courage. But if your whole life is in politics and something comes along and you think it is the right thing to do but your constituents probably don't--what do you do?

[Q] Playboy: Debates are often quite bitter nowadays. Has this happened before?

[A] Moynihan: Jonathan Swift laid out our situation in Gulliver's Travels. There was an empire divided between people who believed a boiled egg should be opened at the big end and those who believed in opening an egg at the small end. No compromise was possible. The Little Endians prevailed. The Big Endians fled to other countries, raised armies and made allegiances with foreign princes. Fleets were destroyed, armies clashed, there were invasions, horrors. It's like our trip to Israel for Yitzhak Rabin's funeral. You remember that Mr. Gingrich was not allowed to leave by the front entrance of the president's plane: literally the big end vs. the little end. No compromise was possible, unless you kicked out the windows.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think will become of the Republican revolution?

[A] Moynihan: Well, the Republicans did develop a powerful conservative ideology--new and different and heretical. As a result, Republicans are now thinking in terms of doctrine. In negotiations with Newt Gingrich, he will say to you in a very open and friendly way, "Now, is this doctrinal with you?" And if you say it's doctrinal--there's no give here--that's OK. What's the position you could compromise on? He is making that distinction.

[Q] Playboy: How has the Republican doctrine worked out?

[A] Moynihan: Not well. The Contract with America has not been so popular as they thought it would be. A lot of the conservative rhetoric, when put to the test, hasn't been very conservative at all. And I think some of the more severe conservatives are finding out that Congress is not the awful place they had understood it to be.

[Q] Playboy: Do the debates on the floor of the Senate ever really change anybody's mind? Sometimes the floor is almost empty.

[A] Moynihan: I think in 21 years in the Senate, I have only once or twice heard a debate where we changed votes on the floor. That usually happens in committee, where the real work is done.

[Q] Playboy: Why have the debates?

[A] Moynihan: Well, people make their cases for your next election, and get themselves on television. Why not? I got myself 20 seconds of fame recently on NBC talking about NATO. I mentioned nuclear war. I thought it was 20 seconds but it turned out to be more like eight.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about how the Senate really works. Do civics books even come close?

[A] Moynihan: Well, once in a while you get little epiphanies about the legislative process. In the House they were gathering up the papers once and nobody knew what the hell was in the bill, and the next thing they knew, they had enacted a statute that said, "Tell Gloria to call Jack, number. . . ."

[Q] Playboy: Did we hear that right? Lawmakers vote on laws that they don't understand?

[A] Moynihan: Yes, a lot of times. I once offered a resolution that said no law could be passed and sent to the president until the majority of those who voted in favor of it attested to having read it. It didn't get anywhere.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us how you win, how you get what you want in this system.

[A] Moynihan: In 1993 I put through the Senate the largest tax increase in the history of taxation. It was a goddamn tough thing to do, but we did it.

[Q] Playboy: And you're proud of a tax increase?

[A] Moynihan: You bet! I felt very strongly that we had to persuade the financial markets we had control of our finances, that we would not continue building up the debt and expect inflation to get rid of it. You could argue that showing we could do this was a factor in the second longest expansion in our history--no inflation, almost full employment. But I have to share the credit. The passage of the tax bill came down to one vote. It was Bob Kerrey, the Democrat from Nebraska who ran for president in 1992 and dropped out after the New Hampshire primary.

[Q] Playboy: Did you back him?

[A] Moynihan: Right. I was his one supporter in the Senate. Bob Kerrey is a very special person. You don't win the Congressional Medal of Honor because of the speeches you give. In his view the tax increase was not large enough. He thought we should get rid of this goddamn deficit right now and pay our bills and grow up. On the day of the vote I am waiting around for his decision, and I get a call at about ten in the morning and Bob says, "I'm at the White House. I'm going back to the Senate. Can you come over and see me?" I say, "Sure." I get over to his office and make my way past 15 television cameras--"Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me," And there's Bob and he says, "Pat, I've told the president I'm voting no." I said, "Well, it can't have been a very easy scene." He said, "It wasn't." I gave Bob just one bit of advice. I said, "Why don't you get the hell out of here? I went through 15 camera crews outside and this isn't going to be any place for you to be."

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't you twist his arm?

[A] Moynihan: Because we're grown-ups. I had made my case. He had heard it out and decided otherwise. I did tell my chief of staff, Lawrence O'Donnell, who called Mrs. Moynihan, who was at our farm in upstate New York.

[Q] Playboy: The real power!

[A] Moynihan: Right! She was out in the stable getting ready for the arrival of our grandson, "Prince" Michael Patrick, painting Thomas the Train, an oil drum equipped with bells and whistles and wheels. She was awaiting word of when he would arrive, so she had taken the telephone on a long extension line and put it in the grass near the stable. So O'Donnell calls her, and she says, "What? Kerrey's going to vote no? He can't do that. It will ruin him as a national figure. It will be said he did it for revenge because he had to drop out after the New Hampshire primary. He must not do this to himself." So she puts in a call to Kerrey, who had taken my advice and slipped out of the Senate and gone to see a movie called What's Love Got to Do With It.

[Q] Playboy: This sounds like a great script.

[A] Moynihan: Kerrey came back and there must have been dozens of calls. But he called Liz and she made her pitch: "Bob, I'm sure your reasons are compelling, but you cannot do this to yourself." The conversation went on a bit longer and he said, "You know, I think you're right." At the last minute he comes on the Senate floor and gives a speech: "Mr. President, if you're watching, and I think you are, I've decided to vote for this bill." Bill Clinton phoned Liz and told her, "You saved my presidency."

[Q] Playboy: Most Washington stories aren't so nice. Most stories tend to confirm the New York Times' columnist Russell Baker's claim: "All the evidence suggests that when Americans look at Washington they see a conniving bunch of hustlers playing an insider's game at the expense of the nation." True?

[A] Moynihan: The ancients in Greece and Rome taught that the supreme political quality is virtue. Government would be virtuous men doing virtuous things. Bullshit! Madison called this "the defect of better motives." Meaning, don't bet on virtue. That's in short supply. In our system the avarice and anger and aggression of one party is offset by the avarice and anger and aggression of the other party. And it works very well. Anyway, your virtue is not necessarily mine.

[Q] Playboy: Is that healthy?

[A] Moynihan: Self-interest will be stabilizing. It has been a factor in developing this hugely durable society, which is not threatened in any way by internal forces and is now the indispensable, number one nation on earth. And what Russell Baker--I know and admire him hugely--says people think about Washington is not what goes on in Washington. An amazing number of people are doing their work the best they can.

[Q] Playboy: Does what we see in Washington today bear any resemblance to what the founding fathers intended?

[A] Moynihan: I say to you with a measure of vigor that the framers of the Constitution intended our republic to work precisely as it does--as a system of checks and balances between Congress, the president and the courts. Freedom lies in the interstices of these arrangements. You would be amazed at what would happen if they were lost. With so much power at the center, you would no longer recognize your country.

[Q] Playboy: But only 49 percent of eligible voters voted in the last presidential election. Doesn't that indicate that people are turned off by politics?

[A] Moynihan: Well, you can also have a situation where politics doesn't matter a great deal because the conditions of life are really quite satisfactory. Interestingly, in New York City we had a much higher turnout in the 1880s when Tammany Hall was turning out those votes from the tenements. Maybe buying them. The voter turnout fell off precisely because reformers didn't want those undesirables voting--unlike the people on Fifth Avenue who were to be trusted. How do you know they can be trusted? Well, they're rich. How'd they get rich? None of your business. So reformers made it hard to vote. You had to register, fill out forms, prove citizenship, fulfill residence rules and so on.

[Q] Playboy: Kevin Phillips, publisher of the American Political Report, called Washington "an enterprise zone for ethically disadvantaged officeholders." Why is that?

[A] Moynihan: When I go to the Committee on Environment and Public Works, where I was once chairman, and say, "I want a bridge for New York," nobody says, "But Senator, you're being selfish." I'm supposed to be selfish and look after my constituency. And I don't doubt that another senator wants a highway. After we work it out, the next thing you know, we have an interstate highway system.

[Q] Playboy: But we've had the spectacle of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott blocking a bill that would reform campaign financing while Senator Fred Thompson chaired hearings that could lead to legislation.

[A] Moynihan: The Republicans are in an impossible position. They want to go after the incumbent president for abusing the existing campaign finance system, but they are opposed to changing the system. When Dr. Johnson declared patriotism to be the last refuge of the scoundrel, he underestimated the potential in reform.

[Q] Playboy: Can politics solve the country's problems?

[A] Moynihan: I think that we have cycles in which we bring into politics many issues that politics cannot solve through compromise.

[Q] Playboy: Do you mean moral or cultural issues?

[A] Moynihan: Yes. The next thing you know, you find yourself with a large number of alienated people who are persuaded of the evil of the system and who reject it accordingly.

[Q] Playboy: What's on the horizon?

[A] Moynihan: In the year 2000, there will be 70 million children under 18 in the U.S.--about a quarter of our population--of which 25 million will have been born to single parents. When families break up, children often have lifelong emotional scars--the roots of the drug crisis, the education crisis, teenage pregnancy and juvenile crime. Now if you know that, you know what the conditions of your high schools will be in the year 2010.

[Q] Playboy: Is there anything to be happy about?

[A] Moynihan: After World War Two, we still didn't know we could manage the economy. The top income tax rate was 90 percent, and our gross domestic product had been ricocheting up and down. But we've had 50 years of near-continuous economic growth. It's the most brilliant economy, beyond any imagining. Our unemployment rate is around 4.5 percent, with virtually no inflation. For 30 years economists have believed that you can't have both. So we're getting good at doing something that was thought undoable. It doesn't mean you can't screw it up--and if you can, you will.

[Q] Playboy: What will America be like in the next century?

[A] Moynihan: I think the prediction of the economist John Maynard Keynes is coming to pass. He wrote in 1932, "The problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations is nothing but a transitory and unnecessary muddle, for the Western world already has the resources and the techniques, if we could create the organization to use them, and is capable of reducing the economic problem, which now absorbs our moral and material energies, to a position of secondary importance."

Keynes believed that "the day is not far off when the economic problem will take the backseat where it belongs and the arena of the heart and head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems--the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion."

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that's an encouraging prediction?

[A] Moynihan: If the day comes when we don't have the economic problem and all we can think about is religion, you may long for the age of the general strike. You can compromise on wages. There are moral issues that do not allow compromise and accommodation--and those can be hugely divisive.

[Q] Playboy: Are you optimistic about America's future?

[A] Moynihan: By birth I am a Roman Catholic, which demands that I be optimistic. But I've been a student of history too long not to notice how quickly the mighty can fall. Look at the British Empire: "Dominion over palm and pine." "The sun never sets." Now all is gone. We must take care.

[Q] Playboy: When you come down the mall and see the Capitol--where you have membership in the nation's most exclusive club--rising ahead of you, what goes through your mind?

[A] Moynihan: That there are only a hundred of us, and we'd better get it right.

The White House has only the flimsiest grasp of social reality. It has no idea how bad a problem we could have in four years.

In the Senate, everything is done with a smile, and those are the rules. There's no point in getting mad.