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Since he hung up his trademark Irish plaid hat at the U.N. last July, Moynihan has become one of the most jarring diplomats ever to inhabit the towering glass menagerie on Manhattan's East Side. A big (6 ft. 5 in.), bouncy, exuberant man with a cherubic Irish face and a floppy lock of prematurely gray hair, Moynihan, 48, has a well-developed ability to both charm and infuriate. Walking down a corridor, he can pick up a retinue with a nonstop monologue of patter, pontification and wisecracks ("If the U.N. didn't exist, it would be impossible to invent it").
His style is a blend of Gaelic eloquence, Harvard donnishness and American stump evangelism. In front of a microphone or over a dinner table, he can draw on a broad mental library of recondite words, literary and historical allusions and outlandish bits of jargon to taunt, flatter or flay adversaries. He has stormed the rostrum to denounce the General Assembly as "a theater of the absurd" and to dismiss reports on American imperialism as "rubbish." When something clear and pleasing emerges from U.N. newspeak, he quotes James Joyce to describe the rare phenomenon: "Its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance ... the object achieves its epiphany."
When words fail him, which is almost never, Moynihan does not mind making a point peripatetically: he will wander into the Security Council during a debate, walk around, sit down, get up, go out and come back in. "We sometimes feel that he does not take the Security Council seriously," complains one East Asian diplomat.
Some delegates fume at his hit-and-run habit of simply walking out of the Council or the General Assembly after delivering a tough speech and letting his deputies handle the fallout. On one such occasion, Moynihan started to stroll out of the Assembly when Saudi Arabia's voluble Ambassador Jamil Baroody was standing at the speaker's rostrum. "Come back, sit down, perhaps you may learn something," Baroody taunted. Moynihan came to an abrupt halt, wheeled around, sat down and peered up at Baroody with a look of exaggerated attention on his face.
Moynihan has won understandably mixed reviews at the U.N. The Israelis are delighted. But many Western allies are less enthusiastic. Before he introduced his resolution on worldwide amnesty for political prisoners (which was quickly defeated), Moynihan failed to consult any other delegations. One important Western ambassador first heard of the resolution when he tuned in to
NBC's Today show and heard Moynihan describing it to Barbara Walters as a major American initiative. In a widely publicized outburst last November, Britain's Ambassador Ivor Richard compared Moynihan (without actually naming him) variously to a trigger-happy Wyatt Earp, a vengeful Savonarola and a demented King Lear "raging amidst the storm on the blasted heath." Another Western delegate claims that "never in my U.N. experience have I seen such open criticism of an American ambassador by my colleagues."
On the other hand, some U.N. diplomats admire him without saying so in public. At least one Third World delegate has conceded that his "bluntness was necessary and good."
Certainly much of the U.S. would agree.