(6 of 10)
Heartened by such successes, Moynihan started to take his show on the road. At an AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco last October, he approvingly cited a New York Times editorial that called Uganda's President Idi Amin a "racist murderer" and incorrectly added that it was "no accident" that Amin was chairman of the Organization of African Unity (O.A.U.). Moynihan thus in effect denounced moderate African leaders along with the infamous "Big Daddy"—a mistake that may have cost crucial votes on a motion to postpone, and thus possibly consign to oblivion, the notorious anti-Zionist resolution that the General Assembly passed in November (see chart).
Although most of his skirmishes have been with Third World delegates, last month Moynihan directed his fire at the Soviet Union. When several black African nations introduced an amendment to the apartheid resolution condemning South African intervention in Angola, Moynihan countered by standing up and reading excerpts from news stories that detailed the Soviet presence in Angola. Russia is the new colonizer in Africa, he said. "If this Assembly will not face that fact, then what is the good of this place?"
In this episode, Moynihan sidestepped a tacit understanding that Washington and Moscow would not attack each other by name at the U.N.
—an arrangement that dates back to the Nixon Administration's first experiments with detente. Russia's Ambassador Malik promptly attacked Moynihan as "an emotional man inclined to invent the most sensational assertions." But the amendment was dropped.
Moynihan sees nothing inconsistent between such ideological attacks on the Soviets and the policy of detente, which he considers an act of statecraft" by , Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger "that has not had its equal in our time." The trouble, he believes, is that most Americans fail to understand detente because it involves an inconsistency: the conflict between a "technological imperative" that demands cooperation between the two superpowers to prevent nuclear war, and an "ideological imperative" that demands competition. Detente may well mean more rather than less ideological conflict. But living with such contradictions, he argues breezily, is not at all unnatural."
It has not helped, Moynihan believes, "that we picked the wrong word to describe the process. Detente is a French word—perhaps the cause of precision would have been better served had we chosen something from the German*—which means relaxation of tension, as with physical objects like muscles. Now such wholesale relaxation is exactly what will not happen under detente."
Moynihan's critics say that such subtle distinctions are not evident in his rhetorical flights, especially against the Third World. They claim that his tactics only force the more moderate Third World delegates into a face-saving solidarity with their more radical colleagues. In effect, they argue, Moynihan ignores the famous Kennedy dictum, "Don't get mad, get even"; instead of venting his anger, he should be pressing for practical results.