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Moynihan retorts that practical results are exactly what he is getting. Far from hardening Third World enmity to the U.S. and other developed countries, his tactics have begun to break up bloc voting in the U.N. For instance, when the anti-Zionist resolution was in committee last October, two African delegates voted against it and 14 abstained.
In the General Assembly vote in November, five African delegations voted against it and eleven abstained. Moynihan believes that the U.N. is still useful, not only as an occasional peacekeeper but as an instrument of persuasion. The U.S. mission has acquired a new tool: a computer to help keep track of votes for or against U.S. interests, which in turn may help decide who will get U.S. aid.
Moynihan is rankled by suggestions that his tactics are too "confrontational." Said he in an interview with TIME: "Now, in one issue after another the attack came from others and we defended ourselves. That isn't a doctrine of confrontation." He quoted an ironic piece of French doggerel: "Cet animal est trés mechant/ Quand on I'attaque, il se defend" (This animal is very wicked: when it is attacked, it defends itself). Moynihan added: "Do you have any sense of the depth of appeasement that comes out of discerning in self-defense an act of confrontation? Do you realize how passive everybody had become?"
Passive has never been the word for Pat Moynihan. Although he grew up in Manhattan, his route to the U.N. was circuitous. Born in Tulsa, Okla., on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, in 1927, he was brought to New York by his parents when he was six years old. His father, a classically hard-drinking newspaperman, walked out on the family in 1938. Much of his adolescence was spent shining shoes, hawking newspapers and tending bar in Moynihan's, the saloon his mother opened on New York's rough and garish 42nd Street.
Other stops on Moynihan's long road to the U.N. included high school in East Harlem and a longshoreman's job on the Hudson River docks. At the urging of a friend, he took the entrance exam for New York's tuition-free City College, "mostly to prove that I was as smart as I thought I was." In something of the same spirit, he went on to a Ph.D. at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, an academic career as a professor of education and urban politics at Harvard, and a parallel political career that has brought him jobs in two Republican and two Democratic Administrations.
After serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Moynihan, who still labels himself a liberal Democrat, took two leaves from Harvard to work for President Nixon. During his years with Kennedy and Johnson, Moynihan helped draft the Government's first antipoverty programs. Then, by enticing Nixon with visions of becoming the American Disraeli, the British Tory Prime Minister famed for his progressive social legislation, Moynihan almost succeeded in getting his Republican President to push the Family Assistance Plan through Congress. The FAP, a truly innovative plan for a federally administered guaranteed-income program, might well have been an important first step toward reforming the nation's welfare mess.