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Twice in his career, Moynihan has been temporarily undone by his addiction to phrasemaking. In 1965, he wrote the still controversial "Moynihan Report," which argued that most of the social disadvantages suffered by American blacks are traceable to the instability of Negro family life. Although Moynihan clearly attributed that instability to more than two centuries of racial oppression, several black leaders took offense at his use of terms like "tangle of pathology" to describe the Negro family. Shortly afterward, Moynihan left his job at Labor. His stint as director of Nixon's Urban Affairs Council ended a year after his memo urging a period of "benign neglect" of the racial issue was leaked to the press in 1970. Moynihan still bristles at what he regards as widespread misinterpretation of that phrase. It did not, he insists, refer to less Government attention to civil rights, but to a need for more care, at a time of high racial tension, to avoid situations "in which extremists of either race are given opportunities for martyrdom" —such as the 1969 Chicago police raid on the Black Panthers.
After the"benign neglect" flap, Moynihan stayed out of the limelight until Nixon made him Ambassador to India in 1973. Arriving in New Delhi at a time when Indo-American relations were at their lowest ebb—in the wake of the U.S. tilt toward Pakistan in its 1971 war with India—Moynihan wisely decided to keep an uncharacteristically low profile. He stayed close to his official residence, Roosevelt House, which he loathed; he gave private showings of John Ford films to American visitors, and made only one or two speeches. The restraints of the New Delhi post have made the U.N. a doubly welcome forum for his ebullience.
Moynihan's bitterest critics today are doctrinaire liberals who still regard his sojourn in the Nixon White House as treasonous fraternizing with the enemy. "He has no ideological underpinnings," complains a Moynihan colleague from Harvard's Kennedy Institute of Politics. "He is not unlike Kissinger. They both have enormous egos, tremendous ambition, a great deal of moral flexibility, and the same kind of little boy attitude—'Look, Ma, I'm dancing.' "Other critics feel that Moynihan is so intoxicated by ideas that he is apt to skitter along from one to another. Moynihan in turn has spoken scathingly of his fellow intellectuals, in whom he diagnoses a failure of nerve. On one occasion he parodied the plea brought to Nixon by a group of antiwar college presidents: "If you don't end poverty, racism and the war right now, we'll ... hold our breaths until we turn blue."
Says Harvard Sociologist David Riesman, an old Moynihan chum: "The capacity of Harvard to make people feel vulnerable is Incredible, and I think Pat felt that quite keenly. He felt demeaned by having to establish his liberal credentials, pulling out his origins, his work with the Great Society programs. It was the same with the blacks issue. He knows what it's like to be desperately poor; he is a man of very lowly origins, lower than most of the black intellectuals who attacked him."