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Riesman is an admirer of Moynihan's all-embracing academic interests, which he says equip him as a diplomat to "deal with issues on a plane of both contemporary and historical perspective." Riesman recalls a Phi Beta Kappa address that Moynihan delivered at Harvard in which he compared student radicals of the 1960s to the Quaker, Leveler and Digger religious dissidents of Cromwell's England, and then predicted that student activism would die out in the '70s when the demographic bulge produced by the postwar baby boom subsided. Says Riesman: "There aren't many people who have enough knowledge of the Fifth Monarchy Men of the 1640s and of demographics to advance those two thoughts."
Moynihan's wife Elizabeth, a part-time painter, sculptor and the mother of three teen-age children, says that her husband is, above all things, a word man who is "happiest when he writes every day." He goes to bed reading and wakes up writing—when he sleeps at all, that is. Most nights are a series of fitful catnaps, often with spells at the typewriter in between. At the family's 600-acre dairy farm in upstate New York, there is an old schoolhouse on the property that Moynihan uses as his word-mill whenever he has a chance to leave his U.N. life behind. The farming is done by a local tenant who pays Moynihan $350 and 23 gallons of maple syrup a year for the use of the land. At present, Landlord Moynihan is writing the introduction for a volume of collected David Levine drawings, doing "a long essay on the rise of frustration as a mode of social expression," and has just completed a report for the Rockefeller Commission on Critical Choices, "The Quality of Life"—a topic that even Moynihan found intimidatingly sweeping.
Unlike many independently wealthy ambassadors, Moynihan lives entirely off his $44,600 U.N. salary. The Moynihans are provided with the Waldorf suite, a car and a driver. But their only servant is Hives, a life-sized papier-mache butler who stands at the door of the apartment wearing the castaway clothes of a warm-blooded English butler who once worked for them. The figure is the creation of their son Tim. With all three children away at school, Hives and a wire-haired fox terrier named Mr.
Dooley are the only other live-in members of the Moynihan family. At home, there is a casual, rumpled air about the man. In public, he wears meticulously tailored suits, and his voice acquires a reserved, almost harrumphing Tory tone.
In both incarnations, he occasionally indulges a well-cultivated taste for Dubonnet, Scotch, brandy, port or stout. Even Moynihan's critics concede that his unfailing Irish wit and cheer make him a good man to take on a pub crawl.
Moynihan's spreading popularity has inevitably given rise to speculation that he may run for public office, and he is reportedly being strongly urged by supporters to seek the Democratic nomination for the New York Senate seat now held by Republican Senator James Buckley. But Moynihan has denied any intention of running, and he removed his name last week from the ballot for the Democratic primary in Massachusetts.