The most talkative and talked-about ambassador the U.S. has ever sent to the United Nations would not be muzzled. That was stated clearly last week as Daniel Patrick Moynihan emerged from a 40-minute White House session in which President Ford dissuaded him from resigning in protest over lack of State Department support. Announced the White House: "The President and Secretary Kissinger encouraged Ambassador Moynihan to continue to speak out candidly and forcefully on major issues coming before the U.N."
As a sort of ambassadorial fighting Irishman, Pat Moynihan has be] come an American pop hero. He has also riled many African and Arab leaders, and lately some of the U.S.'s European allies, who feel that his unguided missives against the Third World are reaching overkill proportions. But Ford could hardly have allowed Moynihan to quit. It would have opened the President to new criticism from Ronald Reagan's direction, and from others, both left and right, who feel that the U.S. has taken too much Third World abuse. Moreover, it could have been seen as a retreat from Moynihan's impassioned defense of Israel against the recent General Assembly vote condemning Zionism as "a form of racism."
Moynihan's "mini-Salzburg," recalling Henry Kissinger's own resignation threat in Austria last year when wiretapping accusations burst around him, left the Ford Administration with another wound. The President's inability to absorb one more high-level departure was exposed. Moynihan's own reputation was reduced; his threat to quit was seen as a temper tantrum with an aroma of vanity. Kissinger's authority was eroded too, since Moynihan went over his head to the President and won Ford's public backing.
No Connivance. When Britain's U.N. ambassador Ivor Richard ridiculed Moynihan as a shoot-from-the-hip Wyatt Earp (TIME, Dec. 1), some Moynihan supporters heard Kissinger's voice behind it. New York Times Columnist William Safire (who has been conducting a long vendetta-against Kissinger) speculated that Kissinger had planted the idea with Britain's Foreign Secretary James Callaghan during last month's economic summit talks in Rambouillet, France. Though the British later told Moynihan that Richard's views were "official" — endorsed by his government in London — participants in the Rambouillet talks deny any connivance. As one of them told TIME Diplomatic Editor Jerrold Schecter: "I was sitting in on all of Henry's conversations with Callaghan, and, although it may offend Moynihan's ego, I know he didn't talk with him about Pat Moynihan."
Yet Moynihan felt that the British attack was relished by his critics in Washington and Kissinger's first public defense of him — "I very much hope he stays, I consider him a good friend" — was symptomatic of tepid State Department support. Moynihan believes that in the U.N., the conflict is essentially between political philosophies, ind he feels U.S. career diplomats are often untrained for battle. They, Moynihan gibed cruelly in a recent speech, are likely to ask, "Marx who?"
TIME'S U.N. correspondent Curtis Prendergast reports: