Moynihan

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) did not just live in the twentieth century, he strode across it: a colossus of ideas and a man of deeds. He was a seminal public intellectual and sociologist, policy specialist, ambassador and long serving senator. Moynihan was a moralist in a political world where morality – the urge to do good – is often overcome by the desire to do well. He had, as one friend, recalled, a “ mystical belief in public service.” In an age of rigid ideologies and political sloganeering, he was a man who embraced the contradictions and complexity of public policy without ever despairing of the role of government in the lives of its citizens. A decade after his death The Moynihan Documentary Project, the first feature length documentary about his life, captures Moynihan, the man, the thinker and the doer as never before. More than simply a traditional great man biography, the film portrays the spirit of Moynihan’s ideas as they evolved over the course of his remarkable and often tumultuous life in postwar America, both the triumphs and the controversies. Moynihan was a public intellectual, a man who understood ideas as they existed in and influenced the world. His own work was shaped as much by his own life as by his research. His ground-breaking Beyond the Melting Pot, written with Nathan Glazer, on ethnicity in America was informed by his Irish American childhood in New York City. And one of his greatest insights into poverty and the single African-American mother was initially decried as racist and yet Moynihan’s understanding of the problem drew on the deep experience of his own childhood as the son of a single mother abandoned by her husband.