The Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House

Author:Stephen Hess
Publisher: Brookings Institute Press

 

While most books about Richard Nixon focus on his foreign policy or the Watergate scandal, Brookings Institute Press recently published The Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House, which tells the story of an unlikely political partnership between Nixon and White House staffer Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003).

The author, Stephen Hess, is a senior fellow emeritus in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institute. He served on the White House staff during the Eisenhower and Nixon presidencies and as advisor to Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. He has been writing about government for decades since he joined Brookings in 1972.

“I am the only person—perhaps in the world—who was a friend of both Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan before they knew each other,” Hess said in an interview.

Moynihan was a liberal Harvard sociologist and a Democrat when he was recruited to act as Nixon’s top urban affairs advisor. He served in the administrations of four presidents (from Kennedy to Ford) and was elected to represent New York in the US Senate four times. He also acted as ambassador to India and the US representative to the United Nations. He was described in the Almanac of American Politics as “the nation’s best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson.”
 

In the book, a conservative president and a liberal professor from the Ivy League made for one of the oddest couples in American public life.
 

He explained why Nixon appointed a liberal Democrat. “It was an incredibly close election in 1968. He was coming in with an opposition Congress. He needed some prominent Democrats,” Hess said.
Hess said that once Moynihan could get through to Nixon, they developed an interesting relationship because Moynihan was trying to encourage Nixon to do something historic, and he succeeded. On Aug. 8, 1969, President Nixon went on television and announced the Family Assistance Plan, which was Moynihan’s brainchild.
 

Nixon said: “Government can do a lot of things for men. It can provide a man shelter, and it can provide him food, and it can provide him a house. It can provide him clothing, but it can’t provide him dignity.”
 

Hess said that the plan was indeed over the opposition of many of the President’s most conservative advisors, and of course, that was very offensive to Authur Burns, whose whole strategy was to bring down the cost of government. Surprisingly, Nixon had campaigned against this idea prior to his election, describing it as essentially a negative income tax.

 

Chu Guofei is CSST reporter based in Boston.