"One man--resolute--speaking truth,rallies a majority."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is no point in being Irish if you don't understand that the world is going to break your heart someday."

-Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the assasination of President Kennedy

 "Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the exemplar of what the Founding Fathers thought the Senate would be about."

-Sen.Edward M. Kennedy 

Dear Colleagues,

Recently, a great man passed from the scene. It is rare that we can use the word "great" in all its contexts and textures. But Sen.Daniel Patrick Moynihan was truly that, and his death following complications from appendix surgery leaves a great void.

Rising from the poverty of Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen he became the only man in American history to serve four successive Presidents as a senior advisor. Two were Democrats, Kennedy and Johnson, and two were Republicans, Nixon and Ford. He understood early on that loyalty to specific parties aided little in the cause of a just political agenda and in the end all that mattered was to relieve the inequities and inequilaties suffered by the unempowered and disenfranchised from whom he rose, and not knee-jerk adherence to slogan and dogma that resulted in nothing more than political posturing. 

To the salon liberals, he successfully advocated the protection and expansion of freedom in the world as the obligation of all just men, and to the staunchest conservatives he valiantly preached,and progressively advanced, the gospel of social justice. He went on to become the only four-term senator in the history of New York.

He was often emotive and evocative. But perhaps he will best be remembered for what many have argued has been the singular heroism of the most affecting act of political will since Churchill, when in the face of a United Nations controlled by despotic and demonic states, spewing fourth the grotesque bile of anti-Semitic diatribes that resulted in the infamous "Zionism is Racism" resolution in 1975,he raised the nameplate of his country, held it high above his head, and declared in the Security Council:

 "In logic, the State of Israel could be, or could become, many things, theoretically including many undesirable things. But it could not be and could not become racist unless it ceased to be Zionist. There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act will have done the United Nations. Historians will do that for us, and it is sufficient for the moment only to note one foreboding fact: A great evil has been loosed upon the world.

“The United States...does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act."

In an age when political leaders are obsessed with polls and popularity to such a ridiculous degree that, in the words of Gen.Lewis MacKenzie, the very term "political leadership" may well be an oxymoron, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a model profile in courage.

And in our sad public landscape populatedby mediocraties regurgetating the cacophany of simpering sycophancies, his uncompromising compulsion of a conscience of conviction, propelled by the crystal clarity of what Justice Louis Brandeis would have called "...a mind of one piece...", will be sorely missed. He was more than a man for all seasons...he was a man for our time.