A Mensch.

When former senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan died last March, the tributes were instant and profuse--yet they never managed to say all that there was to say. Moynihan was what the Founders had in mind when they envisioned an American political aristocracy. Like them, he was self-made. Like them, he was a thinker, a wordsmith, and a practical pol. Like them, he understood and relished "the spirit of public happiness": public speech, public policy, and fellow public men. He possessed a rare gift for a politician--a talent for friendship. Indeed his friendships crossed partisan lines. Short of friendship, he practiced an equally rare charity. He even had kind things to say about Richard Nixon.

Moynihan was not bigger than life, but he was bigger than TV--a man who simply could not talk in sound bites. In person, he was a three-ring seminar. His mind would dart round, scuttling to connect history, data, philosophy, and literature. Because thinking out loud takes time, TV's limited scope could make him appear nutty instead of wise.

His contribution was not so much legislative as analytical. Even a partial list of his insights is daunting. He identified the core problem of American poverty as the absence of fathers--in 1965. He began to attempt to reform welfare--in 1970. He predicted the Soviet Union would come apart, ten years before it happened. More than a decade ago, he said we should scrap the CIA and start over. He told Hillary Clinton her healthcare revolution was doomed because she didn't understand the system or its problems. A damning critic of the United Nations, he was also the Senate's champion of international law.

Moynihan also knew how to work a room. An enormously savvy politician with a touch of the rogue in him, he could see, hear, and count. He survived employment under four presidents and a quarter-century of New York politics--the toughest in the nation. After his first Senate victory in 1976, nobody laid a glove on him. His pastor remarked that when Moynihan would pass the collection basket at Mass, he would invariably stop for some sort of personal exchange with virtually each person who put in a buck. Those are the instincts of a pro.

The best story about those instincts comes from Tim Russert, who once worked for the senator. Russert recalled preparing Moynihan to appear on a New York talk show the day the Yankees were to play the sixth game of the 1977 World Series--a subject Moynihan knew virtually nothing about. On the air, Moynihan predicted a Yankee championship: "If the Yankees don't do it today, Mike Torrez will do it Tuesday," he said, referring to the team's star pitcher.

Said Russert: "I fell out of my chair." Later he asked the senator, "How did you know about Mike Torrez?'"

"I didn't," Moynihan replied. "I was sitting in the makeup chair and this little kid with a Yankee hat and a ball and glove comes in.... I said, 'Hey, tiger, the Yanks going to win today?' He said, 'If they don't win today, Torrez will do it Tuesday.' I figured, if you can't trust a ten-year-old with a Yankee hat, you can't trust anybody."

Pat Moynihan loved words. He loved rolling them on his tongue and stringing them together on a page. He wrote his congressional newsletters himself for years, and would use summers and recesses to polish essays and draft books in his old schoolhouse home in upstate New York. Along with insight, words were what made his eyes sparkle. He was not a great writer--but he was a true writer.

Moynihan was the last public egghead on the national political scene. By that I mean he had a connective mind, one characterized by a wide, ever-growing range of interests, but one that could synthesize and cut to the heart of an issue. There is manifestly, abjectly, no one remotely like him on the scene today.

To me, Moynihan was a quintessentially Catholic thinker. He loved eloquent speech, stories, and irony. His mission was to complicate the conversation. His faith informed his politics and his thought--but so did many other things. He was the product of New York's public schools, so pluralism was not a posture but a fact of social and intellectual life. I think he was more a philosophical than a theological Catholic. He loved inversion and paradox. For example, he wrote an entire book on government secrecy, concluding that in its passion for secrecy and classifying information, the federal government had destroyed its capacity to keep secret the few things that should be kept secret. Try putting that on a bumper sticker.

Keith C. Burris is editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.