Sage, scholar, statesman.

The Gentleman from New York
Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
A Biography
Godfrey Hodgson
Houghton Mifflin, $35, 464 pp.

Americans are unique in their scorn for government, for in the broader Western tradition it is among the highest of callings. Certainly America's Founders understood it that way--Adams, Madison, and Hamilton were almost painfully self-conscious that they would be judged against the standards of Pericles and the Gracchi. The splendidly creative American statesmanship in the wake of World War II was similarly imbued with a solemn awareness of transcendent purpose; even Americans understood that George Marshall was a great man. But for most of the rest of our history, Americans have tended to regard government as, at best, a refuge for scoundrels and boobs, and, at worst, almost as a kind of tumor.

It is Daniel Patrick Moynihan's almost anachronistic respect for government and his insistence on the preciousness of the American democratic tradition that make him such a singularly attractive public figure. And it is the great virtue of Godfrey Hodgson's smoothly written The Gentleman from New York that he fully explores Moynihan's historical understanding of the American experiment and his deeply felt commitment to its values. As a British journalist and a long-time observer of American affairs, Hodgson may have the detachment to appreciate American uniqueness in a way a native reporter could not.

There is a striking vignette from the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Moynihan, then a young subcabinet official, frantically circulated official Washington, carrying a nineteenth-century Protestant tract proving that John Wilkes Booth was a Jesuit and Lincoln's death the consequence of a papal conspiracy. He was pleading that Lee Harvey Oswald be placed in secure custody and that a remorseless public investigation be launched immediately--not because he believed there was a conspiracy, but precisely because he believed that there was not. And, of course, he was right. Because of Oswald's death, the acrid stench of conspiracy will forever linger over the assassination; and the weeds of mistrust, which so flourished over the succeeding decades, took root. But can one imagine any other politician making such an appeal?

Moynihan's personal politics have always been of the American social liberal, center-left variety, leavened by a disdainful skepticism for the fashionable nostrums of the chattering classes. But reporters and politicos have often complained about his slipperiness, usually because they have misunderstood that his politics have always yielded place to the paramount task of preserving the integrity of the compact that allows Americans to be such a lightly governed people.

As a consequence, while Moynihan is strongly commited to government programs for the needy, he has been scornful of the micromanagerial overreachings of the Johnson War on Poverty or the Clinton national health-care proposals. Respect for government is too important, he has insisted, to be placed at risk by ill-thought-out extravaganzas. Similarly, during the cold war he was equally dismissive of the authoritarian Left that idealized Stalinism and of the dogmatic Right, including virtually all of the national security agencies, that grossly overestimated the capacities of the Soviet Union. Virtually alone among officialdom, Moynihan confidently forecast in 1979 that the Soviet Union was about to collapse from its accumulated record of economic blunders and monstrous abuses.

During his brief, and fiery, stint as ambassador to the United Nations, Moynihan once responded to a complaint that he had been "rude" to the worthies of a UN committee on decolonization. He had meant to be rude, he responded. The committee consisted of "sixteen police states, four democracies, and four others. 'We are not about to be lectured by police states on the processes of electoral democracy.'"

Gentleman is not a muckraking biography. Hodgson is a long-time friend of the Moynihans and an open admirer of the senator, and even more of Moynihan's wife Elizabeth, an indispensable contributor to the senator's career. Liz coped with a young family during frequent moves on low salaries, and at the same time managed Pat's political career, salved his ego, and somehow found time (sans college degree) to produce original scholarship on the history and culture of India. It is hard to imagine Moynihan achieving his eminence without her.

But Hodgson steers clear of hagiography, providing at least a glimpse of the senator's tender ego, his sometimes desperate ambitions, the occasional adroit obsequiousness to a Lyndon Johnson or a Richard Nixon. Much of the Moynihan legend--the poor boy who fought his way up from the violent streets of Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen--is sheer fabrication. He was born in Tulsa into a family from the comfortable middle classes of Indiana, where Pat spent his boyhood vacations. His father came to New York as an advertising copywriter, and they lived in Greenwich Village, Long Island, and Ridgefield, New Jersey.

Security disappeared, however, when the father deserted, and the family endured periods of dire poverty as Moynihan's mother tried to support six children on her own. Moynihan and his brother really did shine shoes after school to help support the family. But while he did live in Hell's Kitchen, it was only briefly, over his mother's bar, one summer when he was home on college vacation, and his career as a stevedore was similarly brief while he was a college student. Hodgson also deals forthrightly with the allegations of the senator's possible alcoholism, concluding that while Moynihan and his friends often drank shocking quantities of liquor, he has greatly moderated his drinking in recent years, and that there is no evidence that it ever interfered with his public responsibilities.

Hodgson's approach to biography is in many ways as refreshing as Moynihan's to government. There was once a highly civil tradition of honoring worthy public men in the twilight of their careers with a "Life." Our skeptical era would never tolerate the panegyrics of, say, the Victorian age. Hodgson's book, however, is entirely satisfying. It is solidly researched and often critical, but the underlying spirit is friendly and grateful. Here is a man, Hodgson tells us, who deserves the public's honor, for we are all the better for his services. Anyone who reads his fine book will come away in full agreement.

Charles R. Morris is the author of American Catholic (Times Books), among other books.