Moynihan's Memo Fever

Maynihan's Memo Fever

As a renegade liberal in a relatively conservative White House shop, Daniel Patrick Moynihan has never had any illusions that life would be easy. He knew he would be under skeptical scrutiny from both left and right, and so he has been. Yet his love of the provocative phrase and the unorthodox idea is so irrepressible that his numerous memos to the President are the kind of documents that inspire huzzahs of approval or howls of censure, depending upon the perspective of the reader. They also seem to have wide appeal and, unlike most private memos, actually reach millions. Lately, Moynihan's flamboyant prose has somehow managed to leak right past the President and into the public domain.

The Counsellor to the President could not resist the fetching phrase "benign neglect" to describe his notion of the proper attitude the Government should now have toward race relations. Predictably enough, the document caused a sensation. Last week two more of his papers trickled out of the federal bureaucracy. Both were dated just before Richard Nixon was inaugurated as President, but they nevertheless drew fire from both conservatives and liberals and kept Moynihan a foremost topic of national controversy (TIME, March 16).

Murderous Population. Taken as a whole, the Moynihan advice in the two memos most recently disclosed was not all that extraordinary. Yet he did manage to hint that whites might have some justification for their negative attitude toward poor blacks. "It is the existence of this lower class," he wrote, "with its high rates of crime, dependency and general disorderliness, that causes nearby whites (that is to say, working-class whites; the liberals are all in the suburbs) to fear Negroes and to seek by various ways to avoid and constrain them."

He again succumbed to his weakness for the tantalizing phrase, citing the "murderous slum population" as contributing to racial tensions. That kind of talk naturally invites debate. A black activist in St. Louis dismissed Moynihan as an "ivory-tower specialist who never asked blacks about themselves and then used his Ph.D. as an indication of his authority in the academic world." Warner S. Saunders, who works with black youths in Chicago, scoffed at Moynihan as "Nixon's straw boss--the deputy in charge of the colored." The New York Times contended that Moynihan's logic is "a sophisticated rationale for racial retrogression." The Chicago Tribune's Walter Trohan, on the other hand, saw "constructive thought and literary merit" in the Moynihan prose. The Wall Street Journal claimed that Moynihan has offered "a fascinatingly perceptive analysis of the nation's present condition."

Countrymen. The whole dubious business of leaking bureaucratic papers to the press can, of course, have its sinister side. In Moynihan's case, no one could be sure whether he was being knifed from adversaries on the right, where his closeness to the President is resented, or from those on the left, where he is seen as a turncoat telling the President what he wants to hear. Yet neither Moynihan nor the White House seems to be taking it all as seriously as do outsiders. Moynihan, in fact, quipped that perhaps he will in the future address his memos to "the President and his fellow countrymen."

Actually, the public has a valid interest in learning what kind of advice its President is getting--so long as people do not get confused about who must accept the responsibility for presidential decisions. And Moynihan seems to have no reservations of his own about Nixon's attitude toward racial issues. "I know what he thinks, and I support and believe in what he thinks," Moynihan told newsmen. Once the rest of the nation is cut in on that secret, the focus of the whole debate might shift back to where it rightfully belongs --on the views of Richard Nixon rather than on those of Patrick Moynihan, the adviser who is only too willing to become the Administration's other household word.

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