Moynihan Mourned

Daniel Patrick Moynihan's reputation as a great mind of politics grew not only from his oratory flair, his love of history and a professorial demeanor.

It was also his prescience that impressed.

From unwed mothers to the demise of the Soviet Union to highway deaths, Moynihan seized on trends and problems years, sometimes decades, before the rest of the nation caught up with him.

Family and friends were remembering Moynihan — a senator of 24 years, ambassador, and aide to four presidents — at a private mass Monday, followed by interment at Arlington National Cemetery.

About 50 current and former U.S. senators were expected to attend the mass. Pallbearers included Moynihan's sons, John and Tim, and NBC's Tim Russert, for years a Senate aide to Moynihan.

A new intercity train station being built in New York City will be named after him, the city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and New York Gov. Pataki, both Republicans, announced last week.

After his death last week at age 76, President Bush called the former Democratic senator an "intellectual pioneer." Former President Clinton remembered him as "a prophet."

He was "one of the greatest minds of our times. He was our Jefferson, our Lincoln," said Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, his successor in the Senate. "Time after time, he could see our nation's next pressing challenge — and its solution — even when it was decades away from our own national conscience."

Moynihan "saw over the horizon of his time," wrote columnist George F. Will.

Moynihan bemoaned the breakup of black families in a 1965 report to President Johnson, forecasting that the trend would lead to generations of social problems. Critics denounced the idea as racist. But over the decades, the rise in single-parent families among blacks, as well as whites and others, has come to be widely viewed as a damaging social problem.

He was an early advocate of mass transportation and historic preservation — taking on the revitalization of Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House as a decades-long commitment.

In 1980, when many of his fellow anti-Communists saw the Soviet Union as a growing menace, Moynihan saw it weakening. He predicted that "the defining event of the decade might well be the breakup of the Soviet empire."

He had a knack for recognizing and embracing others' insights.

Moynihan's interest in highway safety was inspired by William Haddon, at the time an unknown doctor who believed traffic deaths should be treated as an epidemic. It was Moynihan who brought a young lawyer named Ralph Nader into the government and launched him on an auto safety crusade.

Moynihan had "this uncanny ability to know who to trust about any particular subject," said Russert.

Russert recalled preparing the senator 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 the cerebral Moynihan knew nearly nothing about.

On the air, Moynihan predicted with confidence a Yankee championship: "If the Yankees don't do it today, (pitcher) Mike Torrez will do it Tuesday," he declared.

"I fell out of my chair," Russert recalls. "How did you know about Mike Torrez?" he asked afterward.

Moynihan's reply: "I didn't know who it was. 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.'

"If you can't trust a 10-year-old with a Yankee hat, you can't trust anybody."'

The Yankees won the World Series in six games.