A Senator Who Will Be Sorely Missed at Trump's Impeachment Trial

By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker

23 December 19

s the nation contemplates the first impeachment trial of a President in a generation, my own thoughts turn to covering the last one, in 1999, and to someone whom I trailed during those tumultuous days: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York. Under the peculiar rules that govern such trials, the senators are required to sit silently at their desks during the daily sessions. This is a kind of torture for the members, whose presence on the Senate floor generally consists of schmoozing and talking. No one hated the process more than Moynihan. The senator was, above all, a public-policy intellectual, someone who had devoted his life to the study and implementation of government action to improve the life of its citizens. The tawdry evidence at the trial—about President Clinton’s liaisons with Monica Lewinsky and his subsequent lies about it—interested Moynihan not at all.

So it was a relief for the senator to retreat to his Capitol hideaway office after each day’s session, and I was often fortunate enough to join him there. Seated beneath a portrait of one of his heroes—Lorenzo Da Ponte, who wrote librettos for Mozart’s operas and then moved to, of all places, New York City—Moynihan would ritually inquire whether I thought it was an appropriate time for sherry. I would dutifully agree that it was, and he would break the seal on a fresh bottle of Tio Pepe. As its contents dwindled, he talked about his astonishingly wide interests. Government secrecy. The fate of teaching hospitals. Urban planning, especially rail travel and his dream of converting the magnificent General Post Office on Thirty-third Street into a new Pennsylvania Station. (Moynihan Train Hall, as it is to be called, seems finally to be happening.)

Moynihan led an epic twentieth-century life. Raised in poverty in East Harlem after his father abandoned the family. Second World War Navy vet. Tufts Ph.D. L.B.J. adviser who wrote a controversial report about African-American families. Nixon adviser and voice of progressive change within that Administration. Gerald Ford’s Ambassador to the United Nations, where he famously defended Israel against charges of racism. Elected to the Senate, following a fierce battle with Representative Bella Abzug in the Democratic primary, in 1976. In his early days in public life, especially in the Senate, Moynihan was regarded as a neoconservative, but he evolved into a more conventional liberal in later years. In reviewing a book of Moynihan’s letters, Hendrik Hertzberg untangled the competing strands of his ideology.

In our days together, Moynihan, who was then completing his fourth and final term, said that he had never much cared for Clinton. He told me that George H. W. Bush was his favorite of the Presidents whose tenure coincided with his own. Still, by that point, Moynihan’s voting record was pretty much that of a progressive Democrat, and he did vote to acquit Clinton of the charges against him. But, in the current polarized moment, Moynihan’s curious political trajectory looks even more anomalous than it did then. A full exploration of Moynihan’s mind and record awaits the full biography he deserves, but what occurs to me now is how his addiction to complexity seems so out of place, and sorely missed, in the politics of today.

The press gallery in the Senate is in a kind of bleachers above the floor. Each senator was given a set of documents about the Clinton case, and I recall Moynihan pushing them around his desk like pieces of aging fish. He never wanted to hear personal details about his friends or his foes, but instead wanted to engage them in the world of ideas. There’s no point in idealizing the Senate of the late nineteen-nineties; it was a polarizing and petty place. But today’s Senate, run by Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, the Republican Majority Leader, is far worse. Ideas—big ideas—mattered to Moynihan; personalities didn’t. It galled him that his longtime New York colleague, Al D’Amato, was known as Senator Pothole, as if he were the only member of the delegation who cared about the real-world problems of their constituents. In fact, while D’Amato obtained penny-ante federal contracts for roads and bridges, it was Moynihan who obtained the billions to save the New York subway system from disaster at the turn of the century. (The subways could now use billions more.)

I wrote a short piece about Moynihan during the impeachment, but I didn’t pursue him further after he left the Senate, in 2001, when he was replaced by Hillary Clinton. That is something I now regret; he would have been an ideal person to hear reflect on the future of New York after 9/11. Moynihan died in 2003, at the age of seventy-six. When I covered the trial, I remember thinking that the Senate could never function with a hundred like him—cerebral, distracted, unpredictable—but I’ve often thought since how poor the Senate, and our country, is without one of him.