Daniel Moynihan, former U.S. senator, dead at 76

WASHINGTON -- Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York City shoeshine boy who became an iconoclastic scholar-politician and served four terms in the Senate, died Wednesday. He was 76.

Moynihan's death was announced on the Senate floor by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who two years ago was elected to the Senate seat Moynihan had held for 24 years.

"We have lost a great American, an extraordinary senator, an intellectual and a man of passion and understanding for what really makes the country work," she said.

The New York Democrat died from complications stemming from a ruptured appendix at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday at the Washington Hospital Center, hospital officials said. He had undergone surgery on March 11 to remove his appendix, and was moved into intensive care later that week, suffering from infection and pneumonia.

The lanky, pink-faced lawmaker, who preferred bow ties and professorial tweeds to the Senate uniform of lawyer-like pinstripes, reveled in speaking his mind and defying conventional labels. Known for his ability to spot emerging issues and trends, Moynihan was a leader in welfare reform and transportation initiatives, and an authority on Social Security and foreign policy.

His intellect, and his emphasis on principle before politics, won him the respect of both parties. In more than 30 years of watching the Senate, said former Senate Republican leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, "I have not known a more brilliant and a more erudite senator."

President Bush described Moynihan as an "intellectual pioneer" who was "recognized for his commitment to free trade, Social Security, freedom for people around the world and equal opportunity for all Americans."

Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said that "in many respects, Pat Moynihan was larger than life," citing a description in the Almanac of American Politics that Moynihan was "the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson."

Moynihan, said current New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, was "a giant as a thinker, a giant as a senator and a giant as a human being."

His office said a burial mass is scheduled for March 31 in Washington, and he will be buried that day with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. Moynihan served in the Navy from 1944 to 1947.

Moynihan served in the Senate from 1977 to 2001. After retiring from politics, Moynihan became a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Fellow legislators named Manhattan's new federal courthouse in his honor.

He stayed active in politics, from campaigning for Sen. Clinton to his recent work as co-chairman of President Bush's Social Security commission. He also championed a plan to revitalize Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station.

In his college days, the 6-foot-5 Moynihan spent one summer tending bar, and later earned a reputation as gregarious and drink-loving.

In debates on the Senate floor he was known for a love of often obscure academic references.

Moynihan left Syracuse University in 1961 to work for John F. Kennedy, the first of four presidents he served. He later taught at Wesleyan University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Daschle noted that Moynihan was the only person in history to serve in a cabinet or sub-cabinet-level position in four successive administrations, from Kennedy through Ford.

He worked in the Labor Department in the Kennedy administration, and almost immediately found himself at odds with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI over an article he'd written about the mafia.

An internal agency memo called Moynihan "an egghead that talks in circles." At the bottom of the memo, Hoover scrawled, "I am not going to see this skunk."

As President Nixon's urban affairs adviser, he proposed a policy of "benign neglect" toward minorities that drew heavy criticism. A 1965 report to President Johnson created a major policy flap when he warned that the rising rate of out-of-wedlock births threatened the stability of black families.

Moynihan saw himself at the time as a liberal observer warning of future problems. Rather than hearing praise, he was denounced as promoting racism. The controversy haunted Moynihan for years and resurfaced as late as the 1994 elections.

He served as ambassador to India from 1973 to 1975; as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1975 and 1976, he beat the drum of anticommunism and demanded that other countries temper their anti-U.S. rhetoric if they wanted American help.

His unyielding support of Israel made him popular with New York's Jewish population and his televised statements at the United Nations elevated Moynihan to near-celebrity status.

Hoping to win a Senate seat in 1976, Moynihan emerged the winner of a bitter five-way Democratic primary. In the general election he defeated incumbent Republican James Buckley by portraying him as out of touch with New York City's fiscal crisis. Moynihan's own ads proclaimed: "He spoke up for America. He'd speak up for New York."

Moynihan's fascination with global affairs never waned, and he continued to speak and write about world events, at one point foretelling the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"The Soviet Union is a seriously troubled, even sick society," he said in a January 1980 speech on the Senate floor. "The defining event of the decade might well be the breakup of the Soviet empire."

With a staccato delivery that emphasized unexpected syllables, Moynihan's speaking style was often mimicked. He wrote or edited 19 books -- more, it was said, than some of his Senate colleagues had read.

During his years in the Senate, Moynihan became a champion of many of the liberal programs he had once questioned, defending public jobs programs and fighting to increase federal aid to help offset New York's crushing welfare burden.

In 1988 Moynihan, long one of the nation's foremost authorities on work and family, helped bring together conservatives and liberals to enact the Family Support Act, a major revision of the nation's welfare laws.

Born in Tulsa, Okla., Moynihan was the eldest of three children. He spent his early childhood in Indiana, before moving to New York City.

The Moynihan children were raised by their mother after their father deserted the family when Pat was just 10. To help provide money for the family, Moynihan became a shoeshine boy. As a teenager, he first heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor while working on a customer's shoes outside Central Park.

Moynihan graduated from high school, worked on the docks and attended City College. After a stint in the Navy, he went to college at Tufts on the G.I. Bill. He also attended the London School of Economics with a Fulbright scholarship.

Moynihan and his wife, Elizabeth Brennan Moynihan, had three grown children, Timothy, Maura and John. They spent summers at his farm in the upstate hamlet of Pindars Corners, where he liked to write in a nearby one-room schoolhouse.