Volume 47, Number 18 · November 16, 2000
Honorable Man
By Garry Wills
The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan
by Godfrey Hodgson
Houghton Mifflin, 452 pp., $38.00
Daniel Patrick Moynihan seems a throwback to an earlier style of senator, to the flowing locks and florid style, the tailored 'toga,' the poses of moral obstruction struck by all those 'Bourbon' Southerners who affected plantation manners—men like Theodore Bilbo, Harry Byrd, or Eugene Talmadge, the whole line that has died out or dwindled down to a sole survivor, Robert Byrd. How can a Harvard professor like Moynihan stir memories of such dinosaurs? Well, we have to realize that he was as much an oddity at Harvard as on the Senate floor. Moynihan, who is as hard to place as his accent, has been creatively out of phase with an amazing blur of surroundings.
Review, 3872 words
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