With the fiftieth anniversary at hand for the celebrated and once-controversial "Moynihan Report," the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is back on people's minds and keyboards. There will be more of this attention as 2015 unfolds. But Pat Moynihan is seldom off my mind, as he was primus-inter-pares of the mentors who mattered in my life and career, as well as my primary boss in three different settings between 1969 and 1981 (not to mention my doctoral advisor). My first "grown-up" job at his side—if age twenty-five counts as grown-up—was as a junior White House education aide at the start of the Nixon administration. (My version of this tale is recounted in the early chapters of Troublemaker, if you're a real glutton for punishment.) Pat was an assistant to the president for urban affairs, with an office in the West Wing not far from Kissinger's. The other room in his cramped basement suite was occupied by his chief deputy, Steve Hess (who for most of the time since has been an exceptionally prolific senior fellow at Brookings and one of Washington's true "wise men"—as well as a member of the vanishing species known as "moderate Republicans”). Steve has now written, and Brookings has just published, a thoroughly delightful account of the eventful first year of the Nixon-Moynihan relationship, which was unlikely from the outset, but rapidly proved to be both mutually beneficial and highly productive. The Professor and the President is short, utterly readable and already the subject of positive reviews. It's not mostly about education, but it's about two of the most interesting and remarkable individuals in American government during the latter half of the twentieth century, as observed through the eyes of a third. You will close it wondering why they're not making this model very often nowadays—and, perhaps, even more firmly resolved to persevere in this fracas yourself.
SOURCE: Stephen Hess, The Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House, (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2014).
