Daniel Moynihan: A Dangerous Man?

This is Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s account of his brief and stormy period of service as American ambassador at the United Nations in 1975-76. Moynihan had been a very quiet ambassador in Indira Gandhi’s India. Shortly after his return to the U.S., early in 1975, he published his famous Commentary essay on the “U.S. in opposition,” which described the appearance of a new “party,” the Third World, in world politics, ascribed its socialist rhetoric to the influence of the London School of Economics, and proposed that the U.S. move, as he put it, “from apology to opposition,” to fighting not only for the imperative of growth? best achieved through capitalist free enterprise? but above all for it...