Billjames.org Newsletter

March 13, 2010

The 1966 Decision to Abandon the Black Community

The decision by the US to endorse promiscuity & illegitimate births

Read the NY Times report from 1966 about US policy

Those of you on my e-newsletter list know that I have been focused on trying to fix the underlying problems within the Black community because they are proportionally one of the largest internal problem facing America (and the single largest DSS item in the Mecklenburg County budget). It costs Mecklenburg County millions to subsidize immorality (for all races and creeds) either through DSS or via CMS.

I am a fan of Daniel Moynihan, a Democrat and member of the Johnson Administration who wrote a book called "The Negro Family - A Call for National Action".

Leadership in Charlotte (Black and White) seem unable or unwilling to discuss issues frankly. Solutions all revolve around money and while money may be needed the biggest problem is the decision to re-write America's moral code to conclude that out-of-wedlock births and hook'n up was 'ok' and by extension 'moral'.

In January 2005 I had the book passed out at our County retreat. The Board promised to look into and research solutions by a 9-0 vote. The Manager concurred. 5 years later: Nada, Bubkus. Same-ol, Same-ol.

Still, I knew what I signed up for. In politics you are required try.

Some folks however wonder why liberals and Black leaders take the self-genocide positions they do.

Why, for example are they opposed to fixing the Black family? Why do they go into melt down mode at a drop of a hat? Well, it goes back to a fight that happened in the Johnson Administration and it is enlightening and instructive to see the brazen motives that created the current morass America is in.

Back in the mid-60's Moynihan outlined the debate:

MOYNIHAN:

"Moynihan proposes, less energy should be spent trying to create artificial integration, through busing and other methods, and more energy should be spent making the segregated ghetto schools better than they are. "

"[The US should] adopt a national policy for the reconstruction of the Negro family, arguing that the real cause of the American Negro's troubles is not so much segregation, or a lack of voting power, but the circumstance that the structure of the Negro family is highly unstable.......approaching complete breakdown."

WHAT LIBERALS SAID:

"the question of [Black] 'family stability' be stricken entirely from the agenda" (The agenda of a pre-white house conference in the mid 60's). No one was allowed to discuss it. It was Taboo. It was also stricken from the subsequent white house agenda.

"My major criticism of the [Moynihan] report..... is that it assumes that middle-class American values are the correct values for everyone in America. . . ."

"several prominent figures in American Protestantism and such liberal magazines as The Nation and The Christian Century--accused Moynihan of using simplistic logic. . .inadequate empirical evidence. . .and erroneous premises." Furthermore, and most informed observers fell that this was actually the heart of the matter, many claimed that Moynihan, in speaking openly about problems like Negro illegitimacy, was attacking the morality of the American Negro....." (because it is immoral I would guess).

MOYNIHAN: "And what, asks Moynihan, do the Chinese, the Japanese and the Jews have in common? Answer: "A singularly stable, cohesive and enlightened family life".[meaning that because they had a traditional family they could overcome poverty that Blacks - with an unstable family structure could not overcome].

So, liberal leaders and mainstream liberal church leaders embraced immorality back then (promiscuity & illegitimate births) as US approved public policy. They supported these non-family structures (because 'middle class values are not correct for everyone') and the rest us are left to pay for that immoral public policy decision and its related costs.

Here in Mecklenburg we just bleed money to subsidize immorality. This is the way it was ordained to be in the 60's. When Moynihan raised the alarm, the illegitimate birth rate for Blacks was 25%. Now...... it is 69% (90% for Black females under 30).The white rate then was 3% and now is 25%.

Government policy endorses the immorality that gives us high STD rates reported by the CDC. In short, it is government policy to allow a high STD rate (or HIV-AIDS) because to intervene would require ending the policy that allows immoral family structures.

The full NY Times article from 1966 is below.

Regards,

Commissioner Bill James (R, District 6)

Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners

600 East Fourth Street, 11th Floor

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center

Charlotte, North Carolina 28202

HTTP://billjames.org

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The New York Times Magazine
July 31, 1966
Moynihan of the Moynihan Report

By THOMAS MEEHAN

With the notable exception of President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose rise to fame from humble beginnings by the banks of the Pedernales is in the standard pattern of the American rags-to-riches story, increasingly few of those who achieve national prominence in the United States these days--e.g., Governor Rockefeller, Mayor Lindsay, Governor Scranton, Secretary Rusk and the myriad Kennedys-- are likely models for an inspirational novel by some contemporary Horatio Alger Jr. Alger himself, however, could scarcely have concocted a more classic up-from-poverty story than that of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the 39-year-old New York scholar-politician who earlier this month took over as director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who, as recently as 1942, was a shoeshine boy on the northeast corner of Broadway and West 43rd Street, across from Toffenetti's.

Admittedly, Moynihan is somewhat less celebrated than either president Johnson or any of the others mentioned above, but, at the same time, it has become more and more apparent in the past year or so that Moynihan has been one of Washington's most influential behind-the-scenes figures in the creation of the President's Great Society programs.

Indeed, until he resigned his post as Assistant Secretary of Labor a little more than a year ago to run unsuccessfully against Frank O'Connor for President of the City Council in this city's Democratic primary, Moynihan was one of the Administration's three or four leading in-residence thinkers engaged in the attempt to solve such major domestic problems as unemployment, poverty, urban renewal and civil rights. And, though he's now officially out of the Administration, living in Cambridge, Mass., after having spent most of the past year at Wesleyan University's center for Advanced Studies writing a book on the problems of the American Negro family, Moynihan still frequently shuttles to Washington to advise the President and others on critical domestic matters.

Meanwhile, having until recently been all but unknown outside of Washington and academic circles, Moynihan has lately, for the first time, been getting considerable public recognition--he picked up no fewer than three honorary degrees this past spring, for instance, and in May, embraced by the Establishment, he was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also now listed in "Who's Who in America," and though he has yet to make "Celebrity Register," one suspects that he'll be in the next edition, slotted in alphabetically between Robert Motherwell and Gerry Mulligan.

The degree of fame that Moynihan has attained recently stems mainly from the fact that he is the author of a much-discussed Government paper entitled "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action," now commonly referred to as the Moynihan Report, in which he urged that the Federal Government adopt a national policy for the reconstruction of the Negro family, arguing that the real cause of the American Negro's troubles is not so much segregation, or a lack of voting power, but the circumstance that the structure of the Negro family is highly "unstable and in many urban centers. . .approaching complete breakdown."

This is so, stated Moynihan, because of the increasingly matriarchal character of American Negro society, a society in which a husband is absent from nearly 2 million of the nation's 5 million Negro families and in which, too, some 25 per cent of all births are illegitimate. Moreover, Moynihan pointed out, children, especially boys, who grow up in fatherless homes tend not to adjust to this country's essentially patriarchal society, particularly when their problems are complicated by poverty and racial prejudice.

"From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles," wrote Moynihan a few months ago, enlarging on his report for the Jesuit magazine, America, "there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future--that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder. . .are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable. And they are richly deserved."

Though the Moynihan Report, which was issued by the Department of Labor in the late winter of 1965, was ostensibly confidential, labeled "For Official Use Only," its contents became widely known in the summer of 1965 and began immediately to stir enormous controversy in civil-rights circles, particularly when it became apparent that President Johnson planned to use the report as the philosophic basis for a series of new Great Society programs designed "to help the American Negro move beyond opportunity to achievement."

Critics of the Moynihan Report--who included a number of leading Negro and white civil-rights leaders, as well as several prominent figures in American Protestantism and such liberal magazines as The Nation and The Christian Century--accused Moynihan of using simplistic logic. . .inadequate empirical evidence. . .and erroneous premises." Furthermore, and most informed observers fell that this was actually the heart of the matter, many claimed that Moynihan, in speaking openly about problems like Negro illegitimacy, was attacking the morality of the American Negro, and was, in fact, something of a racist.

These were charges that Moynihan, shaking his head in disbelief, found entirely bewildering. "I would say that most of the 'simplistic logic' was on the side of Moynihan's highly emotional critics," observed one of Moynihan's defenders the other day. "The basic fact about Moynihan is that he is uncompromisingly honest, dedicated and selfless--all of his work is in the public interest. And so, naturally, he tends to offend special-interest groups, like CORE."

Originally, as he suggested in a speech at Howard University on June 4, 1965, President Johnson had planned to use the Moynihan Report as the Government's official analysis of the Negro problem at the White House Conference on Civil Rights ("To Fulfill These Rights"), which was held in Washington early last month, but Moynihan's critics quickly mounted a campaign to discredit the report. At various forums around the country, such Negro civil-rights leaders as Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and Floyd McKissick angrily spoke against the report. ("My major criticism of the report," noted McKissick, "is that it assumes that middle-class American values are the correct values for everyone in America. . . . Moynihan thinks that everyone should have a family structure like his own. Moynihan also emphasizes the negative aspects of the Negroes and then seems to say that it's the individual's fault when it's the damn system that really needs changing.")

Meanwhile, a strongly worded critique of the report, written by a Boston psychologist named William Ryan, was published in The Nation, and another, written by Dr, Benjamin Payton, of the National Council of Churches, appeared in Christianity and Crisis. Then, in November, 1965, Dr. Payton organized a pre-White House Conference in New York of some 100 prominent religious and civil- rights leaders at which it was resolved that "the question of 'family stability' be stricken entirely from the agenda." Instead, proposed Dr. Payton's influential group, the conference should concern itself with "quality integrated education" and with equal rights in jobs, job-training programs and housing.

Naturally enough, word of the group's proposals and all of the other criticisms of the Moynihan report reached President Johnson, and the President reluctantly backed away from his original position. "Family stability" was not mentioned at the White House Conference and, furthermore, as Moynihan's critics entirely carried the day, the Moynihan Report was not even among the conference's official working papers.

Understandably enough, Moynihan has found all of this fairly discouraging, but he nonetheless remains convinced that his diagnosis of the Negro problem is correct, and, going now beyond his report, which merely stated the problems without offering solutions to them, he is today busily presenting a variety of solutions to the Negro's troubles, most of which, when he has outlined them in speeches and magazine articles, have got him in even hotter water with the leaders of the civil-rights movement.

Moynihan, for instance, strongly supports school integration, but at the same time he has heretically declared that de facto school integration is still many years away, especially in the Northern urban ghettos, like Harlem. Therefore, Moynihan proposes, less energy should be spent trying to create artificial integration, through busing and other methods, and more energy should be spent making the segregated ghetto schools better than they are.

"The millions coming from Federal aid-to-education programs and other sources should mainly be going into upgrading the academic level of the segregated schools," Moynihan has observed. "A ghetto school like, say, P.S. 175 in Harlem, shouldn't be one of New York's worst schools; it should be one of its very best. I am not saying, however, that this would be simple to accomplish."

To upgrade the ghetto school, Moynihan has specifically suggested that Negro men be hired to replace white and Negro women as teachers in these schools. "We should be paying qualified Negro males $10,000 a year to teach in the ghetto schools, particularly to teach kindergarten and the first and second grades, for it is at this time when young Negro boys, many of whom have no father at home, most need a strong male figure in their lives," he noted recently.

But in offering ideas like this, Moynihan has more and more incurred the wrath of much of the liberal community, for whom integration comes far ahead of abstractions like family stability. To prove to his critics, however, that family stability is of more immediate importance than integration, Moynihan has cited the cases of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Japanese immigrants who came to this country in the late 19th century, hopelessly poor, unskilled and uneducated, whose descendants have nonetheless achieved astonishing success in spite of racial prejudice--and the fact that they have lived and, to a large degree, continue to live in ghettos.

Quoting Census Bureau college enrollment statistics, which sociologists consider a particularly important index of social and economic status, Moynihan has shown that some 44.1 per cent of all college-age Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans are today in college as against 21.4 per cent of all college-age whites and only 8.4 per cent of college-age Negroes. Similarly, according to a study made by the B'nai B'rith, nearly 80 per cent of all college-age Jews are enrolled in college. And what, asks Moynihan, do the Chinese, the Japanese and the Jews have in common? Answer: "A singularly stable, cohesive and enlightened family life."

Moynihan frankly admits that he first became interested in the problems of the ethnic-minority family living fatherless in poverty because he himself grew up in such a family. He was born on March 16, 1927, in Tulsa, Okla., where his father, an Indiana-born, first-generation Irish-American, was working as a newspaper reporter, but before Moynihan was six months old his father landed a job on a New York paper and the family moved here. When Moynihan was 6, however, his father stepped permanently out of the scene, leaving his mother, a practical nurse, to support the family, which besides young Daniel Patrick, included a younger brother and sister.

"In those days, the depression years of the early thirties, when you moved from one tenement apartment to another the landlord would give the first month's rent free if the tenant signed a one-year lease, and so we moved every year," recalled Moynihan the other day, over a martini at the Algonquin Hotel. "And we lived in practically every slum neighborhood in Manhattan--in Hell's Kitchen, in all the worst parts of the upper West Side, and even in Harlem. When I was 10, I set myself up as a shoeshine boy, on the corner across from Toffenetti's, and that was my corner for several years.

"As a kid, I was usually in a different school every year, but I always did well in school, and in 1943 I was graduated at the top of my class from Benjamin Franklin High School, in Harlem. Of course, Benjamin Franklin was no Bronx High School of Science, but I was pretty pleased with myself anyway. Even though I was first in my class, I never even considered going to college--that was something for rich kids. Anyhow, the only college I'd ever heard of was Notre Dame, because of their football team. So after I got out of high school I went to work as a longshoreman on the Hudson River railroad docks.

"After a few months, though, a friend told me about a qualifying examination to get into City College, and mainly to prove to myself that I was as smart as I thought I was, I went up and took the test. I remember playing it very tough--I swaggered into the test room with my longshoreman's loading hook sticking out of my back pocket. I wasn't going to be mistaken for any sissy college kid. But I passed the test and decided to go to City--and that was the beginning of a lot of things in my life.

Proceeding up life's ladder in the Alger tradition, Moynihan spent a year at City College, after which he enlisted in the Navy and was sent for a year to Tufts College, near Boston, in the Navy's V-12 officer- training program. Later, in 1947, when he got out of the Navy, he formally enrolled in the college, getting a B.A. cum laude from Tufts in 1948. And, knowing a good academic climate when he saw one, he then went on to Tufts's Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy from which he received an M.A. in 1949. (Some years later, in 1961, he received a Ph.D. there.)

In the early summer of 1953, Moynihan came back home to New York after a year on a Fulbright scholarship at the London School of Economics and got himself into the political swim. He worked on Robert Wagner's first campaign for Mayor, and his association with the Democratic party led first to a job with the International Rescue Committee and then, in 1955, to a post as a special assistant to Governor Averell Harriman in Albany, where he remained until 1958.

Later, after Harriman had been defeated for re-election, Moynihan spent two years teaching and doing research on urban problems at Syracuse University, taking time off in the summer and fall of 1960 to work on the Kennedy Presidential campaign as a writer of position papers on such questions as urban renewal and traffic safety. Earlier, while on Harriman's staff, he had met the then Senator John F. Kennedy and had been extremely impressed with him, and later, as a delegate to the 1960 Democratic National Convention, he had been an enthusiastic Kennedy supporter.

In consequence, it was not surprising that, early in 1961, President Kennedy asked Moynihan to come to Washington to work for the New Frontier. Thus, at 34, Moynihan became a Kennedy Whiz Kid, serving as one of the President's top advisers on urban and minority-group problems, first as special assistant to then Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg and later, in March, 1963, as Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy and Research.

In the spring of 1963, already established in academic circles as one of the country's leading experts on ethnic minorities, Moynihan published, in collaboration with the sociologist Nathan Glazer, a study of the Negroes, the Puerto Ricans, the Jews, the Italians and the Irish in New York City entitled "Beyond the Melting Pot," a work which Richard H. Rovere has called "perhaps the most perceptive inquiry into American minorities ever made," and which, already now considered something of a classic, was the winner in 1964 of the Anisfield-Wolf Award in Race Relations.

As one of the New Frontier's most prominent experts on the sociology of urban life, Moynihan was asked by President Kennedy in October, 1963, to help draft the Federal Government's first antipoverty legislation, and he was well along on this project when the President was assassinated. In order to complete the legislation, Moynihan opted to remain in Washington under President Johnson. In March, 1964, in collaboration with James Sundquist, Adam Yarmolinsky and Sargent Shriver, he finished a draft of what was eventually to become the landmark Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which set up the War on Poverty.

Moynihan spent most of the rest of 1964 working on the Presidential campaign, helping to draft the Democratic platform and writing a number of President Johnson's speeches. When the election was over, he turned his attention to the problems of the American Negro family, which of course, resulted in his report and all of his recent fame cum notoriety.

In the report, to make note of another statement that angered civil-rights leaders, Moynihan pointed out that Negro children have generally lower I.Q.'s than white children, a fact which appears to be true but which civil-rights leaders do not care to have mentioned in official Government studies for the reason that racists tend to use it as evidence that Negroes are somehow an inferior people.

Moynihan, however, taking a view diametrically opposed to that of the racists, traces lower Negro I.Q.'s, again, to broken and fatherless Negro homes. "The family is society's basic unit," Moynihan has written. "The most important things a person learns are taught by the family in a process that may begin at as early an age as four weeks. It would seem that when one parent has to do the work of two, less learning takes place. Dr. S. Oliver Roberts, a Fisk University psychologist, measuring the changes in I.Q.'s of Negro children, recently reported that 'those boys and girls in broken homes at age 10 had definitely lower I.Q.'s than the other children studied.'"

Moreover, the Moynihan Report noted that first-graders without fathers in the home have I.Q.'s 7.5 per cent lower than those with fathers and that, in central Harlem, where a majority of the children are fatherless, the median I.Q. of sixth-graders is only 86.3. A sub-average I.Q. Moynihan suggests, almost inevitably leads to a bad performance in school and, more often than not, to an early dropout. And, Moynihan further suggests, in America's increasingly technological and automated society, the uneducated, especially the Negro uneducated, are the unemployed. In fact, the rate of Negro unemployment is today nearly double the national rate.

All in all, then, Moynihan sees the predicament of the American Negro male as a vicious circle. He is born either illegitimate or into a home where his mother has been deserted or divorced by his father; he later, in consequence, does poorly in school and ultimately drops out; and when he reaches young manhood he then joins the vast army of Negro unemployed. And, being unemployed, he can't afford to support a family, and thus he, too, fathers illegitimate children or, after a try at marriage, either deserts or divorces his wife, leaving behind sons to grow up as wretchedly as he grew up. As Moynihan sees it, the only way to break this circle is (a) to create new Federal, state and local government jobs for Negro males and (b) to make it financially advantageous, rather than disadvantageous, for the Negro man to remain with his family.

Ironically, in regard to (b) the Aid to Families of Dependent Children program, a New Deal welfare measure which was part of the Social Security Act, has, in Moynihan's opinion, been a major force in the past 30 years in the breaking up of American Negro families, for the program has provided Federal welfare money to indigent families only when the father has died, is disabled--or has deserted his wife and children. Thus, since only the broken family can get A.F.D.C. help, it is often true that if an unemployed or low-paid Negro father deserts his family, its members will be economically better off than they were when he was around, a paradox that has led Moynihan to describe the A.F.D.C. program as "a form of social insanity."

Since 1961, the A.F.D.C. has granted allowances to unemployed men, but the unemployed still represent a mere 10 per cent of the program's cases, and Moynihan has thus suggested that the A.F.D.C. program be supplemented by a family-allowance program, whereby families would receive set sums of money according to their size before they're forced to break up, not after. As a matter of fact, the United States is today the only major industrialized nation in the world that does not have such a family-allowance program. In France, for example, a factory worker with a wife and three children annually receives just about an equal amount of money in family allowances as he makes in salary.

Of course, the Internal Revenue's $600 income-tax exemption for each dependent is intended to be a kind of indirect family allowance, but if a man with say, five children is making only $2,000 a year he can't properly support his family, even though he pays no income tax. But if, for instance, suggests Moynihan, some such figure as $12 per month per dependent were paid by the Federal Government in family allowances, his income would then reach a plausible level. And the father of five would then, too, be encouraged to stay with his family rather than desert it.

In proposing a family-allowance program, Moynihan has, however, made himself yet another powerful bloc of enemies--the thousands of bureaucrats who run the Federal, state and local welfare programs and who feel that, in effect, Moynihan has charged them with having added to, rather than alleviated, the problems of the poor American family.

In July, 1965, his report already the subject of violent controversy, Moynihan decided that, all things considered, he had gone about as far as he could go in President Johnson's Washington, and he thus left the Department of Labor to run for President of the City Council on the Screvane-for-Mayor ticket, figuring that he could in one stroke indulge his passion for politics and get himself into a position of power where he could put some of his ideas on urban problems into practical effect.

For one who could scarcely find a single citizen in the entire borough of Queens willing to vote for him, and who in addition has made himself thousands of enemies in the past few months, Moynihan is remarkably cheerful these days. A sturdily built, towering man, 6-foot-5, Moynihan is the amiable, gregarious, drink-loving, skillful-teller-of-funny-stories, Brenand-Behan type of Irishman, rather than the morose, melancholy, mystic Deirdre-of-the-Sorrows type, and there is almost always a smile on his ruddy, map-of-County-Kerry face. In person, the politician in his personality tends decidedly to overshadow the scholar. On the other hand, once Moynihan starts intently talking about urban problems one realizes that one is in the presence of an extraordinary intellect, perhaps the most notable characteristic of which is his ability to come up with ideas that are remarkable for their simplicity, for a "Why didnít somebody think of that before?" quality.

Moynihan recently suggested in a magazine article, for instance, that the Post Office go back to two mail deliveries per day, thus creating some 50,000 new Federal jobs, many of which, he feels, could be given to Negro men, preferably heads of families. In this way, says Moynihan, a large number of in- trouble Negro families would be stabilized, taken off welfare and given status, while the extra cost to the Post Office Department would be more than made up for by the fact that these families would now be off the welfare rolls and contributing to the economy.

"For $5,800 a year," commented Moynihan recently, "we get a man who can take pride in being a uniformed officer of the United States Government, who raises a family, pays taxes, votes Democratic and delivers the mail. That's quite a bargain--especially when you realize that it costs $9,000 a year to maintain one worker in the Jobs Corps."

As yet, however, nothing has been officially done about this Moynihan suggestion.

Though Moynihan's specialty is the stabilizing of the Negro family, it should be emphatically noted that his interests and ideas cover the entire spectrum of urban problems. As long ago as 1956, for example, he was active in the battle, only now partially won, to persuade Detroit automobile manufacturers to make safer cars. "They can talk all they want about traffic safety, but the basic fact is that there are 90 million licensed driver in the United States and that at any given moment at least half of them are tired, drunk, angry or crazy," Moynihan said recently. "Thus, there will continue to be accidents, and what Detroit must do, in the public interest, is to make certain that these accidents will be less harmful to the occupants of the cars."

Moynihan, too, was the first to point out publicly that the enormous number of automobile accidents that occur each year in this country, many caused by a rate of vehicle failure which "in any comparable field would be regarded as absurd and unacceptable," actually work to the advantage of the automobile companies, for rough estimates made by Moynihan from Department of Labor statistics showed that "perhaps 20 per cent of the total production of the automobile industry is required to replace or repair damaged vehicles." Moreover, it is probably more than slightly significant that Ralph Nader wrote much of "Unsafe at Any Speed" while on Moynihan's Department of Labor staff, working evenings and weekends to write the book with Moynihan's enthusiastic blessing.

Moynihan has also for some time been one of the country's leading behind-the-scenes defenders of the draft. Indeed, he feels that the draft should be extended to include all young American men, suggesting that those who are turned down by the military be conscripted to serve for two years in such organizations as the Peace Corps and its domestic equivalents. As a matter of fact, Moynihan had for years been privately talking up this idea with Defense Secretary McNamara, who then, last May 18, in a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Montreal, came out for precisely such a program of universal two-year service for all young Americans.

"The draft is one of the greatest institutions ever invented by the United States," remarked Moynihan recently. "Service in the military is, for almost everyone who serves, a maturing and enlightening experience, whether they themselves realize it or not, and it is an especially significant experience for the poor, particularly the Negro poor. In fact, for the young Negro boy from the slums, military service is an escape hatch out of the ghetto into the main current of American life, and it is the shame of our urban school systems that so many young Negro boys fail to pass the qualifying intelligence tests for the draft, and, in consequence, are lost in the ghettos."

At this point in his career, after a number of wandering years, Moynihan finds himself ready to settle down--to teach, to write and to speak out publicly and privately wherever he can in support of his ideas on America's urban problems. And he speaks now from a position of power, for the Joint Center for Urban Studies, which was founded by Harvard and M.I.T. in 1959 to organize research on urban problems, is perhaps the most respected center of its kind in the country.

In regard to urban sociology, its director is inevitably a man of considerable influence. Moreover, though certain of Moynihan's ideas have made him a number of enemies, they have also made him many admiring friends, among them some of the country's most powerful government officials, including Secretary McNamara and President Johnson. Thus, it may be reasonably concluded that in years to come Moynihan will have an important voice in how the great urban problems of our times are to be solved. All in all, pulling a switch on the standard Horatio Alger plot, Moynihan has risen to the top from ethnic-minority poverty in the slums not by rescuing a millionaire banker's daughter from a burning building but, uniquely, by becoming the country's leading authority on ethnic minorities, poverty and the slums.

Since he is also one of the country's most prominent authorities on the family, it should perhaps be noted that Moynihan is himself a family man, having, on May 29, 1955, married a Boston-Irish girl named Elizabeth Brennan, and they today have three young children and divide their time between Cambridge and a 100-acre farm near Cooperstown, N.Y., bought a few years ago for $10,000. Though the farm is not called "Dunrovin," one senses in Moynihan these days a desire to lead a rather less hectic life than he has been leading, a desire that, indeed, tends to strike most American men as they approach 40.

Moynihan, however, traces his desire to lead a more contemplative life to the day that President Kennedy was assassinated, when a kind of excitement and yearning for excitement went forever out of the lives of many Americans. "We will laugh again," said Moynihan on the day of President Kennedy's funeral, speaking perhaps for all of the bright young men, like himself, who went so enthusiastically to Washington to man the New Frontier, "but we will never be young again."

Thomas Meehan frequently contributes portraits of people in the news to The Times Magazine.