Aren’t you suspicious of a politician who has not cracked a novel for a quarter-century? Does he have any inner life at all? Maybe Spitzer inhales histories and biographies. And maybe Daniel Patrick Moynihan didn’t read novels either. But he wrote 18 books. And novelists read him. A new collection of Moynihan’s letters and journals has just been published by Public Affairs, elegantly edited by former New York Times reporter Steven R. Weisman. (Moynihan died in 2003 after four terms in the Senate and a lengthy stint in the executive branch.) Among many gems is a letter to John Updike, thanking Updike for commenting on something Moynihan had written. “Dear John,” it began. Moynihan seems to have been on a cordial first-name basis with nearly every prominent person in American politics, scholarship and culture.

George Will has already skimmed the cream of Moynihan quotes and, quite rightly, praised Moynihan’s eloquence and brilliant insights. His accomplishments are well-known. That leaves me with the scraps. But what scraps! Open the book at random: Here he is on Page 618 quoting himself quoting Lionel Trilling to a bunch of politicians on their way out to President Richard Nixon’s funeral. (He had an unfortunate habit of quoting himself, or sometimes, as I discovered in editing a few of his articles for The New Republic, quoting himself quoting himself.) “Not everybody understood me,” he says. I bet. I had forgotten that Moynihan’s first issue was auto safety, of all things, and that he more or less invented Ralph Nader. Characteristically, Moynihan sees auto safety as a “cultural problem: Introducing the concept of safety, with its association of pain and loss, would impair, if not in fact destroy, the personal and social symbolism of the American automobile,” he wrote. And he was on to global warming in 1969!

Moynihan had an inner life. As a large man with a great mouth, he seemed to be brimming with self-confidence. But Weisman’s subtle editing brings out large insecurities and a surprising strain of lachrymose self-pity. He could be a terrible blowhard and an embarrassing suck-up. He wrote to Ethel Kennedy in 1968, “I have a sort of a thing against writing fan letters to politicians” — not remotely true — “but you might just do me the favor of telling your husband he really was quite brilliant on ‘The Joey Bishop Show’ last Friday.” In fact, he was constantly penning notes to important people about something wonderful they had done. If he had bad news, he saved it for the second paragraph. In 1966, Moynihan wrote to Henry Ford II: “I write first to congratulate you on your speech to the National Association of Purchasing Agents, and secondly” to send a copy of his own testimony to Congress about auto safety. Although Moynihan said his “testimony is critical ...,” he “in no way intended to cast any doubt on [Ford
’s] own personal integrity.”

This habit of forelock-tugging finally became too much for his wife, Liz. When The New York Times Magazine ran a somewhat critical piece about Moynihan as he left the Senate, he wrote to the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, pulling out of a planned farewell lunch on the grounds that “we would make wretched luncheon guests” but thanking him for past kindnesses. Liz Moynihan wrote separately saying that she, for one, did not thank The New York Times for anything.

For someone who seemed to relish a good (intellectual) battle, Moynihan could be surprisingly thin-skinned and easily “hurt” (his word). He was constantly policing the use of the term “benign neglect” (from a notorious memo on race relations he wrote to Nixon). And don’t call him a “neoconservative,” a label he rejected with a vehemence that seems like an insult to some of his closest friends who wore it proudly.

His attitude toward the Establishment was complex: He despised it — and wanted in. Early in the book, Moynihan writes to Theodore White, author of “The Making of the President 1960” (a book that reinvented political journalism by finding drama in the minutiae of election campaigns, thereby paving the way, a half-century later, for POLITICO). Moynihan jokes about applying for membership in the Cosmos Club, a literary-flavored gentlemen’s club in Washington. What could be more ridiculous for an Irishman who grew up poor and fatherless in the Bowery? But by Page 513, he is personally blackballing aristocratic Democrat doyenne Pamela Harriman from the (now co-ed) Century Club, an even hoitier institution in New York. Apparently during his first run for the Senate, in 1976, she spread the rumor that he drank more than perhaps is wise. Or, as Moynihan puts it, she “slandered me in the most vicious and hurtful terms.” Vicious? I’m sure she did her best. Hurtful? No doubt. Slander? Well ...

He famously dressed like an English dandy, while denying any interest in clothes, but his working-stiff-versus-the-rich-bastard bile was genuine and not a politician’s log-cabin pose. In 1970, during the student protests against the Vietnam War, he wrote a stunning unsolicited letter to the head of the committee searching for a new president of Harvard. He described attending a dinner party in Washington at which he had to listen to his host’s daughter and her boyfriend, both Harvard undergrads, talk a lot of nonsense about the evils of Harvard and American society in general. The letter oozes contempt for the “class arrogance” of “children of the upper class” making demands of the “frightened patricians” in charge. He concluded, “You need a man with balls for this job.” Then, reverting from Bowery tough to distinguished scholar, he added, “And brains.”

In 1973, he wrote to Pat Buchanan, “You ... are a poor Irishman well into a career of writing speeches for conservative millionaires and their protégés. I am probably an even poorer one ... in a career [of] writing speeches for liberal millionaires and their protégés. I have got some good meals out of it but damn little else.” Moynihan made this appeal to ethnic working-class solidarity in the course of asking Buchanan to stop picking on the Ford Foundation. Its president, the blue-blood McGeorge Bundy, was a friend.

Who in the Senate today is as out-and-out interesting as Pat Moynihan? It’s tempting to say that they don’t make them like that anymore. But of course they do. The trouble is that the humiliating process of raising money, the nastiness of a well-run campaign and the legislative paralysis when you get there all favor the robo-pol with nothing but politics in his or her head.

Michael Kinsley is a columnist for POLITICO. The founder of Slate, Kinsley also has served as editor of The New Republic, editor-in-chief of Harper’s, editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times and a columnist for The Atlantic.