At 10 a.m. on January 23, 1969 — his third full day in office — President Richard Nixon signed Executive Order 11452, to establish a new executive-branch agency called the “Urban Affairs Council” (UAC). With its interdepartmental structure and centralized White House control of federal policy for America’s struggling cities, then as now beset by decay and radicalism, the UAC was intended to replicate the primacy that the National Security Council and its chief officer, Henry Kissinger, would enjoy over U.S. foreign policy. To run the council, the new president — a Republican from California elected with just 43 percent of the vote and facing a Congress with both houses, for the first time in 120 years, under opposition control — selected as executive director a leading light of the opposition: Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Six-foot-five, silver-haired and chubby-cheeked, given to bowties and circumlocutory Irish wit, Moynihan was one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals. From Hell’s Kitchen he had risen to Harvard University: epicenter of Nixon’s fear and loathing of the eastern elite. He was also, worse still, a Kennedy man. After JFK’s assassination, columnist Mary McGrory had famously said to Moynihan, “We will never laugh again,” prompting Moynihan to reply: “Heavens, Mary, we’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.” That same gift with words had first catapulted Moynihan to notoriety in 1965, when he was assistant secretary of labor and published a white paper entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” A product of the Department of Labor’s Office of Policy Planning and Research — the mirroring of foreign-policy architecture by domestic agencies was already in vogue in LBJ’s time — the “Moynihan report” pointedly dissected the “tangle of pathology” afflicting black America.
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