He probably didn’t set out to, but James T. Patterson has written a very melancholy book. On the surface, this is a humble history, written without exaggeration or irony, and largely without bias. Below its modest exterior, however, lies a doleful cautionary tale about the vanity of politics and the limits of government, a tale that comes at a particularly apt political moment.

Patterson’s history has a tragic arc. It begins, as tragedy usually does, in optimism and overconfidence. In early 1965, Democratic spirits were understandably high. Lyndon Johnson had just won over 61 percent of the vote. The civil-rights movement was inspiring a sense of profound moral purpose. In his first State of the Union address, Johnson had announced the War on Poverty, and in short order, Congress had established the Office of Economic Opportunity (command central for that enterprise) and passed major bills to provide federal funds for compensatory education and for a cabinet-level department of housing, to be titled HUD; Head Start and the Job Corps were soon to come. “Hell, we’re the richest country in the world, the most powerful,” Patterson quotes Johnson as crowing. “We can do it all!”

But there were ominous signs that the fates would not oblige. At work on an in-house memo about black employment, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a young assistant secretary of labor, was uncovering some disturbing trends. While a black middle class was close to reaching economic parity with middle-class whites, the black ghettos were sliding into disorder. In the 53 pages of analysis, including 41 tables and graphs, of his final report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Moynihan described alarming levels of male unemployment, crime, welfare dependency, and illegitimacy. Moved by his own experience — his alcoholic father had abandoned his family when he was a boy — and by his broad study of history, psychology, and sociology, Moynihan was especially troubled by growing fatherlessness since, he argued, boys without fathers were more prone to impulsivity and violence. “At the center of the tangle of pathology [of the ghetto],” Moynihan concluded, “is the weakness of the family structure.”

Moynihan’s language surely grates some ears today, but the administration he served found it inspiring. In June 1965, Johnson used the report as the basis for a Howard University graduation speech, one he later called the best of his presidency. Certainly from today’s perspective, it was an extraordinary address. Johnson warned that though the nation had gone far in assuring civil rights, “freedom is not enough.” Blacks continued to be beset by discrimination and economic distress, but “perhaps most important [is] the breakdown of the Negro family structure.” “The family is the cornerstone of our society,” the president continued. “More than any other force it shapes the attitudes, the hopes, the ambitions, and the values of the child.” He vowed to devote his administration to addressing what he viewed as a severe threat to racial progress.

Two near-simultaneous events collided to ensure that that would not happen. The first, seemingly trivial, was that someone — no one knows who, but some suspect Moynihan himself — leaked the report. The second, more serious occurrence came in early August, when the Watts ghetto exploded in rioting. The press wrongly conflated the two events, suggesting that “The Negro Family” was the administration’s harsh explanation for the violence in Los Angeles.

Fearing that the public would lose sympathy for blacks’ plight, prominent civil-rights leaders and friendly academics went on the defensive, insisting that the only pathology worthy of concern was racism. Though he had himself cautioned about the dangers of family breakdown in the past, James Farmer of CORE pronounced the report “a massive academic cop-out for the white conscience.” William Ryan, a white psychologist from Boston, coined the enduring phrase “blaming the victim” in a book by that name. So acid was the anti-Moynihan mood that when he and his family left Washington for Harvard in the fall of 1966, Cambridge parents avoided play dates with the presumably contaminated children and, after one nasty encounter, his wife, Liz, was advised by friends to avoid social events altogether.

And thus it happened that, for the next two decades, the escalating deterioration of the ghetto family became a problem with no name. Moynihan seemed an American Cassandra, warning of the tragedy to come, but dismissed or ignored by all. Johnson, preoccupied by a worsening situation in Vietnam, and feeling his way around a newly radicalized racial era, was in no position to take up the cause he had embraced in his Howard University speech. Throughout the 1970s, scholars insisted that the matriarchal family was an uplifting reflection of black resilience and adaptiveness to the economic hardships of the ghetto. By 1984, 60 percent of black children were born to single mothers, a dramatic leap from the 24 percent that had grabbed Moynihan’s attention in 1965. Meanwhile, poverty, crime, and welfare dependency had also grown considerably worse.

This unfolding tragedy managed to revive the maligned report and its author’s reputation. Ken Auletta’s 1982 book The Underclass was the first to draw public attention to the wreckage of the ghetto family. It was followed by a documentary by Bill Moyers (as an aide to Johnson, Moyers had spoken highly of Moynihan’s work). Called The Vanishing Family — Crisis in Black America, the show was praised in this magazine by Michael Novak as “one of the bravest TV documentaries ever made.” William Julius Wilson, by the late 1980s the most prominent sociologist of black poverty, called Moynihan “prophetic.” Moynihan himself, now a U.S. senator and a veteran of the Nixon administration, was invited to Harvard to give three lectures on the history and themes of his report. By the 1990s, Patterson tells us, just about everyone grasped that ghetto poverty had gone far beyond a simple economic story. It was a crisis that was, in the words of the Moynihan report, “feed[ing] on itself.”

Alas, by this time the damage seemed beyond repair. It still seems so today: Even as the nation’s first black president presides over domestic policy, a once-unimaginable 72 percent of black children are born to single mothers. The poverty rate among blacks is three times that among non-Hispanic whites. Black children are nine times more likely than white to have a parent in prison. To echo a well-known phrase, Americans set out to wage war on black poverty, but black poverty refused to surrender.

Moynihan’s prescience raises a question: Was there a way that history could have unfolded differently? If people had listened to his warnings, could the tragedy have been averted? Freedom Is Not Enough offers nothing to support that hope. For one thing, black-family decline did not occur in isolation; it paralleled the profound shift in the wider culture that saw white out-of-wedlock birthrates go from 3 percent in 1965 to 27 percent by 2007. The splitting of childbearing and marriage, children and fathers, is not only widely practiced; it has become generally accepted. Some readers will be surprised to learn that, for a while, Moynihan’s analysis received a friendly reception from the mainstream media: The New York Times ran a number of admiring articles, as did Life, Time, and Newsweek. But yes, there was a time when journalists would not squirm uneasily in the face of what Moynihan ironically referred to as “‘Victorian’ notions of broken homes.”

Patterson’s useful section on the intellectual foundations of the Moynihan report captures the depth of the cultural transformation. Moynihan’s language echoed that of W. E. B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, and Kenneth Clark. Clark’s 1965 book Dark Ghetto, for instance, described ghetto dysfunction using such phrases as “distorted masculine image” and “institutionalized pathology.” (Clark was one of the few black voices supporting Moynihan’s work — at least, that is, until 1970, when word leaked that Moynihan had advised Nixon to pursue a policy of “benign neglect” on racial matters.) Before the Moynihan report, scholars, black and white, easily combined moral revulsion for slavery and discrimination with blunt judgment of destructive behavior. Today, as pathology has become a word used only in hospitals, people are likely to find such talk archaic — at best.

The Moynihan report nicely synthesized the structural and cultural analyses of black poverty. Structurally, male unemployment, in large measure caused by racism, made men poor husband material. As a cultural matter, single mothers were unable to properly socialize their sons, who then fell into crime and delinquency. This, in turn, made them less employable and marriageable. What to do? Moynihan was criticized for not making clear policy recommendations in his report, but, as Patterson observes, its subtitle — “The Case for National Action” — suggested he had big plans. And with regard to these, Moynihan, perhaps the most sophisticated policy intellectual of the second half of the 20th century, got some important things wrong.

Moynihan well understood the demoralizing effects of welfare dependency, but spent much of his career advocating large public-employment programs and family allowances. Amazingly, he got President Nixon to support the Family Assistance Plan, a radical guaranteed-income program, after he assured the president the bill would make it possible to fire tens of thousands of government social workers. FAP did not succeed, but in 1988 Moynihan helped secure the passage of the Family Support Act, which provided job training and education for the welfare-dependent. Though the bill had a negligible effect on poverty and employment, Moynihan continued to hew to his conviction that jobs were the solution. Eight years later, he blasted welfare reform as likely to cause “something approaching an Apocalypse” because it did not include a jobs program. This time, the American Cassandra was dead wrong: Although the 1996 law did little to knit up the unraveled black family, it managed to dramatically increase employment among single mothers and to lower black child-poverty rates for the first time since the 1970s.

What Moynihan missed — and in this respect, he resembles most scholars and policy experts today — is that if freedom was not enough, neither was the promise of an income. It was reasonable to presume that if structural factors — racism, unemployment — were at the root of the black-family problem, policies addressing the structural problem were the solution. But the policies based on this presumption ultimately could not grapple with the family’s role in socializing children. To this day, scholars look for ways for government to take up that job through everything from programs teaching mothers to read to their children to midnight basketball. They have had little success.

Years after the brouhaha, Moynihan famously wrote: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, which determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” At least when it comes to the black family, this last point remains tragically unproven.