MOYNIHAN, DANIEL PATRICK

born March 16, 1927, Tulsa, Okla., U.S. American scholar and Democratic party politician, U.S. senator from New York state from 1977. Moynihan grew up in poverty in New York City and, after service in the U.S. Navy in World War II, attended Tufts University (Medford, Mass.) on the GI Bill (B.A., 1948) and Tufts's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (M.A., 1949), later receiving a Ph.D. from Fletcher (1961). His first taste of politics came in 1953 as a Democratic campaign worker in New York City, and he held various public and party posts in New York state in the 1950s. During the 1960s he was in Washington, D.C., and, while serving in the Department of Labor, cowrote The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, popularly called the Moynihan Report, which held that many of the educational problems of American blacks resulted from the instability of black urban families. The report caused a storm of controversy and made Moynihan famous. He became a professor at Harvard in 1966, held advisory posts in the Richard M. Nixon administration, and served as U.S. ambassador to India (197375) and permanent representative to the United Nations (197576). As a neoconservative, Moynihan campaigned vigorously for Senator Henry Jackson's ill-fated presidential bid in 1976; and, when that bid failed, Moynihan put himself into the race for U.S. senator in New York. He won the election despite the opposition of liberal Democrats, and in his reelection campaign six years later he won by a landslide.