Daniel Patrick Moynihan

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN
    
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I know there are a group of us who wish to speak about Senator Moynihan. I think that would be the next order of business, and so I will proceed.
    
Let me say that yesterday all of us were caused great sorrow when we heard the terrible news that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a giant among us, had passed from our midst. While the sadness is still there, today I rise to pay tribute to Pat Moynihan and to the extraordinary life that he led.
    
It can rarely be said about someone that they changed the world and made it a better place just with their ideas. Senator Moynihan was such an individual. He was a font of ideas. He was not afraid to utter them and he uttered them in such a way that people listened, paid attention, and changed the way they lived for the better.
    
Pat Moynihan was a friend to me, a mentor. I first met him when I attended his course at Harvard while I was a student and he was a professor. Throughout the many years, he extended me so many kindnesses I can't even count them. But beyond the personal—and every one of us has our personal stories about Pat—is what he did for all of us. He was known in the Senate as a unique individual, as a person of ideas in a body that, frankly, has always needed more of them. He was the kind of Senator that the Founding Fathers, as they look down on this body, would look at and smile and say: That's the kind of person we wanted to serve in the Senate.
    
I think the Washington Post editorial said it very well today. It said:
    
He pursued with distinction enough careers for half a dozen men of lesser talents and imagination—politician, Presidential adviser, diplomat, author, professor and public intellectual.
    
As someone who is barely managing to pursue only one of those many careers, I can't help but observe that, as you look around, there are no more Pat Moynihans in part because of the man—Pat Moynihan's vision, erudition, intellect, dazzling wit, and moral conviction were second to none—and in part because of the times. Pat Moynihan was one of the preeminent public intellectuals in a time when such figures and their ideas could command the Nation's attention in a way that I fear is now all but gone from American life. I hope and pray that is not true.
    
But we mourn his passing. We mourn the passing of his time from the national stage and from this beloved institution that he loved so well and served so well in for 24 years, the Senate.
    
In the coming days, many will pay tribute to Pat Moynihan's leadership and vision on so many ideas where his mark on policy and his mark on individuals are well known. There are children born in this country and in foreign countries whose lives are better, who will live better lives because Pat Moynihan lived and worked on this Earth.
    
His leadership in Social Security, in welfare reform, in poverty, in tax policy, in trade, in education, in immigration, in foreign policy, and most recently in government secrecy—any one of those would have been enough to be a capstone of an ordinary Senator's career. But Pat did them all.

Mr. SCHUMER. As a fellow New Yorker, I am going to speak of Pat Moynihan as a builder. He was known as a thinker, but we forget he was also a builder, a builder of bricks and mortar, somebody who taught us in New York and the country to think grandly of public works once again. Those who knew Moynihan best say that is where his heart truly lay.
    
The week after I won election for the Senate, Pat Moynihan called me into his office. He told me he would announce he wasn't going to run again. He said: I am going to bequeath to you a gift. I am going to recommend that my staffer Polly Trottenberg work for you. Well I took his advice and hired her to be my Legislative Director and she has been with me ever since. He did many nice things for me. That was certainly one of them.    

Because she worked so long and well for him, I asked Polly today what Pat Moynihan had regarded as his greatest accomplishment and she said something that surprised me. But when you think about it, it should not be surprising. It was how he reclaimed Pennsylvania Avenue in this city and made it big and grand and beautiful again and how he lived out the rest of his days there with his wonderful wife Liz.
    
Pat Moynihan not only taught us to think grandly about public works on the national scale, he also taught us to cherish our cities, to make them lively and beautiful, and none so more than his two beloved cities, New York and Washington.
    
His groundbreaking work on Federal transportation policy remains without equal. Pat Moynihan is the father of ISTEA, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991, the most important piece of transportation legislation since President Eisenhower's Federal Highway Act of 1956.
    
Pat Moynihan, as a social scientist, urban planner, and old-fashioned New York politician, helped change the course of American transportation, weaning us from our highways-only approach that had destroyed so many urban neighbors.
    
Instead, ISTEA encouraged so many communities to invest in other modes, such as transit, rail, and even bipeds. I ride a bike every Saturday around New York. It is another small way I thank Pat Moynihan.
    
He provided citizens with far greater say in what types of projects would be built in their communities. ISTEA was especially important to New York. It enabled the State to restore some of our most important but neglected public works, such as the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge as well as dream new dreams like I-86 across the southern tier, and the Second Avenue subway.
    
His passion and dedication to public architecture is well known and dates from his days as a young aide to President Kennedy who, right before his death, tasked Moynihan with restoring Pennsylvania Avenue here in Washington. Moynihan succeeded brilliantly in his task, with the final piece of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, unveiled a few years ago and instantly hailed as one of the best new buildings to grace the Capital.
    
Of course, Senator Moynihan was also a leading force for architecture in New York. He was responsible for building a beautiful Federal courthouse at 500 Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, which we were proud to name after him. Completed in 1994, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse embodies the same spirit as his previous architectural endeavors, an extraordinary work of art inside and outside.
    
He was responsible for the restoration of the spectacular Beaux-Arts Customs House at Bowling Green and for recognizing what a treasure we have in Governors Island.
    
He is beloved in Buffalo, at the other end of our State, for reawakening the city's appreciation for its architectural heritage, which includes Frank Lloyd Wright houses and the Prudential Building, one of the best known early skyscrapers by the architect Louis H. Sullivan, a building which Moynihan helped restore and then chose as his Buffalo office.
    
Moynihan has also spurred a powerful and passionate popular movement, which is gaining strength as he leaves us, in Buffalo to build a new signature Peace Bridge over the Niagara River.
    
His last project—one that I regret he didn't live to see completed—was his beloved Pennsylvania Station. In 1963, Pat Moynihan was one a group of prescient New Yorkers who protested the tragic razing of our city's spectacular Penn Station—a glorious public building designed by the Nation's premier architectural firm of the time, McKim, Mead & White.
    
It was Pat Moynihan who recognized years ago that across the street from what is now a sad basement terminal that functions—barely—as New York City's train station, sits the James A. Farley Post Office Building, built by the same architects in much the same grand design as the old Penn Station. Pat Moynihan recognized that since the very same railroad tracks that run under the current Penn Station also run beneath the Farley Building, we could use the Farley Building to once again create a train station worthy of our grand city.
    
He then did the impossible: He persuaded New York City, New York State, the U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Department of Transportation, Amtrak, congressional appropriators, and President Clinton himself, to commit to making this project succeed. And I can tell you, I don't think President Clinton even knew what hit him.
    
Herbert Muschamp, the noted New York Times architecture critic, praised the new Penn Station design, which brilliantly fuses the classical elements of the Farley Building with a dramatic, light-filled concourse, when he wrote:
    
In an era better known for the decrepitude of its infrastructure than for inspiring new visions of the city's future, the plan comes as proof that New York can still undertake major public works. This is the most important transportation project undertaken in New York City in several generations.
    
We have Pat Moynihan to thank for that and so many other things.
    
The epitaph given to Sir Christopher Wren, designer of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, is an equally fitting epitaph for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice"—"If you would see this man's monument, look around."
    
And not only look at the buildings, look at people, look at highways, look at Government projects and programs—all of which Pat Moynihan had a tremendous effect on.
    
I join with every New Yorker and every American in mourning Pat Moynihan's passing but celebrating his extraordinary life, his extraordinary career, celebrating the extraordinary man himself.
    
I give my heartfelt condolences to his family—Liz and Timothy and Maura and John and his grandchilden, Michael Patrick and Zora—and count myself among the many others who will miss him dearly.
    
Mr. President, I will end with a prayer. It is my hope, it is my prayer, that God grant us a few more Pat Moynihans in this Senate, in this country, in this world.
    
I yield the floor.