With Words We Govern Men

[Valin]

Jewish Review Of Books:

 

SUZANNE GARMENT

Winter 2013

 

McGill University historian Gil Troy has just written an account of the moment in November, 1975 when the United Nations declared in General Assembly Resolution 3379 that Zionism was a form of racism and the United States, led by Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan, mounted a loud and politically important protest. Moynihan's Moment: America's Fight against Zionism as Racism deserves and will doubtless receive good reviews, but this piece will not be among them—because I was Moynihan's special assistant during the seven months of his service in the UN trenches, and my husband, Leonard Garment, and I are in Troy's book as both participants and sources. Nonetheless, there are some events to which there can never be too many witnesses.

 

(Snip)

 

At the time Moynihan received the appointment, the resolution declaring Zionism, alone among nationalisms, to be a form of "racism and racial discrimination" was making its way through UN conferences and committees to the floor of the General Assembly. Moynihan recognized the resolution for what it was, a means not just of delegitimating Israel and its allies in the West but of deflecting attention from Soviet abuses of human rights, not least those of Soviet Jews. His indignant reaction resonated with the American public. In 1976, after fighting the resolution at the UN, he became the Democratic U.S. Senator from New York, catapulted into the front ranks of the party from which he had been more or less alienated for a decade. As senator, Moynihan took many positions and received many honors, but Troy thinks the fight against Resolution 3379 was Moynihan's greatest moment, and it is hard to argue with him.

 

(Snip)

 

The applause throughout the country was loud and long; the criticism in the diplomatic corps and the State Department was quiet and ominous. Isolated within the State Department, Moynihan left his UN post to return to teaching at Harvard. But there was a second chapter to the excitement: his 1976 campaign for U.S. senator from New York. Troy's book says the idea of running for the Senate didn't enter Moynihan's mind until after the furor erupted over his fight against the Zionism resolution. In truth it is hard to say what entered Pat's mind and when it entered; there was hardly a brain more capable of entertaining more ideas simultaneously. But Moynihan's narrow primary victory over Representative Bella Abzug, supported by the same liberal-conservative coalition that had sustained Pat at the UN, did for the state's Democratic Party what his UN performance had done for the country as a whole, providing it with a reminder of certain shared values that a decade of America's internecine political warfare had not torn loose.

 

As later years showed, neither coalitions nor clarity have much staying power in politics. But I was there when the issue was self-evident, the energy was abundant, and the loyalties were unclouded. I was lucky.

 

 

 

 

H/T Power Line: Moynihan’s Moment, with a Minnesota twist