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The Pink Slip in the Post
As U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Daniel Moynihan had become a personal as well as political friend. So I was upset when, in the course of a meeting with him, he produced a copy of The Washington Post. There was a front-page story in which Ivor Richard, the British ambassador, criticized Moynihan, likening him to Wyatt Earp, the avenging cowboy, running amok in the U.N. Richard also made the damning criticism, which I had heard before, that Moynihan put off the third world countries by his frank and outspoken manner.
Moynihan had been around long enough to realize that this article was damaging to him. He did not believe that it came only from the British. He felt it was no accident that it was published in Washington, that the British would not have done this without knowing they had the backing of the State Department, indeed of the secretary of state. A few days later, Lennie Garment called and told me that Moynihan was about to resign. The full story had now run in The New York Times, and Moynihan believed it was definitely Kissinger-inspired. On my way to the U.N., I met Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary. I said to him that it would be wrong for Moynihan to resign; the opponent was the wrong opponent, namely, the British ambassador. I didn't think they could pin this on the State Department, certainly not on the secretary. Podhoretz felt that once a person began to go down in Kissinger's eyes, there was no stopping the sinking and the sooner one faced reality the better. I insisted that wasn't the case. Moynihan was strong publicly, I said, and Kissinger could break his neck on him. Podhoretz just laughed at my naivetŽ. For six years now, he said, all those who had predicted that Kissinger would go too far and would stumble and fall were either in jail or put out to pasture, while Kissinger was still secretary of state. There was no one as nasty as Kissinger when it came to political infighting, Podhoretz said. There was no question that these articles and the campaign against Moynihan came from the great man himself. Moynihan obviously agreed. In February 1976, he went through with his plan to resign.
