Moynihan, Daniel Patrick (1927-2003)

US Democrat politician and diplomat. A senator for New York from 1977, he became chair of the Senate Finance Committee in January 1993. In 1995 he led the opposition to Republican attempts to cut back on welfare spending. He concerned himself with the problem of poverty among urban black families, and was one of the authors of The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (1965), which came to be known as the Moynihan Report.

Moynihan was ambassador to India 1973-75 and to the United Nations 1975-76. He served on the Senate Finance Committee from 1977. In 1996 he was critical of President Clinton's abolition of automatic welfare payments to poor families.

Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He embarked on an academic career before his appointment to the department of labour in 1961.

He was a member of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard 1960-65 and its director 1966-69. Assistant to the president for urban affairs 1969-73, he was the architect of President Nixon's family-assistance programme, which was rejected by Congress. In Family and Nation (1985), he lays out a taxation policy to encourage two-parent families, in an attempt to check the emergence of an underclass. His Pandemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics was published 1993.