American politics: The odd couple

The Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House. By Stephen Hess. Brookings Institution Press; 172 pages; $24. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukRICHARD NIXON and Daniel Patrick Moynihan were a most ill-assorted pair. Indeed, in his new book, “The Professor and the President”, Stephen Hess, a Republican journalist who worked with Moynihan for Nixon in the White House before a long career at the Brookings Institution, asks whether “Of all the odd couples in American public life, were they not the oddest?”Nixon, scowling and paranoid, the most combative (though not the most conservative) of Republican politicians, had survived eight often humiliating years as Ike Eisenhower’s vice-president. When he ran for the White House in 1960 he was beaten by John Kennedy by a handful of votes. He became a laughing-stock for the press when he failed to become governor of California two years later.Moynihan was six foot five inches (nearly two metres) of Irish brawn and charm, one of the “Harvard bastards” Nixon disdained but sometimes employed. He liked to say he was “baptised a Catholic but born a Democrat...

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