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Papers Show Moynihan in Full Voice Under Nixon

He complained about the “Schrafft’s in the basement” color scheme proposed for the White House mess. He warned of the alienation of American blacks. He predicted the potential impact of global warming. He scoffed that anyone could seriously think the public still supported the Vietnam War. And he repeatedly chided his White House colleagues, saying they were making policy on the basis of unproved assumptions.

In 90,000 pages of letters and memorandums released Friday by the Nixon Presidential Library, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, counselor and assistant to the president for urban affairs from January 1969 through December 1970 and a future senator from New York, prodded the president and his White House colleagues to deliver on a domestic agenda and expressed exasperation over the government’s entropy.

He contended that Southern governors who doled out largess to poor whites and welfare rights leaders who supported poor blacks opposed the proposed Family Assistance Plan, which included a form of guaranteed income, for the same reason: they would be put “out of business.”

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Credit...Mark Wilson/Associated Press

In his memorandum suggesting that discourse on race would benefit from a period of “benign neglect,” he also warned about “the incidence of antisocial behavior among young black males,” and added: “Apart from white racial attitudes, this is the biggest problem black Americans face, and in part it helps shape white racial attitudes.”

He apologized to Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader, who had been criticized by a departing government official. “The issue is the intimidation by government of a private citizen because of his holding disapproved opinions,” Moynihan wrote. “I recall from my youth the observation that if fascism should ever come to the United States it would be in the guise of antifascism. I very much fear we see the tendency in this squalid enterprise.”

On Oct. 1, 1969, he recalled that at an official meeting where he described the war in Vietnam as an unpopular political disaster, “there were at least a few persons who seem to think the war is some kind of presidential prerogative which we must not allow college boys or effeminate professors to infringe.”

He was appalled by a British official who belittled the famine in Biafra because the rate of “malnutrition” was only 5 or 10 percentage points above the normal rate. “I really did feel I was talking to Sir Charles Trevelyan 122 years ago,” Moynihan wrote, “assuming all was well in Connaught, that the new potato crop was coming along nicely, and that in any event the Irish always were a bit disorganized.”

And complaining that he was being demeaned in leaks, he wrote: “There is no great harm in having a few character assassins on the White House staff, but we should keep the number of madmen to a minimum.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Papers Show Moynihan In Full Voice Under Nixon. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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