Byline: David Remnick
Has teevee land ever seen a man so tickled as Daniel Patrick Moynihan?
As he describes the plight of the American family to Phil Donahue, the senator's knees lock and his shoe tips wag. His bushy brows hump up like two millipedes on a twig, then ascend to his thatchy forelock. When the audience applauds him, Moynihan applauds back. And as the clapping flattens into a roar, his mouth goes pursy, forming a fleshy Irish rose.
His daughter Maura - late of Harvard and the rock group the Same - has seen the look before. "Dad's mouth gets like that when he's happy," she says.
"One thing about my father you should know," Maura Moynihan adds. "He loves being senator."
After the show, Moynihan lumbers toward the elevator. He is a towering sight - 6 feet 4 inches - and surprisingly trim. He is one of those men whose waggy midlife jowls make them seem far heavier than they are.
The theater he has become - the herky- jerky Anglo-speech, the bow tie slightly askew, the tweedy caps and professorial rambles - they all make him seem vaguely not there, a figure not of the present but of an unreal history, an American Edmund Burke taking dominion on the Hill.
He is partial to Cockney pub songs such as "The Lambeth Walk," odd British evening slippers, English soaps, colognes, cheeses, mustards and ales. He used to stuff his handkerchief up his jacket sleeve in the British mode, but that mannerism has disappeared.
The sources of Moynihan's real satisfactions these days run deep. His Senate seat in New York appears safe. As an analyst of American family problems, he is being hailed as an embattled prophet redeemed, complete with praise for his newest book,"Family and Nation."
When he first spoke out on the state of the black family as an undersecretary of labor in the Johnson administration 21 years …
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