One more comment on DPM

The quote in the earlier post about Amin also reminded me of a dinner I had with a small group and Senator Moynihan. There were about 8 of us at the table; Joe Gale, Moynihan's aide and then a bunch of academics in governmental affairs and in tax policy, and the Senator. He showed up late to the dinner and immediately ordered a neat Scotch. We had dinner with a lot of wine, I think he consumed a fair amount of it. And then he ordered up a large snifter of Brandy at the end of the meal. We then got down to business to talk about a tax issue. Moynihan spent twenty or thirty minutes in the beginning of our discussion laying out some clear thoughts about the development of the tax code. What struck me that night was first, his absolute command of tax issues. I've spent a lot of time trying to get to a reasonable level of understanding but the Senator took policy and mixed it with history and philosophy in a wonderful manner. But second, as he was talking I looked around the table and all of the academics were furiously taking notes on any paper they could find, almost like a graduate seminar in tax. Most of the academics had spent a good deal of their careers either studying tax issues or working on them for their universities but DPM could add something that each of us thought was valuable enough to record.

I did not work with Moynihan on a day to day basis. I did work a lot with his immediate predecessor (Jacob Javits). Both evidenced a charm and intellect that was contagious.