Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a bundle of complexities and contradictions. A hard-drinking Irishman whose mother ran a saloon in Hell’s Kitchen, he dressed and spoke in an erudite manner befitting the Harvard professor he became. A pioneer in sounding the alarm about the collapse of traditional family structure among poor blacks, he urged the Clinton administration to reform welfare before it reformed health care. Yet when welfare reform finally came to a vote, he was against it. An early and stalwart leader in championing Israel’s rights to its capital, he ended up overtaken by Senators Dole and Kyl, who framed the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act that Moynihan eventually threw his substantial political weight behind to help pass. Moynihan was a sometimes sharp critic of President Clinton, yet Moynihan’s endorsement was crucial in getting Senator Clinton elected. On the other hand, Moynihan’s endorsement of Bill Bradley over Mr. Clinton’s vice president, Albert Gore, wasn’t enough to carry Mr. Bradley to victory, even in New York. Moynihan was a builder who was responsible for a stunningly successful remaking of Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue — yet after decades of work, his efforts are only now bearing fruit on New York locations like Governors Island and the Penn Station/Post Office site. He published in Commentary and was close to its editor Norman Podhoretz, yet in October of 2000 Commentary published a witheringly critical piece about him that suggested everyone would have been better off if he were never elected to the Senate.

With welfare policy, Israel, New York politics, urban redevelopment, the United Nations, neo-conservative intellectualism, it is clear the vastness of Moynihan’s ambit, the fertility of his mind. And that leaves aside issues of trade and tax, with which Moynihan was closely involved as a member of the Senate Finance Committee, and, more recently, as a member of President Bush’s commission on social security reform. Even so, some issues escaped his ken. While still on the Finance Committee, the senator once paid a visit to an editor who was his ardent admirer. But when the editor questioned him about why the Congress wasn’t living up to its responsibility under Article 1 of the Constitution to regulate the value of money, Moynihan waffled so alarmingly — he said the international currency markets had grown too big for the Congress to fulfill its obligation — that his admirer, a Democrat, went out and voted for his Republican opponent.

There are no doubt those who view Moynihan’s contradictions as flaws. But on his passing, it seems to us that his complexities made him the extraordinarily attractive figure who is mourned by so many today. His legacy is worth reckoning with. Moynihan’s greatest victory was his defeat of Bella Abzug in the 1976 Democratic primary for Senate. The Democratic Party in New York City is still haunted by Abzug’s influence, as the Democrat-dominated City Council’s vote against the war in Iraq showed. For all of Moynihan’s shortcomings, if the city’s Democrats resolve in mourning him to follow his lead, the city, and the world, will be a better place for it.