Moynihan Speaks on Response to Terror

Atop the steps of Memorial Church and protected from the rain by a canopy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan delivered the 2002 commencement address to a small and drenched audience on June 6.

Moynihan, a former four-term Democratic senator from New York who was a professor of government at Harvard, said the United States government needs to take active steps to combat terrorism.

“We are indeed at war, and we must act accordingly with equal measures of audacity and precaution,” Moynihan said.

The former chair of the Senate Finance Committee painted a grim picture of the future, saying the world is in as much danger now as it was during the Cold War.

“The terrorist attacks on the United States last September were not nuclear, but they will be,” he said.

James Tobin, who received his degree from the Extension School today and was in attendance for the speech, said the address “was pretty ominous. It suits the year of 9/11 well.”

But Moynihan also questioned some of the steps taken by the government to counter terrorism.

“Does the Parks Service really need to photograph every single visitor to the Lincoln Memorial?” Moynihan asked.

In his speech, Moynihan, who has a reputation as a “policy-wonk,” cited journal articles and noted political scientists at length.

Thousands of empty folding chairs filled the Tercentenary Theatre during the speech. About 300 people attended, an audience that did not entirely fill the first 10 rows of seats.

It had been drizzling when Moynihan began his speech, and the rain grew heavier during the roughly half-hour-long address.

The nature of the speech, which Moynihan had said would be policy-oriented, may have played a role in the composition of the audience. Most of the recent degree recipients in attendance, sporting their black robes, were not undergraduate students, and even they made up only a small fraction of the audience.

Wisssam Yafi, who received his degree today from the Kennedy School of Government, said, “Some of the points he made were of interest. Some of them, I’ve heard before.”

Cy P. Chan ’02, taking photographs with his family in the Yard after Moynihan’s speech, said he had chosen not to hear the former senator’s address.

When asked why he didn’t attend, he replied, “The rain. But also because I didn’t think it would be that interesting.”

—Staff writer Alexander J. Blenkinsopp can be reached at blenkins@fas.harvard.edu.