Elizabeth Moynihan, engine of the senator’s success, dies at 94

Elizabeth Moynihan, who was a crucial political partner for her husband, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, during his four terms as U.S. Senator from New York; himself played an important role in Washington; and as an architectural historian made an important discovery in India and died Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Maura Moynihan. No reason was given.

Reticent in public but lively, irreverent and flammable in private, Ms. Moynihan was a formidable political strategist. “I don’t choose to be a public person,” she told The New York Times in 1976. “You know, the more public Pat has become, the more determined I’ve felt in private.”

But she was Senator Moynihan’s full partner when it came to the legislation and policies that they debated with his staffers and other advisers at the couple’s kitchen table in Washington, and she was his surrogate in overseeing his Senate staff and maintain their loyalty.

Although her role was never publicly acknowledged, Ms. Moynihan earned credit for helping pass what was considered in 1993 to be the most important legislative issue of Bill Clinton’s presidency: the budget and tax increases that underpinned the five-year economic program of the White House.

It was her criticism of Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, that provided what turned out to be the one-vote margin needed to pass the legislation after her husband and the president, fellow Democrats, failed to pass it managed to convince him. The bill was seen in the White House as essential to Clinton’s ultimate success as president.

On the morning of August 6, Senator Kerrey met with Mr. Clinton for an hour, but was apparently unconvinced until Mrs. Moynihan called hours later, around 6 p.m.

As Mr. Moynihan later recalled the conversation in a memo, his wife pointedly told Mr. Kerrey, “I want to live to see you president,” but by voting against the bill, she said, “your future as national democrat at stake. risk.” To be fair, it was a bad bill, she said, agreeing with the senator, but her husband “believes we can’t let another president fail.”

At 8:30 p.m., Mr. Kerrey, the last to announce which way he would vote, declared on the Senate floor that he would support Mr. Clinton. Vice President Al Gore then cast the deciding vote.

“She turned him from a hard no to a yes,” Tony Bullock, Mr. Moynihan’s last chief of staff, said of Senator Kerrey.

Mr. Kerrey said in an email Tuesday that while he did not remember the specific conversation, “I’m sure she would have been disappointed with a ‘no’ vote, and I’m sure it would have been easier to to disappoint the president. president than to disappoint Liz.”

Mrs. Moynihan ran all four of her husband’s successful, no-nonsense Senate campaigns starting in 1976. She called them “mom and pop” operations, but they were professional through and through.

She also reinforced his commitment to improving the architecture of proposed federal public works projects, the rehabilitation of Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue, and historic preservation in New York and elsewhere.

“Every night at dinner, the senator would tell her everything — and I mean everything — that happened in the office that day,” said Richard Eaton, the senator’s former chief of staff. “Many mornings, Liz would call me and tell me something that could have been handled better, or about a staffing issue I wasn’t aware of so it could be resolved.”

Mrs. Moynihan was especially effective in discouraging potential Democratic challengers to her husband’s reelection (such as H. Carl McCall, the New York State comptroller) and those from the Republican Party (including Rudolph W. Giuliani, when he was a U.S. was a lawyer). , in part by backing a TV advertising blitz that praised Mr. Moynihan early in the campaign.

In the late 1970s, when her husband was ambassador to India, Mrs. Moynihan became interested in Babur, the emperor who founded the Mughal dynasty nearly 500 years ago.

Analyzing a 1921 translation of Babur’s diary, she became convinced that the elegant pleasure garden he had created 150 miles south of New Delhi still existed, even though most scholars thought it had probably disappeared. She excavated the garden in 1978 in what The Times called “a major archaeological discovery.”

Babur’s garden became an integral part of her book ‘Paradise as a Garden: In Persia and Mughal India’ (1979). She also edited the book “The Moonlight Garden: New Discoveries at the Taj Mahal” (2000), which documented an investigation into the Mehtab Bagh, a forgotten garden near the Taj Mahal. She led an American team that collaborated with Indian scientists on the project, work that spurred the garden’s restoration and provided new and spectacular views of the Taj Mahal.

Mrs. Moynihan continued to support the preservation of ancient sites as a founding trustee of the Leon Levy Foundation in New York City.

Elizabeth Therese Brennan was born on September 19, 1929 in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, on the outskirts of Boston. Her mother, Therese (Russell) Brennan, was an editor of a local newspaper. Her father, Francis Brennan, was a chemical plant foreman who left the family during the Depression when Liz was five, a growing pain she shared with her future husband, whose father left his wife and children in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan left behind when Pat Moynihan turned 9.

She attended Boston College, but never finished because her money ran out. After volunteering in John F. Kennedy’s first Senate campaign in 1952 and in Adlai Stevenson’s presidential race that year, she moved to New York, where she worked for Governor W. Averell Harriman’s 1954 campaign and met Mr. Moynihan, who was writing speeches for the governor. They married in 1955.

Mr. Moynihan died in 2003. Their son Tim died in 2015, and another son, John, died in 2004. In addition to their daughter, Maura, Mrs. Moynihan is survived by two grandchildren.

The family moved more than 16 times during Mr. Moynihan’s career, from professor at Harvard to presidential adviser and ambassador to India and the United Nations before reaching the Senate. But they found refuge in a 500-acre dairy farm near Oneonta, NY, which they bought in 1964. (It was the setting for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 1999 announcement that she would run for Senate from New York.)

Although Mr. Moynihan played a special role in public life when he retired from the Senate in 2001, Ms. Moynihan’s province was also exceptional, especially among the women of the Senate, for her hands-on involvement in politics. In “Irish Americans: The History and Culture of a People” (2015), Eugene J. Halus Jr. wrote. that Mr. Moynihan was successful in government “in part because of his personality and efforts, but also because of his lifelong partner in government.” politics.”

Peter Galbraith, a former ambassador to Croatia and a Senate staffer under Mr. Moynihan, described Ms. Moynihan as “the architect” of the senator’s landslide re-election victory in 1988, in which he won by a record 2.2 million votes. .

Enjoying his victory, Mr Moynihan wrote to a friend: “It’s just that we were ready when the going got tough. Liz was ready.”

But he might never have joined the political fray without Ms. Moynihan’s encouragement and political instincts, said Lawrence O’Donnell, another former legislative aide to Moynihan and now an MSNBC host.

“I don’t think Professor Moynihan could have become Senator Moynihan without Liz,” he said in an interview. “So Pat’s legacy is Liz’s legacy.”