Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Anti-Trump of American Politics

In an Orwellian era when the president’s personal lawyer says that “truth isn’t truth” and when lies are excused as “alternative facts,” a newly released documentary film provides a potent reminder of one public official who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind without perverting reality.

The film, titled “Moynihan,” profiles Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the flamboyant, technocratic, political-clubhouse-bred and Harvard-honed four-term U.S. senator from New York, U.N. ambassador and adviser to Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Produced by Joseph Dorman and Toby Perl Freilich, the documentary is being screened this month in New York, Los Angeles and Washington.

Moynihan, who died in 2003, famously said that people are entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts. He also liked to quote the maxim that “it’s not ignorance that hurts so much as knowing all those things that ain’t so.” Which can only make you wonder how much he, as that rare commingling of politician and public intellectual, would be wincing at the categorical claims coming from Congress and the White House nowadays.

Moynihan distinguished himself because he derived his policy positions from research rather than by cherry-picking statistics to justify those policies. That’s how he propelled himself to the forefront of issues like auto safety and climate change, as well as the question of the durability of the Soviet Union. He championed equal rights and recognition for women, including his wife, Liz, whom he valued as an equal partner in a male-dominated town.

The product of a single-mother household, Moynihan was exploring the failure of so many recruits to qualify for the military when he more or less stumbled on the disintegration of the two-parent black family as a major cause of recurring poverty.

His report on the black family was meant not for public consumption but for Johnson, who adopted its premise in his groundbreaking strategy to go beyond equal rights to address equality of results in his “War on Poverty.” Moynihan’s conclusions were leaked, though, and became public in 1965 when America was wracked by urban riots, and the report was misinterpreted as blaming the victims.

His recommendation to Nixon that the administration’s incendiary rhetoric on race would benefit from a period of “benign neglect” was also distorted. America was still duty-bound to confront the consequences of racism, he tried to explain, but the nation also needed to “create some equivalence between what government can do about certain problems and how much attention it draws to them.”

Similarly, while Moynihan persuaded Nixon to support a radical family-assistance plan to provide welfare to dependent children, the plan was scuttled by rivals in the White House and was defeated in the Senate by one vote. (“People who are poor stand on their own feet,” he once said. “People who are dependent hang.”)

Moynihan was later called a neoconservative, but he was really a frustrated New Deal Democrat. “I’m of a generation which I don’t think will be reproduced for a while,” he said, “which is deeply respectful of American government and owes so much to it.”

Government had obligations, too, he said, and he expressed fear about the consequences of cutting back welfare benefits in the guise of reform. “Here in Washington, the prevailing view is that we have these problems because we tried to do something about them,” he said. “And if you just don’t try, the problem will go away. There is a certain truth in this. If you do not feed children for a certain period of time, they will go away.”

Watching the film, or rereading “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary,” edited by Steven R. Weisman, is a reminder that you don’t have to agree with everything Moynihan said to appreciate his unconventional curiosity and common sense.

Why, he suggested, since we have a century’s supply of handguns, don’t we restrict the sale of bullets? Recounting a conversation between Hillary Clinton and a health care policy expert, he observed: “He had studied the subject all his life, she had studied the subject three weeks and already knows more than he.”

Appalled by a British official who minimized the late-1960s famine in Biafra by noting that the malnutrition rate was only 5 or 10 percentage points above normal, Moynihan invoked the horrific 19th-century famine in Ireland and wrote: “I really did feel I was talking to Sir Charles Trevelyan 122 years ago, assuming all was well in Connaught, that the new potato crop was coming along nicely, and that in any event the Irish always were a bit disorganized.”

As a student of history, Moynihan provided the public with another special gift: his perspective on contemporary events good and bad. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, columnist Mary McGrory lamented what she called the end of Camelot.

“We’ll never laugh again,” she said.

To which Moynihan replied: “Heavens, Mary, of course we’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.”