Daniel Patrick Moynihan, scholar, author, public servant, controversialist, a man of great gifts and of strong convictions, has died. Some of the positions that he took, especially in the later stages of his career, were a matter of deep disappointment but he was also, in the course of his long public life, a stalwart defender of many noble causes. He was a worthy occupant of the Senate seat from the state of New York held before him by, most recently, Kenneth Keating, Robert Kennedy, and James Lane Buckley, and he shares with Jacob Javits the record for length of service as Senator from the Empire State.



Here are the concluding paragraphs of the Commencement Address Moynihan delivered at Harvard University on 6 June 2002.



Last February, some 60 academics of the widest range of political persuasion and religious belief, a number from here at Harvard, including Huntington, published a manifesto: "What We're Fighting For: A Letter from America."



It has attracted some attention here; perhaps more abroad, which was our purpose. Our references are wide, Socrates, St. Augustine, Franciscus de Victoria, John Paul II, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.



We affirmed "five fundamental truths that pertain to all people without distinction," beginning "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."



We allow for our own shortcomings as a nation, sins, arrogance, failings. But we assert we are no less bound by moral obligation. And finally, ...reason and careful moral reflection ... teach us that there are times when the first and most important reply to evil is to stop it.



But there is more. Forty-seven years ago , on this occasion, General George C. Marshall summoned our nation to restore the countries whose mad regimes had brought the world such horror. It was an act of statesmanship and vision without equal in history. History summons us once more in different ways, but with even greater urgency. Civilization need not die. At this moment, only the United States can save it. As we fight the war against evil, we must also wage peace, guided by the lesson of the Marshall Plan -- vision and generosity can help make the world a safer place.



Requiescat in pace.