Early Life and Education
Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of Margaret Ann (née Phipps), a homemaker, and John Henry Moynihan, a reporter for a daily newspaper in Tulsa. He moved to New York City at the age of six. Brought up in a poor neighborhood, he shined shoes, attended various public, private, and parochial schools, and ultimately graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. He was a parishioner of St. Raphael's Church (New York City), Hell's Kitchen / Clinton, and also cast his first vote in that church. He and his brother, Michael Willard Moynihan, spent most of their childhood summers at his grandfather's farm in Bluffton, Indiana. After high school, Moynihan worked as a longshoreman before entering City College of New York (CCNY), which at that time provided free higher education.
After a year at CCNY, he joined the United States Navy, receiving V-12 officer training at Tufts University, where he graduated with a B.A. He was on active duty from 1944 to 1947, last serving as gunnery officer of the USS Quirinus. He received an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, also at Tufts. Moynihan then studied as a Fulbright fellow at the London School of Economics. Many years later, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Tufts.
Read more about this topic: Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“Holinesse on the head,
Light and perfections on the breast,
Harmonious bells below, raising the dead
To leade them unto life and rest.
Thus are true Aarons drest.”
—George Herbert (1593–1633)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)