Throughout his industrious career, which spanned subcabinet service under four president as well as four senatorial terms, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) consistently found himself preoccupied with notions of American family life. He regarded traditional family arrangements as essential to the preservation of Americas moral backbone. Ironically, however, he remained a "liberal", wrapped in the cloth of the New Deal and decidedly deaf to the social upheavals of the 1970s, which overthrew the familial traditionalism of his youth, and came to define mainstream "liberalism" by the late...