Bookbag: The Gentleman from New York, a Biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan

"Ljubljana is lovely, and incredibly prosperous," he wrote home to a secretary from the conference, though the meeting was "incredibly disorganized and wasteful of time and energy, but it is, I think, worth it to me." To the worldly and sardonic Dick Goodwin, he cabled a summary of the conference, saying, "I have seen the Austro-Hungarian empire, and it works."

That last line is as good as his well-known take on the Kennedy assassination ("I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually").

I know that, as a conservative, I am supposed to believe in every man's right to his own tribal loyalties, but I think people should give serious consideration to the possibility that the Irish have unmediated access to truth. Maybe they're just right and the rest of us need to catch up.