The offer of the job at the U.N. came from Kissinger. The secretary of state had found Moynihan's Commentary article so “staggeringly good” that he “suddenly…understood what was going on out there.” For a while, at least, Moynihan's thesis galvanized the State Department: instead of “interminably” maundering on “about ‘damage limitation,’” it could, like Commentary, go on the attack.

Moynihan didn't altogether trust Kissinger. But Kissinger “needed – we needed – some successes,” Moynihan would write, and “The United States in Opposition” indicated a strategy for success. Moynihan took the U.N. job in large part because of the urgings of his friends, James Q. Wilson, Kristol, Bell, Podhoretz, and above all Leonard Garment. A partner in the New York law firm Nixon had joined in 1963, Garment (though a Democrat) had worked on his campaign in 1968 and ended up as White House counsel, replacing John Dean, through the Watergate crisis.

Moynihan's “closest friend” during his two years in Washington, Garment was in 1975 back in New York, “saddened but not diminished.” Watergate aside, the sadness stemmed from feeling out of place in his old firm and from the agony of his wife's mental breakdown (she finally committed suicide). Offering him a job on staff at the U.N. was Moynihan's way of bringing “Leopold Bloom” – his Joycean nickname for Garment, a Jew who was also, at least in spirit, Irish – back into the political game.