Daniel Patrick Moynihan goes with Voltaire and Churchill — they make the rest of us despair of ever saying something both original and well, because inevitably, one of them already said it, only better.

I’m reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (edited by Steven Weisman, 2010). It’s curiously unsatisfactory; also immensely worthwhile.

It’s unsatisfactory in the way one of those all-hand-held roughly-cut documentaries is unsatisfactory: You see a lot of stuff happening, but even with a narrator to provide context it doesn’t really paint a picture.