To the Editor:

I found it a bit disquieting that Deb Palmieri in her March 4 Editor's View piece simply referred to "Assistant Secretary of Labor Patrick Moynihan's leaked internal report, 'The Negro Family: The Case for National Action'" without noting for the benefit of the reader that this report was both written and leaked 50 years ago in 1965. The author was in fact Daniel Patrick Moynihan who served in four successive Presidential administrations beginning with John F. Kennedy, as Ambassador to the United Nations and to India, on the Harvard University faculty, and finally as a four term United States Senator for the state of New York from 1976 until 2000. He was one of the pillars of liberalism during the second half of the 20th century.

The reader can sense from Ms. Palmieri's piece that she wishes poor people would just go away somehow. Her public policy prescription for achieving this is that they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I wish she could put a bit more meat on that bone in terms of making it operational.

In the print edition, the Press ran a Guest View piece lower down on the page. In it Professor Garrison provides a more complete discussion of the context of the report. He will be chairing a forum at Kutztown University on March 18 which will include a closing panel session on whether the report is still relevant in 2015. Unfortunately, I suspect it still is.

Donald Richards

Lower Macungie Township