Today, we mourn the loss of one of the truly great statesmen of the last century, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The brilliant former Harvard professor, U.N. Ambassador, and Senator from New York died yesterday from complications arising from appendicitis. He was 76.

From the tribute by George Will in today's Washington Post:

Many of America's largest public careers have been those of presidents. Many, but by no means all. Chief Justice John Marshall was more consequential than all but two presidents — Washington and Lincoln. Among 20th-century public servants, Gen. George Marshall — whose many achievements included discerning the talents of a Col. Eisenhower — may have been second in importance only to Franklin Roosevelt. And no 20th-century public career was as many-faceted, and involved so much prescience about as many matters, as that of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who died yesterday at 76.

He was born in Tulsa but spent his formative years on Manhattan's Lower East Side, from which he rose to Harvard's faculty and the administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford, serving as, among other things, ambassador to India and the U.S. representative at the United Nations. Then four Senate terms. Along the way he wrote more books than some of his colleagues read and became something that, like Atlantis, is rumored to have once existed but has not recently been seen — the Democratic Party's mind.

His was the most penetrating political intellect to come from New York since Alexander Hamilton, who, like Moynihan, saw over the horizon of his time, anticipating the evolving possibilities and problems of a consolidated, urbanized, industrial nation. A liberal who did not flinch from the label, he reminded conservatives that the Constitution's framers "had more thoughts about power than merely its limitation."

Also read the obituary in today's New York Times.