Andrew Weisman is going to be joining us tonight with some defendant Trump news, but first,

I'm going to tell you the most hopeful story I know.

It's a story about the place where Joe Biden went today. The place

where Joe Biden was applauded by grateful people from around the world. It's a

dangerous place.

That is the title of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's book about his service as ambassador to the United Nations in the 1970s

before New York voters elected him to four terms in the United States Senate,

where I went to work for him in the 1990s.

The title, A Dangerous Place, referred to The World, and the place where the world began to gather

after World War II to prevent another World War, the United Nations.

Ambassador Moynihan served at the United Nations at the height of the Cold War when the United States

and the Soviet Union had nuclear missiles aimed at each other ready for launch in seconds.

The nuclear threat did not appear to soften Ambassador Moynihan's language

about the Soviet Union's imperialistic dictatorship. Many years later, he discovered the power of those harsh words. It was actually

my first time visiting the News division in the building where I now work. I was

staffing Senator Moynihan for an appearance on the Today Show. It was not long

after the collapse of the Soviet Union, something

no one in the CIA or the American government had predicted, except Senator

Moynihan. In 1979, Senator Moynihan said the Soviet Union was economically and socially unsustainable.

It could blow up, he said.

A dozen years later, it did.

Across the large green room full of breakfast snacks and coffee at the Today Show was the new Russian delegation to the United Nations, the post-Soviet delegation.

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