With the death of Bill Moyers, we’ve lost one of the most important public servants and journalists of the 20th Century, a civic pastor whose thoughtful approach to public policy and the national conversation should inspire us all to do better.
Bill was a Texas-born ordained minister and young reporter who became a top aide to Lyndon Johnson while still in his 20s; helped found the Peace Corps under JFK; obliterated Barry Goldwater with the infamous 1964 “daisy ad” implying that electing Goldwater would bring a nuclear war; shepherded the landmark Great Society to passage; served as LBJ’s press secretary; ran Newsday; and won more than 30 Emmys for his “timely and timeless” work on CBS News and PBS. Whew!
The Times and the Post both ran good obits, but they only scratched the surface of a brilliant, complex, and magnetic man who took to the grave the details of his tortured relationship with Johnson. For more than a decade, LBJ considered Bill the son he never had, then, after he resigned and left in 1967 over his opposition to the Vietnam War, Johnson never spoke to him again.
Moyers never agreed to be interviewed about Johnson by Robert Caro or anyone else. I know, because I tried hard over the years with long letters to him, followed by long, maddeningly opaque conversations where he would offer tantalizing clues but never agree to be formally interviewed.
I don’t like it when journalists who spend their days trying to get other people to talk won’t answer questions about important historical events. He kept saying that everything relevant about LBJ was already out, but I didn’t believe him.
Even so, I could never hold that hypocrisy against him. And I never agreed with conservative critics—and plenty of network executives—who viewed him as sanctimonious. He could be Machiavellian and was sometimes a merciless boss. But his reporting was consistently important, and his commentary was usually wise.
He was also the best-connected man in America, a man whose words had great influence long after he left government.
I learned this directly in 1986 when I was writing a cover story in Newsweek entitled “Civil War at CBS.” Bill Powell, another Newsweek reporter, and I had been reporting for a couple of weeks about how Moyers and others in the news division thought that management—especially CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter—had infused too many entertainment values into the news. But Moyers wouldn’t talk.
Then, just before deadline, my phone rang early in the morning in my tiny fifth-floor walkup on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. It was Moyers, and he had decided to publicly blast his bosses. Old Newsweek articles can be hard to find online, but the Times obit included part of what he told me:
“The line between entertainment and news was steadily blurred,” Mr. Moyers told Newsweek. “Our center of gravity shifted from the standards and practices of the news business to show business.”
Moyers went on to tell me that he was appalled by the CBS Evening News running “stories about three-legged sheep” instead of real news.
The Moyers interview and the rest of our story landed like a bomb in the boardroom of CBS Inc. According to the Times and the Wall Street Journal, our article was mentioned more than a dozen times in the board meeting that led to the firing of CEO Tom Wyman and Sauter. After the bloodletting, William S. Paley, founder of CBS, called my proprietor, Katharine Graham, to “thank us for helping me get my company back,” as Mrs. Graham (that’s what we always called her) told me that week. Paley asked to meet me, and I had a one-on-one lunch with him on TV trays in his office at Black Rock (CBS headquarters). I remember nothing about our lunch except that he was a gracious old man and his office looked like MOMA.
None of that would have happened without Moyers, for whom this CBS shakeup—so big for me—was not even a footnote for him. When I asked him about it years later, he barely remembered it.
I asked Charlie Rose, who knew him well, for his assessment, and Charlie said Bill was “a compelling character: funny, smart, strategic.” Once, “LBJ says, ‘Bill, will you say grace?’ Johnson says, ‘Speak up. I can’t hear you.’ Bill says, ‘I wasn’t talking to you.’”
When Charlie told him that he owed it to history to write about LBJ, “He said he intended to write about it, but time caught up with him.” Moyers told Rose what he told me: He didn’t want to spend the time left to him in the library working on a memoir.
But we do have forthcoming excerpts from Charlie Rose interviews, starting with this one:
James Dickey wrote in the Times in 1971 that Moyers “relies on an unfailing faith that if people will just talk to each other, get together on issues, everything can be worked out. There is little hint of the possibility, looming more and more these days, that there are conditions that nothing can help.”
That hopelessness afflicts us again today. In his patented blend of realism and idealism, Moyers never gave up hope. And he wouldn’t want us to do so, either.
If you’d like to watch me talk for a few minutes about Bill Moyers with Princeton historian Julian Zelizer (who wrote a book about the Great Society), you can find it here, as part of our weekly series, “Past and Presidency.”
[Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared in Old Goats with Jonathan Alter with the title ‘Timely and Timeless’: Farewell, Bill Moyers. Moyers was among the founders of the Peace Corps along with Charles Peters, the Washington Monthly’s late founder, and others. See this 1974 piece by Contributing Editor James Fallows, on Moyers, an alumnus of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations and the editor of Newsday.]
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