Bill Moyers, a key member of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s inner circle and later a guiding force in American journalism during more than 40 years in public television, has died at the age of 91, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
At a time when critics said broadcast news was becoming fluffier and shallower, Moyers pursued a thoughtful, in-depth approach, bringing an intellectual perspective delivered in a soothing Texas twang.
He took an activist approach to the job and The Nation magazine called him a “radical presence” in broadcast news, which his critics said was proof that the Public Broadcasting Service network should not get federal funding.
Starting in 1971, Moyers had regular shows on public television, including “Bill Moyers’ Journal,” “Now With Bill Moyers,” “Moyers on America” and “Moyers and Company,” as well limited-run series on the U.S. Constitution, faith and mythology.
Among the other topics he explored at length on his shows were poverty, racism, money in politics, climate change, income inequality, the shortcomings of the media and what he called the “pirates and predators of Wall Street.”
“He used the tools of the documentarian to wield a velvet sledgehammer, bludgeoning corporate polluters and government ne’er-do-wells with precision and grace,” New York Times media columnist David Carr wrote in 2004.
Billy Don Moyers was born in Hugo, Oklahoma, on June 5, 1934, and grew up mostly in Marshall, Texas. A dutiful, energetic overachiever, he dedicated himself to school, church and work, including a job at the local newspaper.
His early adult life would be a tug of war between the pulpit, the press and politics. He was attending North Texas State College when he first went to Washington in 1954 as a summer intern in the office of then-Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson. When he returned to school, transferring to the University of Texas, he worked on the student newspaper and Johnson made sure he had a job at the Austin television station owned by his wife, “Lady Bird” Johnson.
He also pursued the ministry, becoming ordained as a Baptist minister in 1954 and earning a master of divinity degree at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1959.
Johnson’s legendary powers of persuasion eventually prevailed and Moyers became an aide during Johnson’s unsuccessful presidential run against John F. Kennedy in 1960. After the election, Kennedy chose Moyers to be assistant director of his newly established Peace Corps.
After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and Johnson became president, Moyers moved to the White House. He was only 30 years old but became one of the most important people in Washington – a duty-bound, deal-making extension of his boss. He served as Johnson’s press secretary, adviser, speech writer and congressional go-between. In 1965, he appeared on the covers of Newsweek and Time, which called him “LBJ’s Young Man in Charge of Everything.”
Moyers was a driving force in forging Johnson’s Great Society legislation – laws and programs that included the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the “war on poverty,” Medicaid and Medicare, conservation and aid to education.
“He taught me so much about politics and about what’s possible, about human behavior, about the consequences of decisions,” Moyers said of Johnson in a 1989 Texas Monthly interview. “At the same time, he was a driven man, a man who could consume you.”
Critics said Moyers sometimes got his hands dirty on Johnson’s behalf. He was known to leak stories and plant questions with the press corps in advance of news conferences. The Washington Post reported that he ordered the FBI to search for gay people in the administration, and CBS correspondent Morley Safer said in his autobiography that Moyers also had a role in the FBI’s bugging of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
Moyers left Johnson’s service in 1967 – partly because he no longer believed in his boss’s war in Vietnam – to become publisher of Newsday, a Long Island, New York daily. The newspaper won two Pulitzer Prizes under his leadership, but he left in 1970 after the publisher deemed him too liberal.
Moyers then went on a bus ride around the country that he chronicled in the book “Listening to America: A Traveler Rediscovers His Country.”
He made his move to PBS in 1971 with “Bill Moyers Journal” and in 1986 he and his wife, Judith, started their own production company to make shows for public television stations.
Moyers had stints with the major networks – as a correspondent and commentator with CBS in the 1970s, and NBC and MSNBC in the 1990s – but greatly preferred the freedom and depth that public television offered.
Moyers and his wife had three children, William Cope, Alice Suzanne, and John Davidson.
(Writing by Bill Trott; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Rosalba O’Brien)
