American journalist, Bill Moyers has made a name for himself as a television interviewer and political aide in the Kennedy and Johnson presidential administrations. His small-town values and strong Baptist faith influenced his career decisions in politics and journalism. A self-described “moral agent” Moyers produces for public television shows that discuss American democracy, spirituality, and social issues. He has introduced Americans to thinkers such as mythologist Joseph Campbell, poets Rita Dove and Robert Bly, and religious writer Huston Smith. His dedication to opening media outlets to people otherwise ignored by the mainstream media culture has earned him a loyal audience and criticism from conservatives as a “liberal” reporter. He has published books from his popular TV shows, “Joseph Campbell and the Power of the Myth,” 1988 and “The World of Ideas,” 1989.
Moyers was the second son of Ruby and Henry Moyers, Oklahoma Dust Bowl farmers ruined during the Great Depression. When he was three, the family moved to a poor small-town, Marshall, Texas. At 15, he worked as a cub reporter for the town paper, “The Marshall Messenger.” His beat was the sports and local school board. A small, scrawny teen, Moyers did not play high school sports. By interviewing his classmates and reporting the news in the paper, Moyers enjoyed his own prominence in the community. His natural curiosity about people and their lives fit perfectly with his love of journalism.
In 1953, as a sophomore at North Texas State University, he wrote a letter to Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson asking for a summer internship. He worked under LBJ in 1954 but grew upset with McCarthyism in Washington. He returned to Texas and finished his schooling, becoming an ordained Baptist minister in 1959. Instead of working towards his PhD in theology at the University of Texas in Austin, Moyers packed his bags and returned to Washington DC to work as a liaison to President Kennedy. In 1961, he was named deputy director of the Peace Corps. In November 1963, Kennedy sent Moyers to Texas to stop the squabbling in the Texas Democratic party before his arrival.
After Kennedy’s assassination on November 23, 1963, Moyers politically bonded with LBJ on Love Field in Dallas on board Air Force One. President Johnson commissioned Moyers to work on his 1964 campaign. Moyers worked on the infamous “Daisy Girl” ad campaign inferring Barry Goldwater was a war hawk and would not hesitate to put the world in jeopardy by using nuclear warheads. The ad helped to torpedo Goldwater’s presidential campaign, and LBJ won by a landslide in 1964. Moyers participated in circulating J. Edgar Hoover’s files on Martin Luther King, Jr. In the summer of 1965, he was made LBJ’s press secretary.
By 1967, Moyers resigned after growing disillusioned with the Johnson administration and Vietnam. That same year, he went to work as the publisher of the Long Island, New York newspaper, Newsday. He resigned from the paper after it was bought by the Los Angeles Times in 1970, when he became the Editor-In-Chief of “Bill Moyer’s Journal.” In 1971, he went to work for CBS television news. He left CBS voluntarily in the ’80s and started his own production company, Public Affairs Television, with his wife, Judith Davidson. He specialized in producing shows for the Public Broadcasting Corporation.
The “New Republic” magazine ran a scathing cover story attack in their August 1991 issue calling the journalist a “liberal fraud” inasmuch as, while PBS struggled to stay afloat during government cutbacks, Moyers grew privately wealthy from his public television broadcasts. Moyers reacted angrily about the article and defended himself publicly. Other journalists reprimanded him for overreacting and allowing his ego center stage. ABC TV journalist Jeff Greenfield calls Moyers “too earnest” while others call him “a brooding, pious pain in the neck.” In 1992, he took a sabbatical from work fearing that his public TV shows stagnated in the same format, declining consideration of the vice-presidency in the Clinton and Perot campaigns.
Moyers married educator Judith Davidson in 1955. Their son, William Cope Moyers, born in 1960, is a recovering crack addict who is now the director of public policy at the Hazelden treatment center in Minnesota. Moyers is driven and loyal but most of all extremely interested in other people. He is viewed as a serious person who enjoys discussing ideas and good conversations. He listens to classical music and loves to play practical jokes on his friends.
“I see the world feelingly,” he says, “and I’ve often wished that I didn’t because it really hurts. I’ve often wished that I were harder and more callused and more cynical than I am.”
His career’s achievements have earned him three Emmy’s for outstanding broadcasting, and he has written a book entitled “Listening to America: A Traveler Rediscovers His Country,” 1971.
In March 2004, he announced his retirement from “Now,” the PBS news series that he has hosted for many years. His retirement is to be effective after the 2004 elections.
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