The Mythic Rise of Billy Don Moyers
From Marshall, Texas, he set off on a heroic journey: to become LBJ’s protégé, the conscience of TV news, and the prophet of a brand-new faith.
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“I think of a dream as something very private, while a myth is something very public,” Moyers has said. His public life says much about the status of mythmaking today. He is, in many ways, an archetypal contemporary hero. Self-deprecation aside, he clearly sees himself as a man with a mission, destined to pursue it. To follow his bliss—to promote the values he believes in—he has had to master the world of politics and power. He has also had to learn the contemporary art of public relations—to shape his own myth, that is. Finally, he has had to search for the proper pulpit from which to deliver his message. Yet as Moyers has progressed on this path, a more personal journey can also be divined from his steps. All his life he has struggled to live up to the expectations of others while attempting to fulfill his own dreams. Like so many heroes, the myth in the man agrees to carry the hopes and dreams of the multitudes. Meanwhile, the man in the myth is locked in a powerfully seductive search to find himself.
Bill Moyers’ early life is the stuff American myths are made of. Given little to start with, he made a lot. He was born in 1934 in Hugo, Oklahoma, where his father Henry worked as an odd-jobs man. The family had seen its share of tragedy. Washed into poverty by the Depression, Ruby Moyers had lost twin girls between the births of her sons, James and Billy Don. She lost her youngest daughter soon after birth as well. Moving to Marshall in search of opportunity, the Moyers family arrived in the dark, and Ruby cried bitterly all night.
James Moyers is remembered, as were his parents, for being quiet, kind, and hardworking. But his little brother, Billy Don, was something else right from the start. Growing up in a small town peopled with eccentrics, he showed a feel for the narrative—”Tell me a story,” he would demand of his mother—and the stories he loved were those of rescue and virtue as its own reward: the Knights of the Round Table and later the western cinematic version of the same story, Shane.
Moyers’ father described him at fourteen as a “thin, scrawny, tallow-faced boy,” but even then, Billy Don Moyers worked with the frenzy of a child who had absorbed the lessons of his parents’ past and intuitively agreed to pick up the burden of their unfinished dreams. He was drawn to power: Billy Don called his teachers—not his pals—for help with his homework. He supplemented his studies with work at the school newspaper and held down a part-time job bagging groceries. Too small to distinguish himself at football, he became both a cheerleader and a bandmember, switching costumes at halftime to play the $35 trumpet that his parents had saved for months to help him buy. He drove himself so hard that by the time he was fifteen he had ulcers that would plague him the rest of his life.
When Billy Don was not working or studying, he was in church. His parents were devout Baptists, his father a deacon; his attendance was expected at Sunday school, at Baptist youth group on Sunday evenings, and at prayer meetings on Wednesdays. If Bill Moyers has thrown off many of the strictures he learned as a child—the emphasis on sin and damnation, the disdain for abstract thinking—other teachings surely shaped him, particularly the contradictory notions that God has a unique plan—a call—for each of his servants but that each is ultimately unworthy. Salvation comes through sacrifice; duty is the highest honor. That Moyers would have considered a future in the ministry was only natural; it would have been expected of the brightest boy from a place like Marshall, and it would have pleased his parents to no end.
But when he was fourteen, Billy Don heard another call. James had gone to work at the Marshall News Messenger,and though still in school, his younger brother followed suit. Billy Don’s zeal caught the eye of editor Millard Cope, a genteel historian. Cope was not a crusading editor; he was, for example, a segregationist, in keeping with his time and place. (“Deep down you might have known something was wrong,” Moyers would say in the autobiographical documentary, Marshall, Texas; Marshall, Texas, “but you didn’t want to admit it to yourself, or share it with others.”) Cope took Billy Don under his wing, just as his teachers had done, and by the time he was a high school sophomore, the boy was the editor of the sports page. It was assumed that Cope was grooming him to inherit the paper one day. Moyers grew into his role: Instead of Billy Don Moyers, his byline became Bill D. Moyers.
But Cope believed his protege needed broadening. In 1954, when Moyers was a sophomore at North Texas State University-dutifully writing his mother eac hday—Cope suggested that he ask Lyndon Baines Johnson, then the Senate majority leader, for a summer job. Moyers did as he was told. In a letter to Johnson he vowed to work hard at any task (“This…is not a request for a political favor”), cited his qualifications (author of several student handbooks, director of the college radio station, class president), and displayed a nascent political savvy by offering to help LBJ reach young voters (“What so many office-seekers fail to realize is that, although many of those people are too young to vote in the current election, they will be of age next time”). But it would have been the letter from Johnson’s longtime ally Cope that would have caught LBJ’s eye, a letter that eloquently reveals the passions this young man would stir in his mentors throughout his life: “He’s a top boy, Lyndon,” Cope wrote of Moyers, “and I truthfully can say I have never known a boy of his age with the newspaper possibilities he possesses. In addition, he knows how to handle himself…and seems to be able to do just about any job that comes along. He’ll work 24 hours a day and loves to do it; you can borrow money on what he tells you.”
So it happened that in the summer of 1954 the young journalism major who had never made a grade other than A found himself being introduced to Lyndon Johnson in a corridor of the old Senate office building. Moyers gaped as Johnson’s hand enveloped his. “Millard Cope’s friend,” Johnson said. “Yes sir,” the boy answered. “Well, I hope you’re not as conservative as Millard, but I hope you’re as loyal,” Johnson said.
The terms had been established. When the first overload of mail came in, Moyers worked around the clock to answer it. Within three weeks, the top boy had advanced himself to a desk located strategically outside the senator’s office. “Late in the day I’d be the only one left in the office,” Moyers once related, “and he’d call me in, and I’d sit there—I wouldn’t breathe—I’d just sit there and listen.”
And he learned, and the world of politics beckoned. But there were other expectations to attend to, and as the summer ended. Bill Moyers, naive to the will of Lyndon Johnson, still believed he had a choice. There was the call to the ministry to consider, and there was Millard Cope, who still hoped Moyers would return to run the paper in Marshall. But the new mentor advised him to transfer to the University of Texas at Austin, where he could get a better education. A job at Lady Bird’s radio station there would help him foot the bill. So Moyers and his bride, the former Judith Davidson, headed for the state capital, where Moyers was again an honor student in journalism and again worked as if pursued, this time at the radio station. His salary was $100 a week, higher than his father’s had ever been. Bill Moyers had built a world in which he could still be all things to all people: He even traveled the Hill Country as a lay preacher on weekends.
But the choice could not be put off forever. Accepting a Rotary scholarship to study ecclesiastical history at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1956, Moyers’ determination to enter the ministry deepened. “I would feel like a heel in not going back to Austin,” he wrote a Johnson aide, “simply because I owe you so much … but it would never work out for me. I could never be complete with just a job. There are other things I must consider, things which are largely intangible and indivisible, and which, because often I myself have trouble understanding them, I cannot honestly ask anyone else to understand. These could only be sufficiently expressed in either of two fields that are both divergent and similar at the same time: politics and religion. Because my opportunities are definitely limited for many reasons in the former, and because of my background beliefs, I have chosen the latter. Perhaps someday it may lead to the other; who knows?”
Moyers headed for the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, with plans to go on to Yale. He served as the school’s director of information while preaching in several churches nearby. He had hoped to be called to a large church in Abilene, but in a rare disappointment, he did not get the job. For once Moyers’ youth was not an attribute; an elder told him he was too immature. (“There was something about being called Reverend that I couldn’t endure,” Moyers would later say.) Instead, as he finished his seminary work in 1959, he served as a $35-a-week pastor in Brandon, a farming community of 121 souls near Hillsboro. The sky above Brandon is beautiful and infinite, the ground below bountiful but monotonous, an endless sea of plaintive sorghum fields. The few streets even today are dusty and semi-paved. The First Baptist Church, with two small towers, is gallant but forlorn. It is hard to believe such a place would have satisfied a young man who was convinced there was a grand plan for his life.
It didn’t, of course. Moyers was deeply loved by the community—he would arrive in a battered car, always ready to demonstrate a magic trick, coach a softball game, or rehearse the choir after Sunday school. But far away in Washington, Lyndon Johnson was laying plans to run for president. One day in church Moyers’ mood was unusually somber. He told the assembly that he had reached a great decision—to leave the ministry. He had stood upon a ridge, he said, and had seen his life spread out before him and had found that the path of politics, of action, was the one ordained for him.
Leaving his flock, Bill Moyers broke down and cried. But his real journey had begun. “Senator Johnson called him,” Ruby Moyers remembered, “and told him to get himself to Washington.”
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