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.
(Page 3 of 5)
They were a perfect match. LBJ and Moyers had a shared background of near poverty, a mutual passion for education, limitless energy, and the profound desire to do good. Then too, the enormous, overwhelming putty-faced master and the anxious, angular protege in horn-rims each possessed what the other needed. Lyndon Johnson demanded herculean loyalty from those closest to him; Bill Moyers—quick, clever, and awesomely ambitious—had an equally boundless desire to please. Finally, Johnson was an expert in the uses of power, and Moyers was not. “Power is what counts, power to change things,” LBJ told him time and again. “You get power through politics and money—you hear me, boy?” Bill Moyers wanted to change the world, but he didn’t know how to effect change; in Lyndon Johnson he had once again found the elder who could teach him what he most needed to know.
When Johnson lost his bid for the Democratic nomination and settled for the vice presidency, it seemed to Moyers that his sentimental education had reached its conclusion. With Johnson glumly installed in the vice president’s office, Moyers begged for and got a job creating the Peace Corps with Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver. It cut Johnson to see him go—”Go then, damn it” were his parting words to Moyers. President Kennedy too would have preferred that Moyers remain in his role as liaison to the soul and psyche of Lyndon Johnson. But for an ambitious young man who believed in values, the Peace Corps was the ideal place. He could change the world and build a power base at the same time.
First, however, Shriver and Moyers had to sell the idea to a Congress that was, at best, indifferent. Turning to his mentor once more for help—LBJ told Moyers who to call and how to apply the screws—Moyers lobbied the Peace Corps into existence, making sure, for instance, that Shriver met personally with each of the House’s 435 members. As deputy director, Moyers had learned the lessons of power well. He had established a network of political and bureaucratic contacts throughout the government—in both the Kennedy and Johnson camps.
Another man might have launched his own political career from that vantage point, but instead, in 1963, Moyers heeded a call of a different sort. Sensing a brewing political crisis, Kennedy’s advisers asked Moyers to go to Texas to mend fences between U.S. senator Ralph Yarborough and Governor John Connally. Political loyalty placed Moyers at a luncheon in Austin on November 22; when he received the news that Kennedy had been shot, a more profound instinct took over. Moyers chartered a plane to Dallas and fought his way through the chaos to Air Force One. When a Secret Service officer refused to let him on the plane, he penned a fateful note to his mentor: “I’m here if you need me.” Within minutes, the door to the forward cabin swung open, and the Peace Corps receded into the past. By the time Lyndon Johnson gave his first televised speech on November 26, Moyers was operating with Johnson’s portfolio. Set up for the new president was the lectern that Kennedy had used. “This won’t do,” Moyers said. “Get one sixty-two inches high.”
That was how it was to be. As Moyers grew in knowledge and skill, it became more and more difficult to realize where Johnson ended and Moyers began. “He was a hustler. He walked the halls of power with a sure tread,” remembers former press secretary Liz Carpenter. “He was cocky.” In Johnson’s service, Moyers’ power seemed unlimited. At 30, he could cut a deal with a Southern senator as easily as he could converse with the Kennedys’ Georgetown crowd. With speechwriter Richard Goodwin, he joined the president for nude swims in the White House pool. The price for all this was, of course, his independence. It was Judith Moyers who refused the president’s attempt to put a phone in their private car and who endured LBJ’s ire when he learned that the couple had named their firstborn after Millard Cope instead of after him. Though Moyers had a reputation as the only man who could say no to the president, he did so rarely and rather glibly. (A popular anecdote held that when Johnson admonished him to speak up while saying grace, Moyers replied, “I wasn’t addressing you, Mr. President.”)
In 1964 Moyers was charged with engineering the landslide Johnson so desperately wanted. As part of his work, he oversaw the creation of the so-called Daisy commercial, in which a young girl plucked petals from a daisy while a countdown for nuclear holocaust played in the background. Devastatingly subtle, it painted opponent Barry Goldwater as too irresponsible to have his finger on the nuclear button—without mentioning name. “My God, what’s happened? “ Johnson demanded, when objections to the commercial flooded the White House switchboard. “Well, it seems to have done what you wanted it to do,” Moyers replied.
Moyers wanted to return to the Peace Corps as director, but he could not break free of Johnson. “You’re not going to get the job, and I want you to get that into your head,” he told Moyers. Instead, Johnson made him a special assistant. Moyers supervised the drafting of Great Society legislation—on pollution, housing, education, and anti-poverty programs—as thoroughly and swiftly as he had once drafted Johnson’s speeches. He was not an innovator; his talent, like Johnson’s, was for consensus building and packaging. “He’s the fastest brain picker I’ve met,” recalled a colleague, Joe Laitin. “You’d tell him about an idea, and before you were through, he would turn it back to you, and you’d think it was brilliant.” Sometimes Moyers collapsed from work and required a few days of hospitalization. Mostly, however, he coated his ulcer with Coca-Cola and Pro-Banthine pills and, puffing 25-cent cigars, went back to work.
Trouble came, finally, because Johnson’s reputation began to sag just as Moyers’ started to take off. As criticism of the Vietnam War began to mount toward the end of 1965, Johnson added the job of press secretary to Moyers’ already packed list of duties. But Moyers could not stop the country from turning against the president. Moyers did what he could to overcome what reporters were calling the credibility gap—he tried to focus attention on the cease-fires instead of the body count—but Johnson negated his efforts. Once, after Moyers told the press that Johnson was returning from a Southeast Asia trip to campaign for Democrats in the 1966 off-year elections, Johnson denied that he had ever made any such deal.
Reporters trusted Moyers but not Johnson. Moyers was charming, he had access, and he was a consummate leaker. (Like all insiders, he leaked when it was to his advantage as well as his boss’s. When LBJ, weary of reporters, decided to build a wall between the press office in the Executive Office Building and the White House, Moyers leaked the information, knowing once LBJ saw the news in print, he would give up the idea. Later, Moyers ran the same play when he sensed Johnson intended to replace him as press secretary with another aide.) In return, the press made Moyers a star—so much so that his face appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek in 1965.
LBJ was not happy that his chief aide had become a media darling. Moyers tried to reassure his boss—and protect himself—by following his natural inclination to lay it on thick. “You have been so good for this country so far,” Moyers wrote in a note after a particularly difficult time. “I know the decisions, whatever they are—on Vietnam, the budget, poverty, the economy, civil rights, housing, all ofthem—will be right. Helping you execute them, however small my part, is the most satisfying experience of my life, and my gratitude to you for permitting me a share will be enduring.” When he refused to participate in a Time profile, he carboned his letter to LBJ. “I hope you believe me,” he wrote the president, “when I say I am sick and tired of the stories in the press about me…whatever I have done, whatever my success, is a reflection of your confidence and permission.” Still, few heroes are enchanted with obscurity, and most like to manipulate their own myths: Moyers traveled on the press plane, not Air Force One, and he gave any aide who leaked information about him an ungodly chewing out.
Eventually, however, even Moyers could not keep spinning so many political plates. He wanted out. He longed for something grander than the press secretary’s job—undersecretary of state, perhaps, when George Ball departed—but once again, Johnson would not turn loose. He saw Moyers’ restlessness as betrayal. “Deep down, he knew he needed Moyers,” says George Christian, who took the press secretary’s job after Moyers. “In my opinion, anybody could leave the White House except Bill—he’d been the glue.” Moyers’ continuing relationship with the Kennedy crowd only added to Johnson’s growing distrust, and though Moyers was not particularly vocal in his opposition to the war—contrary to what many writers have suggested—he wasn’t a supporter of massive escalation either, which further angered LBJ. In addition, Moyers’ carefully constructed power base had eroded. Old White House allies like Walter Jenkins were long gone, replaced by ivied technocrats like Walt Rostow, who had a grand agenda and guerrilla tactics of his own. And though Moyers was a seasoned infighter—his nickname was Mack the Knife—Johnson’s waning loyalty made him more vulnerable. Slowly the ultimate insider was being pushed out.
Still, it took a personal tragedy to get Moyers to break the tie that had defined his entire adult life up to that point. In 1965 Moyers had recommended that his brother, James, come to work for the Johnson administration. Johnson had been all for the plan—he had called James at his PR job in Shreveport, Louisiana to charm him into coming. James did a competent job under extreme pressure in the press office, but like his father and brother he was plagued by ulcers. In 1966 he developed stomach cancer. In horrible pain, he killed himself with an overdose of medication.
A different kind of duty called: Bill Moyers assumed responsibility for his brother’s wife and children, but clearly he could not support two families on his salary of $28,000 a year. Moyers’ era as a golden boy had come to an end. James’s death, recalls Liz Carpenter, “taught him to count the time.”
My Library
