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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Moyers spent a weekend at the president’s ranch with Johnson, wandering the caliche roads in Johnson’s Lincoln. Afterward, neither man would speak of the resignation, except to offer contradictory reports about who had or had not begged whom to go or stay. Either way, Moyers was leaving. He had accepted an offer to become the publisher of Newsday for $100,000 a year. Even in departure, Moyers would play the loyal servant to his generous benefactor. “I believe you know that I am not leaving because things are dark or because of any differences between you and me,” he wrote Johnson. “I am leaving because of personal reasons you and I discussed…At any rate, I intend to try to be of help to you—that I pledge.”
But loyalty had dwindled on both sides. Each man felt as though the other had failed him. On his last day in the White House, Bill Moyers celebrated by having lunch with Robert Kennedy at San Souci. Two weeks before, LBJ had made two changes in the draft of a reply to Moyers’ resignation letter. Johnson altered “You leave a legacy of trust and deep respect behind you in Washington” to eliminate the reference to trust. The phrase “I treasure the past” Johnson cut altogether.
Moyers would spend the next few years in a kind of cushy limbo. Still and forever possessed of the profound desire to serve people, he would be thwarted each time he tried to act on his ambition. At Newsday, for instance, the best that can be said is that he did his job well and benefited mightily before it was taken away from him. Moyers arrived in Garden City, Long Island, with little experience in running a paper but with carte blanche from its owner, a conservative Republican named Harry Guggenheim, who was, nevertheless, a fan of Johnson’s. Once again Moyers captivated an older man and willingly, if subconsciously, embraced his expectations. So enthralled was Guggenheim with his new publisher that it was commonly assumed he would leave Moyers the paper. For Moyers, the job may have shimmered, miragelike, as a return to the call of journalism and the comforts of Millard Cope and the Marshall News Messenger. A blinding optimism afflicted both men: Neither could acknowledge their profound political differences.
Moyers threw himself into his standard work pace and set about remaking Newsday in his image. Office-bound on Sunday mornings, he was so innately solicitous that he took calls from irate subscribers who had not received their papers. He was not the typical publisher, concerned with the paper’s business side; editorial—the idea side—inspired him. It was not enough for Moyers that Newsday spoke to the people of Long Island. He wanted the same access to the world that he had had in the White House, and he set about broadening the paper’s scope. He added international desks and pushed for writers whose stories would demand to be read. Saul Bellow covered the Six Day War in the Middle East, and John Steinbeck traveled to Vietnam.
But as that war came to dominate public life, the paper’s editorial side shifted to the left, particularly when Richard Nixon took office in 1969. Guggenheim, weak from a stroke and afflicted with cancer, began to see his publisher as a traitor to the cause. Egged on by Republican cronies, such as CIA director-to-be William Casey, Guggenheim finally sold the paper to the Times-Mirror Company, rejecting a higher bid from Moyers, and imposed the condition that Moyers be dismissed. By May 1970 Moyers was gone, two Pulitzer prizes for the paper behind him. Once more, the rupture with a mentor was grievous.
Still, Moyers had used his time at Newsday wisely. The network he had built so shrewdly in Washington now extended to include the East Coast establishment; he could count as his friends everyone from Republican David Rockefeller—who made him a trustee of the family foundation—to Jack English, Bobby Kennedy’s onetime point man in New York. The hero may have lacked a forum, but his following was larger than ever.
In fact, another contact, Harper’s editor Willie Morris, gave Moyers the inspiration for his next project, a book called Listening to America. “I learned that it is possible to write bills and publish newspapers without knowing what the country is about or who the people are,” he wrote in the introduction, explaining that he was setting out to find Americans “who are trying to correct the wrongs of society.” The moral of Listening to America is the same one that propelled Moyers through his White House years—there is salvation in the service of social change. The book is, finally, a series of mini-heroes’ journeys, those of a conscientious objector, a small-town doctor, a labor organizer, and a civil-rights worker. Though well received, it was a comparatively small project for a man who had once shaped national policy. Listening to America resembled nothing less than a trial run for what was to come.
Billy Don Moyers of the White House by way of Marshall, Texas, and the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary was trying to begin anew in more ways than one. He was described on the book jacket as “a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, a Director of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Member of the Board of Visitors of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.”
But beginning again was not so easy, of course. Whether from a genuine longing to be of use, a deeper need for forgiveness and absolution, or both, Moyers continued throughout this time to try to win back Lyndon Johnson’s affection. He passed on the results of polls, as well as political intelligence he picked up from Moyers and shakers like Averell Harriman. He refused to take part in anti-administration attacks engineered by former administration hands—and let Johnson know of his refusal. In November 1967 Marvin Watson had reported to LBJ that he had seen Moyers and sensed his desire to return to politics. “He does not like being a critic—he wants to be a player,” Watson noted. But Johnson, who had at one time loved Moyers more than anyone else, punished him by pushing him further out of his life than anyone else. Even as Johnson lay hospitalized in San Antonio in the early seventies, he continued to refuse his former protege’s reconciliation attempts. For Moyers the road behind and the road ahead took on a slightly different cast. “You go out to conquer and come home humbled,” he told a reporter in 1968. “You turn on everything you possess and you still can’t save the world. Then you realize that perhaps it wasn’t the world but you who needed saving.”
Though Moyers was uncertain about which path to take, other people had plenty of ideas. He had offers to become the president of several colleges, to take over a Washington newspaper, and to man a slot on the Today show. He could, in response to great popular demand, write his White House memoirs. So many people had come to see Moyers as a hero by the midseventies that writer James Fallows, now the Washington editor of the Atlantic, saw fit to write a contrarian profile in the Washington Monthly. Fallows had his own expectations for Bill Moyers: He asserted that Moyers could not be a true leader until he got the nerve to strike out on his own—specifically, to free himself from reliance on patrons.
Moyers responded to Fallows’ interview with a haunting eight-page single-spaced letter, signed by an alter ego named Spectre Pliny. Simultaneously florid and excruciatingly intimate, it reflects Moyers’ grandiose side and his continuing need to shape his own story “My man doesn’t think that politics is all that matters,” Pliny declared, explaining why Moyers had turned away from that call. “The democratic experience … can’t be confined to politics….It has become, as Moyers sees it, the whole range of human conversation among a people looking to fulfill the seemingly irreconcilable appetites for liberty and order….” Pliny claimed that the man who could bridge the gap was a “communicator [emphasis his] who can convey not only facts and information but symbols of meaning: values as well.”
Bill Moyers had always carried the word. He had been preaching nothing less than the gospel of good values whether he was preaching in the service of God or Lyndon Johnson. But since leaving the president’s service, he had not found a way to reach the multitudes on a comparably grand scale. The solution had been there, of course, waiting for him to see it. He had known it when he had watched a little girl alter a presidential election by plucking a single daisy. An entire world of symbols could be shaped to convey an entire world of ideas—to millions. Bill Moyers followed his bliss, and it led him to the largest pulpit of all. Television.
He was only loosely bound by the conventions of journalism. Moyers was not a reporter, he was an advocate, one who would teach and preach. He was contemptuous of most reporting on television, having no use for the trendy lifestyle stories found on most morning shows or the splashy “infotainment” news shows, such as West 57th,that ran in prime time (Moyers was such a purist that he even disdained 60 Minutes). From the time he started at This Week on PBS in 1971, he opted to make classic public-affairs television, documentaries rich in historical context, that generally took months to make and required at least an hour of air time. Moyers also favored extended interviews with people he considered the value shapers of the day, from poet Maya Angelou to pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton and physicist Steven Weinberg. Shows like Creativity and A World of Ideas fall into this category, which Moyers’ faithful refer to as “ideas television.”
His years of preaching gave his work a deeper emotional pitch, and his years in politics had perfected a common touch that helped him draw out everyone from African famine victims to Mortimer Adler. Unlike more conventional reporters like Sam Donaldson or Dan Rather, Moyers was polite and deferential: unlike more unconventional documentary filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman, he never took his viewers where they were not ready to go. To lead his flock, Moyers appeared to dwell squarely within the realm of the ordinary (“What is a profound experience?” he asked Campbell, in his trademark flat-footed style).
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