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 am just like you was his message. In his soothing-rural cadence, Moyers frequently harked back to his small-town beginnings. A 1982 Easter commentary for CBS News was typical. After reporting on Curly Wiggins’ new catfish place and the Rives’ expanding feed business, Moyers told viewers. “The mimosa trees in my parents’ yard died of old age last year, but in their place this spring are two young dogwood. Life is its own news there, and the big story is that old people still plant trees they will never sit under.” Other correspondents acted like stars, but Moyers stayed on equal footing with his subjects. Unlike other reporters, he would stay behind with the camera crew to put an interviewee’s furniture back in place. So intent was he on reflecting the views of ordinary people that producers joked about installing a bag lady outside his office to pitch his ideas.
His work had added resonance because it was almost always autobiographical. He had a tendency to explore the same questions—on race, religion, and the government’s role in people’s lives—over and over. Politics was, naturally, at the heart of many of Moyers’ reports. He offered a shrewd critique of Jimmy Carter’s failings and later interviewed hardworking Americans who had slipped into poverty (Moyers’ chance to subtly blame the Reagan administration for dismantling programs he had been instrumental in creating). He took on the church of his youth by exposing the hypocrisy of the religious right. “I know the people in this report. I was born and reared among them,” he stated in closing. “They’re my kin.” Redeeming himself from a time when he was too young and powerless to speak out, Moyers produced programs revealing the devastation of bigotry on black neighborhoodsand families. (Loyalty made for his own sacred cows. During the making of Marshall, Texas; Marshall, Texas, childhood friend Joe Goulden, the author of Fit to Print, urged Moyers to reveal Millard Cope’s role in keeping the town segregated. Moyers, tight-lipped and pale, stonily ignored him.) It was as though, in sorting out the American agenda, he could sort out his own history.
To the public, his image was one of profound deference—of being the best listener around—inside the business he was perceived differently. He drove his staff at a Johnsonian pace, papering their desks with ideas and assignments before seven-thirty in the morning. One producer, after working for Moyers for months without rest, got a call from his boss on his first night off. Moyers, calling from a meeting, ticked off new ideas in a frenzied whisper. To work with Moyers was to sign on to a holy crusade, and loyalty was as much an issue for him as it had been for LBJ. Moyers became a father figure to young producers and expressed profound disappointment when one of them strayed from the fold. He may have been frustrating to work for—testing an idea, he would voice a different opinion morning, noon, and night—but the withdrawal of his approval often left former proteges angry and bereft, as if by striking out on their own they had abandoned the side of right.
This version of Moyers rarely found its way into most reporters’ notebooks. He had done his PR work. As he had during the Johnson administration, Moyers cultivated decision makers in the media and elsewhere, making sure his programs were noticed. “There’s something you should see…” began his handwritten notes. When Moyers lost his sponsors at PBS or was censored by the CBS brass for tough reporting, the media somehow got the word; when Reagan administration officials protested some of his criticisms on the nightly news, it only added to his heroic appeal. Hence, Moyers’ departures—from PBS in 1976, CBS in 1978, PBS again in 1981, and CBS in 1986—were similarly portrayed as a moral battle in which both public and commercial television failed to support quality TV (Moyers’ weary and disillusioned quotes, however sincere, certainly helped his case). Still, with each departure, Moyers got more air time, more viewers, more influence—and more great press.
His most brilliant PR campaign was waged during the most difficult struggle of his professional life, from 1981 to 1986, while he was at CBS. Moyers had joined the network believing he would be allowed to televise documentaries in primetime; instead, network executives wanted him to do shorter pieces on more-popular topics (he was once asked to do a show called American Parade, in which Michael Jackson was a suggested guest). In short, values were not high on the agenda. For a while, he fought back using his political skills. Ignored by flamboyant CBS News president Van Gordon Sauter, he protected himself by working vulnerable and unpopular lieutenant Ed Joyce with a mixture of flattery and angst. (Moyers’ tortured resignation attempts were a running joke at CBS News; so too was his habit of calling on his allies nationwide each time a decision loomed. He earned the nickname Hamlet, and one executive even referred to him as “remote from Elsinore.”) Meanwhile, as chronicled in Peter Boyer’s Who Killed CBS? suspect Moyers publicly and privately undermined CBS News, even criticizing programs created by a protege.
Finally, however, Moyers could not convert CBS any more than he could have converted Lyndon Johnson. Seizing control of the debate, he let reporters know that he planned to leave and would not go quietly; the New York Times and Newsweek began competing furiously for the scoop. Moyers finally went with Newsweek, which provided him a page of his own accompanying a cover story on the decline of CBS. There was another reason he preferred Newsweek: The Times, he told a reporter, felt obligated to present both sides of the story—what he had to say was too important to be trivialized in that manner. Objectivity is the journalist’s burden; the prophet journeys free of such constraints.
Moyers lacked only the proper message for his time. America in the late eighties did not seem particularly interested in the social and political issues Moyers had traditionally chronicled. Leaving CBS in 1986 for PBS (this time with his own production company and $15 million in grants), he had sensed a spiritual restlessness in the country, a longing for meaning that established religion seemed unable to satisfy. There was someone who could speak eloquently to that need. Back in 1980 Moyers had interviewed Joseph Campbell, an aging professor of comparative mythology at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. His seminal work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, had been a college classic far years and had evolved into a kind of New Age self-help guide. The first time Moyers put Campbell on the air, 14,000 people requested transcripts.
But when Moyers decided to talk to Campbell again, many of his friends were lukewarm. “Bill, that’s comparative religion. It’s Frazer’s Golden Bough. It’s Freud’s dream projections,” warned Moyers’ friend James Dunn, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. “It’s old hat.” In agreement were public-television station executives around the country, who in Moyers’ five-year absence from public TV had become disenchanted with the interview format. They thought it was boring. Suddenly, a fight ensued over the very definition of educational television, and Moyers found himself in a popularity contest with nature specials like Ducks Under Siege.
But Moyers persevered, and eventually things fell into place. Star Wars director George Lucas, who had been heavily influenced by Campbell’s work, learned of the project and offered his Skywalker Ranch as a place to film the interviews. There was the phone call from one of Moyers’ friends from long ago. “I have two heroes in the world, Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers,” said Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, now an editor at Doubleday. “I want to do a companion book with the series.”
Without Moyers, Joseph Campbell could be inscrutable. (“We have come two stages: first, from the immediate emanations of the Uncreated Creating to the fluid yet timeless personages of the mythological age; second, from these Created Creating Ones to the sphere of human history.”) Without Campbell, Moyers could be leaden. To make The Power of Myth succeed, Moyers once more played the dutiful son, sitting at his master’s feet and interpreting his words. Rubbing his chin, knitting his brows, he asked his questions in an almost reverential whisper: “Do your emember the first time you discovered myth? The first time the story came alive in you?” In so doing, Moyers turned Campbell’s words lost yuppies found a day soothsayer. Now, instead of belief in established religion, belief in myth could lead to transcendant experience. In Joseph Campbell’s words ailing yuppies found a spirituality uncomplicated by religious doctrine and a self-determination missing from twelve-step programs. “When you are following your bliss, it is as if invisible hands are helping. Doors open that you never knew were there,” Campbell said, and millions of viewers guided by Bill Moyers believed.
In record time, The Power of Myth—both the television series and the accompanying text—went from good idea to phenomenon. Campbell’s original works hit the best-seller lists along with the series transcript, and across the nation, study groups formed to watch the video. One attorney even wanted to hire the book’s editor, University of Texas Plan II director and English professor Betty Sue Flowers, as myth consultant on a case. As so often happens, a project intended to promote a spiritual flowering became a vehicle for personal realization. And after Campbell was gone, the public expected yet another incarnation from Bill Moyers. They wanted him to become the prophet of a brand-new faith.
Faced with that prospect, Moyers behaved consistently. He made two appearances with his revival and road show ofthe spirit—at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Texas—and then he folded his tent, hearing the call of TV seasons to come.
The elements in Moyers’ life had come together in a kind of heroic fusion. The success of The Power of Myth had brought Moyers full circle: The former Baptist minister had found a word he believed in, the professor of Christian ethics had found the largest classroom imaginable, the ambitious Washington operator had even found redemption. “We’re not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves,” Moyers posited to Campbell. “But in doing that,” his teacher replied, “you save the world.”
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