Bill Moyers
The seventy-year-old journalist—whose new collection of speeches and essays arrives in bookstores this month—on why he's parting ways with PBS, what it was like to work for LBJ, and whether objectivity is all it's cracked up to be.
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But I also remember once calling the Pentagon's office of public affairs and asking them to send me the clippings on Vietnam from around the country. They came over in a large box covered in tape and marked "Top Secret." These were clippings from newspapers! That's what happens when you're prone to keep a secret.
How valid is the criticism that the media are biased?
Since the eighties, when Ronald Reagan vetoed the continuation of the fairness doctrine, we've seen the rise of an ideological press. A study we cited on the air last fall of the 45 top-rated radio stations in the country found that there were 310 hours of right-wing talk and 5 hours of non-right-wing talk. If there isn't a vast right-wing conspiracy, then there's a vast right-wing echo chamber, and you can track it from the Republican National Committee through Rush Limbaugh and on to the talk-radio wannabes around the country, then right up to Sean Hannity in the afternoon and Bill O'Reilly in the evening and on into the night with Michael Savage. It's designed to attack anybody who challenges the right-wing mentality. That's why they come after me or Rather or anybody who dares to tell the opposing view of reality.
And now we have Al Franken and the liberal folks at the Air America network trying to go toe-to-toe with Limbaugh. Is that the answer?
Journalism shouldn't imitate the propaganda of the right. That's not what journalism is about. If you program for an audience that is not served by ideology, if you just cover the news that needs to be covered and tell the stories of what's happening, you'll have a larger audience, because this country is largely nonideological. I'm glad as a citizen that there's an alternative to the right-wingers, but I'd hate to see journalism stuck in that us-versus-them mentality. And I'd hate to see Franken and that crowd become as irresponsible as the right is.
Let's talk about the president. Do you feel, as a Texan, that you understand him any better than the rest of the country does?
Well, I have particular insights for several reasons. I know how Texas works. I understand the good ol' boys' game. Texas has always been a plantation for the powerful or the wealthy or the corporate interests, from ranchers to oil barons and chemical companies. Lyndon Johnson rose on their shoulders, and as he rose on their shoulders, he lifted them up too. I understand how Texas politics has always been: You do well by doing good. Bush comes out of that Texas mentality that says, "What's yours is mine, and what's mine I'll compound the interest on." He represents the power structure of Texas. Governors and politicians have always done it. John Connally did it too. It goes back a long time.
I also think I understand President Bush because I understand recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. I did a series called Close to Home because my son, at age thirty, crashed. It turned out he had been using drugs heavily since he was about fifteen. Judith and I didn't know, and that shows you how naive and blind parents can be. He's had three relapses, but he's done very well. So I understand what happens to a human being in midlife who crashes from the use of drugs. In their reaction to alcoholism, I see a lot of George W. Bush in my son and vice versa. In this way I also understand him from a religious standpoint. He's a Methodist; I'm a Baptist. I understand how you carry into your public life your own private matters. I do. I understand him, I think, as a man who brings piety into politics, as someone under the grip of substance abuse. He's constantly fighting it, trying to overcome it, resisting it, and I admire him for that.
The thing that troubles me most is that he seems to have lived in a cocoon, locked up like that boy in the bubble in Houston many years ago. He does not seem to me to understand the implications of leading a polarized nation.
If the president himself were here, or if his aides were here, they would say, "Moyers is a journalist. Moyers shouldn't have a public point of view about this. Moyers's job is to be objective."
I once thought that. But as experience has taught me, objectivity can sometimes be a blinder. Objective means not being seduced by the good intentions of public men. Objectivity means being true to your own reading of the record and your own analytical processes of reasoning and conclusion and logic. It's a journalist's job to tell the viewers or the readers what he has come to think about what they see as only data or information. There's a truth behind the news that is the journalist's obligation to discover as fairly and responsibly as possible. I can't refuse to share it because I'm afraid that I'm going to be accused of being unobjective.
With that assessment of Bush in mind, let's go back and talk about LBJ. In reading your new book, Moyers on America, I was reminded of your ambivalence toward him. At one point you say, "I don't harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy; after all, I worked for Lyndon Johnson." I wonder if your own personal history of the man has evolved over time—if you feel about him today as you did back then.
I didn't really know Lyndon Johnson. I served with him for only four years, and I couldn't see him in all his other relationships. The president was many characters: He was one thing with [Secretary of the Treasury] Douglas Dillon and another with Lady Bird. But as I also say in the book, he was one of the most interesting and complex men I have ever met, and I have a deep sense of obligation to him. He trusted me. If it hadn't been for Lyndon Johnson, I probably would have had a good life editing the Marshall News Messenger, which was one of my ambitions.
But I've had a good life in a different way. He taught me so much about politics and about what's possible, about human behavior, about the consequences of decisions. At the same time, he was a driven man, a man who could consume you. Part of my struggle with him was to serve him but not be consumed by him. People used to say it was like a father-son relationship. I don't think it was that. I think it was a relationship of a combat veteran and a new recruit. You learn to loathe the sergeant who tries to mold you because he knows something you don't know—that one day, you're going to be shot at. But later on you realize what he was trying to tell you. For all of Johnson's overreaching, hyperbolic scheming, I shared some moments with him—tender moments, moments of empathy and imagination—when I almost wept at his desire to make a difference to people whose lives would be worse without him.
Do you think the public's view, after all the histories of Johnson that have been written, squares with yours?
I think it's coming around. This was a man who was a president at the wrong time. He was a consensus builder when the country was coming apart. He was rooted in the Depression in an era of growing prosperity. He had to be a cold war president, but he wasn't really born to be that. It was a black-and-white world, and nothing was ever really black and white to Johnson. No master parliamentarian could use the words "black and white." You've got to deal with sons of bitches and at the same time you've got to deal with people who think of themselves as saints. He had a passion for compromise, but that was not what it took to win the cold war. Ronald Reagan proved that you have to get your gun and blaze away. And that wasn't Johnson.
I cannot tell you how many people have talked to me about hearing the [LBJ] tapes on C-SPAN. They show the Johnson that I remember, in all of his raw and ribald reveries with [Senator Richard] Russell, in his wily seduction of a House member, in his efforts to intimidate the press or inflate the importance of a journalist sitting across from him. He was a master impresario of human emotion and need and greed. He knew everybody's price, and watching him try to negotiate it was like watching a great art connoisseur go through a museum .
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