Bill Moyers Had Three Careers and Excelled at Every One of Them

• “The problem is that the moments of reality are smothered by the steady stream of contrivances and manipulations that people now accept as the norm in politics. We are now living in a wall-to-wall culture of contrived images designed for the purposes of manipulation. Our entire society is built upon a foundation of fiction.”
• “ seem to have lost the ability to think about our future, to consider our responsibilities to our children, to posterity. Leaders are afraid to come forth and say, ‘This is where we need to go, and this is how we ought to get there.’ Just take the recent crime bill passed in the Senate. It is a fraud. It will compound the problems it is supposed to solve, but everybody feels better. The purpose of politics in the media age is to make people feel good, not to think critically about what we need to do to solve our problems.”
• : “He and his kind hated the right wing, yet he caters to it now. I followed his trail through the South in the 1984 election, and what I heard was George Wallace refined, making sure the good ol’ boys knew he was one of them in keeping ‘other people’ in their place. There’s a mean spirit in the man that often acts the bully and usually toward those weaker than him.”
• “ Niebuhr was right: The art of politics consists of directing rationally the irrationalities of men. But when neither people nor leaders are willing to face reality, look out, brother—you’re living a lie, and nations can die of too many lies.”

I have so far focused on only a tiny part of Moyers’s incredible careers (plural on purpose). Individually, they are of enormous historical significance. Added together, they comprise a contribution to the history of this republic that stands with that of almost anyone for the past 250 years. It would take the book that nobody has yet tried to write to even begin to do justice to the man who, as an aide to Lyndon Johnson, helped created the Peace Corps (and remains the youngest person ever to be approved by the Senate, to become the Corps’ deputy director), and then, as much as anyone beside the president himself, was responsible for imagining and helping to execute the successful strategy that put in place the Great Society programs that Donald Trump is now seeking to tear down. He left that White House in 1966 over his frustration with his inability to influence Johnson to wind down the Vietnam War to embark on what I have argued is the most distinguished and valuable career of any American television journalist ever.

Moyers had a third, lesser-known career as a philanthropist, in care of the roughly $60 million dollar foundation put at his disposal by Florence Ford and John J. Schumann Jr., heirs to a fortune created by General Motors. With what became the Schumann Center on Media and Democracy, Moyers helped to shaped much of progressive journalism, environmental activism, and opposition to the power of money in politics in the United States for roughly 30 years. For a description of a few of the high points of his career, you can start with Janny Scott’s Times obit.

In one of those wonderful “only in New York” stories, this ordained Baptist minister from a little town called Marshall, Texas somehow became, for most practical purposes, my rabbi. No one, not my mother, romantic partners, or any of my editors ever responded to my work with greater appreciation and encouragement. Bill would frequently call me and ask if I was free for dinner that night, and I always made sure to be. We would discuss frequent projects he was thinking about, both for himself and for me, and he would promise me funding for whatever work I wanted to do if he thought it was important, and I was assured of a place to publish it. It was all done above board, with the foundation board’s approval, which didn’t always come. (Occasionally, when he let an idea I liked drop, he apologize and blamed “the bourbon talking.”) I would also draft memos for him and outline speeches he was slated to give; speeches he always improved upon to a degree that I barely recognized when I heard them as a member of his audience.

Here are a few a stories you won’t find in any of the recently published obits.

• Bill’s much-discussed refusal to be interviewed by Robert Caro—also a friend, and whose case I pleaded with Bill more than once—was, he said, based in part on the fact that he did not trust his memory and had too much work to do and couldn’t perform the research necessary to get things right. More than that, however, he did not feel right about trying to justify himself to Caro. It felt too egotistical to him, he said. One could say he was willing to trust himself to history. My own theory, however, was that he was deeply, and I mean deeply, pained by some of the things he went along with as a young man in the Johnson administration, though these are not the ones he has sometimes been accused of. He was, he explained when I questioned him in some detail on some of the allegations in the 1991 interview, “I was a very flawed young man, with more energy than wisdom.”
• After Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1980, he called Moyers to offer him the directorship of the CIA. Moyers happened to take the call in Havana where he was interviewing Fidel Castro. He told the dictator what Carter had said, and Castro offered to denounce him in a speech that night if he thought it would help him with the Republicans in Congress.
• During the election of 1992, both Ross Perot and Bill Clinton proved extremely eager to be able to secure Bill’s support. (One of the many “Moyers for President” boomlets had already begun that year, started by Molly Ivins.) While briefly leading in the polls, Perot offered Bill both the vice-presidential spot on the ticket and the chairmanship of the campaign, together with an investment of $120 million dollars (just under $275 million in today’s dollars) to win it. Bill considered this for a while and asked me if I would be willing to leave my doctoral program in history at Stanford to be his deputy. But after speaking to Perot a few times, he decided the dude was nuts and went back to work.
• As Perot was working on Bill, George Stephanopoulos and I talked frequently about how to convince Clinton to consider Bill as his vice-president. At one point, Clinton said to George, “I do think Moyers would be best.” Al Gore turned out to make a lot more sense, but immediately after the election, Clinton invited Moyers—as a fellow Southerner and, apparently, the Democratic Party’s recognized “wise man”—to Little Rock to seek his advice about the task that lay before him. I had been hoping that Moyers would call me and say, “We’re going to the White House. I’m going to be chief of staff.”George did not want this, however, because he wanted a weaker person in that position, who would not be able impede his access to the president. This is what happened when Clinton picked his boyhood friend Mack McLarty, who lasted less than 18 months in the job. It had not, however, been a done deal in Little Rock that night. Bill told me that Clinton had said to him, “Have you ever thought of serving your country again?” Bill told he me he replied, “I think I am serving my country right now.” This was true, of course, but not in the way Clinton meant it. Clinton and Moyers went to see A River Runs Through It that night at the local Little Rock theater together when they should have been drinking bourbon and plotting how to save this country.
• Next, Hillary Clinton tried to salvage the situation by asking Bill if he would set up a think tank/seminar program operating inside the White House for the president and his staff. Bill had no interest in this, nor in being named Librarian of Congress, which Clinton later offered Bill as yet another consolation prize. After his struggles with Johnson, CBS, NBC etc., Bill could not really imagine working for anyone except himself.
• Bill and I shared an obsession with the right-wing takeover of the news business together with the gutlessness so many in the mainstream media challenge its various bullshit narratives. With the Schumann millions at his disposal, he entered into discussions at one time or another to buy Mother Jones and The Washington Monthly, to take over The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review and to create, during the days of Martin Peretz’s ownership of this magazine, what we were then calling “a liberal New Republic.” None of these came to fruition, though at one point, we had a deal with Rick Hertzberg, a former two-time editor of the actual New Republic and then Tina Brown’s deputy editor at The New Yorker, to co-edit this Holy Grail of liberal publications with me. But Rick ultimately backed out and decided to remain at The New Yorker as a writer. Bill eventually committed many millions of dollars to expanding both the reach and frequency reach of The American Prospect (and later paid for my two years writing my “Altercation” blog there).
• In addition to funding my work and that of numerous others in this field, he commissioned me at least half a dozen times to write memos about how we would create a new sort of think tank-media organization that would fund and publish reporting that had no other place but also give journalists and intellectuals a place where they would be appreciated and could make contacts and maybe even occasionally be fed. Here again, however, when we came close to achieving it—a lifelong dream of mine, along with a liberal New Republic—he pulled back yet again. It would have been located inside the CUNY Graduate Center, and Bill did not want to risk being in any way beholden to the whims of the politicians who helped to fund it.

Here’s a story that does not actually qualify as news, but I love it and hey, it’s history. Thanks to Judith Davidson Moyers, Bill’s wife of more than seven decades as well as the CEO of his production company, I was invited to join him and about a dozen former members of the Johnson administration who were still alive at a 70th birthday lunch for Bill at the Century Club. When it came to my turn to ask a question, I changed the subject from LBJ to JFK and asked: “As a political historian,” I said, “I keep reading of John Kennedy’s legendary ‘charm.’ Can you explain how it worked?