Missing Bill Moyers

Two big careers marked by discretion

The contemporary American history book I've long most wanted to read, Bill Moyers’ memoirs, was always a fantasy that I’ve long known would never be published, an outcome confirmed by the announcement of his death this week. The book’s non-existence says a lot about Bill’s integrity and how things have changed since the 1960s when he was an LBJ aide.

It is a story that might also make a compelling opera.

Moyers grew up in small-town Texas as Johnson did decades earlier, was recruited for the Johnson team in the 1950s and became a Washington operator, helping create and run the Peace Corps, displaying his unique combination of morality, perhaps reflecting his ordination as Baptist minister, and smooth political savvy.

His status rose when Johnson moved to the White House, where they worked together creating the Great Society until the relationship soured when Moyers was serving as press secretary and was called on to defend the American presence in Vietnam. Moyers left and Johnson reportedly never spoke to him again.

And, displaying a reticence or loyalty typical of that time but very uncommon now, Moyers never spoke of what had happened, rejecting an interview with Robert Caro, who has relentlessly pursued and talked to anyone close to Johnson for his magisterial biography of LBJ.

I’ve always wondered what happened, a curiosity fed when I worked briefly for Moyers in his first television foray, an essay on the American bicentennial in 1976 and several other projects including the 1972 political conventions, where we had the odd experience of using a purloined internal script of the GOP convention.

At that time it seemed that he fit into the Washington category of the formerly famous, but that was wrong. In fact, that was just the beginning of an impressive second career that went far beyond politics.

He embarked on a distinguished television career(now there’s a rare phrase for you) at CBS where he stretched existing boundaries, but still felt confined (an echo of Good Night and Good Luck?) and PBS where he won a loyal audience on issues, often philosophical or even spiritual, generally ignored by the mainstream media.

These efforts reflected a general liberal bias from many of those he interviewed, but Moyers never used his relevant prior personal experiences to guide the conversation. He interviewed interesting people, asked them intelligent questions and didn’t cut the resulting conversations short, creating a surprisingly innovative journalistic style that sadly remains unique.

Despite my frustration at his failure to write a compelling book about his interesting life and what I imagine to be a fascinating relationship with LBJ, I remember him personally not for his fame, but for his basic polite decency and loyalty to those who elevated him to a position of influence.