Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary "who became one of television's most honored journalists, masterfully using a visual medium to illuminate a world of ideas," died June 26, the Associated Press reported. He was 91. In addition to his role with President Lyndon Johnson, Moyers's career ranged from young Baptist minister to deputy director of the Peace Corps to senior news analyst for the CBS Evening News and chief correspondent for CBS Reports.
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| Bill Moyers (photo: Gage Skidmore) |
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"But it was for public television that Moyers produced some of TV's most cerebral and provocative series," the AP noted. "In hundreds of hours of PBS programs, he proved at home with subjects ranging from government corruption to modern dance, from drug addiction to media consolidation, from religion to environmental abuse."
Moyers's life and career as a broadcast journalist have been widely acclaimed since his death. He was also an author, with several books to his credit, including Listening to America: A Traveler Rediscovers His Country (1971); The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis: With Excerpts from an Essay on Watergate (1988, co-authored with Henry Steele Commager); A World of Ideas: Conversations With Thoughtful Men and Women About American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future (1989); The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (1995); Genesis: A Living Conversation (1996); Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft (1999); Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times (2004); Moyers on Democracy (2008); and Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues (2011).
"In an age of broadcast blowhards, the soft-spoken Mr. Moyers applied his earnest, deferential style to interviews with poets, philosophers and educators, often on the subject of values and ideas," the New York Times wrote. "His 1988 PBS series, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, drew 30 million viewers, posthumously turned Mr. Campbell--at the time a little-known mythologist--into a public broadcasting star, and popularized the Campbell dictum 'Follow your bliss.' "
A companion book, The Power of Myth (1988), based on his interviews with Campbell and championed by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis--who was then an editor at Doubleday--became a bestseller, as did earlier books by Campbell.
Tributes were paid to Moyers on social media by other writers, including historian Simon Schama: "Bill Moyers, eminence of public affairs broadcasting, dies at 91.... I am so sorry to hear this; a prince of the news, straight as an arrow. I was lucky to be on his PBS programs now and again and we always had serious discussions unafraid of complexity and nuance. None like him."
New York Times columnist and author Nicholas Kristof posted: "Bill Moyers, brilliant journalist, commentator and press secretary to President Johnson, is dead at 91. My favorite Moyers story: LBJ asked him to say grace at a White House dinner, then interrupted: 'Bill, don't mumble!' Moyers: 'I wasn't speaking to you, Mr. President.' "
Author Lawrence Wright noted: "Bill Moyers was a guiding light for me. He gave me my first blurb, on a book about growing up in Dallas during the Kennedy assassination. I was a nobody and he was a somebody with a very generous heart."
The Library of Congress paid its respects with a recollection of Moyers's appearance at the Coolidge Auditorium in the fall of 2023 to mark the preservation of more than 1,000 of his public television programs in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, noting: "His relationship with the Library went back to the summer of 1954, he told the packed auditorium, when he was a 19-year-old from a little town in Texas, in D.C. for a summer internship with U.S. Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson. On his first day, Johnson's top aide took him to the Library's Congressional Research Service as the place to do his background work for Johnson's policies and work on Capitol Hill.
" 'I came over and I was shown what they do, it's incredible,' Moyers told the crowd, 69 years later. 'All summer, I was much smarter than anyone knew I was because it was coming from the Congressional Research [Service].... I've been a fan of the research office and the process here and the Library all my life.' "