Remembering Renowned Broadcaster Bill Moyers

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This is Fresh Air.

I'm TV critic David Beancooley.

Bill Moyers, who made significant contributions to presidential politics and policies, newspapers and network TV news, and was an early proponent of public television, where he did much of his best work, died Thursday.

He was 91 years old.

On today's show, we'll listen back to excerpts of the many interviews he did with Terry Gross, but we'll begin with this appreciation.

Bill Moyers was born in 1934 in Hugo, Oklahoma and raised in Marshall, Texas.

By age 16, he was a cub reporter for the Marshall News Messenger.

In 1954, while attending Texas State College and majoring in journalism, he got a summer job interning for his state senator, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

He got the job by writing LBJ a letter that said, quote, I can tell you something about young people in Texas if you can tell me something about politics, unquote.

Moyers became an ordained minister in 1959 and crossed paths with LBJ again when Johnson was running as vice president on the Democratic ticket with John F.

Kennedy.

Moyers stuck around to help design Kennedy's Peace Corps program, and after Kennedy was assassinated, was on Air Force One to witness LBJ be sworn in as the new president.

Moyers worked on Johnson's pivotal political achievements, including the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and such great society programs as Medicare and Medicaid.

When Johnson was running for re-election in 1964, It was Moyers who helped LBJ beat Republican candidate Barry Goldwater by creating the most famous political ad in TV history, the so-called Daisy ad, with a little girl plucking a daisy while counting down to a nuclear explosion.

From 1965 to 1967, Moyers was LBJ's White House press secretary.

He also was a member of the commission that led to the creation of public television.

After falling out with Johnson over his Vietnam policies, Moyers retired from politics and became publisher of New York Newsday, where he hired Pete Hamill and won two Pulitzer Prizes.

Despite all those achievements, it was in television that Bill Moyers made his biggest mark.

He began working in public television almost in its infancy.

In 1976, reporting for a local station, he won his first Peabody Award for an extended interview with a then little-known Georgia politician named Jimmy Carter.

That program would evolve into the PBS series Bill Moyers Journal, which also would win a Peabody,

as would seven other Moyers programs over the decades.

His distinguished career, mostly at PBS but also at CBS, continued until his retirement from TV in 2015 at age 80.

Moyers was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 2006, adding to his personal Emmy total of an amazing and well-earned 35 Emmy Awards.

My ambition always was to be a teacher, Bill Moyers told me once in an interview.

He went on to say, and I think that is what essentially television has enabled me to do.

It is the largest classroom in America.

The apex of Bill Moyers as a TV teacher came in 1988 with the six-part PBS series Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers.

Campbell, as author and professor, had devoted his life to the study of comparative mythologies and religions, and his life was almost over.

Campbell would die before his recorded conversations with Moyers were televised, but his message was delivered posthumously to 30 million PBS viewers.

With Moyers as guide, theirs was a genuine conversation, allowing Campbell at one point to deliver his famous three-word inspirational message, follow your bliss.

Do you ever have this sense when you're following your bliss, as I have at moments, of being helped by hidden hands?

All the time.

It's miraculous.

I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time.

Namely, that if you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you.

And the life that you ought to be living is the one you're living somehow.

And

when you can see it, you begin to deal with people who are in the field of your bliss.

And they open doors to you.

I say, follow your bliss, and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

Because of his years in government, Bill Moyers knew government better than most.

And as a broadcaster covering politics, he was articulate and unafraid in describing and warning against what he saw.

In 2013, two years before he retired, Moyers appeared on his PBS Moyers ⁇ Company program to give this frank assessment of the political status quo.

And this was a dozen years ago, when Barack Obama was president.

We are so close to losing our democracy to the mercenary class, it's as if we're leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon, and all that's needed is a swift kick in the pants.

Look out below.

The predators in Washington are only this far from monopoly control of our government.

They've bought the political system, lockstock, and pork barrel, making change from within impossible.

That's the real joke.

Sometimes I long for the wit of a Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.

They treat this town as burlesque and with satire and parody show it the disrespect it deserves.

We laugh and punch each other on the arm and tweet that the rascals got their just dessert.

But the last laugh always seems to go to the bold-faced names that populate this town.

To them belong the spoils of a looted city.

If that sounds uncannily prescient, try this.

More than 10 years earlier, on an episode of Now with Bill Moyers on PBS in 2002, Bill Moyers warned against the results of the midterm elections, which had Republicans gaining control of both houses of Congress.

And for the first time in the memory of anyone alive, the entire federal government, the Congress, the executive, the courts, is united behind a right-wing agenda for which George W.

Bush believes he now has a mandate.

That agenda includes the power of the state to force pregnant women to surrender control over their own lives.

It includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich.

It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable.

And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine.

Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life.

If you like the Supreme Court that put George W.

Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what's coming.

Moyers spoke passionately and perceptively about his times.

And today on Fresh Air, we have four different examples of that, courtesy of his many conversations between Bill Moyers and Terry Terry Gross.

The first one we'll hear is from 2017 and was recorded about eight months into Donald Trump's first term of office.

Trump's latest attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act had just failed, and Moyers was reflecting on how President Johnson had maneuvered Congress into enacting Medicare and Medicaid in the mid-60s.

Bill Moyers, welcome back to Fresh Air.

It is great to have you back again.

And I'm delighted to be here.

So in your article, you describe what healthcare was like in your family.

Why don't you tell us about that at the time?

And we're talking about the mid-30s.

Well, in 1935, when Roosevelt made his proposal, I was one year old.

My family was poor.

The Great Depression had robbed my father of being a tenant farmer.

He took a job for a dollar a day helping to build a highway in southeastern Oklahoma, a highway I think from Dallas to Oklahoma City.

And my mother was marked all of her life by the fact that she had lost twin girls, one at birth and one some months later, I don't remember just how many, because the nearest doctor, the only doctor, was too far away to get through the countryside in his horse and buggy in time to help.

So eventually my mother and dad moved into town and to pay the doctor who did deliver me, my father carried by hand very large sandy stones to the site that the physician had bought to build his first office.

It's still there.

So all through my life, I was reminded of what it had meant to my parents and my family, and of course to many others of that generation and beyond, who didn't have coverage and good health care when they most needed it.

Truman tried and failed to pass a version of Medicare.

Then Kennedy and LBJ made it a plank in their platform.

You're right that, Kennedy's death helped Lyndon Johnson actually enact that agenda.

How did LBJ

use Kennedy's death to try to unite people behind the passage of Medicare?

Well, he knew that Kennedy's program was, his proposals on health care and civil rights and others were very important, but were stalled in Congress.

And on the plane back from Dallas, on Air Force One, coming back from Dallas with the new president and a small coterie of aides and friends in the front compartment.

And LBJ intuitively felt that this was the moment to try to move what had been a stalled agenda in the Congress.

And so, in his first major address to Congress a few days after the funeral of Kennedy, Johnson said in that slow Texas drawl of his, but with genuine conviction, let us continue.

And that kind of sparked the awakening of America from their deep grief and a realization that life had to go on, government had to work.

So you became Lyndon Johnson's press secretary.

So you were his press secretary during the passage of Medicare, right?

Well, the first two years in the White House, I came back with him from Dallas, went to the White House with him, stayed in his home for a few days, and then, although I, at the time, was the deputy director of the Peace Corps and wanted to go back to the Peace Corps, he insisted I stay.

And my first major assignment, I had two major assignments in 1964.

One was to manage

his campaign for election in November in his own right, but the most important assignment I had was to put together the task forces that would lead to the legislative program of 1965.

That included, by the way, the Public Broadcasting Act, which was passed in 1967.

It included education, it included poverty, and it included health insurance.

So for 15 months, I worked intensely helping to shape that legislation, including Medicare.

Then in the mid-part of 1965, as he had run through two or three press secretaries, he insisted that I take that job.

And I did reluctantly.

Why were you reluctant?

I loved what I was doing.

I mean, I loved, first I wanted to go back to the Peace Court when I could first get free.

Secondly, I thought creating this legislation and working with some of the best minds in government and from around the country was exhilarating.

It was exhausting, but it was exhilarating.

And there was something coming out of it.

There was something being

created that would make a real difference in the lives of Henry and Ruby Boyers and Marshall, Texas, and millions of people like them.

I liked doing that.

I liked the anonymity of it.

It was easier to get things done when you were not Scaramucci or or Bannon or somebody like that.

And the second thing is I did not want to be press secretary.

I mean, the third time he asked me, I couldn't say no.

I said no twice.

The third time he insisted.

And I still have a sore shoulder from that encounter.

And I went home, and that night I said to my wife, as we went to bed, well, this is the beginning of the end.

And she said, why?

And I said, because...

Obviously appealing to the New Testament with which I was familiar, no man can serve two masters.

And I just didn't want get caught in the middle between the press and the president.

I loved what I had been doing, and I didn't covet that job.

And the truth of the matter is, in time, as I anticipated, our credibility was so bad we couldn't believe our own leaks.

Well, that wasn't part of the war in Vietnam, right?

Yes.

Mainly.

It was also because Lyndon Johnson was 13 of the most complex people I ever knew.

And

you had to deal with a different persona from day to day or from week to week.

And sometimes it was difficult to figure out who he was at that particular time.

And you'd find yourself contradicting yourself even though you hadn't intended to.

When I took the job, when it was announced, my father sent me a telegram, and he said, Bill, telegram, most of your listeners don't know what a telegram is, but it was then

a tweet that took a long time to come by wire and paper.

But he said, Bill, tell the truth if you can, but if you can't tell the truth, don't tell a lie.

And I tried very hard to walk that line.

Sometimes I fell on the wrong side of it, but it was a tough and tenuous assignment.

So Johnson had quite a reputation for being like a brilliant tactician

in Congress.

Give us an example of an arm he twisted or a deal he made to get an essential vote.

Well, he had very effective powers of persuasion.

He knew how to phrase an issue

or a challenge so that it would connect to people who had to vote on it in the House and Senate.

I mean, when we were working on our bill in 1965, I and others had urged that the Medicare bill include a provision

for a retroactive increase in Social Security payments because they would be an economic stimulus, and we sort of needed that at the moment.

And he called me on the phone, and he said, well, I think it's fine to be retroactive, but I think it can be defended.

I think Medicare can be defended on a hell of a better basis in Congress than this.

I mean, we do know that it affects the economy.

It helps in that respect.

And here's a direct quote from that telephone call to me.

That's not the basis to go to the hill, lawyers.

It's not the justification.

We've just got to say that, by God, you can't treat grandma this way.

She's entitled, and we promised it to her.

When he talked like that to members of Congress, they got it.

And he said, give everybody bragging rights.

He said, you go to them and you say one day their grandson or their granddaughter is going to look back and say, I'm paraphrasing here, my grandfather was in the Congress when they passed Medicare.

And he said, you know, those grandchildren are going to be so grateful to you, and their parents are going to be so grateful to you, because they didn't have to find the money to pay for grandma and grandpa in the nursing home.

So you go to them and say they can brag that they were there when the moment came to decide for their parents and their own generation.

And you know what?

I can tell you, one after, I saw the light go off in one congressional face after another when that argument was made.

You're writing history, you can can brag about it to your grandchildren.

That was how he did it.

And then, of course, he knew how to play the tough game of threats against members of Congress who didn't vote for it.

He could offer a dam.

You know, he knew Lyndon Johnson was a genius in knowing everyone's price.

And he knew that some senators just wanted to bring their wives to dinner at the White House.

Some

senators wanted a dam built on a river in their home state.

He knew how to trade.

He once said to us, you know, the cardinal rule of what you're doing up in Congress is if you don't got something to give, you're not going to get something to get.

In other words, you got to trade.

What all of this shows is that it takes a president who is informed and engaged and active in the legislative process, respecting the differences between the branches.

But it takes somebody who knows what's going on.

That's how he worked at it.

We're listening back to Terry's 2017 interview with Bill Moyers.

They spoke about eight months into Donald Trump's first term as president.

Sean Spicer was Trump's first White House press secretary, but he resigned early in the term and was replaced by Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Moyers also was a White House press secretary from 1965 to 1967 when Lyndon Johnson was president.

Since you were the press secretary, I am really interested in hearing your reactions to what's been happening at the White House Communications Office.

So what's your impression of how First Spicer and now Sanders has dealt with difficult questions from the press?

Well, let me say that I'm wary of criticizing my successors as press secretary.

It's a hard job under any circumstance, and I certainly didn't handle the press secretary job beautifully or perfectly.

And it's hard to be a journalist because I don't have the language to describe adequately for my viewers or readers the malevolent furies that have been released into our body politic.

This penchant for chaos, which is a dagger being twisted in the heart of our political process.

I don't get it and I don't know how to explain it to people.

You have to watch.

I watched the briefings of Sean Spicer to see if I could understand

and explain the chaos that was there.

We've had failed presidents and brilliant and unsuccessful press secretaries.

We've never had this situation where the president is living in a different reality from everybody else, including those who are trying to serve him in the White House.

So it's a weird, bizarre, and very, very tumultuous situation that is very difficult to decipher.

So, in one of your articles, you called Kellyanne Conway the queen of bull.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Look, I was not a perfect press secretary.

I made a lot of mistakes, but I did feel that the job was to try to help the reporters get what they needed to tell their stories and help the president understand what the reporters were trying to do.

I never did think of myself as a propagandist for the administration or the White House.

But these people I'm listening to and have been watching in the Trump administration are really just, you know, they're lying.

They're deceiving us.

And if you don't call that out, then the lie becomes a part of the lived experience of the people who are watching or listening.

I wouldn't have lasted.

Pierre Solinger wouldn't have lasted.

James Haggerty wouldn't have lasted.

We wouldn't have lasted six weeks if we had said we were going to lie for the president that we served.

Bill Moyers, it's been great to talk with you again.

Thank you so much for coming back to our show.

Thank you, Terry, for being who you are.

Thank you.

Bill Moyers from an interview with Terry Gross recorded in 2017.

We'll continue our tribute to Moyers with excerpts from three of his other Fresh Air interviews in the second half of our show.

I'm David Biancoule, and this is Fresh Air.

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This is Fresh Air.

I'm David Biancoule, Professor of Television Studies at Rowan University.

We're remembering television journalist Bill Moyers.

He died last Thursday at the age of 91.

When Terry spoke to him in 1996, the subject was his series on the book of Genesis, one of his many programs exploring religion.

Before he became a journalist, Moyers studied at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and was ordained as a Baptist minister.

Terry asked him if he ever turned to the Bible during times of crisis or doubt.

I never go to the Bible for proof text.

What we used to say

in seminary was the proof of the issue that if you were having an argument with somebody, you just open the Bible and say, here, see, it says this, I told you so.

I never use it that way.

I was fortunate to grow up

in a Baptist church that was emphasized thinking for yourself what we call the priesthood of the believer, that you had to read the Bible and wrestle with its meanings and then bringing to bear the best teaching and

the best

scholarship, decide for yourself what it means.

So I've never been to the Bible for that kind of,

as a life raft, as a life jacket, as a pill to pop when I'm feeling down or when I'm uncertain.

It's the fact that it's so woven into my whole life and that I read these stories as

mirrors, in a way, of our own individual journeys.

That's what gets me about.

But the exciting part of going back and talking with these stories with so many people, 38 different people in the course of this series, is that these stories speak to us today because they are so starkly human.

The people in Genesis rage at one another, they rage at God, they struggle with temptation, they're jealous, they're grief-stricken, they're patient, they're conniving, they're loving, they're hateful, and the dilemmas they face are ours: sibling rivalry, family violence, infertility, and surrogate parenting, parents who play favorites.

I mean, I read these stories now more as reflections of the human experience in the light of a believing person than I do reading them for instruction.

You preached for a few years, I think, before entering politics and in the future.

I wouldn't call it that.

You wouldn't call it a few years, you wouldn't call it preaching, which.

I wouldn't call it preaching.

Oh, I was pretty, I think one of the reasons I didn't pursue that is that I just never, I never, it never came out quite right.

I never felt comfortable doing it.

I actually intended to teach, Terry.

I wanted to go.

I signed up when I finished seminary to do my Ph.D.

at the university in American civilization, and I wanted to look at religion as a phenomenon in American life.

That's what I intended to do.

But in seminary, yes, I went out to small churches on Sundays and inflicted my amateurish

wisdom on very patient and loving congregations, mostly farmers and their spouses.

Well, I'm wondering if anybody ever came up to you and asked you

for advice about what the Bible had to say about their predicament.

Well, I had a very scary experience

that was a turning point also in my life.

I was pastoring at a student minister.

I'd go out, my wife and I would go out on weekends, and I was in this small church.

There were two sisters there, two spinster sisters.

They must have been in their late 60s.

And they lived

with their brother on a farm not far

from this church.

And they were there every...

This was only every other week I would go out.

They were there.

And

one Sunday, they asked if they could see me after church.

I must have been 20.

Yeah, 20, not quite 21.

I was my second half of my sophomore year at the university.

And

they said to me that they admitted to me, they confessed to me in Protestant church, but this was a confession that

they'd been having

incestuous relations with their brother, and they needed help.

They were deeply guilt-stricken.

They were deeply disturbed by this, and they needed help.

And what did I have to tell them?

Well, I remember mumbling and fumbling something and saying, you know, let me think about it and I'll come back to see you.

I went immediately that afternoon to, the next afternoon when I got back

home, I went to a marvelous man who was a great and generous soul

minister.

broad in his faith and learned in his wisdom and talked to him.

He said, Moiriers, you've got no business trying to bring the Bible to bear on them.

Thank God you didn't do that.

I want you to go out to the university and see.

And he gave me the name of a leading psychiatrist,

psychologist who taught at the University School of Department of Psychology.

I went out to see him and this man said, well, I'll be glad to try to help them.

It's a very serious issue.

Here's you tell them to call me.

Try to get them to come see me.

Bring them if if they'll come with you.

So the next time I went out, I went by to see them and talked to them and I could tell that

if the Bible couldn't help them, if I couldn't help them, then they didn't think psychology and psychiatry could help them.

Now this was back

in the 50s when that generation of folk didn't have much use for the new psychological insights of the secular world and

they never followed through.

And that was, I realized at that moment that I wasn't equipped to help those people

who hungered

for some answer that I couldn't give them, for some help that I couldn't give them.

So that was an occasion in which

it wasn't easy to open the Bible and find

something that would give them encouragement.

Bill Moyers, speaking to Terry Gross in 1996, will continue our tribute to Moyers after a break.

This is Fresh Air.

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trying to lead a national discussion now on the subjects of death and dying.

Was death discussed in your family when you were growing up?

No, not explicitly.

Death was all around.

My mother lost three of her children

before they were two years of age.

My brother, my older brother, died at the age of 39 in 1966.

He was just seven years older than me.

My father lost his father in the flu epidemic of 1918.

Death was a constant reality in the lives of my family, and it was just there.

We didn't talk about it as

death as death.

It was just talked about in terms of, well, Mr.

Paul Pace died last night.

My father was very active in the Little Baptist Church where I grew up in Marshall, Texas.

And anytime any member of the church died, the elders of the church organized themselves to provide a round-the-clock vigil for them.

My father always took the one o'clock in the morning or two o'clock in the morning shift.

He would go down for an hour and just sit there in the presence of the corpse.

Even though my father would get up at 5 o'clock, 5.30 in the morning and go to work as a truck driver, he would do that.

Other men in the church did it too.

Death was to be witnessed.

Death was to be attended.

It wasn't so much to be talked about.

What did your brother die of in 1966?

He had throat cancer.

He was a heavy smoker, and

he

went too early.

What was it like for you to have your brother die at such a young age?

It was totally unexpected.

It was like receiving a visitor death from another world.

You don't expect your 39-year-old brother to die.

You won't.

You just don't expect it.

You expect to grow old

together.

And there was a sudden loss, a sudden emptiness, a sudden

disappearance from your life.

And it took me a good while to come to terms with it.

I don't think death is ever accepted so naturally as we like to think it should be.

Well, just a few years before your brother died, you were

close to one of the most traumatic deaths of the century, the assassination of JFK.

I think you were even on Air Force One with the body carrying him back from Texas.

That must have thrown your life into upheaval.

It did.

It was one of those events that erupts, that change the direction when you don't consciously change it yourself.

I mean, when you come out of that experience, the road that you were on is closed and there are new roads open that you're on without even knowing that you've chosen to be on those roads.

And that's what happened.

I was having lunch on the 22nd of November in Austin, Texas with the chairman of the State Democratic Executive Committee and the future lieutenant governor of Texas and we were celebrating the very significant success of John F.

Kennedy's trip to Texas.

I had been down there to advance that trip at President Kennedy's request and we saw that it was going beautifully.

He'd had a big response in Houston, a big response in Fort Worth and it landed in Dallas on a blue clear day and large crowds and we were celebrating at lunch when we were interrupted by a phone call from this friend of mine in Austin, the manager of the local station, who said something's happened in Dallas.

So I called the Secret Service, Bill Payne, who was the Secret Service agent

with whom I was working, and he said there's been a shooting, and we think the president's hit.

So Frank Irwin, the chairman of the State Democratic Executive Committee, and I raced out to the local airport in Austin, chartered a plane, and flew to Dallas, halfway between Dallas

and Austin over Waco, Texas.

Robert Trout, I think it was Robert Trout, said, ladies and gentlemen, the President is dead.

I did land at Love Field, Goon Air Force One, for the swearing in of Vice President Johnson as President, and we flew back to Washington.

Mrs.

Kennedy and the coffin and Kenny O'Donnell and Larry O'Brien, all of the loyal Kennedy folks were on that plane.

It was a strange time, like passing

through

some underwater

passage where all sound was muffled and all sight

was

unfocused.

And there was an eerie silence on the plane.

No one seemed to know how to respond or what to say.

Larry O'Brien and I began to talk, and Kenny O'Donnell, who almost always never had anything to say.

And I did go back once to

where the coffin was, and Mrs.

Kennedy was sitting there, the bloodstain still on her dress,

and suddenly the world had been silenced by death and changed by death.

And none of us knew at that moment what had happened.

what was going to happen.

All we knew was that the president was dead, and dead

was real.

A lot of Americans took a day of mourning.

A lot of businesses, movie theaters were closed.

And of course, family is supposed to take time to mourn and to fall apart if they need to.

But as a political professional, it was your job to make sure things didn't fall apart and to keep things moving forward.

And we did.

It was almost automatic.

Liz Carpenter was on that plane.

Jack Valini was on that plane.

Lady Bird was on that plane.

The president, of course, was on that plane.

And

decisions started being made automatically, but always in the context context of

apprehension that we wouldn't, we'd be moving too fast into that circle of grief from which Mrs.

Kennedy had not yet recovered.

I mean, it was the most awkward moment I can imagine a president ever being in, of having to start immediately, not by choice, but by circumstance, to make decisions, even as the widow of his slain predecessor was on that very same plane.

I will always, whatever Lyndon Johnson's great outsized

flaws were, I will always be in deep admiration of the sensitive way he began to be president, even as he knew in the minds of many people on that plane he could never be president.

I mean, I said to him at one

he was on the phone with the Attorney General Robert Kennedy in Washington.

We were on the phone with J.

Eggdeh Hoover trying to get information about what the FBI knew regarding the Kennedy assassination.

We were

on the phone with Robert McNamara.

The president was talking to a variety of people.

And then there was one moment when he fell into

a very obsessed silence.

He was preoccupied in his own mind, and he was staring out the porthole.

He had raised the shade a little bit.

We were told to leave the shades down on the flight back, and we did mostly, but occasionally we would look out to see what we could see.

And I found the President in his cabin

looking out the porthole, and

I said, Mr.

President, which was awkward in itself, although it came naturally, because I think that title just goes to the man who's taken the oath.

But I said, what are you thinking?

And there was a long pause, and he said, Are the missiles flying?

And I realized he was struggling with, was this a Soviet attack?

Was our Cold War nemesis behind this?

Could this be the precipitation of some conflict,

of war?

Of course, we were quickly assured

that it wasn't, but I was intrigued by how that played on his mind.

Bill Moyers, speaking with Terry Gross in 2000.

Coming up, one final interview excerpt from 2004 about the challenges of being being a journalist in a country that was becoming more and more polarized.

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This is Fresh Air.

We're concluding our tribute to journalist Bill Moyers, who died last Thursday at age 91, with an interview he recorded with Terry Gross about his book, Collecting His Speeches and Commentaries, called Moyers on America, a Journalist and His Times.

The interview was recorded in 2004 when George W.

Bush was President of the United States and when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

You said you think that this is a difficult time to be a mainstream reporter.

Do you think the meaning of mainstream has changed, and do you think that there are certain points of view that earlier in your journalistic career were considered extreme but are now considered mainstream?

Yes,

I do.

I think, just take, for example, the fact that

government policy should reflect

religious values is new.

The fact that we have faith-based initiatives which are taking federal dollars and putting them behind religious organizations that do not have to

follow

general rules and guidelines

of government policy.

Yeah, I think the intrusion of religion as a force in the policies of government, as opposed to being

a moral agent operating on politics from outside, like Martha

Luther King bringing

his moral conscience to bear on the government in the civil rights movement, I think

that is new.

That sense of government as the enemy

is foreign to me.

Of course, I was a child of the Depression, a child of the New Deal, and I really believe in public action for the public good.

I believe in public resources

that should not be privatized.

All of that is radical to me.

It's foreign to me.

Do you feel like you saw this coming, the shifting of what mainstream means?

I saw it coming because I experienced it.

In the campaign of 1960, when I was a young aide to Lyndon Johnson, and we were walking across the street from the Waldorf to the Baker Hotel in downtown Dallas, Texas, and suddenly we were confronted with a mob of howling women.

Women in red, white, and blue uniforms with little hats on their head.

Their faces were wreathed in fury.

Their eyes were brimming with fire.

Their

fists were raised

in the air.

They were led by a right-wing congressman from Dallas named Bruce Alger.

These were housewives, and he had harnessed and loosed them

to surround Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson.

And I happened to be there as just a sort of aid.

And it took us a long time to cross that street.

The women spat at the Senator Johnson and spat on Mrs.

Johnson.

It was a shake.

We were shaken.

We went up to the

room in the hotel across the street and could not believe what we had just experienced.

Lyndon Johnson, shrewd politician that he was, thought it was probably going to turn the election

in Kennedy and Johnson's favor.

But Mrs.

Johnson and I both sat for a moment and realized

what had unleashed these anger in these women.

We hadn't experienced anything like that.

It was the first time I had seen what can happen when ideologues become ferocious in their anathema toward the other person.

And so I was aware of that for time to come, and then I saw it beginning to unfold with the rise of the religious right in particular, because to be furious in religion, Terry, is to be furiously irreligious.

And I could see that happening.

I could see it infecting politics with that righteous indignation that

transforms politics from compromise into conquest.

Now, critics of public television say that it is part of the, quote, elite liberal media.

And I'm wondering what you hear when you hear the words elite and liberal.

paired with media.

Well, first I want to know who's saying it and why they're saying it.

Is Rush Limbaugh saying that?

Is it an adversary of public broadcasting, somebody who wants to bring public broadcasting down?

I don't get that from the taxi drivers who brought me here today

and said

with relish in his voice that

his children watch public television, he watches public television, he had NPR on.

I don't get that.

I get it from the enemies of

public television, but I don't get it from the people who watch and listen to us.

To the contrary, I think that public television and public radio enjoys a following out there of people who would not have information available to them otherwise.

I don't consider myself an elitist.

I'm from Marshall, Texas.

My father had a fourth-grade education, my mother an eighth-grade education.

I've been fortunate through the years to gain a position in life in which to see a lot of things that I then feel obliged to report to

my viewers.

And the fact of the the matter is, I think the greatest travesty happening in America right now is the hollowing out of the middle class and the exploitation of the working class.

And I think it's easy for

the opponents,

the class warriors at the top, to dismiss that kind of reporting and that kind of journalism by calling it elite popular opinion.

I think that's bull, frankly.

What about the word liberal?

You know, elite liberal media.

And that's what a lot of conservative critics say about public broadcasting.

I mean, you give your opinions on your show.

I mean, you are liberal.

So is that do you see that as a problem, calling public media liberal?

Well, I think that one of I think the right has been allowed to steal values and read their meaning into values.

I think they have tainted words by besmirching them.

I mean, most people in polls say they want the same kinds of things I I want for our country.

Does that make them liberal?

I think that the most effective defamation that has occurred in America over the last 50 years has been the right wing's ability to make people wince when they hear the word liberal.

But liberal, if it means Social Security, I'm for it.

If it means public education, I'm for it.

If it means protecting the environment, I'm for it.

If that makes me liberal, it makes me liberal.

But

I still think of liberals as being open to the conversation of democracy and trying to be inclusive in

our embrace of America.

And I think we've got to take that word back and not run from it just because Rush Limbaugh and Hannity and Combs and Bill O'Reilly and others

cast aspersions on it.

You were at the meeting in 1964 that led to the creation of public broadcasting.

You You write about this a little bit in your new book, Moyers on America.

And this was in 1964 at the Office of Education to discuss the potential of educational TV, which became public broadcasting in 1967 after the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act.

What do you remember of the mission as it was discussed in the proto-public broadcasting era back in 1964?

The mission of public broadcasting was to create an alternative channel that would be free not only of commercials, but free of commercial values.

A broadcasting system that would serve the life of the mind, that would

encourage the imagination, that would sponsor the performing arts, documentaries, travel.

It was to be an alternative to the commercial broadcasting at that time.

And I think the most important thing that we can do is to continue to treat Americans as citizens, not just consumers.

If you look out and see see an audience of consumers, you want to sell them something.

If you look out and see an audience of citizens, you want to share something with them.

And there is a difference.

And I think public broadcasting, public radio, and public television

have to be locked to the commitment to seeing America as a society of citizens, not as consumers.

And somehow, if we accept that as our basic operative assumption, we'll find our way to serving that public in the years to come.

Bill Moyers speaking with Terry Gross in 2004.

He retired from television 11 years later in 2015 when he was 80.

Bill Moyers died last Thursday at the age of 91.

On the next fresh air, NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff joins us to talk about the latest ICE raids across America.

His new investigation looks at who is being detained, including farm workers, day laborers, and street vendors, many of whom do not have criminal records.

I hope you can join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

Our senior producer today is Roberta Shurrock.

Fresh Air's technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman.

Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy Nesper.

Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson.

For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Beancool.

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