NEW YORK \u2014 Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary who became one of television\u2019s most honored journalists, masterfully using a visual medium to illuminate a world of ideas, died Thursday at age 91.<\/p>\n
Moyers died in a New York City hospital, according to longtime friend Tom Johnson, the former CEO of CNN and an assistant to Moyers during Lyndon B. Johnson\u2019s administration. Moyers\u2019 son William said his father died at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York after a \u201clong illness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moyers\u2019 career ranged from youthful Baptist minister to deputy director of the Peace Corps, from Johnson\u2019s press secretary to newspaper publisher, senior news analyst for \u201cThe CBS Evening News\u201d and chief correspondent for \u201cCBS Reports.\u201d<\/p>\n
But it was for public television that Moyers produced some of TV\u2019s most cerebral and provocative series. 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.<\/p>\n
In 1988, Moyers produced \u201cThe Secret Government\u201d about the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration and simultaneously published a book under the same name. Around that time, he galvanized viewers with \u201cJoseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,\u201d a series of six one-hour interviews with the prominent religious scholar. The accompanying book became a bestseller.<\/p>\n
His televised chats with poet Robert Bly almost single-handedly launched the 1990s Men\u2019s Movement, and his 1993 series \u201cHealing and the Mind\u201d had a profound impact on the medical community and on medical education.<\/p>\n
In a medium that supposedly abhors \u201ctalking heads\u201d \u2014 shots of subject and interviewer talking \u2014 Moyers came to specialize in just that. He once explained why: \u201cThe question is, are the talking heads thinking minds and thinking people? Are they interesting to watch? I think the most fascinating production value is the human face.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Softly) speaking truth to power: <\/b>Demonstrating what someone called \u201ca soft, probing style\u201d in the native Texas accent he never lost, Moyers was a humanist who investigated the world with a calm, reasoned perspective, whatever the subject.<\/p>\n
From some quarters, he was blasted as a liberal thanks to his links with Johnson and public television, as well as his no-holds-barred approach to investigative journalism. It was a label he didn\u2019t necessarily deny.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m an old-fashion liberal when it comes to being open and being interested in other people\u2019s ideas,\u201d he said during a 2004 radio interview. But Moyers preferred to term himself a \u201ccitizen journalist\u201d operating independently, outside the establishment.<\/p>\n
Public television (and his self-financed production company) gave him free rein to throw \u201cthe conversation of democracy open to all comers,\u201d he said in a 2007 interview with The Associated Press.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think my peers in commercial television are talented and devoted journalists,\u201d he said another time, \u201cbut they\u2019ve chosen to work in a corporate mainstream that trims their talent to fit the corporate nature of American life. And you do not get rewarded for telling the hard truths about America in a profit-seeking environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the years, Moyers was showered with honors, including more than 30 Emmys, 11 George Foster Peabody awards, three George Polks and, twice, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Gold Baton Award for career excellence in broadcast journalism. In 1995, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n
From sports to sports writing: <\/b>Born in Hugo, Oklahoma, on June 5, 1934, Billy Don Moyers was the son of a dirt farmer-truck driver who soon moved his family to Marshall, Texas. High school led him into journalism.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to play football, but I was too small. But I found that by writing sports in the school newspaper, the players were always waiting around at the newsstand to see what I wrote,\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n
He worked for the Marshall News Messenger at age 16. Deciding that Bill Moyers was a more appropriate byline for a sportswriter, he dropped the \u201cy\u201d from his name.<\/p>\n
He graduated from the University of Texas and earned a master\u2019s in divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was ordained and preached part time at two churches but later decided his call to the ministry \u201cwas a wrong number.\u201d<\/p>\n
His relationship with Johnson began when he was in college; he wrote the then-senator offering to work in his 1954 reelection campaign. Johnson was impressed and hired him for a summer job. He was back in Johnson\u2019s employ as a personal assistant in the early 1960s and for two years, he worked at the Peace Corps, eventually becoming deputy director.<\/p>\n
On the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Moyers was in Austin helping with the presidential trip. He flew back to Washington on Air Force One with newly sworn-in President Johnson, for whom he held various jobs over the ensuing years, including press secretary.<\/p>\n
Moyers\u2019 stint as presidential press secretary was marked by efforts to mend the deteriorating relationship between Johnson and the media. But the Vietnam war took its toll and Moyers resigned in December 1966.<\/p>\n
Of his departure from the White House, he wrote later, \u201cWe had become a war government, not a reform government, and there was no creative role left for me under those circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n
He conceded that he may have been \u201ctoo zealous in my defense of our policies\u201d and said he regretted criticizing journalists such as Pulitzer Prize-winner Peter Arnett, then a special correspondent with the AP, and CBS\u2019 Morley Safer for their war coverage.<\/p>\n
A long run on television: <\/b>In 1967, Moyers became publisher of Long Island-based Newsday and concentrated on adding news analyses, investigative pieces and lively features. Within three years, the suburban daily had won two Pulitzers. He left the paper in 1970 after the ownership changed. That summer, he traveled 13,000 miles around the country and wrote a bestselling account of his odyssey: \u201cListening to America: a Traveler Rediscovers His Country.\u201d<\/p>\n
His next venture was in public television and he won critical acclaim for \u201cBill Moyers Journal,\u201d a series in which interviews ranged from Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist, to poet Maya Angelou. He was chief correspondent of \u201cCBS Reports\u201d from 1976 to 1978, went back to PBS for three years, and then was senior news analyst for CBS from 1981 to 1986.<\/p>\n
When CBS cut back on documentaries, he returned to PBS for much less money. \u201cIf you have a skill that you can fold with your tent and go wherever you feel you have to go, you can follow your heart\u2019s desire,\u201d he once said.<\/p>\n
Then in 1986, he and his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers, became their own bosses by forming Public Affairs Television, an independent shop that has not only produced programs such as the 10-hour \u201cIn Search of the Constitution,\u201d but also paid for them through its own fundraising efforts.<\/p>\n
His projects in the 21st century included \u201cNow,\u201d a weekly PBS public affairs program; a new edition of \u201cBill Moyers Journal\u201d and a podcast covering racism, voting rights and the rise of Donald Trump, among other subjects.<\/p>\n
Moyers married Judith Davidson, a college classmate, in 1954, and they raised three children, among them the author Suzanne Moyers and author-TV producer William Cope Moyers. Judith eventually became her husband\u2019s partner, creative collaborator and president of their production company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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