Television’s Idealist : JFK AND LBJ ONCE HAD HIS EAR: NOW BILL MOYERS LISTENS TO AMERICA

It’s fitting, in a way, considering how television has taken over his professional life, that in telling the story of the life and spirit and influence of journalist Bill Moyers one turns finally from words--the tools he has has used so eloquently throughout his many endeavors--to pictures.

But the story, in a sense, is there.

The older photos, taken in the early 1960s, show black-and-white images of a porcelain-faced young man wearing heavy black glasses and extremely short hair, a political aide and ordained Baptist minister from Texas who very much looked the part.

But shift forward a few years, and there’s one picture of the still close-cropped and dark-suited Moyers doing a very enthusiastic version of the twist at a party in 1966.

The sideburns came out somewhere in the ‘70s, as did the hair, which stayed long even after others’ locks had been cut back down. The suits got lighter and the expression softened.

Age? Yes. Experience, the changing times? Of course. But there was something else.

The pictures show a person in development , becoming. And, like him or not, agree with him or not, that seems to be the key. Development. If you watch him on tape or television, Moyers, now 58, even looks a bit different--as if he’s moved, shifted somehow--at the end of one of his more intense interviews than from its start.

“I’m drawn to people (to interview) not because I know them, but because I’m interested in their ideas, usually because of some book they’ve written,” said Moyers, who last week launched a new series on PBS, “Listening to America.” “But what begins as a formal relationship ends up being very intimate.”

Moyers brings the people he interviews in close. According to his friends, he brings the people in his life in close.

“There’s a line (in Shakespeare) where King Lear says to Gloucester, the blind man on the heath, ‘How do you see the world?’ ” Moyers said. “And Gloucester answers, ‘I see the world feelingly .’ Well, I see the world feelingly. And I’ve often wished that I didn’t. Because it really hurts. I’ve often wished that I were harder and more calloused and more cynical than I am.”

But perhaps it is just that soft core along with the journalist’s resilient outer layer that has propelled Moyers along his many paths, and fueled his growth as a human being. He says that he still remembers nearly every person he’s interviewed, and maybe he does.

If he didn’t shut them out, he says, “I would stay awake all night with a thousand voices moaning in my head.”

Billy Don Moyers was born in 1934 in Oklahoma, to Ruby and Henry Moyers, Dust Bowl farmers who lost everything they had in the Great Depression. The family moved to Marshall, Tex., a town in the mostly poor eastern part of the state, when Bill, their second son, was 3.

Marshall, he later wrote in the narration for a PBS documentary about the town, “gave me that small-town soul which one writer long ago said makes a man want to know small, unimportant things about the people who go past on swift journeys.”

When Moyers was 15, he went to work for the town newspaper, the Marshall Messenger. Under the tutelage of publisher Millard Cope--for whom he later named his son--the teen-ager covered sports and the local school board.

“I loved from the very beginning the world of journalism,” Moyers said. “It permitted you to talk to people and go places. It made you a big man in a little town.

“I was too small to play sports. I’d tried out for football ... and in the tryout for the team I was hit by a big tackle and went down on my knees, hurt my kneecaps. I knew I wasn’t going to play football. But when I became sports editor of the newspaper, I really found myself in an enviable position.”

At 19, then a sophomore at what is now North Texas State University, he wrote to Texas’ senior senator, Lyndon Johnson, asking for a summer internship.

That letter started a career that has included positions as a top aide in two presidential administrations--Kennedy’s and Johnson’s--publisher of the Long Island, N.Y., newspaper Newsday, a million-dollar-a-year reporter for CBS and producer of dozens of series and specials for PBS.

At PBS, which he has joined three times and left twice in the past two decades--he’s preparing to take some time off again later this year--he compiled an eclectic mix of programming. With series such as “Creativity” and “World of Ideas,” he made a reputation for intense, idea-oriented interviews. With “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,” discussions with the late mythologist Joseph Campbell, he extended his interviews out over a six-part series, and later into a book.

Since returning to PBS in 1987, Moyers has tended to produce more topical programs, which tend to focus more on ordinary people. One special in 1990 looked solely at the history and interpretations of the gospel song “Amazing Grace.”

This year he has produced specials including “Beyond Hate,” about racism, and “Minimum Wages,” about Americans forced by the recession to exchange well-paying jobs for minimum-wage work.

“Listening to America,” Moyers’ eleventh regular series for PBS, is named after his 1971 book of the same name, and designed to be part of the public network’s election-year coverage of issues facing Americans. See related story, next page.

His friends describe him as driven and loyal--and extremely interested in other people.

“He’s a remarkable listener,” said Stan Asimov, Newsday vice president for editorial administration, who has known Moyers since the two worked together at the paper in the late 1960s. “He hears. He hears people talk. He hears what resonates with people.”

At a recent gathering of journalists in Los Angeles, Moyers was approached by conservative media critic David Horowitz, who has published highly critical and often downright nasty articles and letters about Moyers. Horowitz has called him “too liberal” or “too left wing,” and has accused him of growing rich off of public television.

Never flinching, Moyers put his hand on the shoulder of the much-shorter Horowitz. He drew his would-be antagonist in close and listened intently to what he had to say, all the while looking into Horowitz’s eyes.

“He’s OK,” Horowitz said later. “He told me he hoped I would be able to find conservative documentaries (to put on the air at PBS).”

Judith Moyers, who has been married to Moyers for 37 years and is president of their production company, “Public Affairs Television,” describes her husband as “complex.”

“That’s the best explanation I can give,” said Judith Moyers, who at times in her life thought she was going to be married to a career military man (he couldn’t get in because of his eyesight), a preacher (he got the call from LBJ before he took on a congregation), a politician (he left the White House for Newsday) and a journalist. “He’s a very complicated person. If you look at the run-down of the shows he’s done, it’s all over the place.”

On camera and when being interviewed, Moyers comes across as very serious, and to a great extent he is. He loves to discuss ideas, read and listen to classical music. He and his wife don’t tend to participate in sports, although Judith Moyers says they love to hike.

But people who have known Moyers a long time describe another side, one that is a bit unexpected to an outsider.

Like the time he was working at LBJ’s radio station in Austin, and he slipped a lit firecracker under the chair of the announcer, Cactus Pryor, causing Pryor to run out of the station with his microphone still on. It turned out that the firecracker was a fake.

“Bill always has been a terrible practical joker,” said Don Rives, Moyers’ oldest friend from Marshall. “He still is.”

Liz Carpenter, a Texan who with her late husband ran the Carpenter News Service in Washington and later worked with Moyers for Johnson, said Moyers once sent a neatly wrapped plate of chicken bones to the researchers compiling information for the LBJ library.

“He put a note on them saying, ‘These are bones that were dined on by President Johnson,’ and asking that they be catalogued for the library,” Carpenter said.

Moyers said the stories are all true. He offered another:

Once, he said, he fabricated an Associated Press story in which a speech writer for LBJ took credit for the President’s eloquent speeches, claiming that “Without me, LBJ would still be talking like some hick.” Moyers tacked the fake report to the speech writer’s desk with a note, “See me about this----LBJ.”

“Television presents me as so pious and prim and composed,” Moyers lamented. “My children will tell you I still get a perverse sense of pleasure out of practical jokes.”

His latest favorite, according to his wife, is to play telephone tricks. And his friends all trick him in return. Moyers and Cactus Pryor have been playing an ever-escalating set of spoofs on each other for 30 years.

“He does a lot of telephone practical jokes, where he calls and plays another part,” Judith Moyers said. “I think he looks forward to the retribution.”

And while psychologists have said that practical jokes gone wrong can be hurtful and divisive, many of the friends who tell about Moyers’ pranks also describe him as a man capable of great tenderness and understanding.

“With no prompting from me whatsoever, he called my son during a period of time when my son was at a very difficult point in his life, and invited him to New York to work with him on the ‘CBS Evening News,’ ” said Tom Johnson, president of Cable News Network and former publisher of the Los Angeles Times.

The two men go way back. Moyers hired Johnson, then 23, to work as an intern in LBJ’s press office in 1965. He named Johnson assistant press secretary a year later.

“Bill has this extraordinary work ethic,” Johnson said. “He never seems to be completely satisfied. ... It’s almost as though he always feels he could have done (a task) better in some way. It’s true in his writing, his public speaking, his television. It’s true in his parenting. I’ve never known a person who presses himself as much as Bill does.”

Working for Moyers in the White House, Johnson said, meant putting in long, sometimes trying days.

“He expected the very best of everybody around him, and he expected the very best for himself,” Johnson said. “He had no room for laziness or mediocrity.”

The 1960s were glory days for Moyers. When John F. Kennedy was elected in November, 1960, the new president personally asked the 26-year-old Moyers--who had been assisting Johnson in the vice presidential race--to stay on.

“It’s taken me a long time to recover from the lost opportunities of the ‘60s,” Moyers said. “We believed that we were about to create a more equal America, that we were about to see communism fall. We thought we were going to end poverty. ... I remember the elation, I remember the transcendence of what was going to be possible in America in the ‘60s. And when all that came to pieces, when it all drowned in Vietnam or was incinerated in the riots in the cities, it did something to you.”

Moyers still has enemies from those days. Conservatives who supported Barry Goldwater remember him as the man who engineered the infamous “Daisy Girl” commercial, which showed a little girl picking the petals off of a flower while a mushroom cloud began to explode. The implication was that the right-wing Goldwater would cause a war, and the commercial is credited with helping to sink his campaign.

To this day, many conservatives are highly critical of Moyers, who they claim is too liberal, and have pressured PBS to take him off the air.

It was the crashing down of the ideals of the ‘60s, Moyers said, that propelled him from government back into journalism, where one could take a step back and watch the stage, instead of playing out the painful reality up on the stage.

It has been in journalism, particularly television journalism, that Moyers has done his most lasting work. He has made household names out of poets and scientists who would otherwise be known to just a few. He--along with the producers and reporters who work for him--has tackled social issues as a kind of investigative Studs Terkel, looking at life through the eyes of people living it.

He seems to be fascinated with people. In a short conversation with a stranger, he elicits information usually kept guarded--and gives out knowledge of himself as well.

For himself, he says, the process can be painful. But it is also what makes his projects work.

“I stand in awe of a place and I want to share it,” Moyers said. “I don’t want to experience it alone. ... It’s like you find a pearl and hold it up and say, ‘Look what I’ve found.’ ”