Bill Moyers: Leaving TV after Three Decades

DATE December 17, 2004 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Bill Moyers talks about his new PBS series, "On Our
Own Terms: Moyers on Dying"
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, TV critic for the New York Daily
News, sitting in for Terry Gross. Tonight on PBS, Bill Moyers presents the
final edition of his public affairs and interview series "NOW." The show
itself will return next month with current co-host David Brancaccio flying
solo, but this is Moyers' last turn at the helm of the program he created.
To mark that occasion, we'll hear highlights of three different conversations
Terry had with Bill Moyers. But first, I'd like to offer my own take on the
veteran broadcaster.

Bill Moyers has ruffled a lot of feathers over the last three decades,
especially from conservatives unhappy with his commentary and choice of
subjects. Therefore, there might be lots of people today who are happy to see
Moyers go, but I'm not one of them. This is a year in which TV news already
has seen the retirement of producer Don Hewitt, the creator of "60 Minutes,"
and Tom Brokaw, for more than 20 years the anchor of "NBC Nightly News." Now
we're saying goodbye to Moyers, whose 34-year career in television included
nightly news commentaries and many distinguished documentaries for CBS and
several landmark PBS series that explored weightier and more elusive subjects
than TV generally tackles. These included "Bill Moyers' World of Ideas,"
"Healing and the Mind," and perhaps his most memorable, "Joseph Campbell and
the Power of Myth."

Before coming to television, Bill Moyers parlayed his journalism and divinity
degrees--He's an ordained Baptist minister--into a job as a special assistant
to Lyndon Johnson and then as LBJ's press secretary. After leaving the White
House, he published New York's Newsday, then embarked on a long career in
which he divided his efforts between CBS and PBS.

I visited Moyers in his New York office earlier this week and asked the
70-year-old high-profile broadcaster, `Why now?' I loved his answer. It
wasn't because he was being forced out by any powers-that-be. He's very
grateful for the freedom given him by Public Broadcasting. And he's not
leaving for health reasons. He wasn't being pushed, he said. He was being
pulled. He didn't know by what, but he knew he had to clear his decks to be
ready for wherever life took him next.

It's significant, I think, that Moyers reached this decision because he
listened to his own guests. He told me of two interviews he had conducted
this spring with septuagenarians, actor Hal Holbrook and the children's book
author Maurice Sendak. Holbrook told him about sailing as a younger man
across the Pacific solo. What it taught him, he told Moyers, was to bend
enough to nature in order to survive. Sendak, on the other hand, told Moyers
a simple story about savoring the bite of a perfect peach, something you
really focus on only when many more years are behind you than ahead of you.

So Moyers is bending by walking away from television and prepared to savor, to
savor, among other things, the autumn of his marriage to Judith Davidson
Moyers, his professional and personal partner. Their 50th wedding anniversary
is tomorrow, and they'll be celebrating it tonight with a family gathering at
their home. Moyers, at least for now, is gone from TV. No one is
irreplaceable, but many of the best people will not be replaced, and Moyers is
one of them. I'll never forget his observations during the Republican
National Convention of 1980, talking about how Ronald Reagan's campaign and
victory signaled a new marriage of politics and religious conservatism.
Journalists have called that the story of this past election, but Moyers
pegged it almost 25 years ago.

He also, by conversing intelligently and enthusiastically with such people as
mythologist Joseph Campbell, gave us television that was inspiring rather than
demeaning, illuminating rather than ridiculing. "The Power of Myth" changed
many lives and also demonstrated the power of television. As an interviewer,
Moyers was such a strong force because he was well-prepared, he was passionate
about his chosen subjects, and he was a careful listener.

As you're about to hear, when it came to answering questions, Bill Moyers also
was an excellent talker. 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 turns to the Bible during times of crisis or doubt.

(Soundbite of interview)

Mr. BILL MOYERS (Journalist): 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 emphasized thinking for yourself, what we called 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--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.

TERRY GROSS, host:

You preached for a few years, I think, before entering politics and entering
journalism.

Mr. MOYERS: I wouldn't call it that. I wouldn't call it that.

GROSS: You wouldn't call it a few years, you wouldn't call it preaching?
Which...

Mr. MOYERS: 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--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 had signed up when I finished seminary to do
my PhD 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 of mostly farmers
and their spouses.

GROSS: 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 predicaments?

Mr. MOYERS: Well, I had a very scary experience that was a turning point also
in my life. I was pastoring at a student ministry. 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--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, not quite 21.

I was in my second half of my sophomore year at the university. And they said
to me that--they admitted to me, they confessed to me--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
to--back home, I went to a marvelous man, who was a great and generous soul, a
minister broad in his faith and learned in his wisdom, and talked to him. He
said, `Moyers, 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 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 they'll come with you.'

So the next time I went out, I went by to see them and talk 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 a--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 didn't--it
wasn't easy to open the Bible and find something that would give them
encouragement.

BIANCULLI: Bill Moyers, speaking in 1996 with Terry Gross, following his PBS
series, "Genesis: A Living Conversation" on religion and the Bible.

Coming up in a moment, another conversation with Moyers on the subject of
death and dying. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Today we're paying tribute to journalist Bill
Moyers, who is retiring from daily and weekly deadlines after 34 years as a
broadcast journalist. His programs have explored religion, politics and
dying.

(Soundbite of television show)

Mr. MOYERS: I'm Bill Moyers. Like you, I don't want to think about death,
especially my own. But I've realized that death is pushing through the door
we try to keep so firmly shut.

BIANCULLI: Terry spoke with Moyers again in 2000 about his PBS series on
death and dying. The focus wasn't just on dying, it was also on trying to
live a decent life in the face of death and on the movement to improve care at
the end of life, such as new approaches to pain relief and hospice care.

(Soundbite of interview)

GROSS: You did a survey of what Americans' biggest fears of death are. What
were the results you came up with?

Mr. MOYERS: Whatever their backgrounds, people said they most fear reaching
the end of their lives hooked up to machines. They just want a gentle
closure. They want a dignified death. They want not to die in a nursing home
or a hospital. In fact, the survey you're referring to, I think, said that 80
percent of the people said they would prefer to die at home, not in a hospital
or a nursing home. However, the fact of the matter is that four out of five
of us will die in a hospital or a nursing home or some other institution
outside our own home. That's what people fear.

GROSS: Pain was one of the things that people seemed to fear most about
death, and pain is the subject of the second edition of your series on death
and dying. And I thought there were some interesting distinctions made
between hospice and its approach and palliative care. Palliative care is
dealing with pain within a hospital setting, as opposed to a hospice setting.
What are the differences you came away with between hospice and palliative
care?

Mr. MOYERS: Well, it's a very fine difference. When you're in a hospital and
doctors are either trying to save you or trying to comfort you, they bring a
great deal of professional skill and training to the task. So it's
institutionalized care, even if it is palliative or comfort care. Palliative
care is comfort care. You know that the person can't be cured, so you will
try to comfort that person as she dies.

Hospice is a way of just providing human comfort. It uses very little
technology--no technology. Hospice is the human touch. So is palliative
care, but palliative care relies more on the medicine and on--well, let me
give you an example.

My own mother died last year, 1999, at the age of 91. It took her three very
hard years to die. I'll never forget the day three years earlier when she
literally stopped aging, in my mind--literally stopped aging and started
dying. I was sitting at her bedside, her forehead wrinkled, her eyes closed,
her jaw slackened, her fingers curled into a fist. I mean, the person that I
had known for 60-some-odd years of my life just suddenly disappeared.

I made a lot of mistakes during those three years. I didn't know enough about
the breakthroughs in palliative care, comfort care. I mistook the
inscrutability of the doctor for authority. My doctor would not give my
mother enough pain control, enough pain management. I finally had to let him
go and bring in another doctor. This doctor said, `Mr. Moyers, your mother's
not going to make it. You should call in hospice. Hospice will make sure
that she has as much comfort as is possible.'

The striking thing to me, Terry--here I was, a man in my early 60s, worldly,
wise, traveled, experienced in government and politics, publisher of a
newspaper, 30 years a broadcast journalist, and I didn't know how to take care
of my mother. I didn't know about hospice. So fortunately, I called in
hospice. And my mother died on the very first day--April 12th of last
year--the very first day that we were filming for this series. I was
interviewing Frank Ostaseski, whom you'll see in the first show, at his
hospice center in San Francisco. And my wife was with me, as the executive
producer of the series, and she interrupted us when we were changing tapes and
said, `You have a message.' I went out into the hall, and she said, `Your
mother's dead.'

Well, my mother died quietly, holding the hand of the hospice volunteer,
remarkable woman named Jenny Mahud(ph). The last thing Jenny Mahud said to my
mother in that nursing home was, `You know, Mrs. Moyers, your family really
loves you.' And my mother, who hadn't spoken or indicated much response over
the last three years, a tear, says Jenny Mahud, formed on my mother's cheek
and quietly crept down her cheek. And I thought, what hospice did, what Jenny
Mahud did was to provide a witness to my mother's death, a friend who was
present at that moment. And that's what hospice does.

GROSS: Your new series looks at, you know, many different aspects of the
process of dying: emotional aspects, medical aspects. When the series was
over, did you re-examine, like, your own insurance policy, your living will,
your own funeral plans, things like that? Did you do, like, a tune-up in your
own preparations?

Mr. MOYERS: I started--yes. My wife and I--one of the first things we did
after coming back from interviewing Dr. Bartholome in Kansas City, who was
dying when we interviewed him, was to update our health proxy, our advanced
directive. Even a sophisticated and knowing man like Bill Bartholome realized
in the course of his dying that he didn't have enough coverage for hospice and
that his advanced directive, his health-care proxy, his instructions to the
people around him, had a loophole in it that might mean despite his wishes,
efforts would be made to prolong his life. So he came up with what he called
a naked, durable power of attorney, something I'd never heard of, but it makes
it very explicit that, in this case, his wife, Pam, had the sole and
controlling and total authority to make the decisions for him.

My wife and I came back, went to the lawyer, had our advanced directives
fine-tuned to that distinction, so that there's no doubt now if something
happens to her or if something happens to me, the other of us has the power to
make those decisions, not the doctor, not the hospital, not even a member of
our family if one of us is there. We did that.

The interesting thing, though, is, you know, we--death is still the last
taboo. It is still very hard to talk about, even though the last time I
looked, the death rate remains the same: one per person. We still don't like
to talk about it. And there was a time when we'd finished the series, when
Judith and I were sitting on our couch in the apartment and I said to her,
`You know, we have never really addressed the issue of where you want to be
buried. Where do you want to be buried?' An hour later, we were still
discussing the issue, but we hadn't closed it. We hadn't come to that point
of a declaration: `Well, this is where I want to be buried.' She said to me,
`Where do you want to be buried?' And, `Well, I have made a decision that I
want to be cremated.' `Well, where do you want your ashes spread?' `Well, I
don't know.'

So even though we have been through this experience for the last two years of
working on this series, we still have a hard time closing the deal, so to
speak.

GROSS: You're 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?

Mr. MOYERS: No, not explicitly. Death was all around. My mother lost three
of her children before they were two years of age. 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 1:00 in the morning or 2:00 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 5:00--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.

GROSS: What did your brother die of in 1966?

Mr. MOYERS: He had throat cancer. He was a heavy smoker. And he went too
early.

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

Mr. MOYERS: It was totally unexpected. It was like receiving a
visitor--death from another world. It was--you know, you don't expect your
39-year-old brother to die. You want--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 I think
it should be.

BIANCULLI: Bill Moyers, speaking with Terry Gross in 2000. Moyers is leaving
television after 34 years as a broadcast journalist. We'll continue our
tribute to Moyers in the second half of the show. I'm David Bianculli. And
this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Coming up, we continue our tribute to Bill Moyers, who retires
from TV tonight as his current PBS series concludes. We'll hear about his
experiences with American politics, starting with a stint as President
Johnson's press secretary.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli in for Terry Gross.

Tonight Bill Moyers presents the final edition of his "NOW" on PBS and walks
away from television, at least for now. We continue our tribute to Moyers by
returning to Terry's 2000 interview with him on the occasion of his PBS
documentary series "On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying." When we left off, he
was discussing the death of his brother.

GROSS: 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.

Mr. MOYERS: It did. It was one of those events that erupts that changed 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 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 big response in Houston; a big response in Ft. Worth and had 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 in--at--with whom I was working. And he said, `There's been a
shooting. And we think the president's hit.'

So Frank Irwin(ph), 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 gentleman, the president is
dead.' I did land at Love Field; go on 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
that--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 blood stains 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.

GROSS: 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.

Mr. MOYERS: And we did. It was almost automatic. Liz Carpenter was on that
plane. Jack Valente was on that plane. Ladybird was on that plane. The
president, of course, was on that plane. And decisions started being made
automatically, but always in the context of apprehension that we
wouldn't--we'd be moving too fast into that circle of grief from which
the--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. Edgar 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. The--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 the--was our Cold War nemesis
behind this? Could this be the precipitation of some conflict, some--of war?'
Of course, we were quickly assured that it wasn't. But I was intrigued by
how that played on his mind.

BIANCULLI: Bill Moyers speaking with Terry Gross in 2000 about his series "on
Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying." The final installment of "NOW with Bill
Moyers" will air this evening on PBS. Coming up, Moyers on America, a
journalist and his times.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: During Bill Moyers' long career in broadcasting, he's won more
than 30 Emmy Awards, as well as nine Peabodys. When he announced earlier this
year that he'd be stepping down as host of the weekly PBS series "NOW with
Bill Moyers," he said it wasn't that he was feeling old, but that there were
things he wanted to do that are difficult to do while hosting a weekly show.
One of those things is writing a book about President Lyndon Johnson, under
whom Moyers served as special assistant and press secretary. Moyers' most
recent appearance on FRESH AIR was last May, to discuss a collection of
speeches and commentaries called "Moyers On America: A Journalist and His
Times." Terry asked him about a speech he gave after George W. Bush was
elected the first time in the 2000 election.

GROSS: I want to quote something that you wrote for a speech after President
Bush was elected.

Mr. MOYERS: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: And you were writing that the Eisenhower type of
Republican--conservative by temperament and moderate in the use of power--is
gone, replaced by zealous ideologues. And for the first time in memory of
anyone alive, the entire federal government--the Congress, the executive, the
judiciary--is united behind a right wing agenda. How has that opinion of the
Congress and the judiciary and the Bush administration, you know, being
represented by a log of ideologues--how does that opinion affect your approach
as a journalist in terms of what is fair and what is balanced in the
presentation of issues on a program?

Mr. MOYERS: Well, it was a prescient truth, by the way. It created quite a
reaction when I said that for the first time in anyone's lifetime alive today
we have a common ideology that's governing the three branches of government
and it would lead to certain things: a redistribution of wealth, assaults on
the environment, the corporatization of government. And all of those
analyses proved to be true.

It is true that the Democratic Party once held hegemony over the government,
controlled the White House, controlled the Congress, controlled the
judiciary. That wasn't good either for the balance of power in this country,
but Democrats always included a lot of liberals, a lot of conservatives, and
a lot of people who went with the play of the moment. This new ideological
governance that we have is uniform in its outlook. It's self-protective. It
has an echo chamber. So it is much harder to be a mainstream journalist
today than I think it has been in a long time.

GROSS: Well, do you feel an obligation to have on some of the people who you
think are zealots and ideologues?

Mr. MOYERS: You know, I'm an old-fashioned liberal when it comes to being
open and being interested in other people's ideas. I really do think--and I
know this is old-fashion--that democracy is a conversation; that we should be
talking, debating, arguing about who we are and what we want, but that we
should listen to each other. And I did the very first interview in 1980 with
the leaders of the religious right: Paul Weyrich and John Lofton and Howard
Phillips. I put the senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch--I gave him his first
interview on television after he was elected. I believe in listening to other
people. So I have conservatives on. I led my show last week with Paul Gigot,
who is the editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, perhaps the
most powerful editorial page in America, not because I felt obliged to have a
conservative on but because that morning he had run an editorial, a very
powerful editorial, saying Donald Rumsfeld should not resign. I wanted to
talk to him about that. I believe in the mixture of voices and I do that
because that's a conviction with me, not because I feel obliged to do so.

GROSS: 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?

Mr. MOYERS: 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 Martin 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,
'cause 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.

GROSS: 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.

Mr. MOYERS: 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 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.

GROSS: Well, what about the word liberal, you know, 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?

Mr. MOYERS: 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 that 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 Colmes and Bill O'Reilly and others cast aspersions
on it.

GROSS: Now you were at the meeting in 1964 that led to the creation of Public
Broadcasting. 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?

Mr. MOYERS: 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 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.

GROSS: Now you served as press secretary to the president during the
escalation of the war in Vietnam. What were some of the things that you and
President Johnson most did not want the press to find out about?

Mr. MOYERS: Well, the president didn't want to disclose what might be the
full cost of the war, the same thing that George W. Bush is going through
right now.

GROSS: When you talk about cost, you mean financial cost?

Mr. MOYERS: Yeah, the financial cost, because he feared that if--he didn't
think this would last very long, by the way. He thought that if he escalated
the troops and made a real show of force that Ho Chi Minh would back down,
that the leader of North Vietnam--I remember when the president gave a speech
at Johns Hopkins University and proposed a vast Mekong delta system for North
Vietnam if, in fact, it would come to the peace table. He said to some of us
at the White House later that night, `You know, George Meany wouldn't turn
that down,' that is, the president offered a bargaining chip and George Meany,
the head of the AFL-CIO would accept that.

He thought Ho Chi Minh would accept it. He did not understand, we did not
understand the depths of Ho Chi Minh's commitment to the unification of
Vietnam, but the president thought this would be over before too long and that
he didn't want to put a price tag on it because if he anticipated it going a
long time, the conservatives would use that to cut back the spending on the
domestic programming that was so important to him. He also didn't want the
people to know when and where he was going to be making his moves, either
militarily or diplomatically. That's understandable. It's why presidents
shouldn't go to war unless it's a war of necessity, not a war of choice
because you can't fight a war in a democratic way without undermining the
success of the war. And if you don't fight it in a democratic way, you
undermine democracy itself.

So, I mean, George W. Bush has made the same tragic miscalculation that Lyndon
Johnson made in Vietnam. Iraq is not Vietnam. Iraq is a desert country.
Vietnam was a jungle. Iraq is an urban society. Vietnam was not. But the
rhetoric is the same. The optimism is the same. The belief that we can with
military force achieve democratic ends is the same as it was in Vietnam and
that's why if you start a war on tragic--on flawed premises, you're going to
have terrible things happen, and ultimately you're going to come to grief.

GROSS: When you were press secretary during this period of the escalating war
in Vietnam and President Johnson did not want the press and the public to know
what the full financial cost of the war was going to be, how did you try to
prevent that from getting out?

Mr. MOYERS: Well, I--when I became press secretary, my father, who had a
fourth-grade education, was a very honorable and humble man, sent me a
telegram in which he said, `Tell the truth if you can, but if you can't tell
the truth, don't tell a lie.' And I tried never to tell a lie. I would more
often than not say, you know, `I can't answer that right now. I'll get back
to you on that when I can.' My job was to try to be responsive enough to
satisfy the appetite to know but not so responsive as to give away the whole
thing.

BIANCULLI: Bill Moyers speaking with Terry Gross earlier this year.

We'll hear more after this break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's interview with Bill Moyers recorded
earlier this year.

GROSS: Let me quote something else from one of the speeches in your new book,
"Moyers on Moyers." And, again, this is referring back to the period when you
were press secretary for President Johnson. You write, "Iraq is not Vietnam,
but war is war. Like the White House today, we didn't talk very much about
what the war would cost. In the beginning, we weren't sure, and we didn't
really want to know too soon anyway. We were afraid of what telling Congress
and the public the true cost of the war would do to the rest of the
budget--the money for education, poverty, medicine. In time, however, we had
to figure it out and come clean."

When and how did you come clean?

Mr. MOYERS: It was in the budget--I believe it was the budget process of
1967, when it became impossible to continue to spend on Vietnam and spend for
the domestic priorities that were important to the president. And Kermit
Gordon, the head of the Budget Bureau at that time, said, `You're going to
have to pay for this one way or the other, either through deficit spending or
through taxes.' And that was when it hit the wall. That was when the
president realized he could no longer hold out trying to put a price tag on
the war. Even then, he tried to.

I left soon after that. I remember going over to the Defense Department,
crossing the Potomac, going to see Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Now
I said, `Mr. President, my responsibility is the domestic side of this, and,
look, here are what the costs are going to be. Your responsibility is the
Pentagon, the Defense Department. Here are the costs you've sent over. They
don't add up. They add up to far more expenditures than we have revenues
coming in. We need to ask for a tax increase.'

And Mr. McNamara, the secretary of Defense, said, `We can't do that, Bill.'
He said, `If we go up to the Congress and ask for a tax increase to pay for
the war in Vietnam and to pay for domestic spending, then the conservatives in
Congress will cut off the spending for poverty, spending for education, and
the spending for Head Start. And if we aren't careful, then the liberals will
vote against what we need in Vietnam.'

So he and the president worked out a budgeting system that continued to defer
for awhile the real costs, but in time the deficit rose, inflation spiraled
out of control, and the country was feeling the pain of that financial
straightjacket. And that was when reality set in and you couldn't hope or
hide it any longer.

GROSS: Let me quote again from one of your speeches collected in "Moyers On
America." And this is referring to Vietnam. "The dead were coming back in
such numbers that LBJ grew morose and sometimes took to bed with the covers
pulled over his eyes, as if he could avoid the ghosts of young men marching
around in his head."

Were those ghosts marching around your bed, too?

Mr. MOYERS: I was never at peace with the war, even when I believed that the
people who were arguing for it believed in it. Do ghosts march in my head?
No. Sadness reigns and melancholy at the lives that were lost that didn't
need to be lost. That whole experienced convinced me that war should be in
self-defense and by necessity, not by choice. But the president was
melancholy. He had a depressive streak in his nature anyway, and he took the
keen responsibility of suffering psychologically and emotionally for all those
lives, all those people.

You know, when his two sons-in-law went to Vietnam, he would go with Lucy, his
youngest daughter, to the little Catholic Church he belonged to, 2:00 in the
morning, she would go with him up there for him to seek some kind of solace.
He was a torn man because of this. He was a true cold warrior. Remember, he
was in the Senate in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, and he did
believe that in the doctrine of Munich, that if you didn't draw the line
against an aggressor at a certain place, then you'd have to fight that
aggressor later on.

He also believed in the credibility of his inheritance, that Eisenhower and
Kennedy had said Vietnam was important and that it had happened on his watch,
that he had to put meaning behind that evaluation. But the human cost of that
became unbearable to him and a source of constant sadness and despair.

BIANCULLI: Bill Moyers speaking with Terry Gross earlier this year. The
final edition of "NOW with Bill Moyers" is televised tonight on PBS. The show
returns next month with a new host. As for Moyers, he told me this week he
might have one more documentary series in him, a look at the fight for
democracy through American history. He said he didn't know if he'd find
either the energy or the funding to turn it into a reality. Here's hoping he
finds both.

(Credits)

BIANCULLI: For Terry Gross, I'm David Bianculli.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.