THE POWER OF BILL MOYERS

Remembering a legend—and friend

- MONIKA BAUERLEIN

“AND THEY GET away with the corruption,” read the subject line. I knew it was from Bill Moyers, because launching right into the point was typical when he sent me news clips and ideas, sometimes several times a day, in the waning months of the first Trump administration. They would ding in at 5 a.m. or earlier—that, too, was typical of a man who, then in his mid-80s, showed no sign of slowing from a pace that his longtime producer, Judy Doctoroff, described to me as that of an “overwhelmingly energetic idea machine.”

Moyers died in June, at 91. His life had an incredible arc—born to a dirt farmer in Oklahoma, ordained a Baptist minister at 25, LBJ’s right-hand man and present on Air Force One after the Kennedy assassination, key architect of the Great Society and the Peace Corps, and then, for decades, legendary correspondent and host on PBS and CBS, where his interviews and documentaries changed how Americans thought about masculinity, spirituality, inequality, pollution, and more.

I didn’t get to know him until after his official retirement, when he was still reading everything, talking to everyone, charming the socks off people with that soft drawl while also steelily driving them toward where he needed them to go. He talked about journalism as a calling, whose goal was “getting as close as possible to the verifiable truth.”

He also thought hard and strategically about what the truth might accomplish. Once I heard him described as “that curious and very rare blend of idealist-operator,” and that sounded exactly right.