Remembering Bill Moyers, Who Always Strived to Make the Future Work
In the wake of today’s grim Supreme Court decision imperiling American citizenship for millions, he exemplified what a citizen could and should be.
A point of personal privilege, as they say: I want to take a minute to mark the death and life of Bill Moyers, first because he was a friend and an integral if quiet part of the climate fight, but also because I think—more than almost anyone else—he puts our strange moment in stark relief. In the wake of today’s grim Supreme Court decision imperiling American citizenship for millions, he exemplified what a citizen could and should be.
I knew who Bill Moyers was, of course, my whole conscious life. He’d been an omnipresent figure in the 1960s, coming to D.C. as a key aide to Vice President Lyndon Johnson only to quickly peel off to help found the Peace Corps. When LBJ wound up in the Oval Office, Moyers became one of his core advisors, helping shape the Great Society programs, before he finally broke with his mentor over Vietnam. Then he remade himself into the most important television journalist of his time, with a devoted following at CBS and then PBS.
But he really emerged into my thinking in the early 1990s when I was writing a book called The Age of Missing Information, which was an effort to understand how the mediated lives we were living shaped our minds and world. It was something between an experiment and performance art: I found the largest cable system in the world (a hundred channels in Fairfax,Virginia) and taped everything that came across them for for 24 hours—that meant I had 2,400 hours of tv, which I spent a year watching. A miserable year—there was so little sustenance. Except for Mister Rogers, and for Bill Moyers (who were not unalike, come to think of it). He interviewed a poet, and it was thoughtful and real and human, an oasis in that desert. No wonder he was beloved; no one save perhaps Edward R/ Murrow ever used the impoverished medium that is television with as much grace and skill. (Thirty Emmys, by the way.)
Bill Moyers was the preeminent interviewer of his time because he was so good at listening—that’s what effective interviewing really is. And listening is the thing most out of fashion in the people who rule over us now.
And then, a few years later, still in my 30s, through a series of coincidences, I got to work with him much much more closely; he’d asked me to join the board of the Schumann Foundation, the philanthropy that he ran for many years even as he continued his documentary career. Schumann was an unusual operation—the two brothers (heirs to the IBM fortune) who’d founded it were on the board too, and they were as generous as it was possible to be. When Bill decided an idea was worth, say, $200,000, they would invariably propose $400,000 instead. And so a great deal of important media and progressive work for several decades was funded essentially through his good graces.
I left the board, in fact, to avoid a conflict of interest because they wanted to make the grant that would help found 350.org; without it the first global grassroots climate campaign would not have gotten off the ground. And when the time came to start Third Act, the Schumann Foundation, then in the final throes of “spending down” their assets, made a small but key grant to give us the chance to explore the idea. I was a volunteer in these organizations, but not everyone can be a volunteer; Moyers understood that, and helped make sure that we, and others, had the wherewithal to pay decent wages to people doing hard and important work. He was instinctively generous.
But that’s not what sticks in my mind right now. It’s his other qualities: a deep empathy, a deep curiosity, and a deep commitment to reality as the basis for understanding the world. Those are not to be taken for granted—he’d grown up in the segregated south, for instance. But he cultivated them his whole life, till they were his nature. And they are, I think, the exact and polar opposite of our current political dispensation—the people defunding Black colleges and renaming naval vessels to make sure they don’t honor diversity, the people shutting down satellite feeds so we can’t see the Arctic melting, the people fixated on rounding up the poorest and most vulnerable among us.
Bill Moyers was the preeminent interviewer of his time because he was so good at listening—that’s what effective interviewing really is. And listening is the thing most out of fashion in the people who rule over us now. President Donald Trump, above all, just talks and talks and talks some more, in CAPITAL letters.
Moyers, by contrast, was not just an architect of, but also the exemplar of, the postwar liberal order in America, one of the best reflections of its virtues (and doubts). He represents a literacy now passing, an unpretentious sophistication that marked America at its intellectual best. I know, from many conversations in recent years, just how saddened and alarmed he was by the turn our world has taken, but I also know that he was constantly thinking of ways to make the future work. Which is, after all, our job.
