Bill Moyers, the press secretary of the White House Onetime and newspaper publisher who spent four decades as a broadcasting journalist and documentary maker respected for PBS and CBS, died on Thursday. He was 91 years old.
Moyers died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York after a long illness, his son William told the Associated Press.
Moyers has hosted, writes for and / or produces PBS programs as Bill Moyers Journal,, Moyers & Company, a world of ideas,, Front line,, Now with Bill Moyers, Creativity with Bill Moyers And A walk through the 20th century In stretching from 1971 to 2010, winning two Peabody prizes, three prizes Humanitas and four Emmy Primetime Emmy along the way.
Lecturer eloquent with a soft Twang from Texas, he was a long -term skilled interviewer who confronted social and political problems with an incisive folk exploration. He was not afraid to declare his point of view and supported the causes and liberal organizations, including equity and precision in relationships and resume America.
“At a time of television, Mr. Moyers is an anomaly,” wrote David Carr The New York Times In 2004. “His delivery was measured and tempered rhetoric. However, he used the tools of the documentary maker to handle a velvet hammer, Matraque corporate polluters and the ne’er-Do-Wells government with precision and thanks. His trend in the choice of conservative objectives earned him the femety of the public of public television and the examination of conservative observers.”
In 1976, Moyers came out of PBS to become editor and chief correspondent to CBS reports. He also did On the road mini-documentary as well as analysis and comments for CBS Evening News with Dan rather From 1981, a salary of $ 1 million a year.
In a bitter split, Moyers left CBS in 1986 – he declared that the border between entertainment and the news of the network had “unrolled regularly” – and had formed his own business, television of public affairs, to distribute its programs. Transcribed versions have been published in the form of books, including Joseph Campbell and the power of mythwho stayed on the Times“List of bestsellers for over a year.
Moyers was hailed by some as “the consciousness of America”, a public figure of confidence in the mold of Walter Cronkite. He was considered as a possible candidate for the presidential election of the Democratic Party but never took the bait.
In 2006, he received an Emmy Achievement for life from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to “devote his life to the exploration of the main problems and ideas of our time and our country, giving television viewers an enlightened perspective on political and social concerns”.
The youngest of two sons, Billy Don Moyers was born on June 5, 1934 in Hugo, Oklahoma. His father, Henry, was a truck driver and his mother, Ruby, a housewife.
Raised in Marshall, Texas, he started his journalism career as a Cub journalist on the Marshall News Messenger And was the editor -in -chief of the Sports page while being a second year student at Marshall High School.
At the North Texas State College, he spent the summer of 1954 on an internship for Lyndon B. Johnson in Washington, obtaining the post after writing a “daring” letter to the Texas senator. “I said to him,” I can tell you something about young people in Texas if you can tell me something about politics, “he recalls in a 2001 cat for the Television Academy Foundation website.
Moyers graduated from the University of Texas with a diploma in journalism in 1956. As a student in Austin, he also worked at KTBC-TV, a station belonging to the wife of Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson. He then studied in Scotland for a year before attending the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, winning a master’s deed in 1960. (He officiated the marriage of George Lucas and Mellody Hobson at Skywalker Ranch in 2013.)
Moyers joined Lyndon Johnson, who will soon be the choice of John F. Kennedy for the vice-president, as a “Friday man” during the presidential campaign in 1960. He helped create the Peace Corps during the JFK administration in March 1961, falling under the president’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, as deputy director.
When Johnson became president after Kennedy’s assassination, Moyers remained his special advisor and assistant. He was very involved in Johnson’s re -election campaign in 1964 against the Republican Barry Goldwater and approved controversial television advertising “Daisy” in which a girl counts the petals she attaches from a flower before another countdown leads to a nuclear explosion on the screen.
“He never mentioned Goldwater, it was not a personal attack,” said Moyers in his interview with television archives. “It was an affirmation of concern about the hand on the nuclear trigger. It was a subliminal announcement, even if I did not even know the meaning of this term then. [Goldwater] I never forgiven me for what he understood my role, until the end of his life. »»
After the triumph of Johnson’s landslide, Moyers was a press secretary of the White House from 1965 to 1967 – a media darling, he was on the covers of Time And Nowsweek During his first year of work – before resigning to become publisher of Newspaper in 1967.
The Long Island Journal hired the columnist Pete Hamill and won two Pulitzer prizes during his three -year term, which ended when Newspaper Was sold to The Times Mirror Co. (Moyers had prepared a higher offer to buy the newspaper but was postponed.)
He then traveled across the country to Harp Magazine for four months in a “Swing of Rediscovery”, of which he wrote from 1971 Listen to Americawhich has become a bestseller.
From this, the New York public television station, WNET, hired it to organize a weekly half hour that would become Bill Moyers Journal. The program included the first major interview with Jimmy Carter before being known outside the plains, in Georgia, as well as an “essay on watergate” acclaimed in 1973.
Moyers had a philosophy “five years and outside”, since people “renew”, they should spend every five years. This philosophy was born when he persuaded the congress to make this period the maximum volunteer job in the Peace Corps.
He also organized this public dissemination policy. “It is very important for [it] To constantly open up to new people, to renew it, “he said.” And that will not happen less than us, the ancients do not pass. “”
He also worked for NBC and MSNBC in the mid -90s.
Moyers married the classmate north of Texas Judith Davidson in December 1954 – she continued to be president of public affairs television – and they had three children, William, John and Alice.
