RIP Bill Moyers

 

Bill Moyers died on Thursday, June 26 at the age of 91.  He began his second (or third) and lasting career as a television journalist and documentarian in 1971.  Though he effectively retired in 2015 at age 80, he participated in making one last documentary last year, which he also narrated.  On the day of his death, it won for Outstanding Social Issues Documentary at the Emmys. 

 Two American Families 1991-2024 previously won the International Documentary Association's 2024 prize as Best TV Feature Documentary.  It was originally shown on the PBS series Frontline. This Emmys broadcast (for news and documentary awards only) also featured a tribute to Moyers, who had been inducted in the Television Hall of Fame in 1995.

Bill Moyers was the single most outstanding broadcast journalist of his time.  Among his many contributions over the years was an insistent analysis of the news media itself, so incisive that it became prophetic.  "We have an ideological press that's interested in the election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that's interested in the bottom line. Therefore, we don't have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people."  He said this nearly 20 years ago.  Similarly, his warnings about the imminent dangers to American democracy made a decade ago are now coming true in the headlines every day.

His first, brief career was in government, and his accomplishments are astonishing: he helped create the Peace Corps and was instrumental in administering its first years; he helped shape, write and get passed such items on the LBJ Great Society agenda as Civil Rights and Voting Rights, and anti-poverty programs.  He even had a guiding hand in the creation of PBS itself, which later became his principal TV home.

Late in his life Moyers described his career as a "teacher at-large."  He hoped that it would be said of him that "he was a darned good listener."

The old cliche of "we will never see his like again" is this time unfortunately true. The breadth and depth of his television work remains unique. Fortunately, much of his work is still accessible, on You Tube, and the Bill Moyers website., and elsewhere on the Internet as well as in his books.

All I can add is how Bill Moyers shaped my life, only through his TV work and his books.  It's my tribute, and one example out of many of how he influenced individuals as well as our entire culture: everything from highlighting the defining roles of money in politics and the growing chasm between the very wealthy and everyone else, to independent news media and diversity in reporting, the interplay of mind and body in health and the care of the dying; the "world of ideas" existing outside media exposure, and the vital roles of spirit and poetry in many aspects of American life. 

I first wrote about this two years ago in the middle of my last long post of my "TV and Me" series.  What follows is that long section, with a few edits and changes.

 Simply in terms of broadcast journalism, there was no more important figure in the twentieth century  after Edward R. Murrow--and so far in the 21st after no one-- than Bill Moyers.  But with his many programs (often produced by his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers) he went far beyond the usual concerns of journalism. 

Born in rural Oklahoma, christened Billy Don Moyers, and raised in Marshall, Texas, he became a teenage reporter for the local newspaper before studying journalism at North Texas State College.  A summer internship in the offices of Senator Lyndon Johnson led to a long association that ended in the White House.

 After earning a journalism B.A. at the University of Texas, Moyers entered divinity school, and was ordained a Baptist minister and for awhile was a pastor for a Texas church.  In 1960 he rejoined LBJ, now Democratic candidate for Vice President, and went to Washington to work in the Kennedy-Johnson administration, where he was instrumental in establishing the Peace Corps and getting it running. According to the excellent Washington Post obituary, these Peace Corps years were, he said, "the happiest three years of my life."

 Later in the Johnson White House he was instrumental in shaping and lobbying for Great Society social legislation, like Civil Rights, Voting Rights and anti-poverty programs, as well as the early forms of Medicare and Medicaid and environmental laws.

Then his tenure as LBJ's press secretary became compromised over the Vietnam War, and he quit. Moyers returned to journalism to set a stubborn standard for probity and ethics. This kept him changing jobs, which included stints as a newspaper publisher and a commentator on CBS and NBC evening news broadcasts. 

 But it was on PBS, which he helped create in the Johnson White House in 1967, that Moyers operated most often and most fully.  An early (and recurrent) title in his many news-oriented program of reportage, interview and commentary was Bill Moyers Journal, which is the first I recall watching in the early 70s, and even ordered transcripts of some impressive episodes. I also remember A Walk Through the 20^th Century. 

Over the years he cut through official excuses and political obfuscation to provide relevant information and succinct critiques of activities and trends that alarmed and depressed me in the 1980s and afterwards. I especially remember his powerful two hour environmental documentary Earth on Edge in 2001, and his early 2000s weekly program, Now. One episode won the Edward R. Murrow award.

 Moyers also focused on journalism and its responsibilities in relation to political life.  I remember his short series, The Public Mind in 1989 as particularly powerful.

   These programs deepened my understanding, and as upsetting as many were, they rescued me from despair because there was someone else who saw what I saw, but in more context and detail, eloquently expressed. I recall Earth on Edge, on interlocking ecological crises, as a model documentary that ought to be taught.  It was so much better than anything else produced at PBS or elsewhere. 

But much as he once dumped journalism for divinity school, Moyers kept turning to deeper and vastly different subjects-- areas of human life and thought that underlie political realms.  These were the programs that made the most difference to me. There were so many I can only mention the ones that were the most personally important.

 Probably Moyers’ most extensive series was A World of Ideas, begun in 1988: some 70 hour-long interviews, subtitled “conversations with thoughtful men and women about American life today and the ideas shaping our future.” 

 Moyers was responding in part to the impoverished national dialogue, the lack of ideas in the political discourse in that election year, but his interviewees were not in politics: they were scholars and thinkers in anthropology and sociology, linguistics and management, ethics and medicine, religion and history, education, physics and environmental sciences.  They were filmmakers, writers, novelists, poet and playwright. He described his “self-appointed” mission:  “ I was attempting to bring to television the lively minds of our time.” 

They were also—Moyers as well as his guest—excellent company.  There were some misses—I thought Moyers wasted an hour discussing Canada as a funny foreign country with (Canadian) Northrop Frye, one of the greatest minds applied to literature in the 20^th century.  But mostly they were enlightening and inspiring conversations.  I valued equally those with figures I knew and wanted to know more of (like August Wilson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Peter Sellars, Richard Rodriguez, Issac Asimov and Toni Morrison), and with those introduced into my world for the first time (like philosopher Jacob Needleman, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, classicist Martha Nussbaum, educator Vartan Gregorian and historian of religion Elaine Pagels.)  

The timing of these interviews was significant in introducing me to three Native American figures when I was beginning an exploration of American Indian literature and culture that would grow over the next decade of my life: Onondaga chief and national leader Oren Lyons (with whom Moyers also did a separate program), and contemporary American Indian novelists Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris (pictured.)  Like everything else Moyers did for PBS, these interviews were rerun several times (especially during pledge drives), and I managed to tape quite a few of them for later study.    

 In 1989 Moyers visited a biannual poetry festival to record the readings and interview the poets in the series The Power of the Word.  It would be the first of several such series (for instance The Language of Life in 1995, The Sounds of Poetry and Fooling with Words in 1999, and interviews with individual poets on his revived Bill Moyers Journal) featuring a broad range of poets. 

poets Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell

The first episode of The Power of the Word with William Stafford, Lucille Clifton Octavio Paz, Robert Bly, Sharon Olds, and Galway Kinnell, shows interactions between poets and students (many in high school) who attended the conference. The atmosphere is warm, and it definitely heats up at the end with Olds and Kinnell trading love poems.

 

poet Li-Young Lee

  The second explores poetry in prisons with James Autry and Quincy Troupe; the third, “Ancestral Voices” highlights the through-line of tradition in contemporary life with Joy Harjo, Barett Kauro Hongo and Mary Tall Mountain.  Then poets Li-Young Lee and Gerald Stern explore the poetry of memory. 

Lucille Clifton

A full hour is devoted to Stanley Kunitz, then one of the most respected American poets at age 84 (he lived to be 101.)  The final program is  “Where the Soul Lives,” featuring W.S. Merwin, Lucille Clifton and Robert Bly.  Bly ends the series on stage with the Paul Winter Consort reciting a short poem by Rumi, the concluding lines I have since often quoted: “Let the beauty we love be what we do./There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the earth.”  

Again, I taped some of these programs and over the years they continued to nourish and center me.

 Robert Bly was prominent in this episode, and he was a focus of the 1990 production of A Gathering of Men. The so-called men’s movement, and Bly’s part in it, were distorted, trivialized and lied about for years.  They were ridiculed, and the men who participated were cruelly shamed.  Moyers showed that this one event was serious, sincere, not political or a hostile escape from women but an exploration of feelings and their denial, particularly about a man’s relationship to his father.  Though others including psychologists James Hillman and Michael Meade not shown in this program were also leaders of these workshops, they all—like Bly-- employed poetry, myth and fairy tales to explore this and related issues. 

 I’ve never attended a men’s group, and I did not always agree completely with Bly at the pitch of his enthusiasms. But whatever other such gatherings were like, the ones these men led were serious attempts that met a need.  This program on its own is a tentative exploration that remains a useful introduction.  When I first saw it, these questions were new to me, but they immediately resonated.  This arrived at about the same time as related discussions about children of alcoholics and forms of abuse felt by children were being explored for a general public, or at least that’s when they were reaching me. 

Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood

These programs foregrounding poetry are among those that were centered on a particular conference or festival, where the Moyers team filmed the public events and some audience response or interaction, and Moyers interviewed principal participants.  Others include the Spirit and Nature program in 1991, which featured an interview with the Dalai Lama, and the Faith and Reason series in 2006, which provided a rare interview with the revered Buddhist monk Pema Chodron, as well as lively and absorbing conversations with Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis.  Apart from providing a permanent digest of these proceedings for the many who were not there, the words preserved in these programs continue to stimulate thought and suggest new perspectives. 

Other programs were pieced together from research and interviews in various places, as the five-part 1993 series Healing and the Mind.  Modern western medicine had long discounted any connection between mind (including emotions) with physical processes and health: it was all about mechanics, all about the plumbing.  Anything else was considered superstition.  When reports circulated of some Buddhist monks being able to control blood pressure during meditations, it was considered at best an unverified mystery, or more typically as occult nonsense.

 This was only beginning to change in the early 1990s, and this series of programs was groundbreaking in revealing how much practical work and theory was ongoing, even in hospitals and clinics, exploring the relationship of brain, mind and body.  Experts and practitioners discussed relations of the brain and emotions with the immune system, the effects of environment and community on healing, and generally a new, broader attitude to treat patients holistically, as well as ways for individuals to provide for their own health.

 Today most of the practices discussed, from mindfulness and acupuncture to support groups and mothers holding their newborns immediately after birth, are mainstream.  Most therapies are such normal elements of treatment that insurance often covers them.  Similarly, the hospice care I first glimpsed in On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying (2000) was a rare approach then, but very much accepted now. 

The segment of Healing and the Mind that most stayed with me was Moyers exploring the work of Jon Kabatt-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center’s Stress Reduction clinic, where he was employing the radical idea of addressing intractable back pain with the practice of meditation.  Kabatt-Zinn’s variation on single-point or mindfulness meditation was still relatively new to America, especially outside Buddhist monasteries and related places like the Zen Center in San Francisco.  His techniques were demonstrated, and he talked persuasively about them.

 The program referred to Kabatt-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living, which included instructions on meditation and the “body scan” he employs, as well as a couple of yoga regimes.  I got that book and the associated tapes in which Kabatt-Zinn speaks you through the process.  When it comes to physical movements I am a slow learner, and group instruction just befuddles me.  So I used the tapes in conjunction with diagrams in the book to learn one of the yoga regimes, and I did it regularly for years.  Though I still use aspects of it, maybe it’s time to return to it in a more formal way. 

 The experience Bill Moyers had was similar to mine, and many others: the body scan was a revelation, while meditation was hard and confusing and a bit irritating.  But it opened the door to learning the practice of meditation in various ways, including a deeper understanding of Zen practice.  This has been a major theme in my learning for the past 30 years, and it effectively began with this segment.  And I still use several of Kabatt-Zinn’s guided meditations, and profit from a couple of his subsequent books on the subject.

 Again, I acquired many of the companion books to these Moyers programs (several published by Doubleday thanks to senior editor Jacqueline Kennedy.)  They remain active resources.  Many of the programs themselves are accessible via YouTube, PBS and the Bill Moyers.com website. 

I have saved the most popular—and for me the most influential—of these many Moyers programs for last. In 1988, Moyers interviewed Joseph Campbell, previously unknown to the general public, with associated images from his work on world mythologies over six one-hour episodes.  The Power of Myth became one of the most popular TV series in PBS history. 

 I saw it when it first aired (and turned up repeatedly for awhile on PBS fund drives), but a recent re-viewing reminded me of an aspect I hadn’t thought much about: that these interviews took place during the last two summers of Campbell’s life.  This series made him famous, but posthumously. By the time it first aired, this Joseph Campbell-- so alive in personality, knowledge and understanding, who we were meeting for the first time-- was already gone.  He had been dealing with cancer those last years, so mortality was not an academic subject. As I watched it this time I was acutely aware of the additional power in his words on death and its meaning. 

 Campbell's many books, such as The Hero With A Thousand Faces, were influential with scholars and artists.  But it was the six-part The Power of Myth series that made him an icon, as he eloquently explained the patterns of mythology and the meanings he derived from them.

  Though the series included visual illustrations of some myths, the programs were basically little more than Campbell talking, with conversational prompts from a completely engaged Bill Moyers.  Yet the series was enormously popular.  It’s likely that many viewers got their first inklings of Buddhist and Hindu thought as well as traditional stories from Native American and other Indigenous peoples, from these programs. 

 But this wasn’t a mythological travelogue; Campbell distilled his own conclusions and related these stories to questions of the eternal within time, to the importance of the present moment, and the central functions of compassion and the individual experience.  He’d taught college students for many years, and spoke directly to their needs and yearnings. His most famous and therefore most misunderstood statement of “follow your bliss” was a profoundly religious message, shorn of any sense of sectarianism, let alone hedonism.   

Seeing the series again left me with two major impressions.  First, that so much of what has absorbed me in these recent decades in some sense began with this program. I even had forgotten that certain ideas and beliefs that I think of as essential to my life had their origin or at least articulation in these programs. (For example, that religion may have begun when humans dealt with the paradox of killing the animals they revered.)

 This series first aired when I was beginning to explore, in sometimes unrelated ways, Native American cultures and beliefs, the psychology of James Hillman and eventually his source, Carl Jung, and ecology in a deeper way.  This series touched on all of them and more.  Now my bookshelves contain dozens of books on these and related subjects, as well as several of Campbell’s books.

 The second impression is that having explored these topics and these thinkers and writers for the past quarter century and more, I found much more to learn and ponder in re-watching The Power of Myth than I could understand or accommodate back then.   That applies in different ways to other programs that Bill Moyers made.  They continue to nourish, as they once opened up new worlds, rescuing me from becoming mired in the goading limitations of the unembraceable world I was supposed to negotiate. 

These programs represent a small sample of the programs Bill Moyers created, every one of them thought-provoking and informative, and many of them revelatory.  Over the years, Moyers and his collaborators have created more worthy programs than any other individual or group, and perhaps more than some entire networks.

 Bill Moyers demonstrated the power of television to expand and deepen our experience.  There should be a thousand Moyers.  But there was only one.