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 20th 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 the interviews of people I knew of and wanted to know
more (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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.