Saying Goodbye to Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers at the 2015 Writers Guild Awards in New York City. Dennis Van Tine/AP

Bill Moyers, who died last week at the age of 91, was without parallel. No public figure over the past half-century forged the sort of career this man did. In his late 20s, already an ordained Baptist minister, the Oklahoma-born Moyers was a key player in the creation of the Peace Corps. As a senior adviser to Lyndon Johnson, after the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy, he served as a kind of an ambassador from the Johnson White House to the hostile and bereaved Kennedy crowd. He became Johnson’s press secretary and protector against negative media coverage and abided some of LBJ’s underhanded maneuvers (including moves against Martin Luther King Jr.). But he also helped develop and promote Johnson’s Great Society programs. During the 1964 campaign, when Johnson was running against far-right Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, Moyers oversaw the creation of what would become perhaps the most infamous of political ads: the “Daisy” commercial, in which a young girl plucks petals from a flower as a countdown leads to a nuclear blast. The point was not subtle: The hawkish Goldwater might blow up the world. It only aired once but the press it generated helped define the race.

Moyers left the White House before Johnson’s presidency crashed on the shoals of Vietnam and then spent the next 48 years in journalism. He started as publisher of Newsday, the Long Island daily newspaper. But he gained his greatest renown for his various stints as a correspondent, commentator, and host for CBS News and PBS. For decades, he bounced between the two networks, always looking for the best home for his mission-driven journalism that focused on social justice, economic equity, government integrity, and values-based politics.

His documentary, commentaries, and reports zeroed in on societal challenges often sidestepped or downplayed by the mainstream media. And he demonstrated that serious intellectual inquiry could be presented in long form on broadcast television, as he did with his highly popular series on Joseph Campbell, the writer and scholar who specialized in religion and comparative mythology. Bill’s magic trick was to find ways to bring these issues to large network audiences. He was soft-spoken but fiercely passionate about confronting the ills of America and promoting solutions. For him, conscience was journalism’s animating force.

I was fortunate to have known him a bit. A few times we discussed projects. (One of his side gigs was doling out foundation grants to journalists.) But nothing came to pass. In 2010, though, Kevin Drum, the well-known blogger, and I appeared on his PBS show, The Bill Moyers Journal, to discuss how big financial firms—after crashing the economy two years earlier—had continued to fleece consumers, pay their executives enormous salaries, and use campaign donations to rig Washington in their favor and keep their taxes obscenely low. We discussed this for close to an hour. Bill always looked to go deep.

As we talked about how corporate money flooded politics and influenced decision-making—hardly a new topic—Bill remarked, “I've been around a lot longer than the two of you. And I'm still amazed, though, at how brazen this is.” Bill was not one to become jaded or cynical. He expressed both dismay and puzzlement that the institutional corruption of Washington had not detonated an uprising among Americans. He saw his job as encouraging outrage by showing his audience the full truth.

Bill was genuinely upset about the S.O.P. of Washington and the role that big money played in undermining the public interest. Repeatedly he asked, how do they get away with it? It was quite unusual for a network to devote an hourlong show to this topic. I’ve not been part of anything like that since.

The day after the episode aired, I got a note from Bill. He wanted to share with me the reaction to the show. He did not refer to ratings or report what the PBS execs had to say. It was something else. Here’s that email (which I’ve tidied up a little):

I walked into the hardware store on West 73rd Street an hour or so ago. The owner—whom I've known for almost thirty years, who is sort of a bright Joe the Plumber—was holding forth with two of his employees. They didn't see me come in. His voice was rising as he spoke: "So help me, the longer I watched the madder I got.” He slammed his fist into his palm and continued: “When they”— meaning you and Kevin—"started talking about the hedge fund guys paying 15 percent in taxes, while you, buddy”—he jammed his finger into the chest of one of the Hispanic employees in front of him—"I was standing up and screaming at the screen. Debbie [his wife] tried to calm me down and turned off the set. I went over and turned it back on, and I said we gotta take to the streets. We gotta take to the streets!”

Then he looked and saw me, and he was startled. Still talking loudly, he said, “Bill, I was just talking about your show. Damnit, man, they own our country. What are we gonna do?” He stepped out from around the cash register and held up a photograph of a new baby, three or four months old. "Look,” he said. “I got my first grandchild, and if those bastards on Wall Street have their way, this kid ain’t gonna have a chance in life with what they’re doing to our country.” He calmed down finally, and I bought the vacuum cleaner I'd come for. As I walked out, he was saying to the same two guys, "Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams—they don't tell you shit about what you oughta know. You guys gotta start watching the real stuff that they [pointing in my direction] do."

Earlier in the morning Judith [his wife] and I were up at the Union Theological Seminary. The new vice president there was until three months ago a top administrator at the Guggenheim Museum. She talked about the show last night, and we could tell she had done more than watch. She had absorbed. The president, Serene Jones, then said they were assigning their students to take one bank this semester and systematically analyze its ownership, management, and behavior against standards of social justice. 

Then the manager of the small "hotel" the seminary runs for people who come to events there (conferences, lecture, trustee meetings), who had been for years assistant manager of the St. Regis, the Peninsula, and other big hotels here in town, started talking about the show. "Remember when they [Corn and Drum] talked about how Wall Street doesn't work anymore for consumers or companies needing capital, only for themselves? Well, that's what happened in the hotel industry." He went into a fascinating 15-minute-long spiel about how the employees of one of the hotels where he had worked had been taken on a "24-hour-day retreat" to be "indoctrinated" about the need for every staff person to remember that their main goal every day was to add to the share value of the new parent company. This is how he described the message: “Before you think clean bathtubs and fresh towels, before you make up the beds, before you refill the minibar, before you get the luggage up to the room—your job is to think about how every move you make increases the bottom line.” He added, “They changed the whole psychology of the staff. Only the fact that the workers were all unionized did we manage to keep believing we were actually in a service industry."   

One more story: I stopped to get my watch repaired on Columbia Avenue. Another customer, an elderly woman, introduced herself, said her late husband had for years managed the Folger Theater and that after the show last night she was going to double her contribution to Channel Thirteen [the local New York PBS station]. “It’s not a lot,” she said, “but I'm just so grateful to find out things I never knew."

I'd say you two done real good last night.

What touched me then—and what touches me now—is that Moyers, a highly influential titan of the media, was so jazzed that he had reached and informed people like the hardware store owner and the hotel worker and then had the opportunity to engage with them. He realized and embraced the responsibility that came with his position. For his audience, he could shine a light into dark corners that otherwise would remain hidden from view. That was his goal.

Moyers did this for many years during an era when gatekeepers controlled a handful of outlets and before the media environment became fractured, thanks to the internet. He snuck past those gatekeepers, knowing he had a privileged perch, and then used it to bring to a wide and diverse collection of perspectives and stories that were often locked out by the powers that be.

Bill won a host of Emmys and other awards. Most important, he showed journalists that their job is not to merely report facts but to pursue the truth and hit readers and viewers in the gut so they better understand the world. He inspired, he encouraged, he enlightened. 

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Sometimes a single quote from a politician can encapsulate a whole story, and often that is unintentional. In a New York Times article on Andrew Cuomo’s dismal and unsuccessful mayoral campaign, David Paterson, a former New York governor and Cuomo supporter, said, “All of us have a blind spot. His blind spot is that he doesn’t really connect particularly well with, just, people.” That’s all. The guy who resigned in disgrace after being credibly accused of sexual harassment isn’t a people person. Yet he still won Paterson’s endorsement.

Here's another. Talking about Trump’s BBB legislation—that’s his Billionaires Bailout Bill—Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-S.D.) told reporters, “I don’t think it gets easier to pass going longer. The more time we take, the more people find things they want to change.” Remember when Republicans used to scream and stomp their feet about legislation—such as the Affordable Care Act—that they claimed was too lengthy to read and examine before voting? Now the GOP is all for pushing mega-legislation through the Senate before senators (and the public) have a chance to scrutinize it. There is no pressing deadline for the measure, but Trump and the Rs have been trying to bum-rush this help-the-rich-and-screw-the-poor bill because they see the polls showing how dramatically unpopular it is.

The Brutalist. I find it hard these days to see a three-hour-plus movie in a cinema. With travel time and parking (or walking after taking the Metro), it can become close to a five-hour expedition. That’s longer than a major league baseball game. So I waited for The Brutalist to hit a streaming service. (Max, soon to be HBO Max.) After watching the film, I was puzzled that it had been so widely hailed. It won best drama at the Golden Globes (I know, they don’t really count) and was nominated for an Oscar for best picture and for nine other categories. It lost out to Anora for that top prize, but Adrian Brody walked off with the Best Actor honors.

Brody put in a strong performance as László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish and Bauhaus-trained architect who survived the Buchenwald concentration camp and, separated from his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and orphaned niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), emigrates to the United States, where, after several misadventures, he lands in a homeless shelter in Philadelphia and works as a manual laborer. Tóth was a heralded architect in Hungary before the Nazis entered the picture, but he doesn’t pursue that passion now, and he’s using what appears to be opium, though it’s not clear if he’s a junkie. He intersects with a wealthy industrialist who recognizes his brilliance and discovers his past, which leads to a job for Tóth designing and building a community center to honor the businessman’s deceased mother—a task that encounters major obstacles.

But this is not the familiar story of the triumph of a survivor. The story drifts. Tóth’s motivations are often hard to discern. The movie’s length does the narrative no favor. For much of the film I found myself wondering what writer-director Brady Corbert was trying to tell us. Usually that is clearer with a Holocaust movie. But what was the point of this tale, which has its ugly moments and was not based on any one person’s real-life journey? In the last minute or two, there is something of a clever pay-off that explains part of Tóth’s story and his genius. But that just made me wish it had arrived much sooner.

Your Friends & Neighbors. As the power of the American oligarchy has become a more prominent political and sociological concern, there appears to be a bump up in rich-people-suck entertainment fare. This has long been a popular theme. But recently we’ve had Succession, as well as Triangle of Sadness, Saltburn, The Menu, and Mountainhead (written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession). I’m sure I am missing a few others. Apple TV+ has weighed in with Your Friends & Neighbors, a black comedy that rests upon the very broad shoulders of Jon Hamm.

Hamm plays Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a hedge fund manager who until recently was living the seemingly good life in a Connecticut suburb with his wife, Mel (a wonderful-to-watch Amanda Peet), and their two teens. But then Mel left him for the friendly former NBA star Nick Brandes (Mark Tallman), who had been one of Coop’s best pals. And next, Coop, after having a fully consensual fling with a young associate at his firm, was fired from his job by his conniving boss who was looking to grab Coop’s lucrative accounts. In other words, everything goes to shit for a guy who in another decade—and in another rich-people-suck story—would have been called a “master of the universe.”

Naturally, the remedy for Coop is to become a thief who preys on his wealthy neighbors, while having an affair with one of them, Samantha Levitt (Olivia Munn). He’s a bit like Cary Grant in It Takes a Thief, purloining watches, jewelry, and other items these one-percenters will likely never notice missing. And through it all, Coop narrates his fall from the plutocracy, sharing with us observations about the filthy rich and the emptiness of their country-club-private-schools-shopping-sprees lifestyle. He once was blind, but now he sees.

From 2007 to 2015, Hamm had the role of a lifetime that became a cultural touchstone: Don Draper in Mad Men. He went on to make some fine movies and star in quality shows, including, recently, The Morning Show, and Fargo (in which he played a right-wing sheriff who leads a group of MAGA-ish extremists). He’s one of those charismatic actors who’s always fun to watch. In Your Friends & Neighbors, he’s well cast as the wry and self-deprecating fellow whose capering gets him snared in a big jam. But he doesn’t attain Draper-like oomph. The series, created by novelist and screenwriter Jonathan Topper, doesn’t pour much more into the what’s-wrong-with-the-wealthy glass than what we already know: They can be vacuous, overly materialistic, self-centered, and unadmirable. Got it.

But the show is a good romp, with a fine cast across the board. The standout is Lena Hall, who plays Coop’s bipolar sister, Ali, who’s honest—perhaps too honest—about her struggle with mental illness, as she tries to pursue a career as singer-songwriter, performing at a local bar. Hall, a Tony Award winner, is both a powerful actor and a gorgeous singer. (Here’s her cover of “Hold Me Now” from the series.) While Hamm is robbing his friends and neighbors, Hall is stealing the scenes.