Bill Moyers, a presidential press secretary who approved one of the most infamous negative political ads in US history before becoming one of broadcasting's most honored journalists, has died. Moyers died Thursday at a Manhattan hospital of complications from prostate cancer, the Washington Post reports. He was 91. As a public broadcasting journalist, Moyers regularly dug into the ways money and power corrupt American democracy, per the New York Times. Of the personal change after leaving government, he later said, "You learn certain things: That you're happier if you're trying to report the truth than if you're trying to conceal it."
Born in Hugo, Oklahoma, in 1934, Billy Don Moyers grew up in what he described as one of the poorest families in Marshall, Texas. His mother raised him and his brother while his father worked as a day laborer. He said he was helped by "people older than me who saw something in me that I didn't see." Moyers was so driven in his schoolwork and activities that he developed ulcers when he was 15, per the Post. Lyndon Johnson made an impression on the teenager when he landed in Marshall in a helicopter in 1948 to give a campaign speech. Johnson had no microphone, and Moyers, in the back row, couldn't hear him. "But I remember the sheer presence of the man," Moyers recalled. "And I thought, 'That's what power is.'"
Moyers studied journalism and worked for Johnson family radio and TV outlets before being ordained a Baptist minister. He worked for the vice president and was on Air Force One when his boss took the oath of office after John F. Kennedy's assassination. As Johnson's presidency launched, Moyers helped draft Great Society legislation that addressed poverty, health care, education, transportation, and civil rights. He had a central role in Johnson's 1964 election campaign against Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater and endorsed the TV commercial showing a young girl picking flower petals along with a countdown to a nuclear explosion. The "Daisy Ad," suggesting Goldwater was a bad bet to have his finger on the nuclear button, was pulled after its first airing. But many believe it led to the era of attack ads. "I wish I could take it back," he later told the Los Angeles Times.
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Moyers resigned in 1967 and became publisher of the Long Island paper Newsday. When the owner objected to the paper's political direction, Moyers launched Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, a single-topic show on such issues as the Watergate scandal and the state of America. He went to CBS to do documentaries and commentary on the evening news. After returning to PBS, Moyers produced nearly 100 documentaries and reports between the 1980s and 2007. He retired in 2015 after winning more than 30 Emmy Awards. In 2019, he told CNN that he was worried about his country for the first time, saying that "a society, a democracy can die of too many lies."
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