Bill Moyers: A Lifetime Preserved at the Library of Congress

Bill Moyers, who died yesterday at the age of 91, was at the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium one night  in the fall of 2023 to mark the preservation of more than 1,000 of his public television programs in The American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between the Library and the Boston public media producer GBH.

His relationship with the Library went back to the summer of 1954, he told the packed auditorium, when he was a 19-year-old from a little town in Texas, in D.C. for a summer internship with U.S. Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson.

On his first day, Johnson’s top aide took him to the Library’s Congressional Research Service as the place to do his background work for Johnson’s policies and work on Capitol Hill.

“I came over and I was shown what they do, it’s incredible,” Moyers told the crowd, 69 years later.  “All summer, I was much smarter than anyone knew I was because it was coming from the Congressional Research [Service] … I’ve been a fan of the research office and the process here and the Library all my life.”

The night was a crowning moment to one of the most influential careers in American media. The AAPB Bill Moyers collection preserves more than 50 years of his work, an invaluable look at American history as it was happening.

The collection “will allow viewers for generations to come to see what mattered to us over the years,” he told the Library, “and how we covered our times through the stories of contemporary democracy and its struggle to survive and thrive as well as the perceptions of many of our society’s foremost thinkers and creators.”

Moyers, born during the Depression in Hugo, Oklahoma, became an ordained Baptist minister and picked up a journalism degree from the University of Texas after his internship with Johnson. He worked for the Peace Corps and then returned to work for Johnson after he became president, eventually serving as his press secretary from 1965 to 1967.

He turned to television journalism a few years later, first with public broadcasting. His interview-based shows were driven by his genial, intelligent demeanor and persistent questioning of newsmakers. “The Bill Moyers Journal” debuted in 1972. His work as a news analyst with CBS began nearly a decade later, and in 1986 he formed a production company, Public Affairs Television, for a long-running series of programs that pursued, as one series was titled, “A World of Ideas.”

Working with his wife and creative partner, Judith Davidson Moyers, some of his most famous programs included “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,” “Genesis: A Living Conversation” and “Moyers on America.” The signature component of his career found its stride in these thought-provoking, long-form interviews. He had significant talks with, among many others, Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Elie Wiesel, Bill Gates, Salman Rushdie, Barbara Tuchman, Carlos Fuentes, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, five U.S. Supreme Court justices and four U.S. presidents.  He wrote bestselling books that stemmed from those interviews. This work led to more than 35 Emmy awards amid a slew of other honors and hall-of-fame inductions.

That 2023 night in the Coolidge Auditorium, Moyers was in conversation with veteran journalist Judy Woodruff, who often worked for PBS and also was serving as chair of the executive advisory council of the AAPB.

At one point in the hourlong event, she asked him about his turn from the White House to public television. He worked as publisher of Newsday for a few years after leaving politics, then wrote a magazine story and book called “Listening to America” that had him travel across the country. It was a bestseller and a PBS producer in New York who read the piece happened to see him on the street. The man told him, “Moyers, you’re a good listener. I’ve got a job for you.”

That was an interview show on public television.

“I spent the next three years listening to America,” he said. “All levels, all kinds, Black, white, everything….and that just opened my pores. Stories flowed into me from other people and from what I read and from what I saw. And I just decided I’d spend my life asking questions.”

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