Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary for Lyndon Johnson who transitioned into a multi-decade career as a reporter at outlets like PBS and CBS News, died on Thursday. He was 91.
Moyers’ son, William Cope Moyers, told the Washington Post that the famed reporter died due to complications from prostate cancer. The Manhattan resident passed away at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
He was best known for his long-running career at PBS, which began in 1971 with a weekly current events program; Moyers ultimately hosted several news programs for the public broadcaster, as well as produced and hosted dozens of documentaries, during multiple stints at PBS.
The New York Times described Moyers as President Johnson’s “closest aid.” Moyers helped the Texas Democrat win the 1964 election thanks to his “Daisy Girl” ad, which implied Republican nominee Barry Goldwater was not fit to lead the country in the event of a nuclear crisis. A year later, Moyers became the 11th White House press secretary, a position he held until 1967.
“He said, ‘Bill, tell the truth if you can. But if you can’t tell the truth, don’t tell a lie,’” Moyers told NPR in 2017, reflecting on his time as Johnson’s press secretary. “And I tried very hard to walk that line, sometimes I felt like on the wrong side of it … it was a tough and tenuous assignment.”
As press secretary, Moyers helped President Johnson maintain a fairly warm relationship with the press, even as criticism of the president and his acceleration of the Vietnam War intensified. Moyers resigned from the position when he felt the war was overriding the goals of the “Great Society” domestic programs LBJ had championed.
Moyers then moved into the journalism world, serving as publisher of Newsday from 1967 to 1970. His career at PBS started a year later with the weekly news show “This Week with Bill Moyers,” which was followed in 1972 by a similar program titled “Bill Moyers Journal.”
Moyers jumped from PBS to CBS in 1976, where he was the chief correspondent for its documentary program “CBS Reports.” But he ended up back at PBS in 1981, after securing $15 million in grants and later, in 1986, started his own production company, Public Affairs Television, per The New York Times. Moyers wife, Judith Davidson Moyers, was PAT’s president from 1986 to 2000 and produced a number of his PBS documentaries.
He hosted his last show, “Moyers & Company,” from 2011 to 2015; it was syndicated and available on most PBS stations.
In more recent years, Moyers has been critical of President Donald Trump. The president “loathes the media because it built him,” Moyers told CNN in 2020. “And because it built him, it can undo him.”
And last year, Moyers told Status that it is “very hard” to cover Trump because he is a “demagogue” and a “congenial liar.”
Moyers was born in Oklahoma in 1934 and raised in east Texas; his first job in journalism was at the age of 16, when he reported for the Marshall News Messenger, his local paper.
He is survived by his wife, his sons William and John and his daughter Suzanne, his six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
