Bill Moyers, eminence of public affairs broadcasting, dies at 91 – The Washington Post

Bill Moyers in 1974. (AP)

Bill Moyers, eminence of public affairs broadcasting, dies at 91

He was White House press secretary under Lyndon B. Johnson and Newsday publisher before becoming an acclaimed television journalist, mostly for PBS.

June 26, 2025 at 3:57 p.m. EDT, Today at 3:57 p.m. EDT, 12 min
By Fred A. Bernstein

Bill Moyers, who served as chief White House spokesman for President Lyndon B. Johnson and then, for more than 40 years, as a broadcast journalist known for bringing ideas — both timely and timeless — to television, died June 26 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 91.

The cause was complications from prostate cancer, said his son William Cope Moyers.

Long before he became a grandee of public television, the Texas-raised Mr. Moyers was a top aide and, by many accounts, a surrogate son to Johnson. The powerful Texas Democrat had given Mr. Moyers a summer job in his U.S. Senate office in 1954 when Mr. Moyers was in college.

Mr. Moyers arrived on Capitol Hill and, without even unpacking his bags, worked through the night addressing 275,000 envelopes using a foot-operated “addressograph” machine. By the end of the summer, he was handling Johnson’s personal correspondence.

Over the next 12 years, when he wasn’t studying or preaching — Mr. Moyers became an ordained Baptist minister in 1954 — he found his way to the highest levels of government. When Johnson was tapped in 1960 as the running mate of Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), Mr. Moyers became the liaison between the Johnson and Kennedy camps. “I could interpret Boston to Austin,” he later told journalist Don Shelby.

After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Mr. Moyers, not yet 30, became one of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s lieutenants. Time magazine called him “LBJ’s young man in charge of everything.” He was named White House press secretary in July 1965.

Mr. Moyers relished his role in shaping Great Society programs to alleviate poverty and foster racial justice, but he grew rapidly disillusioned with Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War.

He left the White House in January 1967, in the middle of the president’s second term; Johnson, he said, never spoke to him again. According to Mimi Swartz, writing in Texas Monthly in 1989, “Johnson, who had at one time loved Moyers more than anyone else, punished him by pushing him further out of his life than anyone else.”

With a growing family to support, Mr. Moyers took a lucrative job as publisher of Newsday, the large-circulation Long Island newspaper. He tilted the paper leftward in its support of anti-war demonstrators, lured a stream of leading authors to write for its pages and led the newsroom to two Pulitzer Prizes. But his tenure was cut short in 1970 amid clashes with newspaper’s conservative owner.

Mr. Moyers accepts a George Foster Peabody Award in 2004. (Mary Altaffer / AP)White House press secretary Bill Moyers briefs reporters in 1966. (William J. Smith / AP)

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