Harold Pachios Interviews Bill Moyers; Harold Pachios Interview of Bill - Bill Camera

Do you know her? Yeah. I've been on the show two or three times. Hey, she's getting it. I want to have her on my show. Let's go, folks. Because we've got... Stand by, folks. We're trying the studio. We are ready. I'm only good because the clock's ticking against the... Yeah, I agree with that. ...loss of this. And I don't want you to be cut short. Okay, here we go. And so, Harold, you can see this if I'm over here, right? If I'm doing this, ten minutes. Okay. You just tell me when we start. Yep. Any time. You ready, Ken? Okay. In five seconds. Quiet, please. Four, three, two... Thank you. Any time. Good evening for another segment of Patious On The News and Public Access Television in Southern Maine. We have a very special guest tonight. And one, we're very... We're going to stop you for one second. At the very beginning, when you say welcome to the show again, if you look in the camera one, it'll be your camera.

Got it. So we'll do it one more time. One more time. Who was it? It was Leslie Stahl. No, it was Quinn. Sally Quinn, who they gave her try out at the... See, this morning news. Yeah. After it was over, she said, What was that red light over there for? But there was no red light there. And Harold, we're still rolling right? And I'm just going to... Okay. Okay, we're ready to go. Yes, we are ready to go. And in five seconds. Four, three, two, anytime. Good evening to tonight's segment of Patious On The News and Public Access Television in Southern Maine. We have a very special guest tonight. And one, we're very excited to present to the people of this state and particularly of Southern Maine, a very famous journalist, Bill Moyers. Bill, thanks very much for agreeing to join us. It's my pleasure, Harold. I ought to tell the folks watching this that you and I go back a long time.

They'll never believe this of me that I've had a friendship going back 48 years. They don't think I'm that old. I do. But Bill and I do go back very long with, simply because he was good enough to hire me twice. Once when he was associate and then deputy director of the Peace Corps in its very earliest days, at the very beginning, and then later when he became White House Press Secretary. We don't have a lot of time with Bill, and I want to get going now and talk to him a little. He knows a little bit about public access television. In fact, a lot. He's done a lot for public access television. He knows it's very low budget television. They call themselves at our station bill free speech television. And some call you the conscience of American journalism. Any thought to begin this show on the role of public access television in America? Well, first, I've never called myself the conscience of television. That was a term used by a critic

for the Christian science monitor many years ago. And I curdled when I read it in print because I knew I would never live it down. The conversation of democracy requires many voices. And for far too long in this country, the voices on television have been determined by corporate interests by what reaches the largest audience to deliver the most eyeballs to advertisers. And that has meant that a lot of voices in this country are marginalized voices that come from the left or the right, voices that challenge the consensus of society, that is skeptical of official policy. Voice is that that don't adhere to the group thing that so often dominates American politics, American business, and American life. So public access across the country is a place where people like you and your viewers can have the conversation you want to have without regard to commercial motives, without regard to making a profit. So I've been a long time advocate,

as an advocate of free speech in the first amendment of public access, television, of low power radio, small radio stations, that may be only a mile or two, but nonetheless cover issues and ideas that are of interest to local people. So I think public access is a small but important potent voice for people like your viewers in communities like Portland and the towns around you. Your journalism, your approach to journalism employs ideas and history. I notice it back here. They're telling me to ask you to sit back for a reason I don't know. It will help you. It's not going to tear back. Oh, that's great. Well, you can't. He's not going to be anything this way. You can't edit this, can you? No. We can't stop it like this. They're not editing the way we do. They said they are. Okay. We just need to sit up, kind of sit up and start over. Can I hold this like this?

Yeah. This last question. Do the last question. Your journalism is really focused on ideas, Bill, and history. I noticed that a lot of your discussion with your guests and the journalism you do focus on history. An initial question. You read a lot. I do read a lot. I read a lot out of professional necessity, because I'm interviewing people who've written books or who are coming from the world of ideas, and I need to know what they've said, what they're thinking. Yes, I read a lot for my work, but I also read a lot for my own idle pleasure. For decades, we've been in America. We've been watching your interviews, your documentaries, I think you've done probably, you've probably done over a thousand hours of television all told, which is a lot, I think, and I don't want to make you blush, and we'll get over this.

Can't let me blush. You tried 40 years ago. Well, I never blushed. We're going to get over this quickly. It puts you back at ease. But I think that you have more enemies than anyone around. I think you have more than 30 Emmys. So you shows are interesting, and they get attention, and they have impact. How do you decide what to do? What are these ideas for shows come from? You know, the editor of the very first newspaper in America, 1691 in New England. It was called Public Occurances, both foreign and domestic, and his name was Harry's. And he said, my mandate is to give an account of such considerable things as have come to my attention. And I think that's what we journalists are obliged to do, and are privileged to do. If we have the kind of freedom I have had on public broadcasting to be able to say, you know, that's a very interesting story.

I'd like to report it, or that's a very fascinating book. I'd like to talk to the author about it. This is an idea that's emerging in culture. And I've seen it pop its head above its gofershole, and I'd like to pull it out of there and address it. Public affairs, I've always been able to take a very large notion of public affairs. It's not just government. It's not just politics. It's culture. And art, it's all, it's religion. It's foreign affairs. It's anything that affects our world and our perception of the world and our role in the world. So I've been very fortunate mainly because I've been all of these years in public broadcasting with a few detours to CBS a couple of times. I've been able to follow my intuition about what's important and what's interesting. I miss at times, you know, in baseball, if you bat a third, at 333, you're going to make a lot of money. In our business, you have to bat at least 500. And I've been lucky, I think, more or less to bat 500.

But I've hit some, I've struck out a lot too. And a lot of it revolves around people's stories. The stories that people tell you, isn't that true? I mean, I get that impression that you listen to people and you hear stories. And the stories illustrate the ideas that are churning within you. Well, I grew up in a small town in the south, as you know. And when you grew up in a small town in East Texas, which is a very southern culture, I mean, I would lie in bed at night and hear my mother and father in the next bedroom talking. I would, my bed was only a few out of very small, two bedroom houses. It was only a few feet from the street. And so when I was lying in bed at night, I could hear the neighbors, the mangers across the street or the Bergens across the other street. I could hear them in the night talking. People would be coming home from the movies at night. And I could hear their voices telling stories as they came down the street. I remember my mother's voice as she and Mrs. Platte, our next door neighbor, would lean across the fence and tell stories about their children and their nephews and their nieces

or just about the town. So as David Brickley once said to me, the late David Brickley, he said, you can't grow up in the south without resonating with stories. Everybody has a story. And of course, we read all the stories in the Bible many, many times. So stories became sort of the idea of people. The stories became the way you knew who someone was. And the way information was communicated and transmitted. So as a southerner, I grew up with forces in my ears. I used to go down on Saturday to the courthouse square. And those days, Marshall was a 50% block and 50% white town and totally segregated. Marshall Texas. Marshall Texas. That's right. And on Saturdays, you could go down in the, all the black farmers were on the west side of the courthouse and all the white farmers were on the east side of the courthouse. And I would just circulate among them. And those days, believe it or not, people came to town in wagons. They brought their fruit, their produce. I know you were old. Well, I am. And you, I just circulate on the town square, listening to the voices of the black farmers, the white farmers,

the Jewish and Syrian merchants who owned the stores around the square. My head was crowded with stories. It's interesting because when I worked with you at the White House, I had a lot of journalists that were southern born and bred. And I remember Doug Keiker telling me, look at Wicker. Look at me. We all grew up in the south, hearing stories. And also, the Baptist tradition. I mean, people, now you come from the Baptist tradition. There was a lot of talking in those Baptist churches. I think that's where I learned about democracy. It was in a Baptist church. Everyone, young and old, was privileged to speak. To offer your opinion. You know, the Baptist believe in the priesthood of the believer. That is, each of us is the editor of our own interpretation of the story. We grew up with the story. The story was the biblical story from Adam and Eve, right through the angels in the book of Revelation. It was all one big story with Phil with characters. You couldn't escape stories if you were living in a culture like that.

And in our church, you know, everyone gave testimony. Everyone gave the equivalent of a Catholic confession, but we didn't do it in a booth. We did it publicly. Sermon, after Sermon, Sunday, after Sermon was, the best Sermons were stories. I went to University of Edinburgh because I wanted to study under a great divine name, James Stewart, who was the best preacher in Europe of his time. And his Sermons began and ended with stories. They were themselves parable. So you can't, you just can't be a journalist with that tradition, doesn't understand the most important thing somebody has to tell you. Is a story. You've been labeled by many caroves and some people like that label you this age, or liberal journalists, the pro so-called progressives. They claim you as their own. How do you think of yourself in terms of George? Do you think a label applies? Well, I sometimes would fit a label and sometimes the label would not fit me.

The fact of the matter is, I think that experience is where we get our most important lessons and make our most important judgments. And I've often said something that Lyndon Johnson used to say to me often, every experience creates a new reality. So yesterday's ideology. Yesterday's true beliefs. Yesterday's known world could disappear overnight, given new worlds, new evidence, new arrival. So, I mean, I'm a liberal in the sense that I believe that together, actively as a government of and by and for the people we can do things that the market can't do for us. The market doesn't deliver good public schools. It doesn't deliver good public libraries. It doesn't deliver anything but commercial television. It doesn't even deliver a good economy. Well, that's exactly right. As the true believers of communism decided that their utopian vision of the economic order was worth this, so we've learned that a utopian vision of the free market is worth this.

I take my conclusions from studying the evidence. That's what a good journalist should be. But I am a liberal in the sense that I believe in an affirmative government. I was born in the New Deal. My father's great regret, as he told me near the end of his death, was that he didn't have a fifth chance to vote for Franklin Roosevelt. He never met Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt didn't know my father. But this petition could reach this truck driver in East Texas because he made government my father's friend. And I still believe that government is capable of great mistakes or a great inadequate. Look at FEMA. Look at the veterans' administration, which has been failing to serve the veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The government is like everything needs checks and balances. I'm a liberal in the sense that I believe in a market. I believe in the free markets,

but I believe the free markets work best when they're regulated and governed by certain principles and watch dogs. So in that sense, I am a liberal. But I've been married to the same woman for 54 years. I've been going back to the same community for 70-some odd years, culturally and socially. I think of myself as a conserva of values, a conserva of institutions, and put whatever label on me that seems to apply. I think you're defined by your story, because we're now into your story, which is where I wanted to go with this interview. And you've talked a little bit about Marshall and blacks and whites in Marshall. And I think one of the greatest shows you ever did was Marshall, Texas, Marshall, Texas, two Marshall Texas. Yeah, the black Marshall and the white Marshall. And by the way, I wasn't that aware of it growing up. I said in that show that the reason I wanted to do this documentary is one of the most popular I've ever done. It's because it shows you how you can grow up well-loved, well-churched, and well-taught,

and still be indifferent to the realities of other people's experience. I mean, I knew there were blacks in our town. I knew we were segregated. Now, I didn't feel their pain. I didn't understand their dilemma. I didn't understand what it was like to be a second-class citizen because I was the beneficiary of affirmative action for white boys. I mean, I was very poor. My father never made over $100 a week in his life, except the last week he worked. And I still have the paycheck after taxes. It was $96 and 25 cents. That's the most he ever made in his life. But I didn't grow up like. So while I could understand the impact of being poor on your life, I couldn't understand the impact of color on your life. It was only much later. It was really in Washington that I began to see the world from the perspective of the person that hadn't been able to understand or recognize when I was a kid growing up in Marshall. And the story continued after Marshall. You became an intern.

I think you were 19 years old in the Senate, interning for Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who was then, I believe, the majority leader. Yeah, I was 20, actually. I had written him a letter out of the blue. He read it and hired me. We had no such things as interns in those days. Everybody who worked for Lyndon Johnson was an indentured servant. No matter what, you're A. So I went up and spent the summer in his mail room in the Senate when he was the majority leader of the Senate. Just because at that time, I had said I want to be a political journalist and I wrote him and said, you know, I know something about young people in Texas and you know something about politics. Let me come and work for you so I can learn how to be a political journalist. And I got the job. You got the job and apparently you did the job because then he wanted to haul you into his circle and keep you there. Isn't that true? Yes, and that was a simple fact that I knew how to write letters. In those days, you know, you'd take the letter that was written to the Senate Majority Leader of the United States Senator and you would answer it.

You'd do the first draft and it would go to an administrative assistant and then to a secretary. Incidentally, I know how that works because I did it for you. You didn't. So when the letter went over to LBJ, the Senate Majority Leader, from the Senate office building to his office and the Capitol, it would have the letter, which he would sign. And underneath it would have a carbon of the letter. Carbons have gone out of fashion. And that would have the initials. That would say LBJMV, the secretary, and then BDM. And I was the one who, I was the BDM. I had written the letter for him. And he liked my letters. And sooner or later, he called me over and put me outside of his desk, his office, and said, you write my letter. So I was writing letters to Dwight Eisenhower, the president of the United States, to members of the government and ported people around the country, which he signed. But that's how he and I became close. He liked my letters. To this day, I say to young people, don't email me.

Don't call me. If you want to get my attention, sit down and write me a letter. I'll know more about you from your letter than I would ever learn, in fact, from just sitting across the room from you. I'll learn about you when I sit across them from you. But your first introduction to me is a letter. And that's how many of the people who worked with me over the years have written me a letter. You didn't. You were too busy in law school to write a letter. We talked a lot. Bill, another piece of the story was you left Washington. You went back to school then to the University of Texas. But then ultimately to the seminary to become a minister. And that's, I think, an important part of the story because you had a theological education. Before I go on and ask you about this, did you have a church after you graduated? Well, the summer that I spent in Washington was a disillusioning summer. Despite my experience with Senate Majority Leader Johnson,

I was living alone. I was new to war. I knew no one. And it was the time of the McCarthy hearings. And I saw the ugliness surrounding those hearings. Senator Joe McCarthy was coming apart quite frankly after his long campaign to identify traders in government and his accusations against innocent people. And that was disillusioning. And then one Sunday afternoon, when I was working alone in my office in the Senate office building, Sunday afternoon, beautiful day outside, I heard a report, a noise, a sound. I didn't know what it was. I kept working. Then I heard feet on the marble stairs. Those great marble stairs in the Senate office building. And I opened my door and looked out and there were Capitol Police running up the stairs to the floor above me. A United States Senator from Wyoming named Hunt had committed suicide right there that Sunday afternoon above my office.

We didn't know why at the moment. I mean, I saw them bring the body down, take it out to the ambulance. And nobody knew why. What was it? Turns out that we learned fairly soon that his son had been outed as a queer. It's what they were called as homosexual. And he given him the fact that that was a cause for public shame in those days, wrongly, but it was. He couldn't face the attention that he was going to come to him because of his sons being outed as a gay man. And he took his life. There's now been a book written about him. That was disillusioning. So when I went back to Texas after this summer, despite the fact that I had flourished in the present in the friendship of President Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, Senator Johnson, I decided, you know, I'm not going to have any influence in Washington. That's not what I really want to do.

So what I did was to decide I was still at the University of Texas to go to seminary to do a master's independent because I thought, frankly, I would teach. When I got out of seminary, I finished my PhD, which I had started at the University of Texas. And I would finish it and I'd wind up teaching in a religious institution. I didn't, during that time I was doing my graduate work. I did go out and inflict my opinions and views upon the parishioners of small congregations in the central part of Texas. I was not a very good preacher. They were a very loyal, attentive congregation. And I, you know, many years ago, we left the house we lived in for a quarter of a century. I found a lot of the outlines of those sermons in the attic as I was cleaning out the house. I looked at them and said, oh my God, forgive me for what I had did to those folks. But you know, that was a very definitive appear. All of my other congregations were in the oil fields of Oklahoma or in the peanut patches of central Texas.

Those were salt of the earth people, both the rigors working in the oil fields and the farmers. They were so tolerant of me. They were so charitable toward me. They were so kind to me. What did I know about what even I was saying from the lectern? But they took us home for lunch. They cared for Judith and then young son, whom you know, now 50 years old. And it was a reminder that beyond theology and ideology, there are people's lives. And that's what really matters. And the story continues and it has such bright colors and such contrast from those small towns where they grew peanuts. And you preached on Sunday to back to Washington in a presidential campaign with Senator Johnson campaigning for president. And you were his close aide.

He asked you to come. And you traveled all over the country with him, didn't you? I was packing up to Lee after I got my degree from the seminary. I was packing up to return the University of Texas to finish my doctorate in the phone rang and it was Senate Majority Leader in the Johnson. It was six years after I'd worked for him in 1954, saying that he was going to make a run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1960. And he said, you know, I'm not going to get it, but I want to do it. I want to get, I want to, I want to run. And so I need you to come and help me out. And I went and I was one of many, but he had me at his right hand doing anything that came up. I wasn't a policy advisor. I was a factotum. But you were at his side. Yeah, I was at his side in Washington Proximity as power. I mean, David Axelrod is sitting in the tiniest little office down the, down the corridor from President Obama. But because he's there and not across the street in the executive office building, he has more power than anybody. I have too much to extract from you.

And I got to move this a little quicker unfortunately. So now you get to the convention. You're fairly close to Senator Johnson. I know you were close. Everybody knows you were close. Were you around when he was asked to be the vice presidential running mate? And if you were around, how close were you? I was in the bathroom of the ambassador hotel suite where we were staying when John F. Kennedy came to the suite. I actually opened the door. I was sleeping in the bathroom. That's where I slept in those days. I was in the convention if we slept at all. I had spread my palate out on the bathroom. And the phone rang about six, early in the morning. And to this day, I still answer a phone on the first ring. Because that's what Lyndon Johnson taught us. If it brings past one ring, you may have lost the customer. So you answer it. And so I thought I would get to the phone first in the hotel. But Lady Bird picked it up. They were in the bedroom together.

She was asleep. He was asleep. And I heard her as I came in the door saying, Linda, it's Jack, Senator Kennedy. And so LBJ woke up and listened to the voice. And then he hung up and he said he wants to come see me. And Lady Bird said, I hope you won't do it. And they were talking about the vice president. They didn't ever mention. He just said, well, I'm going to hear him out. Well, I actually opened the door when John F. Kennedy came in. But I did not, I stayed around the corner and I did not sit in on the conversation. I'll listen. I'll answer snatches of it. And all I can remember for certain is that John Kennedy was very certain. He wanted Lyndon Johnson to run with him. And why wouldn't he? He knew it was going to be a close raise. He needed Texas. He needed a couple of states in the South. He didn't get it. Johnson was a towering figure in Texas in the Senate. And John F. Kennedy, like Barack Obama, was very young at that time. It was not even 41, I think, maybe 42.

He was the youngest president elected since Teddy Roosevelt, so that would have made him 43 when he took the oath of office. And so he needed this man. And his brother didn't want him because his brother was, thought Johnson was too liberal and too southern. But when he left that room, I was sure that he had communicated to Johnson. He really wanted him to run. And then LBJ was going to do it. Lady Bird didn't want him to do it. Sam Rayburn didn't want him to do it. John Connolly didn't want him to do it. All of his close advisors didn't want him to do it. So he became vice president and I'm moving fast now in this colorful story. But then they won. And Johnson became vice president and you were very close to him. And instead of doing what most of us would do, say, well, I'm going to go to work and be kind of a big shot with the vice president of the United States. You refuse to do that. You want to do something else. Well, during the campaign, my job was liaison between the two airplanes. Johnson's swoos and Kennedy's Caroline.

Those were the names of the planes. And my job was to keep the two campaigns in touch and the two principles in touch. So I got to know a lot of the Boston Mafia. And I liked them. And they liked me. Austin, the Boston was the mantra in those days. And there were a few of some Texas who could speak to the Boston Mafia and interpret them back to the Irish and to the Texas Mafia. And I was one other for reasons I don't know. Maybe it's this whole issue we're talking about about stories. But anyway, that was my job. And during the campaign, when I heard John F. Kennedy make the speech about the Peace Corps, it echoed a speech that I had written for LVJ two weeks before that he delivered at the University of Nebraska in 11th of October, 1960, in which we proposed a youth core. Because that word was in currency then. Hubert Humphrey, Senator Humphrey, was pushing a youth core. Milton Shaft, the mayor of Philadelphia, was pushing a youth core. Everybody was.

And it infected me. It attracted my enthusiasm. So, when Johnson was named Vice President, I was up in that same office, sitting outside his Vice President's door as his administrative assistant. But it was dull word. I mean, Vice President had nothing to do in those days. And so, therefore, we didn't have much to do. And when Kennedy announced the Sergeant Shriver, his brother-in-law was going to organize this new Peace Corps, I knew that that's what I wanted to do. It took a lot of finagling on my part to persuade LVJ, the Vice President, and JFK, the President, to let me go, because both of the new, I was a link between there two often suspicious worlds. And I had to really use, I went to the publisher of the Washington Post, Bill Graham, who was a good friend of both men. He lobbied for me. I went to a couple of other people who were influential with both of them. Finally, I was able to get away in New York. You were 25 or 26 years old.

No, that's 25, I think. 25 years old. So, finally, both of them agreed, and I went to help organize the Peace Corps. And then, we have so much we could talk about. We have to skip poll. You were at the Peace Corps until November 22, 1963. And on that day, you, that was your last day at the Peace Corps. Tell us what happened. Well, very quickly, I was deputy director of the Peace Corps. John that Kennedy had named me to help Sarge Shriver run the Peace Corps after we'd organized it. Shriver and I had called on every member of Congress to sell it, because Congress was very skeptical. That young people could go out in the world and do anything. So, we call on every member of Congress. And then, I became the deputy director of the Peace Corps. We sold the bill to them. And I was in my office one day, and the phone rang. It was Kenneth O'Donnell, who was President Kennedy's top political man. He said, Bill, President's going to Texas to raise money and sort of fly the flag

for his reelection campaign next year. Texas was in trouble. Kennedy was in trouble in Texas. And then he said, the Democrats in Texas are fighting each other. The Yarber people, Senator Yarber, were posing the Connolly people. The Connolly people were posing the Yarber people. The Johnson people were suspicious of everybody. And it was just, it was, it was a hornet's nest. And the Italian-American, a good friend of mine, Jerry Bruno. The Italian-American from Boston had been sent down to advance the trip, and he didn't speak Texan. Didn't understand Texas politics. So Kennedy O'Donnell said, we'd like you to go down and just hold everybody's hands until the president gets out of the state. And I said to him, you know, I can't. The Peace Corps is apolitical. And I'm deputy director of Peace Corps. I can't go and involve myself in partisan policy. Kennedy O'Donnell said, okay. So about 30 minutes later, the phone rang, it was President Kennedy. And he said, Bill, I hear you don't want to go to Texas.

And I said, that's right, Mr. President. The school is not involved, not involved in politics. He said, I'll tell you what, you go to Texas and worry about politics. And I'll stay in Washington and worry about the Peace Corps. So I was in Texas 24 hours later. And I was there having, it was a successful trip. I did my work. I held hands, and I tried to reconcile the different factions. And I was celebrating with the chairman of the State Democratic Executive Committee, Frank Erwin. And the soon to be lieutenant governor of Texas, Ben Barnes. At the 48th Club at the University of Texas, when I had a call from Bill Payne, who was the secret service agent, in charge of the, in Dallas, with whom I had worked. I was in Austin, the president was in Dallas. And he said, there's been a shooting, the president's hurt. So I didn't call a newsman, I know. And within 20 minutes, I was, and raced out to the airport. We got a plane from the State Highway Department. And I was halfway between Austin and Dallas when the word came that, JFK had died.

So the plane landed at Love Field. I got in the police car to go to Parkland Hospital, where I thought the new president, vice president Johnson, about to be president Johnson. He'd already become president Johnson. And effect was, turned out he was on the Air Force, Air Force One, which had been the plane, besides which mine had landed when I arrived in Dallas. So I went over to the ramp and secret service agent stopped me. I wrote a little note, Mr. President, I'm here, if you need me. The agent took it up to the plane, came back a moment, and motioned me up. And I was there when President Johnson was sworn in by Sarah Hughes, the judge, and I was on the flight back, and I stayed within the next two and a half, three and a half years. You actually stayed at his house that night, didn't you? First four nights. Yeah. We were at the, at his house. Now, we're running out of time, which is highly unfortunate. For me, and particularly for my listeners. But you were essentially the chief of staff, and then the press secretary. Briefly the chief of staff.

Yeah. And then press secretary and date. The job I had, my first, the job I most enjoyed in the White House, I was responsible for the task forces that put together the president's legislative program in 1954. The environmental act, the civil rights act, the health provisions, the education act, and that's the job that I most enjoyed. That was the substantive job that gave me a great sense of satisfaction. And you were close to the president, and I want to just ask you one thing about those days, and in the White House there's a hundred things to ask you about. But is the story true that when the second civil rights act, the voting rights act of 1965, was passed. Larry O'Brien called you from the Hill and said the Senate is passed it. And you called the president to congratulating him on the second civil rights act passage and he paused and said something to you about politics. No, history does strange things to our memories. But that was the first act. It was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the one that ended discrimination in public facilities,

restaurants, bathrooms, parks, things like that. Public accommodations, that. And the day he signed, it was a great day. And everybody was there in the White House. And it was a celebratory day. I went to the president's bedroom that night. My job included the last thing I did every night, 10 or 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night. I take his night reading to him. So that while he was in his bedroom overnight, he could read the memos that he needed to say. I walked in about 10, 15 or so. And he was lying in bed looking very disconsolate with the covers pulled up to his chin. He looked depressed. And I said, Mr. President, what? And he, across his chest, was the bulldog edition of the Washington Post. The headline was something to the effect President signs historic bill. And I said, you know, it's a great day. You should be. It'd be jubilant. But what's wrong?

You seem troubled. And I think that we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for my lifetime. And then he paused, knowing I was a much younger man, and you're. What he meant by that was he anticipated that there'd be a backlash. And that whereas the party of Lincoln, the Republican Party, had been the party behind the emancipation of the Black men and woman, that it had passed that mantle now to the Democrats. And that the Democrats had in the 1960s become the party of emancipation, the party of liberation. And that the white former Democrats who were racist and segregationists would go to the Republican Party, and the Republican Party would welcome them as their new constituents. And he was right about that, because since then the Republican Party's base has been, in fact, fastened on the deep South. Today it's basically a party of the deep South. If you look at a map of America, you'll see the Republicans' strength is in those few old Confederate states that begin in 1964,

when Johnson knew there'd be a backlash at reaching out and embracing blacks as a main constituency of the Republican Party. Johnson wasn't very happy when you left the White House. He didn't want you to leave, you left, and you went to be publisher of News Day. You didn't talk after that, I don't think. And I know that Mrs. Johnson was very concerned about it. I don't know whether you're comfortable acknowledging what happened and her concerns. Well, I wasn't sure, I still am not sure exactly what happened. There was a great deal of misunderstanding. And a lot of people spread, you know, for example, I was coming to be president to be publisher of News Day here in New York. And Bobby Kennedy was the senator, the junior senator from New York. So out of courtesy, I called him up, we went to lunch, and I informed him that I was coming to be publisher of New York,

that publisher of News Day here in New York. Somebody saw us coming out of the San Susie restaurant and immediately called Drew Pearson, the colonist and official... Political gossip. Political gossip, if you had more. And Drew Pearson called the president. I said, guess what? Warriors was just seeing coming out of San Susie with Robert Kennedy. Now, the irony is that Johnson had sent me up to the Hill over and over again to negotiate with Bobby Kennedy over his opposition to the war and that sort of thing. And I had simply done a courtesy of informing the senator from New York that I was coming to his state. LBJ thought that Bobby Kennedy got me that job as publisher and he thought I'd gone over to the enemy's camp. And he actually thought that Bobby Kennedy had gotten me the job with the publisher, with the owner of News Day, who was a radical opponent of Bobby Kennedy. But that word spread and Johnson didn't forgive me for that and other things, I think.

And but later on there was... I know Mrs. Johnson wanted it to be a rapprochement and actually after he passed away, just a few years ago, she asked you to come to Texas and to talk about him. Yeah, I went down and laid the wreath at his grave on his 98th birthday and that's when she asked me to deliver her eulogy. And so I said, of course, I would. And when she died two years later, two years ago, I went down and gave the eulogy. She was a great woman, a strong woman, a woman who stuck by her man and made him a better man for it. And she and I had been very good friends and soulmates in the White House. All we've talked about really was just a few years in my life because I spent the last 40 years as a journalist. And people often say to me, they often rather talk about my experience in Washington, and then my experience in the last 40 years as a journalist.

The experience in Washington informed me. I mean, it's very hard for me to read a story and not read between the lines because I've been inside. And I know what's meant by language and what's not meant by language. And it was that experience which actually liberated me to be a journalist. It showed me that I didn't want to spend my life in government. It showed me I wasn't a very partisan man. I mean, I loved government. I didn't particularly care for politics, even though that's where I cut some of my teeth. But that experience, those seven years in the Peace Corps and the White House, were actually the best education I could have had for understanding public life and understanding how democracy really works. It also did something else. You know, after I spent five years doing my masters in theology, divinity, I regretted that. When I met you, you were a young lawyer, and I said to myself, that's what I should have done with those four years. I should have prepared to be a lawyer because it would be more practical than having spent those years in seminary and then wound up in Washington.

If I'd had legal training as you did, a law school education as you did, I thought I'd be far more understanding and adept in public affairs. I was wrong about that because those four and a half years I spent getting my divinity, my masters in divinity, proved anticipatory of what's happened in the last 40 years in which almost every issue of democracy converges at an ethical and religious intersection. And so we've had the rise of the religious right. We had all of these issues of separation of church and state. We have ethical issues at every step of the big decision we're facing today and trying to reboot capitalism. So those, my subject, my major in ethics, my major in seminary was social ethics. And that proved to be a great device for interpreting the world of politics and government and economics and journalism. Last question, focusing for a moment on this horrible economic mess.

American journalists, American media have any responsibility for this. And I asked that question because two years ago in one of your speeches, you quoted a, you quoted a fellow named Norton Garfinkle, the American dream versus the gospel of wealth. And you said, quoting him in your speech, when the richest nation in the world has to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to pay its bill, when middle class citizens sit on a mountain of debt to maintain their living standards. When the nation's economy has difficulty producing secure jobs or enough jobs of any kind, something is a miss and then you launched into it. You said yes, something is a miss. That was two years ago, the stock market was soaring and you said that. So journalism missed the boat. You can't be a son of the New Deal without recognizing that markets left to their own appetites will ultimately consume themselves.

They will eat themselves. That capitalism works best when it has rules and when it has restraints and when it accepts those rules. You just know that's what led to the first great depression in this country, to the great depression of the 1930s and you can't be a son of the New Deal without recognizing that. Look, it took me a while after I left the White House to realize that for the journalist, it's not how close you are to power that counts, it's how close you are to reality. And we journalists should be loyal to reality, not to power. And in the last 30 years, the press became too close to power. Where that was the Clinton administration, or the Johnson administration, or the Nixon to the Reagan administration, the press needs to be independent. Both of group thinking the public and group thinking to power.

And we became the press, the main journal, there's a lot of great independent journalists in this country. And there's a lot of world-class journalism done in this country. But by and large, once the press became owned by huge mega corporations with interest in Washington, that trickled down. And the press became too close to the interest of wealth and power and was not able to keep a distance that separated itself from power and looked at reality. So yes, we have a big responsibility, the business press for the last 30 years, which bought into the gospel of wealth, the mainstream press, which turned from doing stories about ordinary people to doing stories about celebrities. The growth of the ideological press, which is designed to carry out a partisan agenda, talking about Fox News and talk radio. They've forgotten that the first mandate of every journalist is to keep in mind the people who have no power and who have no access.

And our job is to tell them what they need to know in order to hold power accountable. It's not to be a party to power. You know, I watched the funeral of my good friend who had been for so long, the moderator of meat to press. And I saw all the people of power turn out for that funeral. I mean, I really liked him a whole lot and admired him a lot. But I said, you know, if had my funeral, people in power should show up. I would have failed to do my job as a journalist. And I think that's where we should take our stand. Bill Moyers, was that? I just want to tell you how much we appreciate it. I think people of our part of Maine appreciate very much having this opportunity to get to know you. I appreciate the last 48 years of friendship. Thanks. Same here. If I get invited to Portland, I'll finish this. I'll interview you for a change. I mean, you've got quite a live story.

This has now been recorded that you've agreed to come to Portland Maine someday and we're waiting for that. Thanks very much, Bill. Thanks, Al. Okay, great. Could you guys just mean it for a second? Yeah, that was fun. We spent too long in the past. Well, I had the whole thing. I was going from the story to then the speeches, which I had. Do you want to do a close to camera? Are you okay? I'm okay. I don't even know what that means. I'm okay. So I had all of these speeches and I had a, and I wasn't going to ask you about the Democrats, too. You said, you know, you're not really a partisan. The Democrats are a bullion in January 2007, as they prepared to take charge of the multi-tree and dollar influence racket that we call the U.S. Congress. I had a whole pile of those things. Well, we didn't have enough time. We went way over what we were allotted here. So I was, I was nervous about that.

I had the number one thing I wanted to talk about was the U.S. Senate. Quite so much for a second. Where's the West Point? First of all, I was surprised to be asked. Secondly, I wasn't sure what I should say. And because they would be going to war. Folks, very quiet in the studio. Harold, we just need absolute quiet for 10 seconds. Okay. Now, the only question I have is, why can't you get guests like that? The Kim. See, see, there are the five things that you told the cadets.

I was going to mention twice you brought their boss, chicken hocks. But then I had the five things, and then I was going to ask you, what went through your mind?