It felt like a gut punch recently when I learned of Bill Moyers’ death. We had him at the Writer’s Symposium in 2005, and he was deep, gracious, courageous and funny.
I was on a hill at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky on a retreat of silence and solitude, when I saw the headline on my phone. The hill was one of the few places that had cell service. I thought about him as I watched the sun go down.
The reason he meant so much to me is that he was my journalism hero. He took on the powerful. He gave voice to people on the margins. He was our culture’s Edward R. Murrow. The show Good Night and Good Luck could have just as easily been about him. One of the purposes of journalism in a free society is to speak truth to power. Bill Moyers did that better than anyone I know. I don’t think it’s a stretch to call him a prophet for our times.
When I was in journalism school at the University of Missouri in 1980, I wrote him a letter because I was doing a research paper on press secretaries. I asked him some questions about his time when he was press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson. He wrote me a lengthy response. I was a nobody, and he took me seriously.
Years later, when I invited him to come to the Writer’s Symposium, I told him that when I came across this statement from Flannery O’Connor in her book Mystery and Manners, it made me think of him:
“The Christian writer does not decide what would be good for the world and proceed to deliver it. Like a very doubtful Jacob, he confronts what stands in his path and wonders if he will come out of the struggle at all.”
When he read that quote, he told me, he decided to cut short his vacation in Mexico and come spend the day with us at PLNU.
Just before we went on stage for the interview, he said in that beautiful Texas drawl, “Before you ask me questions, I’d like to say a few things to the audience.” Of course I said yes, realizing at that moment that he had hijacked the interview. It was totally worth it. See for yourself. Sometimes you just have to get out of the way and let the great ones own the stage.
https://www.ucsd.tv/shows/An-Evening-with-Bill-Moyers-Writers-Symposium-by-the-Sea-2005-9278
I will always be grateful for Bill Moyers.
