(Full disclosure! There is a bit of unrepentant name dropping here!)
When I heard the news of Bill Moyers passing I went back to one of my most memorable lunches ever!
My dear friend Amy Butler had arranged for Anita and I to have lunch with Bill Moyers. As someone who is a news /political junklie, the chance to talk to LBJ’s press secretary, a reporter/commentator for PBC/CBS/MSNBC this was a dream come true!
Our lunch was in February 2017, a little less than a month since Donald Trump’s first inauguration. Our conversation obviously went there! He expressed the same surprise that so many of us felt, how this dilettante had descended down his gold escalator into the White House. But his concern went fr beyond the damage that he might do.
“I fear we are becoming an oligarchy,” he said. Remember, this was 2017! Ho prescient was that!
We talked about how divided our country was. (Again, 2017!) He asked me if I had read Splinterlands, by John Feffer. I had not, but have several times since and strongly recommend it! The range of Moyers knowledge was incredible!
I knew he had been Johnson’s press secretary, but I had not known he had been in Dallas when Kennedy was assassinated. Not there exactly, but when he heard the news he flew to Dallas and was on the flight back to Washington, DC.
On that flight his training as a Baptist minister kicked in and he left the political world to go back to check on Mrs. Kennedy who was sitting with her recently slain husband. (She would later become his editor at Doubleday.)
There are wonderful obituaries in the Washington Post and New York Times that capture his career and life. It was an amazing life!
In a world where so much of our media is consumed with spin, we so miss someone who was willing to listen, to follow a tory where it went, and then try to figure our what it meant!
What I will recall is how though I only hoped for a quick lunch, he spent a bit over 2 hours with this pastor from Charleston, SC. He apologized as he left, saying, “I have to get back to the office at Lincoln Center to finish editing our next series.”
Maybe he could name drop too!