NY Times: “Bill Moyers, who served as chief spokesman for President Lyndon B. Johnson during the American military buildup in Vietnam and then went on to a long and celebrated career as a broadcast journalist, returning repeatedly to the subject of the corruption of American democracy by money and power, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 91.
His son William Cope Moyers confirmed the death, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He lived in Manhattan.
To Americans who grew up after the 1960s, Mr. Moyers was known above all as an unusual breed of television correspondent and commentator. He was once described by Peter J. Boyer, the journalist and author, as “a rare and powerful voice, a kind of secular evangelist.”
But before that, Mr. Moyers was President Johnson’s closest aide. Present on Air Force One in Dallas when Johnson took the oath of office after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Moyers played a pivotal role in the inception of Johnson’s Great Society programs, and was the president’s top administrative assistant and press secretary when Johnson sent hundreds of thousands of troops to fight in the Vietnam War….
To admirers, many of them liberals, Mr. Moyers was the nation’s conscience, bringing to his work what one television critic called “a sense of moral urgency and decency.” …
Famously modest and self-deprecating, Mr. Moyers often invoked his humble small-town roots in Marshall, Texas. Yet he was ambitious, political, intense and shrewd. His Rolodex was once said to contain the names of every important person who ever lived, but he emphasized the importance of speaking to, for and about “regular people.” “