Bill Moyers.

• Author: Dreier, Peter
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview - Cover story

Last October, Bill Moyers announced that he was retiring and that his weekly show, Moyers & Company, would end January 3. Three weeks later, in response to an outpouring of e-mails, letters, and Facebook comments urging him to reconsider, Moyers recanted. He will continue to host the show. His only pushback was to recast the show from an hour to a half-hour format.

Moyers, who turns eighty in June, has been one of the most prolific and influential figures in American journalism. Born in 1934 to dirt-poor farmers, Moyers left Marshall, Texas, in 1954 to attend college. At the University of Texas, he majored in journalism while working full time as assistant news editor for KTBC-TV for $100 a week. He graduated in 1956 and then studied theology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

In 1959, Moyers moved to Washington, D.C., to work for Senator Lyndon Johnson. Moyers was a founding organizer of the Peace Corps in 1961 and was appointed its deputy director by President Kennedy. After Kennedy was assassinated, LBJ brought Moyers to the White House as his assistant for domestic policy with responsibility for shepherding the task forces that led to LBJ's Great Society program. Moyers played a key role in helping LBJ pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1966, Moyers reluctantly agreed to be LBJ's press secretary, but he found it increasingly difficult to defend the escalation of the Vietnam War.

"The things I really cared about--poverty, the Great Society, civil rights--were all being drained away by the war," he recalled. "The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: 'I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral.'"

Moyers resigned from the White House in 1967 and became the publisher of Newsday, a daily newspaper that primarily served New York's Long Island suburbs. He left in 1970 and took a 13,000-mile bus trip around the country, armed with a notepad and tape recorder, interviewing people for his best-selling book, Listening to America: A Traveler Rediscovers His Country.

That year, he began his long relationship with public television, interrupted by a decade (1976-1986) at CBS News. In order to maintain his journalistic independence, Moyers formed his own production company and raised all the funds for his many productions.

On public television, Moyers, a master of the long interview, had the freedom to craft his own programs, including Now with Bill Moyers, Moyers on America, Bill Moyers Journal, and, since 2011, Moyers & Company. He has interviewed important thinkers and activists rarely seen on television, including community organizers Ernesto Cortes, historian Howard Zinn, scientist Rene Dubos, philosopher Joseph Campbell, and theologian Karen Armstrong. He also produced hard-hitting investigative documentaries on a wide variety of topics, including the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on local communities, campaign finance, inadequate funding for public schools, the rise of the Religious Right, global warming, the dumping of hazardous waste, and, in Buying the War (2007), how most of the press corps became complicit in the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq.

"If the watchdog doesn't bark," Moyers said about the show, "how do you know there's a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog."

Moyers's work has received three dozen Emmys and many other awards.

I caught up with Moyers in January. We spoke about his life, his career, LBJ, and his views about contemporary journalism and politics.

Q: You've announced your retirement three times, then changed your mind. Why?

Bill Moyers: When I announced my retirement last October, it lasted all of seventeen days. I really meant it, but during that time thousands of viewers wrote to say, "Don't go!" Reading those letters, I felt like a deserter abandoning his comrades in the heat of battle. So, I took stock: My health is good. I like what I do and keep thinking the...