AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Bill Moyers. He hosts the weekly PBS program Bill Moyers Journal. He was one of the founding organizers of the Peace Corps. He was the publisher of Newsday. He was a senior correspondent for CBS News. He was the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson. He has written a number of books, won scores of Emmys and other awards. His latest book, Moyers on Democracy.

Let’s talk about that time you were press secretary. Let’s talk about the Lyndon Johnson years, because, I mean, we’ve been doing this series, “1968: Forty Years Later.” And Johnson went down over the war. What about what was going on inside the White House then?

BILL MOYERS: Well, if you listen to these telephone tapes, they often tell you more than those of us working there knew, because Lyndon—any president has so many relationships with so many different people that even his closest aides can only keep up with a part of it. The telephone conversations that are now released from the LBJ Library confirm what those of us there at the time felt. This is a man deeply conflicted by the war, a little bit like Jeremiah Wright. You don’t know why there are two different personas there. But here was a man who knew very well in May of 1964—there’s a tape of him talking to McGeorge Bundy, the special—the national security adviser, saying, “Mac, if we go into this war, Dick Russell tells me we all know it’s going to be a disaster. I don’t want to go to war.” And yet he does escalate. He was out of the Cold War era. He did believe that the containment policy had to be implemented. But he also at the same time knew there would be dire consequences from this. And to this day, I do not understand how in his own mind he made the final choices to escalate.

The reason I have been opposed to the war in Iraq is because I’ve seen the Bush administration make very similar mistakes to those of the Johnson administration. There was no second attack, we later learned, at the Gulf of Tonkin, the incident that Johnson used to get the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed in Congress, which gave him, in effect—he considered it a blank check. Same thing with Bush’s weapons of mass destruction. You know, the Constitution is a very powerful document, if it were adhered to. The framers of the Constitution said it should be very hard to go to war. They didn’t want to give the power of war making to a single man. Presidents are tempted to do that. Lyndon Johnson did. George W. Bush did. Great parallels between their own decision making at that particular time.

Victor Navasky and Christopher Cerf are out with a new book on the experts. You know, they run this Institute of Expertology, in which they hold experts up to scrutiny. You look at the comments of experts in the Vietnam period and compare them to the comments of the experts, the government officials, the pundits and all that in the era of Iraq, many of the same statements sound as if they’d come from the same source.

AMY GOODMAN: Why did you leave in 1967? Why did you leave Johnson?

BILL MOYERS: I left in January of 1967, because, remember, my first portfolio had been domestic policy, civil rights, the environment, all of that, and the war began to eat up all of our domestic resources, and I lost my clout. I wasn’t able to do what I wanted to do. Secondly, I began to have doubts about the war, and I could no longer—I felt that I was operating in an environment that was not hospitable to what I was about and what I wanted to do.

Also, when I—the President asked me three times to become press secretary, and each time I resisted, until the last, and I still feel the pain in my shoulder from how he wrenched it. But the day I finally had to say yes, I said to Judith, my wife, “You know, this is the beginning of the end for me, because no man can serve two masters.” And that is true. You can’t truly speak for the President and speak for the press, and that’s what I took my job to be. I took my job to go to tell the President what the press was saying and to try to give them what they needed. And in time, it just wore me down, and it cost me my—the relationship I had enjoyed with the President.

He became skeptical of me over my ability to help the press understand what he was doing, and he became skeptical over my concerns about the bombing in Vietnam and over my growing sense—you know, life is a continuing course of adult education. Every experience creates a new reality. And I hadn’t thought about the war. I was not involved in foreign policy until I got involved. And the more I was involved, the more I realized the more I had these doubts. And so, finally in January of ’67, I just felt the time had come to leave.

AMY GOODMAN: What did it teach you, being press secretary, about how to deal with press secretaries?

BILL MOYERS: It taught me that you have to treat the press as an equal. The press, without—the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy go hand in hand. And unless the White House press corps knows as much as it can about what the President’s intentions are, what his thinking is, it cannot do the job that it is supposed to do. The press can never be a member of the White House establishment. That’s what’s happened now. It becomes an arm of propaganda. And that’s wrong for democracy, wrong for the President. In time, a presidency thrives on the confidence of the people in it. And the more secretive a president is, the more contradictory he is between what he says and what he’s doing, the more trouble democracy is going to be in.

AMY GOODMAN: There’s a lot of conversation about ads and campaign ads. I want to go back to 1964 to perhaps the most famous ad, the ad against war by Lyndon Johnson versus Goldwater.

        LITTLE GIRL: One, two, three, four, five, seven, six, eight, nine.


COUNTDOWN: Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.


[explosion]


LYNDON JOHNSON: These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.


NARRATOR: Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.

AMY GOODMAN: And there you have it, the little girl pulling the petals off of a flower. Only aired once.

BILL MOYERS: You are lucky if you live long enough to revisit your former opinions and your errors. The people who created that ad, Doyle, Dane & Bernbach here in New York, had been charged to try to make it clear that in a time of nuclear terror—remember, we’d just been through the Cuban Missile Crisis, where we were that close to a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union under John F. Kennedy. Barry Goldwater was campaigning—was going to campaign against Lyndon Johnson on lobbing—“Let’s lob one into the men’s room of the Kremlin.” Barry Goldwater was talking about using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam. And the President said, “We’ve got to remind people that we’ve got this huge nuclear arsenal, and you want somebody who understands it to have his finger on the button.” So that ad was designed—never mentioned Goldwater. It was designed to remind people of the importance of thinking through whose hand you did want on that button.

Now, Vietnam was not an issue at this time. This was about the nuclear arsenal, not about the war in Vietnam. And the damning and troubling indictment that comes is that this war made it appear that Lyndon Johnson was the man—who was the right man for the hand on the trigger, but it made it appear that he was against, might be against Vietnam. He then turns around a year later and escalates the war in Vietnam. So the ad has become conflated over time with Vietnam, when it was really about the fact that we were all living at that time under the dread of a nuclear exchange.

I have since, subsequently—and I once did a broadcast called “The 30-Second President” about what’s wrong with advertising. And I’m totally against these short commercials now. But what was wrong with that ad—what I learned from that ad is how quickly you can inject emotions into the mainstream of voters, because ads are impressionistic. Ads are about feelings, not about rational thought, about reason. And they are like heroin. They just give you that high very quickly. And that’s wrong, because people could—we could have the best of intentions with that ad, and voters could take away from it exactly the opposite of what we intended. And so, not long after that, I did this series on politics and one of the broadcasts was about these ads, and I said, somehow we’ve got to find a way to relieve our politics of these highly stimulated, highly distorted messages that we send through these thirty-second commercials.

AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think these candidates, the leading candidates of the Democratic supposedly opposition party, do not call for an immediate end to the war, do not call for single-payer healthcare?

BILL MOYERS: Because the media doesn’t allow complicated thought to be articulated in ways that enlighten instead of misinform people. Partisans seize upon these sound bites and turn them into—seize upon these speeches, take the sound bites and turn them against the candidates. It’s fear. It’s fear of being misquoted. It’s fear of having your ideas misappropriated.

AMY GOODMAN: Is it money in politics?

BILL MOYERS: Oh, it’s who, the big winners in all this money that’s being spent? Obama outspent Clinton three-to-one, and that was all in television ads. It’s the industry that doesn’t want to reform that benefits from the ads. Yes, it’s money in politics, and it’s the triumph of ambition for self over ambition for the country. You know, Mrs. Clinton has a very serious issue to wrestle with in the next seventy-two hours. Is this race about the country, or is it about the Clintons? And ambition and power and particularly the appetite to see the first woman, who happens to be the first wife of a former president, the Adams tradition, the Roosevelt tradition—I mean, that takes over.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think she’s running for vice president right now?

BILL MOYERS: I don’t know. I learned a long time ago, including when I worked there, not to read the minds of politicians. You can only judge them by their acts. Both camps will really look hard at the strategy. There are some places where an Obama-Clinton ticket would not do well: Colorado, probably, Missouri, maybe. There are other places where it might.

You know, the tragic—in the Jeremiah Wright episode, it was tragic to see that most intimate of relationships between a parishioner and his pastor have to become a public debacle.

It’s also sad to see—you know, back in the days of the civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson said to me, “You know, one of these days, we’re going to see a black man sitting right here because of what we’re doing now in the Civil Rights Act of ’64, the Civil Rights Act of ’65. My daughter, my wife have all longed to see, to live in a time when the first woman became president.” And here, we have a black man and a woman running. In a sense, that’s a dramatic result of America’s pluralism, but it also makes some hard choices.

AMY GOODMAN: What are you proudest of, your work, Bill Moyers? We only have ten seconds for you to respond.

BILL MOYERS: The fact that I’ve been around long enough to learn from my experience and to do a variety of things that—I mean, I’ve had a great life as a journalist. Journalism has, in my time, been a marvelous calling, and I’ve been very lucky to do all the things that I have done. And I’m very grateful for that. I couldn’t single out any one broadcast or one series, but I’ve just been a very fortunate journalist.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, thank you very much for joining us today. Bill Moyers’s latest book is a collection of his writings and his speeches called Moyers on Democracy.

Source: http://www.democracynow.org/

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