Bill Moyers started as a teenage reporter on his hometown newspaper in Marshall, Texas. By the age of 30 he was working inside the White House, and he went on to spend four decades as one of the most respected voices in American public television. Moyers died on June 26, 2025, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, after a long illness, his son William said. He was 91.
Minister and press secretary
Moyers was born in Hugo, Oklahoma, in 1934 and grew up in Marshall. He was ordained as a Baptist minister before going into politics. He worked for Senator Lyndon Johnson, helped set up the Peace Corps under President Kennedy and became its deputy director. After Kennedy’s assassination he became one of Johnson’s closest aides, and he served as White House press secretary from 1965 to 1967, during the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He left the White House to become publisher of the Long Island newspaper Newsday from 1967 to 1970, a period in which it won two Pulitzer Prizes. He then moved into television, first at public television and then as a senior correspondent for CBS Reports and a senior news analyst for the CBS Evening News.
Public television
His biggest impact came on PBS, where for decades he made documentaries and interview series on politics, religion, money and power. His 1988 series The Power of Myth, conversations with the mythologist Joseph Campbell, drew huge audiences and turned Campbell into a household name. Moyers won more than 30 Emmy Awards and nine Peabody Awards. His last major project was the podcast Moyers on Democracy, from 2020 to 2021.
Moyers moved from inside government to watching it from outside, and he spent the second half of his life asking the kind of questions he had once been paid to answer.