The Administration: L.B.J.’s Young Man In Charge of Everything

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On Nov. 22, 1963, Bill Don Moyers, the young deputy director of the Peace Corps, was lunching with Texas Democratic bigwigs at the elegant 40 Acres Club in Austin. At 12:42 a waiter summoned him to the phone. Minutes later, a somber Moyers returned to the table. ‘The President has been shot and is believed dead,” he said. “The Governor has been shot and is critically wounded. The Vice President is believed to have been wounded.” Instinctively, Moyers, a longtime protege and former aide of Lyndon B. Johnson, raced off to a chartered twin-engine Cessna and flew to Dallas; in mid-trip, he heard a radio announcer declare solemnly: “The President is dead.”

At Dallas’ Love Field, Moyers hurried aboard Air Force One to join the new President. A Secret Service man, who did not recognize him, barred him from the forward compartment where Lyndon Johnson was about to take the oath of office. Moyers scrawled a note -“I’m here if you need me”—and sent it in. In seconds the forward door swung open, and Moyers was there to witness the swearing-in.

Efficient Normalcy. Johnson’s door has been open to Moyers ever since. In the White House, the President has used his young aide as an organizer and expediter, speech editor and legislative coordinator. In times of trouble, the President has called on him repeatedly to take on new and ever more demanding responsibilities. Most of Moyers’ work was done behind the scenes until, in another crisis last July, he stepped in to fill the vacant office of White House press secretary. Thus, it was not until the most recent emergency, the President’s gall-bladder operation, that Moyers’ smooth, owlish, utterly earnest face finally became familiar on the nation’s TV screens. Day after day, Americans watched in fascination as Moyers read the complex, meticulously detailed summaries of President Johnson’s operation and convalescence.

While he barely looked his 31 years, slight (6 ft., 158 lbs.), dark-haired Bill Moyers managed somehow to impart just the right air of efficient normalcy. For the first time, the country and the world began to get an impression of the young man who is closest to the President of the U.S.

White House Catalyst. Officially, Bill Moyers is only one of seven White House special assistants to the President. In practice, he is Johnson’s No. 1 aide. He was the chief overseer in drafting Lyndon’s 1965 domestic program, serving as the “catalyst”—his term—that got the task forces moving and helped turn their blue-sky proposals into concrete measures. He heads up “Project 66,” Lyndon’s domestic legislative program for next year. “Of every ten ideas that cross L.B.J.’s desk,” says a colleague, “five must be Bill’s.” He is the editor who hands out assignments to several speechwriters and gives their efforts the penultimate polish (Lyndon, naturally, has the final say). As press secretary, he sees his role as that of interpreter of the President to the public and the filter of public opinion back to the White House.

Perhaps the greatest measure of the President’s faith in his judgment was the role he played when Lyndon Johnson underwent surgery. During the hours when Johnson’s mind was dulled by anesthesia, somebody had to be empowered to decide whether to transfer the office of the presidency to Vice President Hubert Humphrey in case of a crisis. That somebody was Moyers.

Operating out of an office in the West Wing of the White House, Moyers has access to virtually every secret document in the national archives, is a regular at the exclusive Tuesday luncheons with Lyndon and his “Big Three” on foreign affairs—Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Special Assistant McGeorge Bundy. The President one day will call him “my vice president in charge of anything”; the next, he will say Bill is “in charge of everything.” Some White House watchers go so far as to rate him the No. 2 man in the entire Administration—over such Cabinet members as McNamara—on the assumption that keeping L.B.J. running smoothly is every bit as vital a task as running the Pentagon.

Spectral Figures. Moyers is one of the men whom Political Scientist Louis W. Koenig describes in The Invisible Presidency as “the toilers in the shadows.” “American History,” contends Koenig, “is customarily written as a saga of great men, especially great Presidents. It needs also to be written—or rewritten—in terms of ‘second men,’ the spectral figures who toil influentially in the shadows around the presidential throne.” Serving as “extensions of the President’s personality, his eyes and ears,” he adds, they cover a range “virtually as broad as the presidency itself.”

The description is particularly relevant to Lyndon Johnson’s staff. “With this President,” says Moyers, “you’ve got to be ready to catch the ball and run with it any time it’s tossed to you. You’ve got to be a darned good generalist.” To Johnson, the ideal staff man is one who “can do anything for you and do it fast”—and keep the boss happy by doing it with as little publicity as possible. In the glare of the klieg lights that focus on the press secretary, Moyers is hardly in the shadows any more, but he understands and shares Johnson’s disapproval of headline-happy hired hands. Nor is L.B.J. unique in that respect. “The best way to stay out of trouble,” John F. Kennedy once told Special Counsel Ted Sorensen, “is to stay out of sight.”

Because they fit into no neat bureaucratic pigeonhole and are constantly competing for the President’s attention, Moyers and his White House confreres live in a state of perpetual uncertainty. “An adviser’s status,” says Koenig, “is not something that can be settled and defined by resonant titles, explicit conferrals of authority, or the organization chart. Status is the subtle, changeable, but unmistakable florescence of the President’s mind.”

“Mah Preacher.” Ambition helps, of course—and so does a degree of ruthlessness. Though Moyers is a natural loner with the sort of drive that would probably propel him to the top in any milieu, even his closest rivals for the President’s favor have never accused him of using his influence unfairly. One official, who admitted recently to having “goofed one,” said that Moyers went in to tell the President about it—without a word about who had actually made the blunder. “Johnson gave him a terrific chewing out,” he recalls. “Moyers just stood there and took it and never passed it on to me.”

Others have noted Moyers’ capacity for absorbing a blistering rebuke from Johnson with the clinical detachment of a volcanologist measuring an eruption. He can do so because he is uncommonly sure of himself. There is an easy communion between the two men. Johnson kiddingly refers to Moyers as “mah Baptist preacher.” Moyers, who was ordained to become a teacher, not a preacher, kids Lyndon right back. As the President tells the story, Moyers one day was saying grace before a White House dinner in such a low voice that he could hardly be heard. “Speak up, Bill!” bellowed Lyndon. “Speak up!” Murmured Moyers: “I wasn’t addressing you, Mr. President.”

On another occasion, when one of Lyndon’s secretaries started a zealous campaign to save the great man’s artifacts for posterity, Moyers stolidly refused to cooperate, throwing away all L.B.J.-initialed memos, scrawled notes and other Johnsoniana. Finally, after the lady had become persistent, Moyers ceremoniously handed her a bulging brown envelope. Inside was a gooey mess of chicken bones. Deadpanned Moyers: “That’s what he had for lunch.”

Nap Time. Johnson has had bad luck with some of his closest advisers. Bobby Baker turned out to be a money-hungry charlatan. Walter Jenkins, Moyers’ overworked predecessor as top staff man, was arrested in a Washington Y.M.C.A. men’s room and booked on a morals charge. Moyers is honest, resilient and, above all, shrewd enough to insist on getting away from his man-killing job whenever possible. He insists on spending all the time he can with his family. Invited to Camp David for a weekend with Lyndon and his entourage on one occasion, he said: “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but my wife and I have longstanding plans.”

Important as it is, Moyers’ role is often exasperated. He is no éminence grise, for Johnson is loath to delegate power; and when he does, it is never on a full-authority basis, as was the case with Dwight Eisenhower and Sherman Adams, or, to a lesser degree, with John F. Kennedy and Brother Bobby. The most Moyers can do is nudge the President, but he does so with less trepidation than anyone whose initials are not L.B.J. When the President got to talking at a recent luncheon, it looked as if he would ramble on until dusk. Moyers edged out of his chair, hovered pointedly at the President’s elbow, thumbing through a sheaf of top-secret State Department papers. Finally he announced: “We are cutting into the President’s nap time. It is really time to go.” End of lunch.

Bothered Brethren. To many Washingtonians, Moyers is one of the squarest guys in town. Because of his Baptist credentials, his cottage-cheese complexion and Sunday-school propriety, he is likely to have trouble shedding the Eagle Scout image. Yet, insists Dr. DeWitt Reddick. director of the University of Texas Journalism School, where Moyers was a straight-A student: “There’s nothing sanctimonious about him.” And, press critics to the contrary, he was never a Boy Scout.

In fact, Moyers’ emancipated ways have landed him in deep trouble with the fundamentalists back home. He smokes half-a-dozen long, thin, 25¢ Fiesta Brazil cigars every day; he even took to sipping a few watered-down bourbons each week. As a result, he has received quite a few “Brother Moyers” letters from hard-shell Baptists who have heard evil rumors of his dissolute ways. Only recently, he decided to give up drinking altogether—not only because of the furor but also to please his stern-principled parents. It was just as well, for he only recently brought a peptic ulcer under control. To keep it so, he quaffs quarts of milk and Coca-Cola, consumes cups of bouillon at midmorning and midafternoon, takes a couple of Pro-Banthine pills daily.

Three Crises. A couple of years ago, Lyndon Johnson said that Moyers was “about the most unusual 29-year-old I ever saw.” In the intervening period he has lived up to that billing in three major presidential crises, performing superbly each time. After the first, the assassination, one of Johnson’s initial acts was to install Moyers in the space nearest the oval office. “He’s the man to see now,” said a Kennedy staffer. “Not us.” The second emergency erupted three weeks before the election, with Jenkins’ arrest and hurried resignation. Stunned as he was, the President did not have to think twice before naming Moyers his top aide.

Crisis three unfolded last July, when amiable, bumbling Press Secretary George Reedy left the job for an operation on his feet. Johnson’s relations with the press had never been worse. Once more he turned to Moyers. “I think you’re the man who should do it,” said he. “I don’t think I can do it,” replied Moyers.

L.B.J.: “Well, I want you to do it.”

Moyers (Pause): “Yes, sir. Let’s try it.”

Latter-Day Boswell. As Press Secretary, Moyers has provided a gusher of information where once there had been an erratic trickle. Some reporters have even complained that there was far too much, particularly after a weekend at the LBJ Ranch, when Moyers deluged them with 40-odd handouts hymning Administration triumphs ranging from a campaign to reduce wasted space in post offices to a wildlife preserve in Maryland. Moyers totally lacks the histrionic instincts of a Pierre Salinger, the avuncular authority of a Jim Hagerty. But after only 3½ months on the job, he is widely rated as the best White House Press Secretary in memory.

In his big test, the President’s gall-bladder operation, Moyers’ performance consolidated that estimate. Since the President’s Oct. 8 operation, he has been like a latter-day Boswell, always keeping a spiral-bound notebook at hand to record everything that Lyndon said and did. And about the only time that Moyers was not with the President was when he was briefing the press on his progress. Though some newsmen blamed him for concealing the existence of one kidney stone until after it was removed by surgery and of another that is still embedded in the kidney, it was the President who decided to keep them, so to speak, to himself.

Proud Papa. Johnson and Moyers understand each other, in part, because they have similar backgrounds. Both are Southwesterners to the core, though Moyers has taken on more of the East’s special patina than has his boss. Both came from families that were far from well-off. Both made it on their own.

Moyers’ father, Henry, is a onetime cotton chopper, candy salesman and truck driver who is now a timekeeper at an ordnance works near Marshall, Texas. Henry Moyers never ceases to wonder at Bill’s present eminence, for he entertained far less lofty ambitions for both of his sons (James, 38, joined the White House staff Sept. 1 as an administrative assistant). “It makes you awfully proud,” says he, “to have raised two boys and to look back and say the police never called to say, ‘We’ve got them in jail.’ ”

Bill was born in Hugo, Okla., but the family moved to Texas while he was still in diapers, finally settling in Marshall, a sizable (pop. 25,000) East Texas oil-processing and manufacturing town named after Chief Justice John Marshall. Moyers considers himself a Texan. “Do I detect a Texas accent?” a TV interviewer once asked him. “Not only in my speech, sir,” he replied, “but in my heart.”

Though his father was never much of a moneymaker, the family lived comfortably in a two-bedroom white house with green shutters. At 14, a “thin, scrawny, tallow-faced boy,” as his father recalls him, Bill went to work sacking groceries at the A. & P. for 75¢ an hour, still found time to write for Marshall High School’s newspaper The Parrot (whose most famous staffer was Lady Bird Johnson), serve as a cheerleader and bandsman, play the role of the parson in his senior class play One Foot in Heaven, and rack up a scholastic average of 95.7% .

Mendelian Long Shot. In his two years at North Texas State College, Moyers was twice top student, twice class president. In summer vacations he worked for Publisher Millard Cope’s Marshall News Messenger as a $25-a-week reporter. With his first byline, he dropped the y from his given name, Billy, has never taken it back. Not all of the paper’s hands found the scholarly-looking cub a welcome addition. “Just what we needed,” grumbled one. “A part-time college boy with neither whisky nor whiskers—one you can’t even cuss in front of.”

His first day at North Texas State, Moyers met a green-eyed black-haired home-economics major named Judith Davidson, daughter of a Dallas postal clerk. “She sat in front of me,” he recalls. “Instead of dropping a handkerchief for me to pick up, she left her books underneath the seat. The professor suggested that I return them to her, and I have been the victim of that conspiracy ever since.” They were married in 1954, now have three children —William Cope, 6, Suzanne, 3, and John, 1—all, by some Mendelian long shot, blue-eyed blonds.

In the spring of 1954, Moyers sat down and wrote a two-page letter to Fellow Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, then Democratic Leader of the U.S. Senate, solemnly reminding him of the importance of the youth vote and offering his services in Johnson’s 1954 campaign for reelection. Johnson checked him out with Publisher Cope, an old friend, got so glowing a report that he put him on his Washington staff for the summer. Said Lyndon: “I want you to learn everything you can.”

World of Words. Moyers’ first assignment was to address 100,000 envelopes with a pedal-powered machine; he started at 7 p.m., finished at 9 o’clock the next morning. That summer he got to feeling that Johnson did not even know he existed. At the end of his Washington stint, Lyndon summoned Moyers to his baronial office, urged him to transfer to the University of Texas, and offered him a $300-a-month job with KTBC, Lady Bird’s Austin television station.

At the university, Moyers would rise at 5 a.m., work three hours at the TV station, return for breakfast, then go off to classes. He preached on alternate Sundays at two small Baptist churches nearby. There was even time for horseplay. Bested in a water-pistol fight with a KTBC announcer, Moyers retaliated by setting off a firecracker while he was on the air. The announcer abandoned the microphone, chased Moyers around the block, caused five minutes of silence on the station. Another time, he labored over a commercial extolling the virtues of a local establishment called Hattie’s, knowing well that it would never be aired. Hattie’s was Austin’s most celebrated bordello.

Busy as he was, Moyers managed to compile one of the best records in the journalism school’s history, on the strength of it won a $3,000 Rotary International scholarship that enabled him to study ecclesiastical history at the University of Edinburgh for a year. John Baillie was dean of the divinity faculty at the time—and, by curious coincidence, it was Baillie’s A Diary of Private Prayer that Lyndon Johnson picked up and read to his nurse just before going into surgery three weeks ago.

The year in Scotland, say friends, also buffed down Bill Meyers’ Texas twang. After Edinburgh and a three-month, 12,000-mile tour of Western Europe, Moyers entered Fort Worth’s Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. However, long before he won his bachelor of divinity degree in 1959, he was beginning to worry that he and the church were mismatched. “I wanted to invest my talents in the broadest possible river,” he says, “and I felt that journalism and public affairs were wider and faster flowing than the ministry.” When he graduated, despite his conviction that the ministry was too much “a world of words and not of action,” he accepted a lectureship in Christian ethics at Baylor. Then, Lyndon Johnson asked him to rejoin his staff. Moyers accepted with alacrity.

Hands & Feet. Moving into an office just outside the “throne room” in the Senate Majority Leader’s lavish suite, Moyers served as Lyndon’s personal aide, writing letters, answering phones, drafting statements. When Johnson announced his presidential candidacy, Moyers packed his family off to Texas, moved into the basement of the Johnson home, for the next five months was rarely out of L.B.J.’s sight. During the Democratic National Convention he slept in an outsized closet in Johnson’s suite at Los Angeles’ Biltmore Hotel.

Lyndon, of course, accepted second billing after losing the nod to J.F.K., and in the hectic vice-presidential campaign that followed, Moyers alone could control the disarray for which the boss was notorious. He knew the schedules, kept the press informed, proved a whiz at making arrangements. He claims he was no more than “hands and feet” during the entire operation, but Lyndon obviously valued him more highly than that. So did Kennedy’s Irish Mafia, whose members found Moyers one of the few Johnson aides with whom they could work. After the inauguration, Moyers was installed in the elegant vice-presidential suite that soon came to be known as the Taj Mahal. It was the kind of job that men 20 years his senior would have relished. Not Moyers.

The Peace Corps, just then taking shape, appealed powerfully to his evangelistic instincts. He enlisted the support of Director Shriver and of Washington Attorney James H. Rowe Jr., a longtime Johnson friend. Wrote Rowe to Sargent Shriver, the corps’ director: “If I were a young man, I think I would be content at the age of 26 to be the top assistant of the Vice President. But this boy Moyers is willing to give this up, without a backward look, so he can ‘do good.’ The world is full—and the Peace Corps will be—of people who want to ‘do good’ and have not the slightest idea how. This young man knows how. He is that curious and very rare blend of idealist-operator.”

The letter clinched it. L.B.J. let him go, and Moyers was named one of five associate directors of the corps. His biggest job was selling the idea to Congress, and he went about it by selling Sarge Shriver. Using the Capitol Hill contacts he had developed as Johnson’s aide, he and Shriver called on practically every member of Congress, thereby ensuring support for the corps where previously there had been mostly skepticism or indifference. At Shriver’s urging, Kennedy 18 months later made Moyers deputy director.

Time off for Homework. Moyers, at 28, was one of the youngest officials ever presented to the Senate for confirmation. “If this trend continues,” growled the Meridian (Miss.) Star, “appointees to high Administration posts will have to have time off to do their school homework.” Louisiana Democrat Russell Long just could not believe that Moyers was not somehow related to Lyndon Johnson. “Any blood relationship?” he asked. “No, sir,” replied Moyers. “Not through marriage or otherwise?” Long persisted. “Only political,” said Moyers. Some Senators considered his proposed $19,500 salary outrageous; few were aware that he had in his pocket a $30,000 offer from private industry. In the end, he was overwhelmingly confirmed by voice vote.

Moyers flourished in the deputy director’s job. “We were able to take an idealistic dream and develop it into an effective program,” he recalls. “Few things in life can be as satisfying as that.” He handled day-to-day administration, oversaw personnel programs, supervised overseas logistics. He dined occasionally at the White House, was even asked to Bobby Kennedy’s Hickory Hill, a rare honor for a Johnson man. A less pleasant task fell to him when he took over Peace Corps recruiting. He found the operation a mess, immediately fired 17 people.

An Icy Piety. That toughness stood Moyers in good stead when he took over the press job last July. One of the first things he did was ask Ike’s press secretary for his advice. Said Hagerty, now an ABC vice president: “Speak only when the President can’t speak for himself.” Moyers has done so with impressive authority, thanks to Johnson’s carte blanche: “My desk is your beat.” When in doubt, he says, he tries to heed his father’s axiom: “Tell the truth when you can, and when you can’t, don’t tell a lie.” Though he is himself a highly competent reporter, he is not without critics. As Reedy warned him, “This is one job where you can’t make everybody happy.” Says one reporter: “He’s Mr. Snow in my book.” There is an “icy piety” about him, complains another. Says a third, with grudging admiration: “He can shave the truth until it is as thin as a razor blade. Nevertheless, it is the truth.”

Moyers rises at 6:15 a.m. in his five-bedroom brick home in McLean, Va., tries to squeeze in at least an hour with the children. Sometimes he frolics with them, and on special occasions performs his “magic” stunt of pulling a nickel out of an ear or a nose. More often he reads to them; he has just finished the legend of Paul Bunyan for six-year-old Cope (named after the Marshall publisher).

Around 8, Moyers steps into a waiting limousine for the drive across the Potomac, scans four or five morning papers and the Congressional Record en route. At the circular desk in his office, furnished in the phone-booth-functional L.B.J. style that staffers call “Pedernales Renaissance,” he phones the other special assistants to check the agenda. At 9, Moyers and his colleagues generally spend an hour with the President reviewing assignments and problems. Back in his office, Moyers prepares for his 11 a.m. press briefing, phoning Lyndon for .final instructions ten minutes before hand. Afterward, he leaves his door open for 45 minutes in case any newsmen have special questions.

After lunch—sometimes a leisurely affair with the President, sometimes a fast hamburger and a glass of milk in the White House basement mess—he is back at his desk. At 3:30, he begins to prepare for his 4 p.m. briefing, often faultlessly typing his own notes at 100 words a minute. Though he frequently works until 10 or 11, he tries to get away around 7:30. Says Judith: “When Bill isn’t working, he is almost embarrassed about it.”

“Serviceable Wisdom.” No athlete, Moyers relaxes at the movies. He dislikes cocktail parties, and as Press Secretary has set some sort of record for that traditionally bibulous post by attending only two since he got the job—and both were for friends. His favorite pastime is reading, which he selects for “serviceable wisdom.” Two weeks ago, when he and Brother Jim took their families to the Shenandoah Mountains to view the autumn foliage, Bill took along Robert E. Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, Clinton Rossiter’s The American Presidency, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and a few others.

Moyers’ own philosophy is expressed in a slightly truncated quote from Thomas Jefferson that hangs on his office wall: “The care of human life and happiness is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” As he sees it, that observation is “the charter” of the Johnson Administration. “The umbilical cord of the Great Society,” he says, “runs right back to the Founding Fathers.”

The Bow of Ideals. Like his boss, Moyers tempers his ideals with hard-headed pragmatism. Last March, addressing a group of Peace Corpsmen, he urged them to “pursue the ideals of a Joan of Arc with the political prowess of an Adam Clayton Powell. Whatever you say about Joan, her purpose was noble. And whatever you say about Adam, his politics is effective.” The word effective crops up repeatedly in bis conversation. “There is no substitute for the effective use of political skills to advance the cause of a great idea,” he argues. “Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.” In terms of this philosophy, Moyers numbers among his heroes Disraeli, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and, not least, L.B.J.—”All that I am, I owe to him.”

“America is a political nation,” says Moyers, “and Lyndon Johnson is the man who has mastered the engine that drives America.” He is quick to concede that “like all of us, the President has his faults,” but reasons: “This country needs a strong, vigorous President, unaccustomed to living tamely. There is some misconception that power is evil. If one pursues power as an end in itself, that is bad, yes. But little progress can come without power, political or spiritual.”

At the Fountainhead. Moyers has been long enough at the fountainhead of power to feel almost certain that he will remain in public life. Few Texans see a bright future for him as an elected representative of their state; his views on civil rights and economics are too liberal. Lately he has grown more interested in foreign relations, and may some day head in that direction. In any case, he is unlikely to abandon the seminary-bred notion of service. “Do you know that the word ‘idiot’ comes from the Greek?” asks Moyers, who studied the language in order to read the New Testament firsthand. “It means a man who did not participate in society.” He adds: “This is a participant’s generation, not a spectator generation.” But he still expresses wonder at the exalted role he has come to play in Lyndon Johnson’s Administration.

It was another President Johnson—Andrew—who, nearly a century ago, described the relationship between a President and an adviser as “a plant of slow growth.” Where Bill Moyers and Lyndon Johnson are concerned, the plant has been maturing for eleven years now. Moyers needs Johnson and knows it. But Johnson also needs Bill Moyers: not as a son-figure, not as a no man—least of all as a yes man—but as a quick, incisive analyst and brilliant administrator. In all probability, as long as Lyndon Johnson remains in the White House, Bill Don Moyers will be in charge of anything—and everything.