06/27/2025
Harper’s Magazine mourns the passing of Bill Moyers and remembers his extraordinary career as a public servant, journalist, and television correspondent. Moyers’s contributions to our pages began after he served as an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson and his stint as the publisher of Newsday. In the December 1970 issue, he penned the story of his 13,000-mile trip across the nation, titled “Listening to America.” “I found that most people not only hunger to talk, but also have a story to tell,” Moyers wrote. “They are not often heard, but they have something to say. They are desperate to escape the stereotypes into which the pollsters and the media and the politicians have packaged them for convenient manipulation … They were brought up to believe that each man can make a difference, but they have yet to see the idea proven. I discovered how unfair it is to call a man ‘bad’ because part of his culture still owns him. I found out how important it is to get a man to acknowledge that people different from him are also human.” Discover more about Moyers in the Harper’s archive, including Tom Wicker’s 1965 profile of the young public servant and a trove of Moyers’s journalism and essays.
https://harpers.org/author/billdmoyers/
