Bill Moyers, former White House press secretary and acclaimed journalist, dead at 91
Former White House press secretary Bill Moyers died on Thursday at the age of 91 after a “long illness.”
His death was confirmed by Tom Johnson, CNN’s former CEO and close friend, according to The Associated Press.
Moyers served under former President Lyndon B. Johnson, where he helped create the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and eventually curated informational programming for PBS.
Prior to his role at the White House, Moyers helped bolster the Peace Corps as its first associate director of public affairs.
“We knew from the beginning that the Peace Corps was not an agency, program, or mission. Now we know — from those who lived and died for it — that it is a way of being in the world,” he wrote of the government agency in an article reflecting on its success.
After years of service in the federal government, Moyers was hired to be a senior news analyst for “The CBS Evening News” and chief correspondent for “CBS Reports.”
For his lifetime of work, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame and earned 30 Emmys, 11 George Foster Peabody Awards and three George Polk Awards, in addition to two awards for career excellence in broadcast journalism by Columbia University, per AP.
Moyers was also the acclaimed producer of “The Secret Government,” which spotlighted the Iran-Contra scandal.
The 1988 film followed his real-time commentary on U.S. foreign relations with Iran.
Forty-four years ago, Moyers hosted an episode of “Bill Moyers Journal” in which he discussed Operation Opera, a United Nations resolution condemning the 1981 Israeli bombing of Iraq's nuclear facility and Iran’s political massacres with reflections on the event's historical impact.
“As are all such events, this one was made of many parts. There was reality, two realities actually: Iran's and ours. And there was also the perception of reality, again from two viewpoints: theirs and ours,” Moyers said during the June 19, 1981, show.
“The perceptions became so beclouded that reality drifted out of focus, the way your own image does in one of those tricky reflecting mirrors at the circus. In this final edition of my journal, we'll consider how such flawed perceptions contributed to the crisis.”
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