Bill Moyers and "The Place of My Second Birth"
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"I'm a journalist; I don't create," Bill Moyers (B.J. '56) told a crowd of poets and poetry fans at an Austin book store as he emceed a poetry reading and signed copies of his new book on poetry, Fooling with Words (Morrow, 1999). If Moyers has ever lied, surely it was then. For over the past 30 years, he has created some of the most memorable moments in documentary broadcasting and created some of the worthiest programs on television, period. The year 2001 marked his 30th year as a broadcast journalist. For those 30 years, he conveniently counts 30 Emmys. Part of Moyers' mystique stems from his unlikeliness:
Born in Oklahoma and raised in Marshall, Texas, 15 miles from the Louisiana border, Moyers was called by journalism on his 16th birthday when he went to work for the Marshall News Messenger. At 18 he wrote a fateful letter applying to work for Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. In 1952, on the first day of his freshman year at North Texas State University in Denton, he met Judith Davidson. They married, and both transferred to The University of Texas two years later. He worked his way through school as a reporter for KTBC in Austin (wheeling around town to various accident and crime scenes in a station wagon called "Red Rover") before taking a five year side-trip into the Baptist seminary, including a year at the University of Edinburgh. But he veered back into politics by working for LBJ's 1960 presidential, then vice-presidential bid, a project that eventually led him to the directorship of the Peace Corps, then to White House press secretary. Moyers crossed the fence from public official to journalist when he left the White House in 1967 to become publisher of the New York newspaper Newsday. From there it was on to a fledgling PBS, then to CBS where he did nightly commentary and news analysis. But it was his return to PBS that seemed to ensure his place in the pantheon of journalism, as he cast himself as the thinking-man's reporter. His in-depth, long-form, and eclectic reporting was epitomized by his epic six-hour series of interviews with author Joseph Campbell in 1985, The Power of Myth. Moyers' body of work now comprises a sprawling yet detailed tapestry, weaving together meditations on and explorations of religion, politics, philosophy, health, addiction, hate, and death. All have been produced by him as executive editor of Manhattan-based Public Affairs Television. Judith Moyers (B.S. '56), his wife of 45 years, acts as president and executive producer. His two sons and daughter are all "in public interest fields," he says proudly, and have made him a grandfather three times. 
Throughout it all, he continued to cover every national convention between 1972 and 1996. In 1986, The Ex-Students' Association gave Moyers its highest honor, the Distinguished Alumnus Award. And when he delivered UT's 117th commencement address in May 2000, it was the fourth trip back to his alma mater within the year, having participated in an LBJ Library symposium on the '60s, The Daily Texan centennial celebration, and having given the Liz Carpenter Lecture at Hogg Auditorium in February. For 18 years, he has lived in a "modest, comfortable, full of books" apartment on 75th Street on Central Park West, retreating on the weekends to a "modest" ranch style house on 13 acres in New Jersey. "I love the energy of New York. It carries me further than I would go on my own. But you have to get out of it to rehabilitate yourself," he says. Bill Moyers speaks more eloquently off the cuff than any 1,000 authors would dare to write. Even in small talk, if there is such a thing with him, his words are alive with metaphor and alliteration, allusion and profundity, all in the familiar baritone and accent that stops just short of a drawl. His considerable native intelligence is layered with the residue of hundreds of interviews with some of the world's most vigorous thinkers. And one has to resist the temptation to stop him after every third or fourth sentence and ask, "Did you just make that up, or are you reading from cue cards?" During the Liz Carpenter Lecture, he summarized the story of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. "For that insubordination, Zeus sentenced him to be chained to a rock for all eternity while an eagle devoured his liver -- kind of like working for LBJ." And though he doesn't spare his late old boss in the course of analysis, he clearly remains nostalgic for that time, the springboard of his prominence. He seems to be preparing to produce a PBS series on "those tumultuous days" of the LBJ White House. Of his fellow Great Society alumni, he says, "I want to get their stories before we all move into the twilight of our senility. "Lyndon Johnson taught me two things. He'd say never pass up a bathroom and never pass up breakfast, because you'll never know when you'll get either again." He doesn't pass on lunch either. And if it's lunch in Austin, you had better believe it's brisket. Have you crossed over that line of notoriety in which you are now the interviewee more often than the interviewer? No, and there's a reason for it, which is, I'm not a celebrity. I'm well known, but I'm well known within certain circles for the work I do, not for who I am or what I am. It's like that fellow in the elevator a minute ago. He wasn't responding to me as a person, he was responding to a body of work which, over the years, he as a citizen has watched or he as an educator has used. It is more my work than my notoriety. I'm reminded of that all the time. I was shopping at the Pioneer Grocery Store on 74th and Columbus Avenue the other day. Television makes us intimate strangers. This woman thought she knew me, but she wasn't sure. So she started following me around with her basket so she could try to get a look. I'd see her looking around the tomato cans, over the cereal boxes, I'd see her peer through the broccoli, trying to figure out who I was. We both rounded the same corner at once and met, and she said, "Are you who I'm thinking you are?" And, in one of the few times in my life I've been quick, I said, "Leonardo DiCaprio." "No," she says. "Arnold Schwartzenegger." "No," she said, "but if you don't know, I can't help you." I was vaguely familiar to her. People are familiar with my work, but I'm not a celebrity in their consciousness. And that happens all the time. My wife and I were walking down 76th one evening about twilight. Halfway down the street on one of the stoops were three women engaged in conversation. As we got close again, I saw this light of familiarity go off in this woman's eye. When I got close to her, she asked, "Do you know who you are?" (Laughs) That's pretty deep when you think about it! It is! My wife said, "He's 63, and he still hasn't made up his mind." People might know Amazing Grace or my series Healing and the Mind, or my series with Joseph Campbell; but they know Joseph Campbell better than they know me, and that's the way I like it. I would prefer to practice my work behind the anonymity of just a byline or on radio, where you can do your work without people ever seeing who you are. But I can't, I practice my journalism in public. I'm glad I have never gotten between the public and my work, because I don't believe that the journalist is more than the story, and I don't believe that the storyteller is more important than the story, either. So I haven't crossed that line, and I don't ever want to cross that line. For another thing, I do my work in public broadcasting, which doesn't nurture celebrity as much as it showcases your work. It is not your personality in public television the way it is in commercial journalism. Have you been retained by any of the networks to work this political season [summer 2000]? A couple of them gave me a call, and I've been there, done that. Occasionally an opinion rises within me with which I would like to shatter the prevailing consensus, but I have passed into a different phase of my work where I'm doing less of it, but more deeply. We've just finished a six-hour series on death and dying that will air in the fall [2000] that has taken us two years. It's very hard to accomplish that difficult and delicate reporting and editing while thinking about anything else, like current affairs. Do you count yourself as having three careers to this point: the ministry, politics, and journalism? I've had a polyglot life. Sometimes those careers haven't been in different stages; they've been intertwined. I started out in journalism at the age of 16, and I was serious about it. At that age, I knew that's what I wanted to do. At the age of 18, I knew I wanted to move to political journalism. That's when I wrote Lyndon Johnson a letter in April of 1954 applying for a job on his staff, and I got it. Then after that summer in Washington and during my time here at The University of Texas, I had another summons from somewhere within. I had grown up in a very religious culture, and somehow that intuition, that impulse began to shape my vision of the future, and I thought about the ministry, at least teaching at a religious institution. I went off and got my master's of divinity, but by the time I had finished with that work, I realized that wasn't exactly the course for me. So I applied for admittance to the University to do my PhD, and I had a teaching job offered to me as an instructor at Baylor and was going to come to Austin and work on my PhD in American civilization and hopefully teach here. 
Then I got that call from Lyndon Johnson in late December of 1959, saying he was going to run for the presidency and would I help him. I did, again drawn back to that world. He didn't get the presidency but he got the vice presidency. I participated in that campaign. That led to the Peace Corps. That led to the White House, and that led to Newsday, through events so convoluted I still don't understand it! But it hasn't been like I've done this and then that and then this. It's been more constantly interwoven between government and politics and religion and journalism. So you've never been in the pulpit as an official? No. I would occasionally subject the kindly congregation to the naivetŽ of my own theological opinings when I was a student at the seminary and while I was at UT. I worked full time at KTBC, I was a full-time student, and on Sundays, I would go out to small churches in the area, at their invitation, and speak. And some of my closest friendships, my deepest appreciation of people comes from those little churches out near Georgetown and Taylor, small churches. I was never an official minister but I was their preacher, if you could call it that. I remember I once preached a sermon on sin, and an old farmer came up to me and said, "Son, you ought not to preach about sin, until you know what you're talkin' about. You ought to have a little more experience before you try to tell us about it!" What really turned me away from that work, was in one of the churches that I was the student pastor at, there were two dowager sisters who lived together with their elderly brother, and they came faithfully every Sunday I was there. And one day they asked to see me, but see me not at home, so I talked to them in the car. It turned out they were having a deeply troubled relationship with their brother, a very seriously askew relationship, a sick, neurotic relationship. And what they needed from me, I couldn't give them. I had no experience in psychology; I had no wisdom or insights to bring to that. So I beat a hasty retreat to my mentor here at First Baptist Church in Austin, a marvelous man named Carlyle Marney, a great figure in this city for many years. He put me in touch with a professor at the University, who was himself a psychologist. And he said, "Those people need serious help." There was nothing in the Bible I could quote to them that would have helped them. And I realized then that to be really effective as a minister I needed what I didn't have, that it was risky for people to need from you what you can't give them. That was a very important factor in my not pursuing the ministry, although my love of journalism was just as strong in the other direction--pulling me back to that. I wound up where I should have been all along. Journalism chose me when I was 16. I kept being unfaithful, but journalism never quit on me. And yet this image of you as an ordained Baptist minister follows you; people always tag that onto your introduction. They do, and articles in particular stroke it. I try to tell young people, you get some brands when you're young that you can never escape. And it was so unusual when I went to Washington that here was a young man next to Lyndon Johnson who-- Who had scruples! (Laughs) Well, there is no direct connection between being ordained and having scruples, as we all know! (Laughs) No, it was just the fact that he had come a different way with a different trademark. He had different origins. So some people wrote about that and it did stick. Even though my real interest was in teaching. There was a period of time while I was in Washington and shortly thereafter, when I doubted the wisdom of my choice. I felt I may have wasted those four or five years in seminary. But as it turned out later, that pursuit so informed my angle of vision on the world that my journalism became infected by it. It gave me beats to follow that others wouldn't. It alerted me to a dimension of life that affects human behavior as much as politics, but which most journalists only cover as if they were covering church meetings and sermons. The power of religion, belief, and attitude in human behavior is profound, and my journalism has been somewhat informed by that. My desire to talk to a Joseph Campbell, or interview a Houston Smith, or to do God in Politics all can be traced to the tributaries running out of that experience many years ago. And my emphasis, my major, in religion was social ethics, church and state relations. I went to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland from The University of Texas and studied the ecclesiastical history of Europe, and why was it that when religion got involved in politics so many horrible things happened in the history of Europe. America's great contribution to political science is the notion of disestablishment, separation of church and state. We've been a less than perfect society--we've been an unjust and cruel and uncaring society often, but we've never had religious wars. And that was a fascination to me. Why have we not had religious wars? It's this doctrine that the two are separate and never should meet. They should affect each other, but they shouldn't be entangled in alliance where either religion or the state can use the other to advance its interest. That's informed a lot of my journalism, a lot of my politics, a lot of the things I do as a citizen. So there's a thread that ties those chunks of your résumé together? Campbell said to me that at any given moment in life, it's very hard to see a pattern to it. It's only when you look back through the mirror of hindsight that you can see that one thing was leading to the other. That there was a pattern and a purpose to your choices and to the connections that were joining your life. What looked like a jumble of irregular escapades in the course of a developing young life turned out to have been joined as if by some common aquifer underneath. It's led to a journalism that tries to connect what seems to the untutored eye unconnected. The influence of belief over politics, the influence of politics over society, the influence of society on institutions. My journalism, if you look at the whole body of work over my 30 years in broadcasting, is an eclectic array of interests. I've never had to take an assignment from anybody. Even at CBS, my assignments were self-selected. That's a rare freedom that one has as a journalist that I would never have had if somehow I hadn't been through this process we just talked about and reached the point where I could be an independent journalist--political investigations, looking at the influence of religion on life, how to make a poem. You've said before that your favorite beat is the life of the mind. Many people might say that you invented that beat, at least in broadcasting. Did you have role models for this? What made you think you could go out and do these six-hour explorations of Genesis? It never occurred to me that I couldn't, and I trace that directly to my experience at The University of Texas. I was very fortunate in high school to have a succession of English teachers who made me aware of language. And at North Texas State, where I went for two years, I again had some dedicated and exceptional teachers in both government and English. But it wasn't until I transferred here that all of those ideas began to connect. There was something about the University in the '50s that did not separate. There was something about this campus that created a river of energy out of all the streams and tributaries flowing here from other places. So that Robert Cotner in history and Gilbert McAllister in anthropology, and DeWitt Reddick in journalism and Alice Moore in English, were somehow talking about the same thing. They were talking about life and the life of the mind. Everything I did here seemed to connect both to every other thing and to the larger world. All the strands came together. It wasn't deliberate; it was just the atmosphere here. Willie Morris editing The Daily Texan was connected to the larger world of politics. At North Texas State, the newspaper was named The Campus Chat, indicating that kind of separateness of campus journalism from the rest of the serious world. Here, it was The Daily Texan. In the course of my unfolding life, my journalism rejected what to the outsider might seem to be eclectic, but to me, meets a sort of unified theory of knowledge. Somehow this nurturing here of the often invisible connection of seemingly contradictory experience that I think has made my journalism different, not better than anybody else's, not superior, but just different. And I'm grateful for that. Where did you live when you were a student? In a place that no longer exists: 507-A East 18th, in a garage apartment behind what some people would call a used furniture store but would be more rightly described as a junk shop, which was on Red River. We paid $40 a month for it. (Tuition was $40 too.) I made a hundred dollars a week at KTBC, my wife made $1.02 an hour as a typist at one of these residential dorms, and we lived very well. Have you ever had a job that did not relate to your career? Ever sling hash? I sacked groceries in high school. We came from very modest means. My dad, I think, was making $25 a week then, delivering Coca Colas and Dr Peppers. My mother was making maybe $15 a week as a clerk at Bealls or J.C. Penney. I went to work at 14 at an A&P Food Store, but my brother was working for the Marshall News Messenger, and I was working on the high school newspaper and was really busy. My English teacher mentioned to the publisher of the newspaper that this kid is pretty good. So they asked me to come write about boys going into the Korean War. After that I never had to do anything but this kind of work. At North Texas, I was the director of sports publicity. When I came down here, I worked for KTBC radio and TV. I worked my way through Southwestern Theological Seminary as director of news and information, working 40 hours a week just as I did here. But no, I've never had to sling hash, which is one reason I'm sympathetic to those who do. How do you typically pick your interview subjects? Are they mostly the authors of things you've read? Ideas come from a variety of places. In the Campbell case, I had read The Hero with a Thousand Faces while here at the University. It was an interesting book, but it hadn't particularly registered with me. But one day I read a small item about a lecture to be delivered at the New York Arts Club in Manhattan by Joseph Campbell, and it gave just a little bit of bio about him. It was curiosity: "Gee, that sounds like an interesting person, an interesting field of work." I went down to the lecture. He was scintillating, interesting, articulate, a lively mind and a unique vocabulary, and I thought he'd make a good television interview, so I did two hours that aired in 1981 and the response was amazing. Ten thousand letters. People were really taken with him as a teacher. So I resolved that there was more to do with him. I came back five years later, talked to him. I did that before I knew that George Lucas had called him in to advise him on the creation of Star Wars because of his great knowledge of mythology. He agreed to do it over two summers at Skywalker Ranch. That went on in the summer of '87, and I don't think anything I've done has had that much impact. Even people today stop me and say, "It changed my life. I became a writer because of that." Even though he would appear to many people to be an esoteric teacher at Sarah Lawrence College, it was to me connected to what was happening in the world. That was somehow just reading that little item in the paper that somehow connected to that subterranean pool of insight and curiosity that had grown over the years. The idea for the series on Healing and the Mind came from my own father's long chronic illness with headaches that couldn't be cured, and my desire not to see anybody else suffer like that. And it came from Norman Cousins, who'd been a great magazine editor I knew back in New York, who was stricken with a seemingly incurable and rare disease and brought himself back to health through laughter. He checked himself into a hotel after his diagnosis and discovered that watching the Marx Brothers on television made him laugh, and that made him feel better. He started renting videos and watching them and getting better. He said to me, "You've got to do something about this relationship between emotions and health." That led to Healing and the Mind. The idea for Genesis came from hearing about a seminar like it at New York Jewish Theological Seminary and going up and listening to it and saying, "This would make good television." The idea for Close to Home, a series we did last year that had such an impact, came from my own son's experience with drug addiction. And a series that airs this fall [2000] comes from my own mother's death and seeing so many people whom I care about die and wanting to see if there isn't a way to improve care for the dying. It's been interesting to me that none of the things I do get huge ratings. They get modest ratings by commercial television standards, but the nature of the subjects themselves resonates far beyond the numbers. In fact the real impact of television is not the number of people who watch, but the imprint on those who do watch. There are social observers today who will tell you that Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth gave the country a new vocabulary for talking about spiritual life. And Healing and the Mind gave the country a new vocabulary for talking about health. The New York Times just had a front-page story about how alternative medicine has grown to such importance in the country today, and it began with that series, which wasn't intentional on my part, it was consequential. And there are people who say that Genesis gave us a new vocabulary for talking about religion in a pluralistic society. And that Close to Home gave us a new vocabulary for talking about addiction recovery and if we're lucky, On Our Own Terms will give us a new vocabulary for talking about death and dying. That's because for some reason, those struck the Zeitgeist. They acted as a microphone, a magnifier of an otherwise relatively modest series on a small network like PBS. I think that if that's the case, it is because that, like at The University of Texas, I don't see anything in isolation, everything is connected somehow to how we live. So that the subjects that my team and I choose to do have a more visceral connection than somehow just watching television. Television is transient; it's here and it's gone. But it seems like your work finds a staying power. Whether through books or videotapes, it gets a second life. It's also through a distinction that people make who come to watch it. Most people, including myself, watch television to be entertained. We want to be amused; we've had a tough day. We don't want to be seriously employed in the evening. We just go there for escape. But the people who come to public television in general and to my work specifically come to be engaged, not to be entertained. And when you come at attention, you take more away than you do if you simply are slouched in the chair with your mind easily distracted. I've been fortunate to be around when enough people were willing to be engaged by television. I think if you want to kill journalism sometimes, give it a large audience, because the temptation then is to go for the lowest common denominator. That robs the journalism of its particular passion, its idiosyncratic relationship to the journalist, the creator. When you start thinking, "What will get me a large audience?" you make trades that you wouldn't make otherwise. I've been spared the burden of a huge audience. What size operation do you have? We have a very small staff, seven permanent people. Judith [Moyers], who's president and executive producer; researchers; and administrative support staff. But when we do a project like On Our Own Terms, we're up to 43 people. I've got a team of producers and associate producers, two researchers. Everybody in our business now is a freelancer, independent producers, cameramen, researchers, everything. We put a team together for a year to 18 months to do a series. So we'll go from seven to 50, seven to 30. How did you get into TV? 
I started in 1971. I had been publisher of Newsday, and it had sold. I was out of work. Willie Morris, who was editor of Harper's called me and said, "I'll give you the whole magazine. Go out and travel the country and report what you see." And I did. It was a cover story called "Listening to America." It had the back of a bus on it with the license plate "MOYERS." Somebody in what was then called National Educational Television saw that. They were starting a new weekly half hour called This Week, and they wanted a reporter-host for it and asked me if I'd do it. I had no television experience except as a press secretary, and I was intrigued by the medium as a journalistic medium, as a storytelling medium. So I took it, but I was not a natural. I was too stiff. I had horn-rim glasses; I was too formal; I was too much like a government official or the publisher of a newspaper. And I was tempted at the end to quit. But a very wise old director named Jack Stamath said, "No, you've just got to use this medium for what you're about, for who you are, not for what other people want you to do." So we changed the name to Bill Moyers' Journal, and instead of being just the reporter and host, I insisted on the title of executive editor, which meant that I had the last word. I want the last word. I want to be able to shape it and then take responsibility for it. That's what I've done for 28 years. Doesn't mean I have to be hands-on for everything, but I have the last word. You've traveled across the country so much and talked to so many people. Do you find that there are regional characters? Is there a New England or a Western personality type? There long has been, and there was when I was a young man. But those distinctions are being gradually and now more swiftly eroded by mobility, technology, television, and radio, all of which tend to promote a uniformity and orthodoxy. We're all becoming more alike. You can still travel in Texas and find characters who are typical. The same is true in the Deep South, in New England, or the Rocky Mountain West, but those are fewer and farther between, and they're not being replaced by the next generation of characters. We're losing that distinctiveness, ironically, as pluralism washes over us, as we become more and more a nation of nations. We're also losing the particular regional personality that was so prominent when I was young. Throughout history, people would tend to go to a place and stay, and that staying created local persona and dialect and stories that became legend, the kind that Frank Dobie was a master of recording. But that's less and less. Do you see in yourself a Texan characteristic, and do others see a Texan in you? No. I don't think so, and there's a reason for that. Marshall was Texas, but it was more Southern than Texan. Marshall was very much an antebellum town. At one time Harrison County owned more slaves than any other county in Texas. After the North took Missouri, the Confederate government of Missouri fled to Marshall. After the fall of Richmond, Marshall was temporarily the military headquarters of the Confederacy west of the Mississippi. So the influences on Marshall were much more Deep South than deep Texas. I consider myself a Texan, but even I didn't know at that time that the dominant image in Marshall was the Confederate soldier standing on the east side of the courthouse facing Richmond. That's what you saw every day walking to school. As a cub reporter, when I'd go to the courthouse to pick up the records, I passed right underneath it. All the people spoke more with a Southern accent than with a Texan accent. It's true that I lived on Austin Street and crossed Alamo Street and Houston Street to get to my high school, but we were less aware of who those figures had been than we were who Johnny Reb had been and Robert E. Lee and the lost cause of the South. In Washington, more people heard a Southern accent in my voice than a Texas accent. So I'm not perceived as a Texan in the same sense that some of the more noted journalists like Dan Rather seem to be. Were you ever one, as a young person, to buy in to the nostalgia for the Old South? No. I was spared that for reasons that I don't quite understand. My father was a man totally without bias, truly without any prejudice. I know a lot of people want to believe that about their parents, but it was true of my dad. He was a gentle man, and he delivered soda pop to small grocery stores all over East Texas, and I would go with him. And the black folks greeted him the same way the white folks did, and there was just nothing there that massaged any inherent racism that I might have been born with. As I said yesterday [in the lecture], I was half blind. I knew that there were blacks in town. I knew that they were in the balcony above us. But it was the natural order of things that I didn't challenge until I left. Leaving to come to The University of Texas, and then getting a scholarship to go to the University of Edinburgh, was like rising in a balloon above the landscape that below you had only seen the rough contours of, but when you were above it, you could see the whole of it. When I was in Scotland in 1956 as a graduate student, the papers there were full of stories about Mansfield, Texas, which was experiencing race riots. The editorials were critical and there were scenes on the weekly news. I suddenly saw my own hometown, my own culture, in a full relief, as opposed to just an edited snapshot, and I saw the full portrait of the South that I couldn't see when I was abroad. And a lot of people did. Ralph McGill and other great journalists of the South had led the charge against segregation, but I was late coming to the perception because of just being so totally wrapped up in my own local culture. Your programs have included What Can We Do About Violence?, Facing Evil, Beyond Hate, Facing Hate with Elie Wiesel, and Hate on Trial. By now you must be something of an expert. What do the monthly shooting rampages that now come under the heading of "Columbine" say about our society? They say more, I think, about human nature than they do about our society. They don't come as a surprise to me. I wasn't here then, but I was deeply affected by the shooting from the Tower [at UT Austin], because I had friends who lost children in that. So what happened at Columbine is in a sense sort of what happened in the 20th century. Human beings have always done terrible things to each other. We've always had this capacity and instinct to cruelty, oppression. But in the 20th century, the rise of modern technology wedded to the power of the state gave organized institutions in society the capacity to inflict horror. Most of the armies of history have been warring mercenaries. Wars were professional soldier versus professional soldier, and civilians were very rarely affected. Even the American colonists had to first fight Hessian mercenaries who had been sent over here. That began to change in the 20th century. The poison gas that spread across the fields of France fell upon civilians as well as soldiers--the air strikes of the Germans against Britain, and Americans against Dresden. The atomic bomb was not dropped on military targets; it was dropped on civilian targets. The wedding of enormous technology with the power of the state created a record of war, terror, and genocide in the 20th century unprecedented in the history of the species. "Columbine" was the small-scale wedding of technology in the hands of private citizens who were disturbed enough to use those for whatever neurotic and sick reasons compelled them, so it didn't surprise me. And I'm a journalist, not a sociologist or a psychologist, so I don't understand those boys. But I know that civilization is a thin veneer of conciliation stretched across the warring passions of the human heart. It's a very fragile cover that channels, contains, shapes our passions. That's why I care so much about democratic politics. Lyndon Johnson affected me very much with his "Come now, let us reason together" theme. Also it goes back to the connectedness where, in my studies in graduate school, I saw what happens when sovereign claims to God are wedded to the power of the state to wipe out those who don't worship God as we do. It's made me a very temperate soul when it comes to the wedding of church and state. All that comes out of my life's experiences, not any kind of special knowledge or epiphany of some kind. My last semester here at UT, I had a class on the Civil War with a marvelous history teacher, Robert Cotner. And I remember vividly how he was able to empower us to see that this was a war of brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, citizen against citizen. It was a very vivid narrative that he drove home to us. Then only after I left Marshall did I begin to do enough reading to see what had happened in my own back yard. There's a marvelous exhibit called Witness in New York right now of lynchings in the South between 1880 and 1938. There was a lynching that took place not far from Marshall the year I was born. This exhibit is a vivid reminder of what people called "the lost cause," which was really a cruel cause. I have no truck with this waving of the Confederate flag as a symbol of honor; there was nothing honorable about it. It represented a segregationist society, a slave society that we covered up for a long, long time. So I return to these themes of hate and violence out of some deep-seated concern that it can always happen again. I think journalists in general tend toward pessimism, perhaps because they spend so much time in courtrooms. Is there anything that makes you optimistic about America, any good news? I asked a friend on Wall Street a few years ago, "How do you feel about the market?" He said, "I'm optimistic." Then I said, "Then why do you look so worried." He said, "I'm not sure my optimism is justified." I'm an optimist, but I am never sure that my optimism is justified because I also read history and I know what we're capable of doing to one another. But I'm not cynical. A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I do know the value of many things. But I'm a skeptic. I think every journalist has to be reasonably skeptical, because I know how thin is this veneer across the passions of the heart. But I wouldn't know how to live in the world without getting up in the morning, believing in a confident future, and then using that day to try to make it happen. And I'm modest about the power and the role of journalism. Quoting playwright Tom Stoppard, "People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark." I think journalism throws an occasional light on something that we're doing that enables us to correct our course. We Americans are not more enlightened or virtuous or even more intelligent than other people. But we do have that capacity for self-correction that is inherent in the Bill of Rights, that enables us to metaphorically climb up to the neck of the ship and grab the captain's arm and say, "That's an iceberg out there!" and usually we turn, just in time. Slowly! 250 years to end slavery and then another 100 years to give the freed slaves their rights as citizens. Didn't do it until my time. The great contribution of Lyndon Johnson was to realize that the time had come and then to move events to fulfill what was by then 300 years of oppression. Took women 150 years to get the right to vote. More than that. Took labor long, hard struggles to achieve the right to organize. We're slowly changing cultures. Technology changes very rapidly. So we're essentially a conservative culture. So yes, I see lots of good news, but I can balance it against the other harsh realities. But this prosperity is good. There's no better antidote to poverty than a job. Employment is really lifting a lot of people. Technology is marvelous, and as everybody knows, will change the world. It will change the way we speak. Even now in speeches when I talk about the sands of time, people look at me funny, because nobody uses an hourglass anymore. Biblical allusions no longer register to a general population. People don't know what the lilies of the field refer to. People don't know what it means when you say "the lost sheep," or "Let justice roll down like water." Are you comfortable with technology? I'm fascinated by and lured by it, but am not myself dexterous. I still prefer my Smith-Corona. My three children gave me a new computer for Christmas with a strict mandate to get up to speed, and I'm working on it. I cannot myself see the shape of the world to be, but I can wish, as I do that I was 25 instead of 65 today. I've lived in marvelous times, but I'm going to miss some even more remarkable times. If a president were to call you up to serve again full-time in the White House, would you do it? I've faced that. Jimmy Carter asked me to be his chief of staff in 1978 midway through his term, and I declined. Then he asked me to be the first secretary of education, and I declined, though I was more tempted by that because I had worked on education legislation in the White House. Bill Clinton sent emissaries twice to ask me to be chief of staff, once after Mack McLarty retired and then a year later. They still see me the way I used to be. They remember my youth. And I explained each time that I had crossed the Rubicon, that once I had chosen to leave the White House and be a journalist, I was going to stay on that side of the fence. I really don't believe in going back and forth. I was flattered but not tempted in the least. In one sense I regret that, because journalism has no power. It's government that can pick our pockets, or send us to jail or run a highway through our rose garden. Government is where things happen. And I believe in government. I'm a strong believer in the necessity for us to act collectively as a society to solve our problems. What do you do when you're not working, if there is such a time? There is. I read. I like movies. One of the first things I did for KTBC [Austin] was review movies. I got free tickets as a UT student to go see fresh movies. Went down to the Paramount, which was right around the corner from KTBC. I mean, there is almost no experience I haven't had. And now we have three grandchildren in St. Paul who we try to spend all of our spare time with. Do you think you would ever move out of New York? We've actually thought about coming back to Austin, and I was twice asked if I wanted a chair at the University, but I wasn't finished with journalism, and now, with my daughter marrying a second time and settling down out in New Jersey, we'll probably be staying. 
But this is the place to which I do return. Someone asked me the other day, "You were here for The Daily Texan celebration, you're here for this, you're giving the commencement in May. Why?" And I said, "Because it's the place of my second birth." I became intellectually awakened here. And it's like the astronauts returning from space; they always head for earth. And for me to return from the atmosphere of a vagrant sojourner, which is what journalism is, you go from place to place, restless, homeless, this is the earth to which I always return. Somehow coming back here, even though it has changed drastically since your time and my time--there were 18,000 students [in Austin] then and two institutions, the University and the state legislature--it's a much different place, and yet, somehow, I get more in touch with what I really am, who I really am, here than anywhere else. That's because I was initially formed here. It's like going back to your birthplace, even though somebody else lives there or even though it may be gone. And the fact is that most of the landmarks of my youth are gone; that happens. But the Tower is still there. The Legislature is still there. The live oaks are still there and there is a very palpable memory here, a living memory of what I felt and experienced. The exhilaration that greeted me whether I was in Ginascol's class on philosophy or Cotner's class on history, or Moore's class on Chaucer or McAllister's class on anthropology or Reddick's class on journalism. I can see them in my head right now. I can hear their voices. How do you explain that? I don't know how you explain that. Some people talk that way about their religious conversions. But I have that still-fresh sense of really coming alive here. Coming back here is to be put back in touch with that. By Avrel Seale, from The Alcalde magazine(May/June 2000)
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