Bill Moyers

About Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers (born June 5, 1934, as William Donald "Billy Don" Moyers) is an American journalist and public commentator. He served as White House Press Secretary in the Johnson Administration from 1965-67. Since 1990, he has been President of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. He lives in New York City.

Born in Hugo, Oklahoma, and raised in Texas, Bill Moyers was born to father John Henry Moyers, a laborer, and mother Ruby (née Johnson).

Moyers began his journalism career at the age of sixteen as a cub reporter at the Marshall News Messenger in Marshall, Texas. Bill Moyers studied journalism at the University of North Texas. In 1954, he worked as a summer intern for Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, eventually being in charge of Johnson's personal mail before his internship was finished. Moyers soon transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, where he wrote for The Daily Texan newspaper and graduated in 1956 with a Bachelor of Arts in journalism. While in Austin, Moyers worked as an assistant to the news editor for KTBC Radio and Television, a station owned by Lady Bird Johnson. During the academic year 1956-1957 he studied at the University of Edinburgh as a Rotary International Fellow. In 1959, he received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He was ordained two years later after working as a minister. He planned to enter a PhD program at the University of Texas and briefly accepted a lectureship in Christian ethics at Baylor University. During Lyndon Johnson's unsuccessful bid for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination Moyers served as a top aide, and in the general campaign he acted as liaison between Democratic vice presidential candidate Johnson and the Democratic presidential hopeful, John F. Kennedy.