John Eskow
Me, Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow As the Bill Moyers of the world begin to question the media’s endless focus on Russiagate, some brave soul at the networks will finally begin to listen
L
ast week I had a revelation about American liberals and their obsession with the Russiagate story – a revelation that came, oddly enough, courtesy of Bill Moyers.
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I have a curious history with Moyers. In the summer of 1967, as a 17-year-old college dropout, I was hired to help plan an experimental branch of the State University of New York at Old Westbury. All the other student planners were high-achieving academics; I was referred to as “Dropout in Residence.” So I spent that magical, hash-scented summer of ’67 on the idyllic grounds of the campus-to-be, an impossibly beautiful estate filled with dazzling flowergardens and stands of rare trees, as luminaries of all kinds dropped by for day-long hang-out sessions – people like WH Auden, Alan Watts, and Joan Baez (who sang to me, alone, for an hour, in front of a roaring fireplace – a once-in-a-lifetime solo concert that I completely ruined for myself by obsessively wondering if I had a shot with her). The other kids were all high-achieving academics; I was the token punk. Bill Moyers – still famous, back then, as Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary – had been invited to spend a day with us by his close friend, the Old Westbury president, a JFK liberal and former Peace Corps head named Harris Wofford. As ten or 12 of us sat around the mansion-house table after dinner, drinking sherry, Moyers advised us to keep our quasi-revolutionary project very hush-hush, lest the reactionaries “out there” try to shut us down. In retrospect, it was probably very savvy advice – but I’d been waiting for an opening all night. “Why should we listen to you?”
I cheap-shotted him. “You were Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary. You lied for that asshole, and look where it got us.” Not my finest rapier-thrust, I admit, but it was the best I could do at the moment. Poor Wofford choked on his sherry, his gentle face aging ten years in the one second that followed my wiseguy query – but Moyers was pretty unfazed. “Well, I would not agree with your characterisation, but . . .” I forget what he said after that. I was probably on a testosterone high, as well as highs from various other chemicals. But I remember he kept his cool. In the 50 years since, Moyers has moved well to the left, and I’ve grown to have increasing respect for him. In the corporate media landscape in which he operates, he’s shown genuine courage, prodding what my late mother called “good liberals” to a more daring worldview. But, until recently, he seemed to be enveloped by the MSBNC/Democratic Party mindset on all things Russiagate. So I was astonished when I heard that Moyers, on his Facebook page, had republished a piece I wrote titled MSNBC: A Trainload of Fools Bogged Down in a Magnetic Field. (See ColdType, Issue 154, mid-Feb 2018, Pages 32-33 – Ed) The thrust of the piece was that MSNBC, and other media, were neglecting to report on the evils around us in favour of nonstop Russia/Mueller yammering. Bill Moyers co-signing that message? Weird! And believe me, his readers thought so, too. Several of them were sure that his account had been hacked. Others were profoundly hurt, on a personal level, that he had endorsed any putdown of Rachel Maddow, who has assumed high-priestess status among her viewers. But a surprising number of Moyer’s Face-
ColdType | March 2018 | www.coldtype.net