Four Questions with Bill Moyers, Legendary Journalist

You officially retired—again—from public television. The last time you retired, it was for 17 days. What might coax you out of retirement one more time? The 2016 presidential race?

I was 70 when I first retired and 75 when I retired a second time. At 80 it’s for real. If I have any contribution to make next year, it will be to help others be heard. We need many new and younger voices speaking up for democracy.

You have been passionate about ‘the corrupting power of money in politics.’ What’s the best chance for change? 

First, tell the truth: as the late Jessica Mitford once said, we may not change the world,  but we can shame the guilty. Then, get behind the movement to amend the Constitution to declare that corporations are not people and money is not speech. Check it out at freespeechforpeople.org. Start a local chapter. Get political (which means linking arms with kindred spirits, even if they are only a few, where you live).

As LBJ's press secretary, you had a front-row seat to the civil rights movement’s critical moments. While you found the film Selma to be powerful, you  also found it flawed. What concerned you most?

President Johnson was made to appear as if he opposed the march. He didn’t. From his years in Congress he was a master of timing and he believed Congress wasn’t ready to take up another major bill (on voting rights) so soon after enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But as the march on Selma unfolded and the white supremacists viciously attacked the marchers, he moved immediately and within days called on Congress to act. Also, the film minimizes the drama of the speech he made to Congress in which he turned the mantra of the civil rights move-ment—“We shall overcome!”—into a national exercise of will. It was one of the great dramatic moments of American history and the film-maker missed it.

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, chair of the Senate Environment Committee, brought a snowball to the Senate floor earlier this year to discredit global warming. Given the critical nature of this issue, how would  you characterize our national discourse? 

Half the country is serious about it, the other half is in denial. And James Inhofe and his crowd will appear in history as willfully ignorant philistines who sabotaged the future.