Outing LBJ’s & PBS’s Bill Moyers

Here’s Peter Wehner at Commentary Magazine’s Contentions blog - -

… [PBS’s Bill] Moyers is among the most sanctimonious individuals on television (quite a feat, given the competition). He presents himself as a champion of good government, an intrepid voice for integrity and honesty, ever on the lookout for people who would degrade our public discourse or act in a dishonorable manner.

That’s why this [Washington Post] revelation — Moyers seeking information on the sexual preferences of White House staff members — is particularly notable. …

Wehner refers to a WaPo story Thursday, Feb. 19, which told readers - -

Previously confidential FBI files show that Hoover's deputies set out to determine [in 1964 during the Johnson-Goldwater presidential campaign] whether [top White House aide Jack] Valenti, who had married two years earlier, maintained a relationship with a male commercial photographer.

Republican Party operatives reportedly were pursuing a parallel investigation with the help of a retired FBI agent, bureau files show.

No proof was ever found, but the files, obtained by The Washington Post under the federal Freedom of Information Act, provide further insight into the conduct of the FBI under Hoover, for whom damaging personal information on the powerful was a useful tool in his interactions with presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard M. Nixon. [WaPo should have made clear here that while FDR, JFK, LBJ and Nixon were involved in such activities with Hoover, there's no evidence Truman or Eisenhower ever were so involved. – JinC]

In the Washington of the early 1960s, allegations or proof of homosexuality could end a career. In October 1964, Walter Jenkins, another senior aide in the Johnson administration, was arrested for allegedly having sex in the men's room of the Washington YMCA.

The news leaked just before the election, and Johnson, rushing to stem the political damage, quickly secured the resignation of Jenkins, then his longest-serving aide.

Even Bill Moyers, a White House aide now best known as a liberal television commentator, is described in the records as seeking information on the sexual preferences of White House staff members.

Moyers said by e-mail yesterday that his memory is unclear after so many years but that he may have been simply looking for details of allegations first brought to the president by Hoover. …

An opinion column with the apt title - J. Edgar Moyers - appeared Saturday, Feb, 21, in the WSJ. It adds to the story of Moyers’ flagrant abuse of his White House office - - -

…But as the Post reports in passing, the dossier also reveals that Mr. Moyers -- then a special assistant to LBJ -- requested in 1964 that Hoover's G-men "investigate two other administration figures who were 'suspected as having homosexual tendencies.'"

This isn't the first time Mr. Moyers's name has come up in connection with Hoover's abuse of office. When Laurence Silberman, now a federal appeals judge, was acting Attorney General in 1975, he was obliged to read Hoover's secret files in their entirety in preparation for testimony before Congress -- and as far as we know remains one of the only living officials to have done so.(emphasis added)

"It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service," he wrote in these pages in 2005. ...

The following is from Judge Silverman’s WSJ op-ed of July 20, 2005 which was adapted from a speech he’d recently delivered to the First Circuit Judicial Conference.

… Only a few weeks before the 1964 election, a powerful presidential assistant, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a men's room in Washington. Evidently, the president was concerned that Barry Goldwater would use that against him in the election.
Another assistant, Bill Moyers, was tasked to direct Hoover to do an investigation of Goldwater's staff to find similar evidence of homosexual activity. Mr. Moyers' memo to the FBI was in one of the files.

When the press reported this [in 1975], I received a call in my office from Mr. Moyers. Several of my assistants were with me. He was outraged; he claimed that this was another example of the Bureau salting its files with phony CIA memos.

I was taken aback. I offered to conduct an investigation, which if his contention was correct, would lead me to publicly exonerate him. There was a pause on the line and then he said, "I was very young. How will I explain this to my children?" And then he rang off.

I thought to myself that a number of the Watergate figures, some of whom the department was prosecuting, were very young, too. . .

My comments:

The four pieces linked here are all worth reading. If you only have time to read one, I suggest Silverman’s. He tells us some very important things about our recent political past.

Plenty of people have fooled me but never Moyers.

Moyers – a man of equal parts hypocrisy, sanctimony, and sleaze – is as easy to peg for what he really is as a department store Santa. Yet he fools millions of PBS's viewers, many of whom think of themselves as smart people. Wonder of wonders.

Moyers is lucky to be a liberal Dem making his millions hustling on PBS.

If he were even a true centrist and on Fox, the “firestorm of outrage from gay activists, civil rights leaders and congressional Democrats now calling for an investigation into Moyers’ conduct while a White House aide” would've very likely brought him by now to the point of resigning from PBS.

Moyers is one of the reasons I don’t contribute to PBS.