The Soul of American Democracy: Celebrating the Life of Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers reminded us time and again: the real story isn’t just the personalities on stage, but the power structures behind the curtain. What his work taught me: Get curious. Peel back the layers.

American journalist and media critic Ben Bagdikian once offered this enduring reminder to those in the press: "Never forget that your obligation is to the people. It is not, at heart, to those who pay you, or to your editor, or to your sources, or to your friends, or to the advancement of your career. It is to the public.”

Today, we celebrate the life of Bill Moyers (June 5, 1934 – June 26, 2025), whose courageous journalism exemplified this quote.

Moyers was an American journalist and political commentator for major news outlets including NBC, CBS, and PBS News. He also served as the eleventh White House Press Secretary from 1965 to 1967 and the director of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1967 to 1974.

After working within top levels of the political establishment, a deep sense of moral responsibility drove him to expose the fear, greed, and secrecy he found guiding the decisions of the powerful and influencing the machinery of mass media. Yet he also was a thoughtful visionary seeking to awaken a sense of shared humanity and civility to transform the darkness in the world.

Consider his reflections in an article he wrote, "The Oligarchy vs. The People," where he draws on his PBS series with mythologist Joseph Campbell:

One day, two policemen were driving up that road when, just beyond the railing, they saw a young man about to jump. One of the policemen bolted from the car and grabbed the fellow just as he was stepping off the ledge. His momentum threatened to carry both of them over the cliff, but the policeman refused to let go. Somehow he held on long enough for his partner to arrive and pull the two of them to safety. When a newspaper reporter asked, "Why didn't you let go? You would have been killed," he answered: "I couldn't... I couldn't let go. If I had, I couldn't have lived another day of my life."

Campbell then added: "Do you realize what had suddenly happened to that policeman? He had given himself over to death to save a stranger."

How can this be, Campbell asked? [German philosopher Arthur] Schopenhauer's answer ... represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical reality, which is that you and the other are two aspects of one life, and your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is our identity and unity with all life.

The truth of our country isn't actually so complicated. It's in the moral compact implicit in the preamble to our Constitution: we're all in this together. We are all one another's first responders. As the writer Alberto Rios once put it, "I am in your family tree and you are in mine."

I realize that the command to love our neighbor is one of the hardest of all religious concepts, but I also recognize that our connection to others goes to the core of life's mystery and to the survival of democracy. When we claim this as the truth of our lives — when we live as if it's so — we are threading ourselves into the long train of history and the fabric of civilization; we are becoming "we, the people."

The religion of inequality — of money and power — has failed us; its gods are false gods. There is something more essential — more profound — in the American experience than the hyena's appetite. Once we recognize and nurture this, once we honor it, we can reboot democracy and get on with the work of liberating the country we carry in our hearts.

So who is advancing this religion of inequality — of money and power? Below, we explore some of the most revealing investigations by Bill Moyers, revealing the corruption and deception operating at the highest levels.

What Moyers Revealed to the World

One reason I'm in hot water is because [I] didn't play by the conventional rules of journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news. — Bill Moyers

Much of the media fixates on political personalities and partisan talking points, preventing people from understanding the deeper machinery operating regardless of who holds office. Moyers consistently pointed to the existence of a "secret government." This system of power consists of corporate and government interests that have the resources and influences to shape the direction of their world to their benefit. While different factions of this "secret government" are often at odds with each other, their interests converge around war, secrecy, and the protection of corporate power.

• In a 2001 report, Trade Secrets, Moyers exposed one of the most far-reaching corporate deceptions in American history. Drawing from tens of thousands of internal documents uncovered through a widow’s lawsuit, the report reveals how the chemical industry knew for decades that vinyl chloride and other toxic substances were linked to cancer, neurological damage, and birth defects.

  Vinyl chloride is a toxic gas used to make PVC plastic, an essential component in pipes, flooring, packaging, children’s toys, and countless everyday products. During World War I, it was used as a lethal chemical weapon. A 1966 BF Goodrich memo revealed that vinyl chloride exposure could cause the bones in the hands of their workers to dissolve. In the early 1970s, when European studies revealed that low-level exposure to vinyl chloride caused liver and brain cancers in rats, US chemical companies (Conoco, BF Goodrich, Dow, Shell, Ethyl, Union Carbide) signed a secrecy pact to block this evidence from being disclosed to workers, doctors, and regulators.
  

  CBS News reported that in 2021 alone, US plastic plants released over 428,000 pounds of vinyl chloride in the air—half of which came from just five facilities. Moyers himself underwent a chemical body burden test and was found to carry 84 industrial chemicals in his blood despite never having worked near a plant.
  

• In a 2010 report, he posed a question most major news outlets wouldn’t touch: how did Big Finance grow so powerful that its hijinks nearly brought down the global economy – and what hope is there for real reform with Washington politicians on Wall Street's payroll? Moyers lifted the veil on the hidden crimes of the 2008 financial collapse, revealing a political cover-up of corporate fraud, blocked prosecutions, and secret deals that funneled billions in public money to the very banks that caused the crisis.
  

• In his highly revealing PBS documentary The Secret Government, Moyers exposed the unchecked power operating within the military-intelligence world. Bringing together firsthand testimony from CIA operatives, military generals, and insiders, this documentary revealed the extent of secret CIA assassination programs, disinformation campaigns, media deception, covert collaboration with Nazis and the Mafia, and global suffering at the hands of the US war machine.

  
  War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.
  — Bill Moyers
  

  Across Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Vietnam and beyond, US foreign policy consistently prioritized corporate interests and destroyed global democracies in the name of national security. In Iran, the CIA overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq after he nationalized the oil industry, paving the way for US oil companies to seize control while backing a brutal dictatorship that tortured and murdered thousands. In Guatemala, President Jacobo Árbenz was ousted by CIA-backed death squads after attempting land reform that threatened the monopolies of the United Fruit Company—a firm with deep ties to Washington power brokers. In Chile, the US sabotaged Salvador Allende’s elected government after he nationalized copper mines, triggering a military coup that ushered in 17 years of dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet. During his rule, some 38,000 would become political prisoners — most of them victims of some of the most egregious and horrifying forms of torture. These torture methods were later taught to other aspiring human rights abusers all over the world at the Pentagon's educational institutions.

Suppose the enterprise grew into a super-secret, self-financing, self-perpetuating organization. Suppose they decided on their own to assassinate Gorbachev or the leader of white South Africa. Could a President control them and what if he became the enterprise's public enemy Number One? Who would know? Who would say no?

This remains for me the heart of the matter. The men who wrote our Constitution, our basic book of rules, were concerned that power be held accountable. No party of government and no person in government, not even the President, was to pick or choose among the laws to be obeyed. But how does one branch of government blow the whistle on another? Or how do the people cry foul when their liberties are imperiled, if public officials can break the rules, lie to us about it, and then wave the wand of national security to silence us? — Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers reminded us time and again: the real story isn’t just the personalities on stage, but the power structures behind the curtain. The question isn’t simply who’s running for office, but who they serve. What corporate interests fund them? What unelected power brokers influence their decisions? What voices or narratives are being excluded from public discourse? “Trust the science” sounds noble—until you realize that even top editors of world-renowned journals have warned that much of published medical research is unreliable, distorted by fraud, corporate influence, and conflicts of interest.

Here's what Moyers’ work taught me: don’t just react. Get curious. Peel back the layers. Seek out narratives that bring us all together across our political differences. That’s the kind of journalism and civic courage Bill Moyers modeled for all of us.

With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

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