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Legendary PBS journalist Bill Moyers dead at age 91
Former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers arrives for the formal Artist's Dinner honoring the recipients of the 40th Annual Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C., in 2017. He died Thursday at a Manhattan, N.Y., cancer center at age 91. File Pool Photo by Ron Sachs/EPA-EFE
June 26 (UPI) -- Former journalist, presidential spokesman and longtime PBS host Bill Moyers died Thursday at a Manhattan, N.Y., cancer center at age 91.
Moyers died at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, his son, William Moyers, confirmed to The New York Times.
Moyers was a spokesman for former President Lyndon Johnson and was with Johnson when he took the oath of office on Air Force One after President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Moyers was Johnson's top aide and press secretary when the president greatly increased the United States' military presence in Vietnam.
Moyers resigned from the Johnson administration in December 1966 when he was 32.
He then spent the next four decades as a television commentator and correspondent and was an ordained Baptist minister.
He won more than 30 Emmy Awards for his many television pieces covering race, income inequality, violence, poverty and the influence of money on politics.
Moyers worked as a CBS correspondent and then a PBS television host, whose 1988 "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth" series reached 30 million viewers.
The show made mythologist Campbell a star after his death and set a PBS viewership record.
Moyers was born in Hugo, Okla., on June 5, 1934, as the youngest of two sons to Ruby and John Moyers.
His father was an unskilled laborer and moved the family to Marshall, Okla., when Bill was an infant.
While there, Moyers eventually worked for The Marshall News Messenger newspaper while still in high school.
He credited the newspaper's publisher, Millard Cope, with raising his interest in public affairs, which led Moyers to study journalism, government, history, ethics and theology at North Texas State College.
He retired from PBS in 2004 at age 70 after working for the public broadcaster for three decades.
Moyers lived in Manhattan prior to his death.
