Quote of the Day (Bill Moyers, on a Prior Presidential ‘Arrogant Disregard for the Rule of Law’)

“There in brief is the Watergate morality embedded in the Nixon White House—belief in the total rightness of the official view of reality and an arrogant disregard for the rule of law, the triumph of executive decree over due process. By arbitrarily and secretly invoking the national security, the President or his men can nullify the Bill of Rights and turn the Constitution into a license for illegitimate conduct. The President is set above ordinary standards of right or wrong. What's right is what works. And he alone decides what that is. One man, in effect, becomes the state. It was close. It almost worked. And it would have changed things for keeps: the public conscience smothered, the Congress intimidated, the press isolated, and the political process rigged. The President would have been free to dictate the popular morality for his own ends. And we would have been at the mercy of unbridled, capricious and arbitrary rules. It was close. It almost worked. But not quite. Something basic in our traditions held.”— American journalist, political commentator, and former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers (1934-2025), “An Essay on Watergate,” Bill Moyers’ Journal, original air date Nov. 7, 1973, directed by Jack Sameth

I was fortunate enough to meet Bill Moyers at a local promotional event for Fooling With Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft—one of his book/PBS series tie-ins in which he interviewed cultural figures such as Joseph Campbell. He signed my copy of this particular book, and immediately followed up with a response to a question I had asked about the source of a quote.

Late last month, when I heard about Moyers’ death, I realized with a shock that I hadn’t heard about him for a while. His commentaries had become lower-profile, largely confined to his Website, after his retirement from PBS in 2015.

That year, I remembered with a start, coincided with Donald Trump’s descent down the escalator at Trump Tower and into a political arena that he quickly defiled more than many of us dreamed possible. 

I badly missed Moyers’ soft-spoken, earnest, but piercing insights into the culture of Washington and what the changes about to ensue in American life meant for the survival of the republic.

The memories forged in youth endure the longest. So it was for me, as, I suspect, for many others, in my first exposure to Moyers—not as the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson (a tenure that began 60 years ago this month), but in my early teens, watching Bill Moyers’ Journal.

From his time in government, and even as part of major news organizations (Newsday, PBS, CBS), Moyers knew how addictive power could be. He was hardly a naif, giving, for instance, the go-ahead to the ethically dubious “mushroom cloud” commercial used against Barry Goldwater in LBJ’s 1964 Presidential race.

But, as a Baptist deacon's son and ordained minister himself, he also recognized that at some point, it was necessary to one’s soul to cease participating in evil. When he couldn’t continue defending a Vietnam War policy he knew to be wrong, he resigned after only a year as press secretary, even if it meant incurring his boss’s wrath to the end of the Johnson’s life.

“An Essay on Watergate” outlined in detail, through conversations with Presidential historians, how LBJ’s successor, Richard Nixon, sought to expand the prerogatives of his office as a means of striking at his enemies. 

But neither Johnson nor Nixon could even conceive of the lengths to which Donald Trump would defy the Constitution, trampling norms and pushing, pushing, pushing against laws, daring Congress and the courts to rein him in.

What Moyers warned could have come to pass had Watergate gone undetected and unpunished—" the public conscience smothered, the Congress intimidated, the press isolated, and the political process rigged,” not to mention “unbridled, capricious and arbitrary rules”—has occurred with Trump’s second coming to power.

In a 2022 podcast interview with Dr. Bandy See, Moyers laid out a case for how a notably psychologically disturbed Trump had posed a threat to the Constitution. 

But fewer people were aware of this discussion compared with the audience he could reach in his years on television—and it’s a sign of our political fragmentation that, even if he had reached the old numbers, many people would not have paid attention to the message.

Such is the plight of our time—or, as the biblically conscious Moyers would have known, a prophet is without honor in his own country.

(The image accompanying this post shows Bill Moyers speaking with attendees at a special screening and discussion of his documentary, "Rikers: An American Jail", at the First Amendment Forum at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in Phoenix, AZ. It was taken Apr. 19, 2017, by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ.)