Bill Moyers

Many people look on Bill Moyers as the conscience of America and some have pleaded with him to run for president. For thirty years Moyers has been interviewing people from everyday citizens to visionaries in the fields of philosophy, spirituality, politics, poetry, and medicine. Moyers television work, both for the networks and PBS, have won more than thirty Emmy Awards, and Moyers is the author of numerous best-selling books on subjects such as The Bible, poetry, politics and mythology.

Moyers television special and book Healing and the Mind has moved the medical establishment to take alternative health therapies more seriously, and continues to change the lives of people struggling with illness. Moyers follows the advice that Joseph Campbell offered in an interview "Follow your bliss." Moyers recent TV special and book, Fooling With Words: A Celebration of poets and Their Craft, was inspired by his own lifelong passion for poems, which he counts as his favorite means of winding down from work and recharging his own imagination.

Although Moyers subjects span the full range of human experience, they share one theme, the human spirit. One of Moyers' television series was built around hours of fascinating conversations with religious scholars Huston Smith and Elaine Pagels that plumb the story of Genesis and its influence on the modern-day American psyche and culture. This was the basis for his book, Genesis: A Living Conversation. Moyers' discussions reach beyond religion to pursue what he says is one of the most compelling stories of our time.

"We're bombarded everywhere by the pernicious and debilitating effects of nonsense, trivia, and violence, by a stream of mass-produced, mass-consumed carnage masquerading as amusement." Moyers admires and honors those people in society who are trying to counter that stream of pernicious images. When Moyers pitched a six-hour discussion with a little-known scholar of myth named Joseph Campbell, he had trouble getting the series funded, and some station managers refused to air it. "People would say, what--an eighty-three-year-old mythologist talking head for six hours? You've got to be crazy. Who's going to watch this? Says Betty Sue Flowers.

But the Campbell series, titled The Power of Myth, gained tremendous word-of-mouth notice and was turned into a best-selling book. Moyers has a skill for knowing what audiences will find compelling before they themselves know. "Lyndon Johnson once said to me that there are three ways for a poor boy in the South to do well, one was to preach, one was to teach, and the other was to politic. And so I followed all of those until circumstance, more than choice, decided my destiny." As a student at North Texas State, Moyers wrote to Johnson, then a senator from Texas, asking for a job. "I would like to be a political journalist and would like to learn politics at the feet of someone