NEW YORK, NY (KTAL/KMSS) — Bill Moyers, a former White House Press Secretary, documentarian, news legend, and one of Marshall, Texas’s most notable residents, passed away on June 26, 2025, at the age of 91.

Moyers’ son William told the Associated Press his father passed away at Memorial Sloan Kettering, a hospital in New York known for cancer care, after a long illness.

Moyers was born on July 5, 1934, in Hugo, Oklahoma, to a dirt farmer and truck driver. The family later moved to Marshall, Texas, where Moyers would get his first taste of the media covering sports for the Marshall News Messenger at the age of 16 and later graduate from Marshall High School in 1952.

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES – MARCH 01: Portrait of journalist Bill Moyers. (Photo by Hugh Patrick Brown/Getty Images)

Moyers went on to graduate from the University of Texas and later from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Moyers preached part-time before deciding that was not his calling.

A relationship with Lyndon Johnson from their college days proved fortuitous when Johnson hired him to work on his 1954 United States Senate re-election campaign as a summer intern.

Moyers also worked for news outlets owned by Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, including KTBC radio and television in Austin.

Johnson resumed their working relationship when Moyers became his personal assistant in the early 1960s. Moyers also worked with Sargent Shriver to establish and secure funding for the Peace Corps, with Moyers eventually rising to the position of Deputy Director.

The world changed for Moyers, like everyone else, on November 22, 1963. He was in Austin helping coordinate President John F. Kennedy’s presidential trip to Texas when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

As one of Johnson’s top aides, Moyers served in several capacities, most notably as press secretary. In this role, a major task was strengthening the new president’s fraying relationship with the media.

Moyers worked for Johnson for years. Helping shape policy and editing Johnson’s speechwriters. However, the escalation of the Vietnam War proved to be his breaking point. He resigned in December 1966, later stating, “We had become a war government, not a reform government, and there was no creative role left for me under those circumstances.”

Moyers became the publisher of Newsday in 1967, and the publication won two Pulitzer Prizes in the next three years. After an ownership change, he left the company in 1970 and traveled 13,000 miles around the country, ultimately penning his first book, “Listening to America: A Traveler Rediscovers His Country.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson with Bill Moyers, his press secretary. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

From 1972 to 1976, he hosted “Bill Moyers Journal,” the first news show on PBS. The show featured current events and interviews with subjects from all walks of life. He served as chief correspondent of “CBS Reports” from 1976 to 1978 before returning to PBS and “Bill Moyers Journal” for three years. He then served as senior news analyst for CBS until 1986.

In 1983, he returned home to Marshall, Texas, to produce “Marshall, Texas; Marshall, Texas,” the first installment in his acclaimed 19-part documentary series “A Walk Through the 20th Century with Bill Moyers.” The documentary has segments on everything from “The Arming of the Earth” to a piece about Civil Rights titled “The Second American Revolution,” but he started at home.

Some of his career choices were unpopular with the residents of his hometown. “When I was in the White House, I worked on drafting the 1964, ’65, and ’66 civil rights legislation. That made me persona non grata in my hometown. My former English teacher said that ‘until 1964, we had won the Civil War,’ said Moyers.

Bill Moyers, 1984. (Photo by Getty Images)

In 1986, frustrated with the constraints of corporate media, Moyers and his wife Judith formed Public Affairs Television, an independent production company responsible for hundreds of hours of public television programming. Moyers explained, “I think my peers in commercial television are talented and devoted journalists, but they’ve chosen to work in a corporate mainstream that trims their talent to fit the corporate nature of American life. And you do not get rewarded for telling the hard truths about America in a profit-seeking environment.”

Moyers may have been best described in 2009 by Neil Gabler in The Times. Gabler said, “His mission has always been to make things better, not louder. In a world of ego and bombast, he has always been modest and self-effacing.”

The Moyers ran PAT until 2015, producing shows, documentaries, and investigative reporting.

Over the course of his long career, Bill Moyers received more than 30 Emmys, two Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia University Awards, nine Peabodys, and three George Polk Awards. He received the Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the American Film Institute in the first year it was bestowed. He received a Career Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association and was honored by the Television Critics Association for career achievement. Moyers was elected to the Television Hall of Fame in 1995 and received the Charles Frankel Prize (the National Humanities Medal) from the National Endowment for the Humanities “for outstanding contributions to American cultural life.”

In 2005, Moyers received the PEN USA Courageous Advocacy Award for his passionate, outspoken commitment to freedom of speech and his dedication to journalistic integrity. He was also honored with the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Lifetime Achievement Award. He is survived by his wife, Judith; three children, Suzanne, John, and William; six grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.