Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  You write that you looked into the eyes of these people and saw your own reflection, with confessional moments of your own. Are you having to unlearn some things that have made you the success you are?

  As I say, these boundaries are arbitrary. As a scholar, writer, and researcher, each one of the books I write is really a new quest for me. I’m able to engage in new learning. And that’s a huge, huge luxury, to follow your curiosities without many constraints. There are careers that sustain your curiosity throughout. But there are ways in which my approach has shifted within the context of my institution. I can feel it at a faculty meeting.

  I used to reject the idea that I needed to mentor other people. It seemed to make me feel old to establish myself as a mentor and guide. Now I embrace this notion. I know it’s important that I let myself be a mentor to my younger colleagues, that I work with and support them. That I tell them stories about my own life and my own career. And here’s something else I’ve discovered in terms of restraint—if I’m in a senior faculty meeting now, I speak once. I listen.

  How uncharacteristic!

  Well, I’ve learned that timing is important. When I speak is important. But this way of engaging in a conversation means more listening. It also offers some historical perspective, and that’s important. I’m likely to say what I think. Really be very honest, very clear. I’m much less cautious. Those two things come together, a kind of courage to speak your mind and speak your heart and to say where your ideas come from, even if they don’t come from cognition. And the idea of waiting and choosing your moment.

  Is it true that you went canvassing, knocking on doors last fall in the presidential campaign, with a twenty-four-year-old?

  Yes. I did. One of the things I talk about in this book is the need to engage in more cross-generational encounters, discourse, conversation, and movements.

  But that’s so hard to do, because we are separated into our different realities.

  I think that’s absolutely true. But one example that I found so exciting, of working with young people, and young people working with old people in a common project, was this Obama campaign. In New Hampshire, three or four times, I went with a young kid from Dartmouth with whom I was paired, and I kept on wishing that I was a fly on the wall, or an ethnographer, watching us navigate our relationship and our encounters.

  How so?

  Because this was a kid who had voluminous knowledge about politics and facts, who was incredibly energetic, who had great ideas. He was completely urgent and impatient and a terrible listener. And also someone who had stereotyped all of New Hampshire. He thought they were backwoods, rural, country people. Republicans. Surely they hadn’t thought deeply about these matters! And his job was to feed them the information, right? And not expect them to change. My approach was to begin by listening to them, not assuming that I knew who they were just because I knew where they lived. Not beginning with a stereotype, but expecting that they had the capacity to think deeply as well. And so negotiating our relationship means I had to help him wait. Help him listen. On the other hand, I needed to experience his energy, his drive, and his optimism.

  Clearly, he had more energy than you.

  He had more energy. But his impatience often depleted his energy. Because he was so impatient to get the message across.

  You quote throughout your book the poet Nikki Giovanni. She has a poem in which she says, “There are sounds which shatter the staleness of lives, transporting the shadows into the dreams.” Most people I know, young or old, want to shatter the staleness. What have you learned about how to do that?

  One of the things I heard in people’s stories touched on the dynamic of loss and liberation. Most people had to go back to childhood stories in order to begin to explain the ways in which they were able to move forward into new learning in the third chapter of life. In their early youth they might have felt unsupported, undernourished, maybe even neglected and abused. So they had to return to that place of hurt, to try to understand it. Not to blame anyone but to try to understand it. Whether that’s a metaphoric return, or whether that’s literally going back to Ohio and walking up the steps of their father’s house and knocking on the door and talking to him honestly about what they had experienced as a small child. That actually happened. It’s part of moving beyond those early negative experiences, if you had them. At least I experienced it with these forty people as a very common theme. Some of them discovered those early hurts in the process of my interviewing. The story they had told many, many times before, which was the positive, affirmative, optimistic story, had a dark underbelly they had ignored. Discovering that underbelly revealed their reasons for now moving forward.

  What do they tell you had enabled them to go forward?

  Let me just give you an example. There’s a public health doctor, sixty-seven years old, from a middle-class African American family. He’s someone who has always worked very, very hard, most of the time in West Africa, to eliminate malaria. He takes his work very seriously, and he has begun to take voice lessons, which he loves. I asked him, “Why voice lessons?” He begins to tell the story of sitting in his mother’s arms, at age six, every Sunday, listening to the Metropolitan Opera. And he loves this moment, because he’s sitting in his mother’s arms, and because there’s nothing more glorious or radiant than the resonant voices of these opera singers. And he says to his mother one day, “Mom, that’s what I want to be. I want to be an opera singer.” She doesn’t respond verbally. But what he remembers, in conversation with me, is the sort of dismissive look that she gave him. And he says with tears in his eyes, now talking to me, that she seemed to be telling him opera singers were sissies, right? He retreats immediately. He never raises that again. He goes on to become a wonderful public health doctor, giving to the world. And at age sixty-five, he takes the big leap of faith and begins to take voice lessons, realizing that this is resonant from this early denial. He experiences what he calls “a liberation I’ve never felt.” And the real kicker in this story is that he discovers in conversation with me that this learning to use his diaphragm, learning to make the sound come up through his body channel, not only feels liberating in that sense, but discovering his voice, his new voice, at sixty-seven, has helped him become a better doctor.

  And in contrast, there’s a woman in your book named Pamela, a psychologist and an activist, who talks very poignantly about wanting, in this stage of her life, to do “the radical thing,” to make a difference. And she’s disillusioned to find that the solutions seem out of reach. That it’s harder for her to rally people to a collective sense of responsibility than she had thought it would be. That neither government nor private institutions are designed to prepare to help her make a difference.

  This is someone who is progressive, who’s been an activist all of her life. She really sought to make a difference. And what she discovers, at sixty, is that she’s worried about death. Many of the people in her family have died early. She sees the finiteness of her life. And she wants to take on something big. She wants government and hospitals and the whole medical and psychological establishment to respond to the veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. To recognize that they’re not crazy, that they’ve been through a trauma of huge, profound significance. And she can’t get this message across. She feels as if the institutions, the government, the hospitals, the medical establishment, are not recognizing their trauma. And she feels enormously frustrated.

  Is she going to spend the third chapter sullen and resigned?

  No. She’s keeping on pushing, but our conversations gave her an opportunity to really weep at the fact that she really is, as she put it, “at my most powerful now. I have the most to give. I’m wiser. My voice is strong. My influence should be great, and I feel it diminished.”

  You hear a lot when you listen, and your listening empowers the people talking to you. Does it strike you that there are not enough people who listen?

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There are tw
o things that came out of this book. One is curiosity. And that’s often dampened or muted in school, as I said earlier—you know, when somehow children stop asking the primary questions: “So, where did he go? Then what happened? Why do you feel that way?” The other important thing is listening. The value of young people listening to old people, old people listening to young people, having a real discourse with respect and with empathy.

  That twenty-four-year-old in New Hampshire. What does he want to do with his life and what did he learn from you about what he could do?

  I hope he learned from me that he will have many chances to remake himself. There will be many chapters and many challenges. I think the other thing that we talked a lot about is the importance of welcoming those moments when we fail as the time to pick ourselves up and move on. Welcome those moments—I hope he learned that from me.

  The people in your book don’t talk much about death. Why is that? Was that deliberate on your part?

  No. it wasn’t. I think Pamela is one of the few people in the book who talk about death. The others were too busy living.

  But surely they have to think in the back of their mind, they can see the grains of sand going down the hourglass.

  There is an expression of such urgency in their work, in their new work, and in their new learning—this notion of limited time is very much in the mix. They experience the paradox of emerging patience during this period of their lives and the sense of time moving on—of urgency.

  Are you feeling that sense of urgency? You’re only sixty-four. To me, that’s just adolescence.

  Well, I certainly am feeling the curiosity. I’m feeling the urgency. I’m feeling the patience. I’m feeling the courage to ask questions that may not have been asked before, to say what it is I need to say. It isn’t that I think I’m invincible at all, but these qualities, I think, have deepened during this period of my life. They help me move forward in my own third chapter.

  People talk openly about their own fears. What are you afraid of, at this stage?

  Sometimes I’m afraid of loneliness. Even though I’m surrounded by a glorious family and friends and have lots of love.

  So why fear loneliness?

  What I experience when I look at people in their fourth chapters is the possibility of isolation. There’s the certainty that as you grow older, your friends will disappear, they will die. And I look at my mother, who’s ninety-four, who is deeply curious about the world around her. Who’s using this stage and chapter of her life to give forward. Her mind is vital and alive. She’s a fabulous listener—

  Hold it right there a second—what do you mean, she’s giving forward?

  Giving forward. I talk about it in the book as a way of serving and contributing to society. Giving back seems to be something of an anachronism. It’s like looking backwards. This is being in the present and looking toward the future, trying to figure out a way of giving and serving that fits the contemporary cultural context.

  But is she lonely?

  She’s very much in the world and engaged in the world. But in the meantime, at ninety-four, most of her friends have died. And I see that as an inevitable and profound loneliness. And so that’s one of the things that I worry about, for all of us.

  You finished this manuscript shortly before the great economic collapse.

  Yes.

  How do you think the new reality would change the answers people gave you? We talked about how they have the means to afford to make this change, make this turn into the third chapter. How do you think the great collapse would change their answers?

  Well, I don’t know that it would change them very much. All of us, I think, have to innovate when resources are diminished. The capacity to innovate is very much what these people are talking about. Innovation, creativity in a time when we have less. We are forced therefore to do more with less, to figure out ways of combining our resources, of collaborating, of innovating. I remember a time in my life when I was at my lowest, and my mother said, “Sweetheart, out of this suffering will come creativity.” And she was right. I don’t mean to be idealizing this at all, but I think there are ways—even at a place like Harvard, which has lost 30 percent of its endowment—there are ways in which this reduction in our resources forces us to think more dynamically, more creatively, about how we can shape a new legacy in this time of sacrifice.

  You make me think particularly about the baby boomers. Not all the people in your book are boomers, but some are. The baby boomers grew up in a period of prosperity, of relative abundance. They saw themselves as powerful actors who wanted to shape the culture and paradigm of their era. And they brought considerable resources and wealth to the challenge. Now the rug has been pulled out from under them. I wonder how they are reacting to the new reality.

  Well, it’s true. I think it’s part of what we did as baby boomers. In our younger years we were audacious, we were entitled, we felt empowered. We stopped the Vietnam War, right? We felt that we grew the women’s movement. We were engaged in civil rights activities. We made a difference. And it seems to me that even with the rug pulled out from under us, we still have this feeling about ourselves. We still believe that we can make a difference. We still believe that we can come up with good ideas that might help solve today’s toughest problems. But we are not the owners of this intellectual capital or this cultural capital. And that’s why I talk about bringing people together, crossing the generations to solve the country’s and the world’s problems.

  JOHN LITHGOW

  One of the memorable scenes in American theater occurs in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons when Joe Keller’s son Chris discovers that the father he adores is guilty of a dreadful crime that cost the lives of twenty-one young pilots during World War II. A hardworking manufacturer, family man, and all-around “nice guy,” Joe Keller had shipped defective parts to the military and engaged in a long cover-up of his malfeasance. He even let his partner take the rap and go to jail while keeping the crime a secret.

  In a recent Broadway revival of the drama, as the moment of revelation arrived and the scales fell from the son’s eyes, the emotional reckoning exploded like a volcano, sucking the oxygen out of the theater. The audience visibly winced; seconds passed before we could breathe again. Mind you, Miller set his play in 1947, but ever since we invaded Iraq in 2003 we’ve been reading about similar profiteering by American contractors—of faulty electrical wiring leading to injury and death, of deficient armor, black markets, and, as ever, coverups. It’s as if Miller created Keller to stalk every generation, haunting us with damnable reminders of human nature, the betrayal of self and others, the loss of trust, and the fall of honor.

  In this revival, Keller was memorably played by John Lithgow. Yes, that John Lithgow: the aging, punch-drunk prizefighter in Requiem for a Heavyweight; the French diplomat madly in love with a Chinese opera diva—in reality, a man—in M. Butterfly; the football player turned transsexual in The World According to Garp; Dr. Emilio Lizardo in the cult classic Buckaroo Banzai; the gentle Iowa banker in love with Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment.

  Name your villain, and odds are Lithgow’s your man, too. He played psychopaths in Blow Out and Cliffhanger (“Kill a few people, they call you a murderer. Kill a million and you’re a conqueror”) and a brutal, rival serial killer in the Showtime series Dexter, for which he received a 2010 Emmy Award. My grandchildren thrilled to hear him as the evil Lord Farquaad in Shrek. And millions became fans when he played Dr. Dick Solomon, the lunatic leader of aliens come to study earth, in 3rd Rock from the Sun (another performance for which he won the Emmy Award—three times, in fact).

  He’s a man of so many parts you can take your pick, but I’ll stick with his role as Joe Keller, a performance that I can imagine causing even playwright Arthur Miller to hold his breath. Lithgow, by the way, is quite a writer in his own name, with a love of language that is evident in his bestselling children’s books and The Poets’ Corner, a kind of chapbook of his favorite poetry. We l
ive in the same building and encountered each other in the lobby as both of us returned from that evening’s performance of All My Sons. He is such a good fellow that he naturally said yes when I asked him for this interview.

  —Bill Moyers

  There’s that scene in All My Sons—a gut-wrenching revelation—when a son learns the awful truth about his father. The night I was there, the whole audience was stunned. How do you explain that scene to yourself?

  The scene comes probably about ninety minutes into the play, after the first act, and the audience has gotten to know these two men when, to all appearances, their relationship was warm and wonderful; they are shadowboxing and roughhousing. Joe Keller, the father, is one of those neighborhood great guys—you see him playing with one of the kids from next door—and his son adores him. He has an idolatrous relationship with him. Arthur Miller sets that up, and then, when he’s thirty-two, the scales fall from the boy’s eyes. To see his father’s failing hits him like a ton of bricks, and there is this incredible emotional rupture.

  The audience gasps and winces. At a moment like that, when you’re onstage holding an audience like that, are you smiling to yourself and saying, “I got ’em again”?

  Yes, I am. That’s my guilty secret. It’s a great pleasure to torture an audience like that.

  And in the audience we see you as Joe Keller, not John Lithgow.

  Well, that’s the mystery of acting, isn’t it? There’s a tremendous amount of calculation, sort of blended with the spontaneity of the moment.

  I’m going to let you in on a secret. I had the star role in my high school play, One Foot in Heaven, and when it was over, our teacher Julia Garrett called me aside and said quietly, “You know, Bill, I think you ought to go into journalism.” I took her advice, obviously, and never learned how an actor does what you do every night. How do you go to such a volatile interior space, time and time again?