Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  The Innocent Man is your first foray into nonfiction—you did deep research into how Ron Williamson and another man were wrongly convicted of a 1982 murder. Eleven years later, DNA evidence proved their innocence, freeing Williamson from death row.

  We’ve sent 130 men to death row to be executed in this country, at least 130 that we know of, who later have been exonerated because they were either innocent or they were not fairly tried. Including Ron Williamson, the guy I wrote about. Well, you know, if that doesn’t bother you, go to death row. Go see a death row. Your first reaction is, how could someone survive here? How could you live? You’re in a very small cell, just a few feet by few feet. How do you keep your sanity? They do, most of them. They function, they survive. There are very, very harsh conditions, and perhaps they should be. I’m not saying prison should be an easy place. But imagine, it’s tough enough if you’re guilty. If you’re a serial murderer, it’s tough enough. But think if you’re an innocent man, if you know you didn’t do the crime, and the guy who did do the murder is still out there. You’re serving his time, and nobody’s listening to you. Nobody’s listening to you. Those are powerful stories.

  The prosecutor was reelected unopposed, despite the fact that the town knew he had convicted the wrong man.

  Wrongful convictions happen every week in every state in this country. And they happen for all the same reasons. Sloppy police work. Eyewitness identification is the worst type, almost. Because it’s wrong about half the time. Think about that. Eyewitness identification has sent more men to prison than probably anything else. Sloppy prosecutions. Junk science. Snitch testimony. It happens all the time. You get some snitch in a jail who wants out, and he comes in and says, “Oh, I heard your defendant confess.” And they’ll say, “Well, okay, we’ll reduce your time and we’ll let you out if you’ll testify at trial.” There should be rules governing snitch testimony.

  There are five or six primary reasons you have wrongful convictions. All could be addressed. All could be fixed with the right statutes. The human cost of wrongful convictions is enormous. But the economic cost is huge, too. Keeping a guy in prison costs $50,000 a year. Executing one costs a couple million. It varies from state to state.

  Wow!

  It’s expensive to crank up the machinery of death.

  What would you do with someone who’s for sure guilty?

  Oh, listen, I have no sympathy for violent criminals. And this country was so sick of violent crime—that’s one reason we’ve reacted the way we do. And we still have the death penalty. And we still have two million people in prison in this country right now. Our prisons are choked, they’re so full, and most of them are nonviolent. We’re spending somewhere between $40,000 and $80,000 apiece to house them, every guy in prison. Now, somebody’s not doing the math here. You know, we’re spending all this money on these people. But for the violent people, the murderers, there are some criminals who do not belong outside prison. I’m not in favor of the death penalty, but I’m in favor of locking these people away in maximumsecurity units where they can never get out, they can never escape, they can never be paroled. Lock the bad ones away, but you’ve got to rethink everybody else. You’ve got to rethink the young kids who are in there because of, you know, crack cocaine. I mean, they need help. They serve five years, they get out, and do the same thing over and over again. The system’s getting worse.

  As the years have gone by, I’ve caught myself more and more taking on an issue, whether it’s the death penalty, or homelessness, or big tobacco, or insurance abuse, or whatever. When I can take an issue and wrap a novel around it and make it compelling, make the pages turn and make it very suspenseful, and get the reader hooked on the book, and also get the reader, for the first time, maybe, to think about a problem from a different viewpoint, those are the best books. The more books I write, the more I seem to think about social injustice, and the stories I have for future books, there are a lot more ideas dealing with what’s wrong with our systems. And maybe how to fix them. Not that I know how to fix them. But I can sure show you what’s wrong with them.

  You paint a pretty dark portrait of what it’s like to be poor, to be marginalized, to be in the minority.

  I didn’t live it myself, but when you grow up in Mississippi and Arkansas, you see it. You can still see it now, in the Deep South and in other areas. For almost ten years I practiced law in a small town in Mississippi. And my clients were working people and poor people. Victims. People who lost their jobs, who lost their insurance. But, also, people accused of crimes. That’s shaped my life. Because I was always fighting for these people against, you know, something bigger. The legal experience was formative. I would never have written a first book had I not been a lawyer. I didn’t dream of writing. When I was reading Steinbeck in high school I was going to be a professional athlete. I had no talent but a lot of big dreams. That didn’t work out. I couldn’t even play in college. I never thought I was going to be a writer. It came later in life, after I’d practiced law for a few years.

  You seem to be talking more politics, writing more politics, which is something risky for a writer, because your readers may not agree with your politics.

  Yes, I guess it’s risky. I think we’re all caught up in politics. With the war going how could you not be caught in politics? A bad war. A lot of the issues of the day are political issues. As a society, we just have this insatiable appetite now for more and more politics. We’ve got the twenty-four-hour cable shows. Everybody’s an analyst. Everybody’s an expert, you know. So we get caught up in it.

  You once called the Iraq War “a moral abomination.”

  I did. Still do. We attacked a sovereign nation that was not threatening us. What was our justification? I don’t know. We were lied to by our leaders. It wasn’t what they said it was. Estimates are half a million Iraqis have died since the war started. They wouldn’t be dead, I don’t think, had we not gone there. How do you get out? We lost four thousand very brave soldiers who would love their country, and would go fighting where they were told because they’re soldiers. Tens of thousands of shattered lives. We’re not taking care of the veterans when they come home. The social cost of this is enormous.

  The brutality of war, and the battles of politics, couldn’t be further removed from A Painted House. You tell the story of a little boy growing up on a cotton farm in rural Arkansas. Is it autobiographical?

  It’s very autobiographical up to a point. The setting is very accurate. The first seven years of my life I was on a cotton farm. I remember the Mexican farmworkers living in the top of the barn. I remember playing baseball with Juan. We had the same name. I remember the floods, losing crops. The house in the book was my grandparents’ house. We didn’t live with them. We lived not too far away. And the church stuff, Black Oak Baptist Church, that’s where we went. It was in town. My mother was a town girl. She grew up in Black Oak. My father was a country boy—they were five miles apart, but, you know, the social structure in these little towns is very important. And my mother said one time she got in a big fight with a kid who lived out in the country. And as the ultimate insult, this little girl said to my mother, “Yeah, but you live in a painted house.” Meaning that you’re kind of an uptown snooty girl because your house is painted. And it was very real, very true. Mother’s told that story for years. And that was always the title from day one.

  How is it so many southerners become good storytellers and good politicians?

  I think anytime you have a geographical location, a region where you have had and still may have a lot of suffering, a lot of conflict, you’re going to have good stories. You’re going to have great writers. Because there’s so much material. You look at the tortured history of the South, the cruelty, the war, the poverty—all the violence in the history of the South gives rise to great stories.

  There’s also the conversation. I remember my mother talking across the back fence to Miss Platt, who was our landlord. I remember the voices of the people
coming home from the theater at nine o’clock, at ten o’clock at night, walking just five yards from my bed. I went down to the courthouse square and heard the white farmers on one side of town telling their stories and the black farmers on the other side of town telling their stories. It was hard to come out of there and not have stories ratcheting in your head. You remember that?

  Well, I can remember my father telling stories his grandfather told him. And these were poor folks with no television, maybe radio, no telephones. They talked, they talked, they talked. They told stories.

  What about the sermons? Did you hear a lot of sermons?

  Well, good gosh, yeah. I heard them all, from the long sermon on Sunday morning when you’re sitting there soaked with sweat, to the revivalists, the evangelists who’d come to town for the big crusades, the tent crusades where the whole town would show up. And it was kind of exciting at times and boring at times. But I’ve heard a lot of sermons.

  Were you “born again”?

  Sure. When I was eight years old—First Baptist Church in Parkin, Arkansas. I felt the call to become a Christian. I felt the need to. I talked to my parents. I talked to my pastor. And I accepted Christ when I was eight years old, just a little small boy. And like most of the kids, you know, in my church, and my brothers and sisters, that was very much a part of growing up.

  And when you look back half a century later, how do you think that moment has played out in your life and in your work?

  Well, you know, once you make that conversion, you are and always will be something different, a different person. I can’t say it impacts what I choose to write. But it certainly impacts how I write. The great secret to The Firm, and this is what, you know, people don’t realize—

  Your second book—

  The first printing was fifty thousand copies, which is nothing to sneeze at. People read that book, and when they finished it, they realized they could give it to their fifteen-year-old or their eighty-year-old mother and not be embarrassed. It sold a zillion copies because of that. My books are exceptionally clean by today’s standards. There are things I don’t want to write, can’t write. I wrote a sex scene one time and showed it to my wife. And she burst out laughing. She said, “What do you know about sex?”

  Spoken like a true Baptist.

  The content of my books, the language, even the violence, is something that is easy to stomach. And I would not, because of my faith, write any other way.

  SUSAN JACOBY

  In the spring of 2010, a Harris Poll reported some aston ishing statistics on how Americans view President Obama. Sixty-seven percent of Republicans said he is a socialist. So did 42 percent of independents and 14 percent of Democrats. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans believed him to be a Muslim, as did 29 percent of independents and 15 percent of Democrats. Forty-five percent of Republicans, 24 percent of independents, and 8 percent of Democrats refused to believe he was born in the United States. And to 24 percent of Republicans, 13 percent of independents, and 6 percent of Democrats he “may be the Antichrist.”

  The right-wing propaganda offensive against the president—a relentless and ruthless barrage of toxic misinformation constantly pumped into the nation’s bloodstream by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his imitators on talk radio, hypocritical partisan apparatchiks like Newt Gingrich, and ranting bloggers—was intended to smear Obama beyond recognition. His face—whitened like a clown, with lips painted bright red like the Joker in Batman—showed up on protest signs at right-wing rallies, alongside others in which the president was depicted as Hitler, complete with mustache and swastika.

  These shock troops in the right’s war on Obama, with their unscrupulous pursuit of the lowest common denominator of public discourse, are the latest vanguard in the headlong flight from reason that characterizes our time. The writer Susan Jacoby, a specialist in American intellectual history, believes that Thomas Jefferson got it right when he said, “Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” and says this flight from reason affects far more than politics. She describes a calamitous dumbing down of American culture, “an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge,” that affects everything from scientific research to decisions about war and peace. And she concludes that the verdict is out on whether Americans “are willing to consider what the flight from reason has cost us.”

  The program director of New York’s Center for Inquiry, Jacoby makes the case in her book The Age of American Unreason. Among her earlier work, Wild Justice was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism was chosen by The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post as one of the notable books of the year.

  —Bill Moyers

  How is this flight from reason, as you describe it, playing out?

  In an age of unreason you tend to focus on very small personal facts as opposed to big issues. But even more than that, lack of knowledge and unreason affect the way candidates speak about everything. For example, obviously the health care situation in this country is very important. All of the candidates say it is. But people don’t know how health care is handled in other countries. How many people, for instance, have the right to choose their own doctors in this country? In other words, without a base of knowledge of how things are, you can’t really have a reasonable talk about how things ought to be. You can say, “Oh, we don’t want a program that will prevent people from choosing their own doctors.” Well, are we able to choose our own doctors? I’m not. I have to choose within a managed care network.

  You describe what’s happened to our political language. You shudder when politicians talk not about people but about the “folks.” What’s wrong with that?

  What’s wrong with it is that “folks” used to be a colloquialism. It was the kind of thing that you’d talk about mostly in rural areas, mostly in the South and the Midwest. People talked about “folks.” It was not considered suitable for public speech. If you used it in the classroom, your teacher would get after you, because it wasn’t considered appropriate language. But think about our political language in the past and today. Just think about the Gettysburg Address: “We highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this government, of the folks, by the folks, and for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.” This is patronizing. It’s talking down to people. I read all of FDR’s fireside chats; I could not find a single reference to “folks.” You know why? Because addressing people as “folks” is talking down to them. It’s not dignifying them. When you call people “citizens,” you’re calling on them to rise above the lowest common denominator. You really need to think about what’s being said when people are called “folks.” It’s encouraging you not to do too much.

  Not to expect anything special.

  Politicians are terribly scared of saying, “We really need to expect more of people.”

  You mentioned Franklin Roosevelt.

  I want him back.

  You talk about how during World War II, when he would have a fireside chat, he would ask the people listening to get a map of the world and spread it out in front of them so that as he talked about the battles that were going on they would be with him in terms of the place, the geography, the strategy of what was going on. Can you imagine a president doing that today?

  No, I can’t. Doris Kearns Goodwin talks about this extensively in her book No Ordinary Time. Maps sold out. You couldn’t buy a map before Roosevelt’s fireside chat the February after Pearl Harbor because millions of Americans went out and bought maps. And they sat there by the radio and followed what he was talking about. But one of the big mistakes today is that we talk about our political culture as if it were something separate, something different from our general culture. What I say in The Age of American Unreason is, no, that’s wrong. Our political culture is a reflection of our general culture. It is as much shaped by our general culture as it shapes our general culture.

  Now to return to FDR, which I’m really glad you asked a
bout—it’s been forgotten now in the mythology of World War II that even when the Nazis invaded Poland and attacked England, an overwhelming majority of Americans were opposed to American involvement in the war. The reason they came around is not just Pearl Harbor. Franklin D. Roosevelt spent several years trying to educate a resistant public about the stake that America had in the future of Europe. The draft extension six months before Pearl Harbor, in the summer of 1941, passed by one vote. Imagine what would have happened if the army had been disbanded, if FDR had not made all those educational efforts, where we would have been six months later when Pearl Harbor was attacked. May I say that everybody talks about who’s equipped to be commander-in-chief, a word presidents didn’t used to use. I hate the word.

  And why do you hate it?

  Because the president is only the commander in chief of the armed forces. He’s not the commander in chief of us. It’s a word that in the past presidents didn’t use except in a strictly military sense. What’s far more important than being commander in chief is being educator in chief. And Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln would not have succeeded as commanders in chief if they hadn’t first succeeded as teachers in chief. To be nonpartisan about it, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are two of the biggest failures as teachers in chief of any presidents we’ve ever had. Bush at foreign policy, obviously. It’s great to bring people along with you when everybody’s in favor of the war, as they were in 2003 because there was this desire to strike back at somebody, anyone, for 9/11. So Bush just said, “Oh, yeah. Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.” And people believed it.