L.B.J.'s Young Man "In Charge of Everything"

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His first day at North Texas State, Moyers met a green-eyed black-haired home-economics major named Judith Davidson, daughter of a Dallas postal clerk. "She sat in front of me," he recalls. "Instead of dropping a handkerchief for me to pick up, she left her books underneath the seat. The professor suggested that I return them to her, and I have been the victim of that conspiracy ever since." They were married in 1954, now have three children —William Cope, 6, Suzanne, 3, and John, 1—all, by some Mendelian long shot, blue-eyed blonds.

In the spring of 1954, Moyers sat down and wrote a two-page letter to Fellow Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, then Democratic Leader of the U.S. Senate, solemnly reminding him of the importance of the youth vote and offering his services in Johnson's 1954 campaign for reelection. Johnson checked him out with Publisher Cope, an old friend, got so glowing a report that he put him on his Washington staff for the summer. Said Lyndon: "I want you to learn everything you can."

World of Words. Moyers' first assignment was to address 100,000 envelopes with a pedal-powered machine; he started at 7 p.m., finished at 9 o'clock the next morning. That summer he got to feeling that Johnson did not even know he existed. At the end of his Washington stint, Lyndon summoned Moyers to his baronial office, urged him to transfer to the University of Texas, and offered him a $300-a-month job with KTBC, Lady Bird's Austin television station.

At the university, Moyers would rise at 5 a.m., work three hours at the TV station, return for breakfast, then go off to classes. He preached on alternate Sundays at two small Baptist churches nearby. There was even time for horseplay. Bested in a water-pistol fight with a KTBC announcer, Moyers retaliated by setting off a firecracker while he was on the air. The announcer abandoned the microphone, chased Moyers around the block, caused five minutes of silence on the station. Another time, he labored over a commercial extolling the virtues of a local establishment called Hattie's, knowing well that it would never be aired. Hattie's was Austin's most celebrated bordello.

Busy as he was, Moyers managed to compile one of the best records in the journalism school's history, on the strength of it won a $3,000 Rotary International scholarship that enabled him to study ecclesiastical history at the University of Edinburgh for a year. John Baillie was dean of the divinity faculty at the time—and, by curious coincidence, it was Baillie's A Diary of Private Prayer that Lyndon Johnson picked up and read to his nurse just before going into surgery three weeks ago.