If you go to this YouTube site, you’ll find a segment of Bill Moyers’ Journal devoted to conservative talk radio and its incitement of hate. The springboard is a murder in Knoxville. A man walked into a Unitarian church and opened fire, killing one man before parishioners wrestled him to the floor. The killer was deranged, and one motive was, according to police, his “stated hatred for the liberal movement.”
He targeted the church because, among other things, the narrator says, it “openly welcomes gays and lesbian and transgendered members.” And the vitriol spilling from conservative books and talk radio spurred him on, the show asserts.
But a recent Washington Post story calls into question whether Bill Moyers has any standing at all to raise the tolerance issue. Here’s the story. According to recently released FBI files, J. Edgar Hoover’s operatives conducted several investigations of the sexual lives of political figures in order to collect “damaging personal information,” especially any evidence of homosexuality.
Some of the investigations were requested by the LBJ White House. “Even Bill Moyers,” the story notes, “a White House aide now best known as a liberal television commentator, is described in the records as seeking information on the sexual preferences of White House staff members. “
Jack Shafer at Slate alleges that Moyers also asked the FBI to investigate homosexuality among Barry Goldwater’s staff (he cites former US Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman.)
That isn’t the only action. The FBI also gathered material on Martin Luther King’s sexual life. Andrew Ferguson describes it here as “the government’s notorious campaign against Martin Luther King Jr. — a series of wiretaps and other surveillance, covering King from his home to his hotel rooms, which began under President Kennedy and accelerated under Johnson.
“Hoover routinely forwarded the results, including accounts of King’s sexual activities, to the Johnson White House, and on at least one occasion Moyers forwarded a Hoover report on King throughout the executive branch.”
Keep in mind how sternly Moyers rebuked the Nixon Administration for abusing government power during Watergate and the Reagan Administration during Iran-Contra. When the Post asked Moyers about the episodes, he gave a reply worthy of any of Nixon’s aides: “Moyers said by e-mail yesterday that his memory is unclear after so many years but that he may have been simply looking for details of allegations first brought to the president by Hoover.”
(Brainstorm illustration incorporating a photo by Flickr user FreaksAnon and a promo image of Bill Moyers)
