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Bill Moyers: the seventy-year-old journalist--whose new collection of speeches and essays arrives in bookstores this month--on why he's parting ways with PBS, what it was like to work for LBJ, and whether objectivity is all it's cracked up to be.

Article Excerpt
Why, at this time in your life, have you decided to call it quits at PBS? I sensed the light at the end of the tunnel. I've been producing television for 32 years. I started in the fall of '71, and while I feel in one sense that I'm at the top of my form, I also feel an unsatisfied hunger to do some things I have not done before. I want to seriously approach a book on the John son years, and I have some other writing that I would like to do. Mostly I want to remove myself from the implacable deadlines of the broadcast and its many moving parts, which leave me no time to do things outside that center of gravity. I presumed to do this a few years ago. At the time, the powers at PBS came to me and said, "We need to start a new program. You and Judith [his wife and longtime collaborator] are essential elements; if you're involved, we can get this started without the usual jealousies and political battles." That program turned out to be Now. It was going to be just one year. One year became two. Two became three.

Three could easily become five or ten. Three could. It's an important show within the realm of niche broadcasting--it has a following. The people who don't like it really don't like it, and they keep telling us so, and the people who do like it love it, and they tell us so. There's no right way to cad a marathon, which is what my career in broadcasting has been. I just thought the time was now--no pun intended.

It's really about you--it's not about some dissatisfaction with the state of public broadcasting. Oh, no. A few weeks ago I ended the broadcast with an essay explaining why I was leaving. I had interviewed Maurice Sendak, who doesn't want to write anymore, doesn't want to draw anymore. So I asked him, "What do you want to do?" And he quoted Keats on the taste of a peach in your mouth and how he just wants to relish it. I'd been thinking about this, so after I finished editing Sendak's interview, I took out my yellow pad and wrote a swan song. Nothing is pushing me, but something is pulling me. I have to stop doing what I'm doing in order to know what it is.

So you plan to stay, from a distance, in the PBS family. I intend to become much more of an advocate for public broadcasting than when...

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