The film Selma, which chronicles the pivotal battle in the civil rights movement, is currently in theaters and has even garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. The film has an unlikely critic, however—PBS host and former White House aide to Lyndon Johnson Bill Moyers. Moyers accuses the film of an “egregious and outrageous portrayal [of Lyndon Johnson’s conduct] that is the worst kind of creative license.” Specifically, Moyers is upset that the film suggests LBJ was behind Coretta Scott King receiving a recording of her husband having sex with another woman.
As an icon of the American left, Bill Moyers is unlikely ever to be held accountable for the sins he committed as Lyndon Johnson’s White House hatchet man. Nonetheless, we never fail to be amazed at Moyers’s arrogance and willingness to wade into civil rights debates given his own participation in the Johnson administration’s persecution of Martin Luther King Jr. The Weekly Standard’s own Andrew Ferguson first dragged Moyers’s misdeeds back into the light two decades ago in the New Republic:
That wasn’t the full extent of it. In 2009, the Washington Post reported that Moyers had also made inquiries regarding the sexual preferences of Jack Valenti and others working in the White House. When the Post asked about these allegations, it reported: “Moyers said by e-mail yesterday that his memory is unclear after so many years.”
Moyers’s reputation in the LBJ White House at the time was such that veteran journalist Morley Safer had this to say in his memoir: “I find it hard to believe that Bill Moyers would engage in character assassination. . . . But I confess, I find it harder not to believe it.” Safer continued:
There is no doubt that Johnson and Moyers had zero scruples when it came to spying on people’s sex lives and leaking personally damaging information. Maybe LBJ wasn’t behind the leaking of MLK’s sex tape to his wife, but Moyers is the last person one should trust to tell the truth about it, and it is by no means the “worst kind of creative license” to speculate Johnson was capable of such a thing. Indeed, this is a case where the use of creative license is more than warranted. Whatever other historical facts Selma may have gotten wrong, we’d venture that nothing in the film is quite so outrageous as the fact that a seemingly unrepentant Moyers thinks he has the moral standing to complain about the accurate portrayal of Lyndon Johnson as a president who abused his power.
