Being a homosexual in America in 1964 was not easy, and one of
the more difficult places to be one was Washington, D.C. While the
nation's capital has long since become the setting for some of the
most important gay rights battles (and home to a vibrant gay
scene), it was also the site of routine antigay witch hunts. At the
time, gays were officially barred from working in government and
their livelihood depended on the secreting of their sexuality.
Indeed, the mere suspicion of homosexuality could get a person
fired, and the consequences of losing one's job due to what was
then known as a "morals charge" were long-lasting.
It's in this context that recent revelations about Bill Moyers
are so disturbing. Before he became the self-righteous scold of the
liberal television commentariat, Moyers served as a special
assistant to Democratic president Lyndon Johnson. This was at the
height of J. Edgar Hoover's reign over the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, during which time the FBI director spied on a vast
array of public and private citizens in order to gather information
for potential blackmail.
According to
documents obtained last week by The Washington Post
through a Freedom of Information Act request, one of these
individuals was former Johnson aide Jack Valenti, later head of the
Motion Picture Association of America. Hoover, according to the
Post, was "consumed" by the question of whether Valenti
was gay, and deployed his agents to investigate the man's sex
life.
They turned up nothing.
Valenti, however, was not the only White House official to be
investigated by the FBI for suspected homosexuality. In late 1964,
just weeks before the presidential election, senior White House
adviser Walter Jenkins was arrested in a YMCA men's room for
performing oral sex on another man. Under extreme mental duress,
Jenkins checked into a hospital and resigned his position. Moyers
wasted no time in trying to discover how much more potential
trouble the Johnson administration might have with gays in its
midst, and went out of his way to ask Hoover's FBI to investigate
two other administration officials "suspected as having homosexual
tendencies," according to the recently released documents.
In an e-mail
response to an article written by Slate's Jack
Shafer, Moyers complains about Hoover, but does not bother to
address the matter of his ordering the FBI to snoop on his
colleagues.
These revelations once again remind us that empathy for the
dignity of gay people does not always fall along partisan political
lines. Whereas Barry Goldwater, one of the crucial figures in the
birth of the conservative movement, could have easily exploited the
Jenkins scandal in the presidential campaign, he refused to discuss
it. In his memoir Goldwater wrote, "It was a sad time for Jenkins
and his family. Winning isn't everything. Some things, like loyalty
to friends, or lasting principle, are more important."
Goldwater, today remembered by most liberals as a fire-breathing
Neanderthal, later became an outspoken opponent of the ban on gays
in the military.
Contrast Goldwater's behavior to that of Moyers, who abused his
power in office to hunt down and expose the gays in his midst.
(Here it should be noted that rooting out gays in government wasn't
the only dirty task Moyers conducted while working in the Johnson
White House. He also oversaw the FBI's wiretapping of Martin Luther
King and successfully prevented the civil rights activist from
challenging Mississippi's all-white delegation to the Democratic
National Convention in 1964. "You know you have only to call on us
when a similar situation arises," he encouraged the FBI agent in
charge of the domestic espionage.)
To be sure, Moyers's behavior at the time took place within a
social milieu far more repressive than today's. It wasn't until
1973, after all, that the American Psychiatric Association removed
homosexuality from its list of disorders. Gays were banned from
working in the federal civil service until 1975. And gays were
barred from having security clearances, amazingly, until 1995. That
Moyers engaged in Nixonian dirty tricks with the aim of
embarrassing and ruining the careers of gay people, while
despicable, was something that many officials in his position
probably would have done, given the mores of the era.
But what makes Moyers's contemptible behavior relevant is that
even to this day he has yet to acknowledge wrongdoing, never mind
apologize. That Moyers has since become a supporter of gay rights
is irrelevant. None of that erases the fact that he used his power
as a senior White House official to pry into the private lives of
his own colleagues.
Today, he has the gall to excoriate other public figures and
lecture the rest of us on virtue. After leaving government, Moyers
became a journalist and subsequently produced PBS documentaries
excoriating Richard Nixon over Watergate and Ronald Reagan over
Iran-Contra. In the early 1990s, his star was so high and his
reputation so pristine that he publicly considered running for
president. His sanctimony rivals that of the pope.
Given his own history of snooping into the private lives of
American citizens with the intent to publicly humiliate them,
Moyers's latter-day sermonizing on the evils of the Bush
administration and conservatives in general rings more than a
little hollow. And the fact that he has been getting rich off the
public trough for decades - earning millions of dollars in
production deals from his documentaries and television programs
aired on Public Broadcasting - makes a full explanation of his
activities in government service all the more necessary.
Moyers didn't just seek dirt on his own colleagues but his
political enemies as well. In 1975, then-deputy attorney general
Laurence Silberman was tasked with the job of reviewing a raft of
secret files once belonging to J. Edgar Hoover. Amid "nasty bits of
information on various political figures," Silberman found a letter
drafted by Moyers requesting an FBI investigation of suspected gays
on Goldwater's campaign staff. When the press reported on this
document, Silberman received an angry phone call from Moyers, who
alleged that the report was a CIA forgery. When Silberman offered
to conduct an investigation so as to exonerate Moyers, the former
presidential aide demurred. "I was very young," Moyers confessed to
Silberman. "How will I explain this to my children?"
It's a good question. And one that we're still waiting for Bill
Moyers to answer.