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In his big test, the President's gall-bladder operation, Moyers' performance consolidated that estimate. Since the President's Oct. 8 operation, he has been like a latter-day Boswell, always keeping a spiral-bound notebook at hand to record everything that Lyndon said and did. And about the only time that Moyers was not with the President was when he was briefing the press on his progress. Though some newsmen blamed him for concealing the existence of one kidney stone until after it was removed by surgery and of another that is still embedded in the kidney, it was the President who decided to keep them, so to speak, to himself.
Proud Papa. Johnson and Moyers understand each other, in part, because they have similar backgrounds. Both are Southwesterners to the core, though Moyers has taken on more of the East's special patina than has his boss. Both came from families that were far from well-off. Both made it on their own.
Moyers' father, Henry, is a onetime cotton chopper, candy salesman and truck driver who is now a timekeeper at an ordnance works near Marshall, Texas. Henry Moyers never ceases to wonder at Bill's present eminence, for he entertained far less lofty ambitions for both of his sons (James, 38, joined the White House staff Sept. 1 as an administrative assistant). "It makes you awfully proud," says he, "to have raised two boys and to look back and say the police never called to say, 'We've got them in jail.' "
Bill was born in Hugo, Okla., but the family moved to Texas while he was still in diapers, finally settling in Marshall, a sizable (pop. 25,000) East Texas oil-processing and manufacturing town named after Chief Justice John Marshall. Moyers considers himself a Texan. "Do I detect a Texas accent?" a TV interviewer once asked him. "Not only in my speech, sir," he replied, "but in my heart."
Though his father was never much of a moneymaker, the family lived comfortably in a two-bedroom white house with green shutters. At 14, a "thin, scrawny, tallow-faced boy," as his father recalls him, Bill went to work sacking groceries at the A. & P. for 75¢ an hour, still found time to write for Marshall High School's newspaper The Parrot (whose most famous staffer was Lady Bird Johnson), serve as a cheerleader and bandsman, play the role of the parson in his senior class play One Foot in Heaven, and rack up a scholastic average of 95.7% .
Mendelian Long Shot. In his two years at North Texas State College, Moyers was twice top student, twice class president. In summer vacations he worked for Publisher Millard Cope's Marshall News Messenger as a $25-a-week reporter. With his first byline, he dropped the y from his given name, Billy, has never taken it back. Not all of the paper's hands found the scholarly-looking cub a welcome addition. "Just what we needed," grumbled one. "A part-time college boy with neither whisky nor whiskers—one you can't even cuss in front of."