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The year in Scotland, say friends, also buffed down Bill Meyers' Texas twang. After Edinburgh and a three-month, 12,000-mile tour of Western Europe, Moyers entered Fort Worth's Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. However, long before he won his bachelor of divinity degree in 1959, he was beginning to worry that he and the church were mismatched. "I wanted to invest my talents in the broadest possible river," he says, "and I felt that journalism and public affairs were wider and faster flowing than the ministry." When he graduated, despite his conviction that the ministry was too much "a world of words and not of action," he accepted a lectureship in Christian ethics at Baylor. Then, Lyndon Johnson asked him to rejoin his staff. Moyers accepted with alacrity.
Hands & Feet. Moving into an office just outside the "throne room" in the Senate Majority Leader's lavish suite, Moyers served as Lyndon's personal aide, writing letters, answering phones, drafting statements. When Johnson announced his presidential candidacy, Moyers packed his family off to Texas, moved into the basement of the Johnson home, for the next five months was rarely out of L.B.J.'s sight. During the Democratic National Convention he slept in an outsized closet in Johnson's suite at Los Angeles' Biltmore Hotel.
Lyndon, of course, accepted second billing after losing the nod to J.F.K., and in the hectic vice-presidential campaign that followed, Moyers alone could control the disarray for which the boss was notorious. He knew the schedules, kept the press informed, proved a whiz at making arrangements. He claims he was no more than "hands and feet" during the entire operation, but Lyndon obviously valued him more highly than that. So did Kennedy's Irish Mafia, whose members found Moyers one of the few Johnson aides with whom they could work. After the inauguration, Moyers was installed in the elegant vice-presidential suite that soon came to be known as the Taj Mahal. It was the kind of job that men 20 years his senior would have relished. Not Moyers.
The Peace Corps, just then taking shape, appealed powerfully to his evangelistic instincts. He enlisted the support of Director Shriver and of Washington Attorney James H. Rowe Jr., a longtime Johnson friend. Wrote Rowe to Sargent Shriver, the corps' director: "If I were a young man, I think I would be content at the age of 26 to be the top assistant of the Vice President. But this boy Moyers is willing to give this up, without a backward look, so he can 'do good.' The world is full—and the Peace Corps will be—of people who want to 'do good' and have not the slightest idea how. This young man knows how. He is that curious and very rare blend of idealist-operator."
The letter clinched it. L.B.J. let him go, and Moyers was named one of five associate directors of the corps. His biggest job was selling the idea to Congress, and he went about it by selling Sarge Shriver. Using the Capitol Hill contacts he had developed as Johnson's aide, he and Shriver called on practically every member of Congress, thereby ensuring support for the corps where previously there had been mostly skepticism or indifference. At Shriver's urging, Kennedy 18 months later made Moyers deputy director.