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Around 8, Moyers steps into a waiting limousine for the drive across the Potomac, scans four or five morning papers and the Congressional Record en route. At the circular desk in his office, furnished in the phone-booth-functional L.B.J. style that staffers call "Pedernales Renaissance," he phones the other special assistants to check the agenda. At 9, Moyers and his colleagues generally spend an hour with the President reviewing assignments and problems. Back in his office, Moyers prepares for his 11 a.m. press briefing, phoning Lyndon for .final instructions ten minutes before hand. Afterward, he leaves his door open for 45 minutes in case any newsmen have special questions.
After lunch—sometimes a leisurely affair with the President, sometimes a fast hamburger and a glass of milk in the White House basement mess—he is back at his desk. At 3:30, he begins to prepare for his 4 p.m. briefing, often faultlessly typing his own notes at 100 words a minute. Though he frequently works until 10 or 11, he tries to get away around 7:30. Says Judith: "When Bill isn't working, he is almost embarrassed about it."
"Serviceable Wisdom." No athlete, Moyers relaxes at the movies. He dislikes cocktail parties, and as Press Secretary has set some sort of record for that traditionally bibulous post by attending only two since he got the job—and both were for friends. His favorite pastime is reading, which he selects for "serviceable wisdom." Two weeks ago, when he and Brother Jim took their families to the Shenandoah Mountains to view the autumn foliage, Bill took along Robert E. Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins, Clinton Rossiter's The American Presidency, Machiavelli's The Prince, and a few others.
Moyers' own philosophy is expressed in a slightly truncated quote from Thomas Jefferson that hangs on his office wall: "The care of human life and happiness is the first and only legitimate object of good government." As he sees it, that observation is "the charter" of the Johnson Administration. "The umbilical cord of the Great Society," he says, "runs right back to the Founding Fathers."
The Bow of Ideals. Like his boss, Moyers tempers his ideals with hard-headed pragmatism. Last March, addressing a group of Peace Corpsmen, he urged them to "pursue the ideals of a Joan of Arc with the political prowess of an Adam Clayton Powell. Whatever you say about Joan, her purpose was noble. And whatever you say about Adam, his politics is effective." The word effective crops up repeatedly in bis conversation. "There is no substitute for the effective use of political skills to advance the cause of a great idea," he argues. "Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism." In terms of this philosophy, Moyers numbers among his heroes Disraeli, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and, not least, L.B.J.—"All that I am, I owe to him."