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Bill Moyers' MemoryWhy you can't trust it.

By Jack ShaferPosted Thursday, March 12, 2009, at 4:30 PM ET

(Continued from page 2)

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If Johnson really said what Moyers claims he said about a GOP plot, didn't Moyers ever slow down for a minute and wonder if this was just more Johnson blarney?

To be charitable to Moyers, it's conceivable that Hoover told Johnson about a Republican plot and that Johnson told Moyers to start the investigation. It's conceivable that Moyers and Johnson were the only ones to know that Hoover (via district police) was the origin of the hypothesis and that Johnson, a legendary motormouth, never mentioned Hoover's role to anybody else. It's also conceivable that Johnson lied to Moyers about the Hoover "tip" and that Moyers has been spreading Johnson's lie for decades. Or it could be that Moyers has consistently misremembered the story since 1975.

Whatever the case, we have additional reasons not to rely on Moyers' memory. In his letters to Slate and the Wall Street Journal, Moyers shares an anecdote to convey how destructive homosexuality rumors were in the old Washington. He writes:

The mere accusation [of homosexuality back then] was sufficient to end a career. Several years earlier, as I worked one afternoon at the Senate office building, I heard the crack of a gunshot one floor above as a U.S. senator committed suicide over his son's outing. I have never forgotten that sound.

The suicide was Sen. Lester C. Hunt, D-Wyo., but Moyers botches the story. Hunt arrived on the third floor of what is now the Russell Senate Office Building at 8:30 on the morning of June 19, 1954, not the afternoon. Hunt's staff discovered him in his office at about 8:55 a.m., shot in the temple by the .22 caliber rifle he had brought to work that morning. Hunt died three and a half hours later, and his death was ruled a suicide.

According to the Washington Post account published the next day, "[t]he building was virtually deserted at that early hour and no one heard the shot which pierced Hunt's right temple and smashed through his brain." The New York Times (paid), the Washington Star, and the Associated Press news stories about the suicide do not contradict the Post on this point.

If Moyers' vivid memory of the suicide is correct, he heard something that the Capitol Police did not hear and that no other ear-witness reported to the Capitol Police, according to the June 20 Star story. It states:

Apparently an effort was made to conceal the shooting. Capt. Broderick [of the Capitol Police] said when the Senator's office called for an ambulance, police were told that Senator Hunt had suffered a heart attack. Capt. Broderick said he learned from a newsman that it was a shooting.

Historian Rick Ewig's 1983 article "McCarthy Era Politics: The Ordeal of Senator Lester Hunt" remains the most complete account of the senator's story. In it, Ewig collects and assesses the considerable evidence that senator friends of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., drove Hunt to withdraw from his re-election campaign and kill himself 11 days later. Hunt's foes allegedly threatened that if he did not quit the race, news of his son's case would appear in every Wyoming mailbox.

Moyers contends that Hunt killed himself over the "outing" of his son, but that's not exactly true. Hunt's son was arrested on a charge of soliciting prostitution on June 9, 1953, and was convicted on Oct. 6, 1953, paying a $100 fine. The eight-paragraph Oct. 7 Washington Post story about the case effectively outed Hunt's son in Washington. News wire stories printed in several Wyoming papers and elsewhere did the same. Yet Hunt did not kill himself for another eight months.

Hunt left several notes behind, "but none of these gives any explanation which sheds light on the real reason or reasons" for his suicide, Ewig writes. "While no one can ultimately be certain of the precise reasons for Hunt's suicide, clearly he was under personal and political pressure."

Moyers criticized my first piece on him because I did not contact him for his side of the story. This time, I asked Moyers if any citations from the public record exist to show Hoover's role in initiating the Goldwater investigations. And I also asked him to explain his faulty recollection of the Hunt suicide.

Yesterday afternoon, his assistant sent this response:

[Bill Moyers] is not able to assist in your research as he has his hands full with his own work, including going through his extensive files from those days which he has only recently begun to examine. He doesn't intend to finish his book until he has checked memories of events half a century ago against his notes and documents, but he'll see that you get a copy when it's done.

A half-day later, presumably when Moyers' hands were less full with the book he's writing about the Johnson years, he composed an e-mail addressing only the Hunt suicide, which his assistant forwarded. I present it in its entirety: