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Bill Moyers' MemoryWhy you can't trust it.

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

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Diane gave me your message late yesterday and I thought about it overnight. I hear you've declared war on me—I'd call it more of an obsession—so nothing I say is going to influence you. But you should know that in that summer of 1954 in Washington I went to the office every Saturday and Sunday at 7:30 a.m. to work on LBJ's correspondence. Sometimes Booth Mooney, an old hand from Texas, came in, but most days I was alone. That particular day I heard what I heard, including the scurrying feet on the marble stairs, and I listened to the chatter among the officers who arrived on the scene. That next day LBJ had the scuttlebutt on what was rumored to be behind the death—where he got it, I don't know, but he and a clique of Senators huddled over it. I rented a room that summer from an old hand in Washington—a senior legislative assistant to LBJ's predecessor as majority leader—and he confided in me what he was hearing around the Hill. None of that speculation was made public for a long time, and even more time passed before the real story came out. But within days of the tragedy, I wrote a long letter about the events to my brother in New Orleans, which was returned to me after his own death. In it there's no reference to the time of day all this happened but the impression on me was indelible—and still is today, 55 years later. I've forgotten some things in the meantime and learned more. But what happened then was a defining experience for me and played over and again in my mind. Make of it what you will.

That Moyers is hard at work on a book about the Johnson years is great news. He hasn't always wanted to revisit the era. In 1982, he told People magazine he had spurned lucrative offers from publishers to write an LBJ book out of deference to his old boss. "That would make me a thief of his confidence," Moyers said. "Johnson spent hours and hours with me in unguarded moments. He could not have done so had he ever thought I would write what he was saying."

Will Moyers find evidence for his long-held belief that he and Johnson were J. Edgar Hoover's victims? I hope he understands that correcting the record will require references to the record.

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Drew Pearson wrote a column (PDF) the day after Hunt's death alleging a blackmail scheme against the senator. Claiming the now-dead Hunt as his source, Pearson wrote that Sen. Herman Welker, R-Idaho, working through intermediaries, had told Hunt that his son would not be prosecuted if Hunt would abandon re-election. Hunt refused, the column states, and his son was convicted. Hunt announced for re-election in April 1954 but withdrew from the race in June, citing illness, but then he killed himself.

In his column, Pearson writes:

It was no secret that he had been having kidney trouble for some time. But I am sure that on top of this, Lester Hunt, a much more sensitive soul than his colleagues realized, just could not bear the thought of having his son's misfortunes become the subject of whispers in his re-election campaign.

Columnist Marquis Childs wrote a similar piece, but Welker denied Pearson's charges in a syndicated column by Holmes Alexander.

Here's what Pearson wrote in his diaries the day Hunt killed himself:

Senator Hunt of Wyoming committed suicide early this morning. I am not sure whether it had to do with the threat Senator McCarthy made yesterday that he was going to investigate a Democratic Senator who had fixed a case, or whether it was Hunt's concern over his son's homosexual problems.

There's something peculiar going on here. Why would Hunt have given in to his purported blackmailers by agreeing to leave the Senate—but also kill himself? Why would Pearson, who was sympathetic to Hunt and his son, deliberately give greater publicity to the son's case—essentially fulfilling the dark side of the blackmailer's threat? Does anybody have an alternate take on this? The Hunt suicide has been written up in Lewis J. Gould's The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate, David K. Johnson's The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, and in Thomas Mallon's novel Fellow Travelers. Send e-mail to . (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

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