Bill Moyers was press secretary to U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the early days of the escalation of the Vietnam War. He describes the impact that then-NYT reporter David Halberstam's reporting had on him, even given his insider's perch.

An excerpt from the Democracy Now! interview in which Moyers talks about his documentary on how the U.S. media covered the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq:

BILL MOYERS: ... What I’m just trying to get us to see in the media is that you should never go to war on a suspicion. You know, I was in the Johnson White House at the time of the escalation to the Vietnam War. David Halberstam and I -- the late David Halberstam -- had many conversations about this. It was David Halberstam’s reporting from Vietnam that made me realize, even from within the White House, that the official view of reality that we were adopting had some flaws in it.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain how it works. I mean, you were press secretary for Lyndon Johnson.

BILL MOYERS: For two years.

AMY GOODMAN: For two years. Halberstam had been reporting on Vietnam. And again, for viewers and listeners who might have missed the horrible news this week, David Halberstam died in a car crash on Monday morning in California in Menlo Park. How did it work? The journalist out there on the ground; you, the spokesperson for the President of the United States who is waging the war, that one, Vietnam?

BILL MOYERS: Well, David Halberstam is the one reporter who helped me realize over time that what’s important to journalism is not how close you are to power. Michael Gordon was close to power. You have to be influenced by that. You have to believe nobody would lie to you about a war. But David Halberstam and Peter Arnett of the Associated Press and Morley Safer of 60 Minutes were out in Vietnam reporting the facts on the ground. And we’d see those reports, and we’d be angry about them, because they were undermining the official view of reality. And yet, when you thought about them, you realized, what’s their stake? They’re not trying to make policy. They’re trying to report the impact of policy. And so, you begin to pay attention to them, and you realize, as I said, that the further you get from power, the closer you can get to the truth. That was the great lesson of David Halberstam's life and all of those reporters in Vietnam.

So the reason that I was initially skeptical about the buildup to the war and what we were hearing from the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department four years ago, is because I had been there forty years ago, when the war in Vietnam was escalating. Lyndon Johnson rushed to a premature judgment on the Gulf of Tonkin. We had flawed intelligence. And we circled the wagons and didn’t want to hear the alternative to our view of the world. And this was happening all over again. George W. Bush, in denial -- I think in denial -- has been making many of the same mistakes that led us into Vietnam. And Iraq has become a quagmire like Vietnam, because, as I said earlier, you can't keep asking young men and women to die for a lie, because that’s not the way you win the support of the nation. And when Harry Reid said the war is not winnable, I thought of Vietnam. No matter how much we said or the government said -- I had left in early ’67 -- that there was hope around the corner, the casualty count, both here and in Vietnam, was undermining the case. And that’s what’s happening in Iraq now.