Bill Moyers on John Gardner, Money and Political Speech at Common Cause 40th Anniversary
October 25, 2010 by Eddie Scher
Last week Bill Moyers delivered a keynote speech at Common Cause’s 40th Anniversary celebration in Washington, DC, focusing his remarks on John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause and a mentor and adviser to the Skoll Foundation’s Jeff Skoll and Sally Osberg. To quote former Senator Timothy Worth, the speech, “contains the seeds of the solution to our basic, most fundamental political problem – the cancer of money in politics.”
Moyers discusses, from his first hand view as a White House staffer, Gardner and President Johnson working together to create and implement the Great Society programs. He relates how Gardner told us, “Don’t pray for the day when we finally solve our problems. Pray for freedom to continue working on the problems that the future will never cease to throw at us.”
Common Cause is a nonpartisan, nonprofit advocacy organization founded in 1970 by John Gardner as a vehicle for citizens to make their voices heard in the political process and to hold their elected leaders accountable to the public interest.