Pubdate: Fri, 20 Mar 1998 Source: The New York Times Author: Christopher S. Wren Contact: Website: http://www.nytimes.com/ BILL MOYERS' SON: FALL AND RECOVERY LIE BEHIND NEW DOCUMENTARY TELEVISION SERIES NEW YORK -- William C. Moyers was graced by fortune, with good looks, wit and social privilege inherited from celebrity parents. His father, Bill Moyers, is one of television's most trusted journalists and a former press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson. His mother, Judith Davidson Moyers, presides over the family production company, Public Affairs Television, and juggles an array of corporate boards and trusteeships. But when their oldest child identifies himself, he says, "I'm a recovering alcoholic and a drug addict." William Moyers is likely to use this introduction when he appears Tuesday before a congressional hearing into substance abuse. "You can't tell who's going to get hit," said David C. Lewis, a psychiatrist who directs the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University. "Even with genetic vulnerability, it's very hard to predict on an individual basis. You certainly can't predict it based on social status or education. Those things become predictors of recovery." William Moyers' ordeal helped motivate Bill Moyers' new documentary series, "Close to Home," which explores the nature of addiction. "It isn't about me," his son said. "It's about thousands of people like me. I think my father uses the tool of his trade to go into areas that he wants to know more about." Still, he added, "if addiction can hit the Moyers family, then no one is immune." William Moyers appears only briefly in the television series, which will be shown on public broadcasting stations beginning March 29. Judith Moyers said: "We discussed whether or not to include our son. We decided Bill would have to acknowledge it. It's a very interesting story." But she added: "We don't tell his story. He has to." Bill Moyers was publisher of Long Island Newsday in 1967 when the family settled in the comfortable suburb of Garden City, N.Y. Their three children attended public schools, went to church and earned their spending money. "I never wanted for anything," William said. "My parents raised me to become the best child I could, and my brain still got hijacked." He admits to having drunk beer and smoked marijuana, like many other rebellious adolescents. "If anyone had ever told me I would become addicted from casual use of marijuana, I would have told them, 'No way,' " William Moyers said. "If anyone had told me I would become an alcoholic, I would have told them, 'No way.' " Drugs filled only a dark corner of his life back when he excelled as captain of the high school track team, snagged passes as a tight end on the football team and played trombone in the band. He graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1981, and went to work for The Dallas Times Herald, where colleagues remember him as an eager reporter, and later worked for Newsday and The Minneapolis Star Tribune. Still, he felt he could not measure up to his parents, who after 43 years of marriage are so close that they finish each other's sentences. Awed by his father's erudition, William Moyers admits that he found it hard to grasp the more intellectual documentaries, like "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth." "I did suffer from lack of esteem and self-worth, comparing myself to my mother and father," William Moyers said. "Drugs took me out of the feelings of no self-esteem, this sense of despair, and put me somewhere else. It made it easier for me to face life for a while." He paused. "Then it came to where I couldn't face life without getting high." By his early 20s, William Moyers said, "I was addicted to pretty much everything and anything." Nobody noticed, he said, because "I was very resourceful at hiding it and keeping my head above water." "On the outside, I looked pretty ordinary," he added. "On the inside, I was burning up." Before he hit 30, William said, he was barely able to function. Bill Moyers recalled: "I insisted we have lunch together because his behavior had become erratic. And I said, 'Do you have a drug problem?' And he said, 'Not at all; are you kidding?' " The next day William disappeared on a cocaine and alcohol binge that lasted all night. "My parents were stunned, hurt and angry," he said, recalling when he called from a pay phone in Harlem to confess that he had crashed. "It was a education for the Moyers family, believe me." Bill and Judith Moyers, who now live on Manhattan's Central Park West, reacted like any other parents. "For the first few weeks, we said, 'What did we do wrong?' " Mrs. Moyers said. Her son had always looked good; he even ran marathons. "He passed every test that we knew to give," Judith Moyers said, "because we were using that great American test: If you're achieving, you must be OK. We had to learn that among many high achievers, there's an extremely high incidence of addiction." Bill Moyers had never encountered drug abuse, though his grandfather and favorite uncle were alcoholics. So when William asked, "I need help; where should I go?" Bill Moyers said, "We didn't have a clue." Even as he made frenetic inquiries, he said, "I felt deficient as a parent because I had not been able to identify or prevent what happened." Judith Moyers was the determined sort of parent who saw her son's addiction as something to overcome. "I had this ego that said, 'I can solve it,' " she said. "I had never let go of anything in my entire life. I said I would wrestle this down." In August 1989, William went into Hazelden, a respected substance abuse treatment center outside Minneapolis. The following month, Bill and Judith Moyers joined him for a five-day program that teaches families to come to grips with their member's addiction. Bill Moyers found it painful to acknowledge that his son was an addict. "It was hard for me to go to these sessions," he said. "I'm a shy man, which may be why I do television. I can hide behind cameras." So when William Moyers slid back into drinking and drugging in February 1991, he recalled, "They were devastated and angry and confused." Bill Moyers describes the relapses as more frightening than the original discovery of his son's addiction. "When William came out of Hazelden, I thought we had a silver bullet," he said. "Ten months later, he relapsed and I thought we had failed." The Hazelden counselors cautioned that relapse is not uncommon, but Judith Moyers said, "We didn't absorb that at the time." "It struck real terror," she said, "because we believed that treatment had worked well with him. He believed that too." William had fallen in love with another patient, Allison, who had arrived from Bermuda to shake her own alcohol and drug problems, and they married. After his monthlong return to Hazelden, they moved to Atlanta, where he went to work as a writer for CNN. Determined to stay clean, he took up flying and earned his pilot's license. On Columbus Day weekend in 1994, William Moyers wandered downtown and impulsively bought a supply of crack cocaine that nearly killed him. "It rolled right over me like a steamroller," he said. "I remember holding the drugs in my hand and saying, 'This is going to last me for a week.' It lasted for eight hours." It was not just the cocaine but also the despair that engulfed him. "I did not consider suicide, but I thought I wouldn't make it," he said. "There I was in the fall of '94, utterly defeated. My wife, who has been sober for nine years, was stunned. My parents were just speechless." After his wife fetched him from a crack house, he checked into Ridgeview, a treatment program in suburban Atlanta, for 115 days. "I went there and said, 'Have me, just have me,' " he said. "I stayed there until they told me to go." Sprawled on his bed at Ridgeview, William Moyers said, "I heard a whisper in my ear, and it said, 'St. Paul' " -- the city, not the apostle. He quit CNN in 1995 and, without a job, moved his family back to Minnesota. Scanning the classifieds, he saw Hazelden advertising for a public policy analyst, and applied. "I really believe that coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous," he said. Jane Nakken, the executive vice president of external relations at Hazelden, had qualms. "I was a little nervous about hiring him because of his parents," she said. "How do you fire Bill Moyers' son if he isn't what you think he is?" She checked with his former boss at CNN, who urged her to send William back to Atlanta, saying they still wanted him. Instead, William Moyers is now Hazelden's director of public policy. "He's just a delight to work with," Mrs. Nakken said. "He is totally passionate about putting a face on recovery." William Moyers, now 38, is lobbying for legislation requiring that insurance companies classify addiction as an disease, and pay for the same kind of treatment they allow for other illnesses. Politicians, he said, don't pay attention to constituents who prefer to be invisible. "We get better and then we melt back into society," he said. "We pay our taxes, mow our grass in summer and shovel our snow in winter. Our success is our own worst enemy." Clean and sober for three and a half years now, he does not underestimate the pitfalls. He worries about statistics that show his three children are four times more at risk of addiction than others because he and his wife were hooked on alcohol and drugs. "I don't take my recovery for granted, but I know what I've got to do to keep recovering," he said. What pulled him through, he believes, was his family's support. "It would have been a lot harder for me to recover if my parents or my wife had turned their backs on me," he said. Judith Moyers said they never considered abandoning their son. "I can't think of anything any of my children would do that would cause a permanent rupture in our relationship," she said "A parent's love is like that." Still, William Moyers said, "I think my father blamed himself for my addiction for a long time. It took my final relapse for him to come to the acceptance that he wasn't at fault." In the last few months that they have spent together, he said, "We're closer than I could have ever imagined." "I can't believe that from such adversity has come such a satisfaction," he said. "We are like kites rising against the wind."