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."