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Recovery in the News
Healing his broken faith: William Cope Moyers opens up about addiction, recovery and his relationship with God
David Tarrant
Dallas Morning News
November 6, 2006
As the Moyers family drove through a torrential rainstorm to their campsite, lightning struck in front of them, followed instantly by a clap of thunder.
In the back seat, a young William peered past his father at the wheel as a car barreled towards them. A woman shouted some news at his father. He heard the words "family" and "dead." A family of six had been struck by lightning.
The scene that summer afternoon in New Mexico would haunt William like a recurring nightmare, marking the time when a boy's innocent faith in God was shattered, and even his famous and powerful father, Bill Moyers, an ordained minister, could do nothing about it.
In William Cope Moyers' new memoir, Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption, the sense of powerlessness that he and his family experienced in the thunderstorm, becomes a driving metaphor in the book. Only it's crack cocaine that threatens to destroy him and split apart his family. It is a story of him hitting bottom in a crack house, not once but four times. Of a marriage destroyed, of jobs lost, of parents powerless to help.
And finally, a story of surrender ... and redemption.
William, 47, was the first of three children born to Judith and Bill Moyers. His father was an influential White House aide once featured on the cover of Time magazine as the man closest to President Lyndon B. Johnson. After serving in LBJ's White House, his father took over as publisher of Long Island's Newsday and then became one of America's favorite broadcast journalists. His awards included more than 30 Emmys and a lifetime Peabody.
William graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1981 and decided to follow in his father's footsteps. He started as a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald and married a woman from his hometown of Garden City, N.Y.
Everything seemed fine on the surface. His stories regularly appeared on the front page. He kept in shape by jogging. He and his wife were trying to start a family. But his addiction was eating away at every part of his life.
He started experimenting with alcohol and marijuana in high school and by college was an everyday user. Along the way, cocaine entered the picture.
He mostly avoided detection. Once, however, while home from college on winter break, he got drunk in a bar, broke into a fish market next door and was arrested.
His parents, the storeowner and legal authorities wrote the incident off as a "youthful indiscretion." He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.
But his bad habits drinking and getting high every day continued.
His parents, rooted in small-town Baptist life, didn't recognize the danger signals that their son was turning into an alcoholic and drug addict. He writes:
"No one close to me ever mentioned the need for an intervention or assessment because no one could imagine that a clean-cut, well-mannered, church-going young man like me could have a serious alcohol problem. Denial took over because the truth was too hard to grasp."
Thinking his son was stressed out from trying to follow his own success, Bill Moyers wrote many letters of encouragement. William's wife taped affirmations on their bathroom mirror which he usually saw after a long night of partying.
So ingrained had drugs become in his life, that he even did lines of cocaine in the bathroom of the Dallas County District Attorney's office before interviews.
He writes: "... In the decade between my twentieth and thirtieth birthday, using drugs became an everyday ritual that achieved reliable results. Getting high, staying high, planning the next high was all part of the routine, as automatic and reflexive as breathing."
Pure bliss, pure misery
In 1986, after four years in Dallas, he took a reporting job at New York Newsday. One evening, a man he met at a neighborhood bar invited him to smoke crack. Though he'd written stories about the deadly crack epidemic, he paused only a moment before thinking, "Why not?"
The first hit off the crack pipe sent him to his knees "pure bliss," he writes. His next thought was how he could get some more.
His life spiraled downhill fast. He quit his news job to start working for his parent's television production company in Manhattan. Mostly, his days revolved around getting high. He'd drink on the train home, or if driving, he'd light up a crack pipe on the Long Island Expressway.
Finally, he succumbed to a binge, moving in with another addict in Harlem for six days. At one point, he called his wife Mary from a pay phone. His mother and a detective who traced the call spent days looking for him. When they found him, they coaxed him into rehab.
Mary left him after he emerged from the crack house and confessed to her that he'd been using drugs throughout their relationship. They had no children when they divorced.
It would take another five years and three more relapses before he finally gained sobriety.
His last relapse came in 1994, in Atlanta. By then he had gone to work for CNN and had remarried a woman he met at the Hazelden drug and alcohol treatment center. They had a toddler son and a baby boy.
One Sunday afternoon, he told his wife, Allison, he was going on a quick errand. He said goodbye to his children and went straight to a crack house. He wanted to die.
That's where a search party put together by his father found him.
After he was helped into a waiting van, William saw his father in the front passenger seat. "There's nothing more I can do," his father said. "I'm finished."
William said he also thought he heard his father add, "I hate you."
William responded, "I hate me, too."
Mind, body and spirit
Recovery meant that William not only had to heal his body, but also the "hole in my soul," that had first appeared during that fateful lightning storm, he says in the interview.
"Addiction is a disease of the mind, body and spirit. And my spirit that was so grounded in my unshakeable belief in God, died that day, July 18, 1971. From that day onward, I struggled mightily to hold on to some belief in God."
To remain drug-free, he would need to come to terms with his spirituality and his relationship with his dad. "My father looms large in the book, just like he does in my life. Being the son of Bill Moyers certainly fed the sense that I wasn't good enough, or that I needed to be better than I was. To measure up, "I would have had to be Bill Moyers and that's impossible," he says.
"That's not why I became an alcoholic but it certainly fed the 'mind, body and spirit' components of it."
Addiction is a family disease and at Hazelden, when William was in rehab, his parents attended family therapy, Judith Moyers says.
"You begin to know what your issues are. But at the same time, you didn't cause this, you can't control it, and you can't cure it," Mrs. Moyers says. She believes that when she rescued her son from the crack house in Harlem, she saved his life. But she also learned that she couldn't cure him.
She had to learn to detach something a mother watching her child self-destruct found it impossible to do by herself. She got help from Al-Anon, a support group for family and friends of alcoholics.
"You have to realize that you need to save yourself, or you will be drowned in this pool of destruction," she says.
The Moyers were warned that relapses were common, especially among cocaine users.
"The first time, we were not that shocked," Mrs. Moyers said. "But when it happened again in 1994, when he had children, a strong marriage and he was working at CNN ..." Her voice trails off.
"This is not just a matter of fixing a person up, and putting them back out there. It really is a lifetime disease," she says.
And, says William, that's the reason the book is called 'Broken,' " "I'm not fixed. I'm human.
"I am healing. And what that's all about is accepting me as I am: imperfect, flawed and yet able to continue recovering despite myself and despite my shortcomings."
William has remained clean and sober since Oct. 12, 1994. Shortly after his last relapse, he decided to get out of the news business. Based only on a dream, he decided to move his family back to St. Paul. After a year of working odd jobs, he opened the newspaper one day and saw a job ad for a public policy specialist at the Hazelden Foundation, the treatment facility where he had first gotten sober.
He's worked there ever since.
Life's not perfect. In fact, the past year was one of the toughest in his life. His wife struggles with depression and had to be temporarily hospitalized. He had the strain of trying to finish a book while meeting his work and family responsibilities.
"Despite it all, I continue to recover, flaws and all," he says.
He did it by doing the things that helped him recover: talking to other addicts and staying connected to God, he says.
"Every morning, I wake up and the first thing I do is I say to God, 'Thanks a lot for giving me the gift of another day.'"
E-mail dtarrant@dallasnews.com
© 2007 The Dallas Morning News Co.