Drunks

by Christopher Finan

  Hughes was a liberal who was not afraid to take a strong stand on controversial issues. Soon after he became governor, he announced his opposition to capital punishment and succeeded in repealing it several years later. Iowans responded to his strong leadership. In the middle of his reelection campaign in 1964, a national magazine published an interview in which he revealed the fact that he was an alcoholic. His opponent attempted to use it against him, but the voters returned him to office with the largest majority ever given a candidate in Iowa, helping his party capture both houses of the legislature. Four years later, he was elected to the US Senate. By then, he had turned against American participation in the Vietnam War, and he would become a major critic of the policies of the new president, Richard Nixon.

  There were many issues facing the new senator, but he had never forgotten the needs of alcoholics. Early in his term, he left Washington to assist a civic leader who had finally admitted his alcoholism. On the return flight, he wondered if he could do more:

  It had been only 17 years since I had made the same admission. I thought of the hundreds of thousands of men, women and youngsters who never seem to find help, who live as derelicts or die tragically. . . . Was this one of the reasons I was brought to Washington, to represent the millions suffering from addiction to alcoholism and drugs?

  Hughes was a deeply religious man. If God had given him a mission, he could not turn away.47

  The federal government had only just begun to pay attention to the problem of alcoholism. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson, whose father was an alcoholic, became the first president to speak about the problem. “The alcoholic suffers from a disease which will yield eventually to scientific research and adequate treatment,” he said in an address to Congress. Soon after, the Office for Economic Opportunity, which created programs to fight Johnson’s “war on poverty,” began to award grants for the establishment of alcohol programs by state and local governments. These programs had made only the barest of beginnings by the time Hughes arrived in Washington. The administration had requested only $4 million for community alcoholism programs in 1969. “This is like trying to stop the Mississippi River in flood stage with a pebble,” Hughes said.48

  Things began to change when Hughes became the chair of the Special Subcommittee on Alcoholism and Narcotics. The new chair scheduled his first hearing in July 1969. Four of the five witnesses on the first day were sober alcoholics, including the actress Mercedes McCambridge and Ray Harrison, an Iowa attorney who had been thrown into the very jail that he later supervised as a municipal judge.

  Bill Wilson and Marty Mann testified on the second day. Before Wilson spoke, Hughes announced, “For the next witness, there will be no television. There will be no pictures taken.” Wilson was eighty-four and suffering from emphysema. But he had survived to see the federal government address the problem of alcoholism. “For me, this is an extremely moving and significant occasion. It may well mark the advent of the new era in this old business of alcoholism,” he said. The Apollo spacecraft had landed with the first men on the moon only a few days earlier. “This is splashdown day for Apollo. The impossible is happening,” Wilson said.49

  The following spring, the Hughes subcommittee introduced legislation that was nearly as ambitious as the moon shot. Hughes had asked a Washington lawyer, Peter Hutt, to draft the bill. Hutt had led the American Civil Liberties Union’s campaign to get the courts to recognize that alcoholism was an illness and to send drunks to treatment instead of jail. He was an expert on alcoholism. When Hughes gave him just a weekend to write the legislation, he closeted himself with young associates of his law firm and met the deadline, presenting Hughes with a bill, the Comprehensive Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation Act.

  Hutt and his associates had examined every federal program that could be used to help alcoholics and created an “administrative structure for a greatly expanded, comprehensive and for the first time well-coordinated federal attack on the problem of alcohol abuse and alcoholism.” “There was everything in it but the kitchen sink,” Hutt said later. The most important feature of the bill was the creation of a new federal agency, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. The Hughes bill also authorized expenditures of $300 million for grants to state and local governments, nonprofit organizations, and individuals providing services to alcoholics over the next three years. Mann called the Hughes bill “an emancipation act for alcoholics.”50

  Hughes and his staff now had the difficult task of moving the bill through Congress. The support of sober alcoholics would be a key to its success. Hundreds of them sought jobs in his office, and one woman, Nancy Olson, became a key player in the legislative campaign. Olson had been sober several years and was working part-time for a congressman when she became a volunteer in Hughes’s Washington office. She had been hired for a full-time position a few months before the Hughes bill was introduced.

  Olson wanted to see the bill passed without changes and often pushed her boss to oppose compromise measures. Hughes did not always listen to her, but she acted as a voice for alcoholics at important moments in the fight. During a committee hearing, a senator asked if a provision of the bill that barred discrimination based on a person’s drinking history would prevent him from firing an employee who got drunk and punched him in the nose. Hughes turned to Olson. “How do you feel about that, Nancy,” he asked.

  I was stunned and flustered. . . . I think I replied something like this, “Well, Senator Dominick, as a U.S. Senator you are exempt from provisions such as this. You can fire anyone you want to for no reason at all. But if the behavior is caused by a drinking problem, we would hope that you would first give your employee an opportunity for treatment and rehabilitation.”

  Hughes turned back to the senator. “That is how we alcoholics feel about it,” he said.51

  For the most part, the alcoholics had their way, but they did suffer setbacks. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism was created within the National Institute of Mental Health, raising concern that the problem of alcoholism might not receive the attention it deserved. A provision requiring the establishment of alcoholism treatment and rehabilitation in the armed services was removed because of a jurisdictional conflict with another Senate committee.

  No other significant amendments were made before the bill was brought to the floor of the Senate for a final vote in August 1970. No senator was willing to oppose the bill openly, and it was approved by voice vote. On returning to their office, some members of Hughes’s staff pulled bottles of whiskey from their desk drawers to celebrate. Olson didn’t object. “Still, it seemed a strange way to celebrate the passage of an alcoholism bill,” she said.52

  The fate of the Hughes bill was still uncertain. The House did not consider the legislation until late in the year, and it was possible that it would not come up for a vote before Congress adjourned. Even if it passed, there was a good chance it would be vetoed. President Richard Nixon was trying to dismantle Johnson’s welfare programs by turning over responsibility to the states. Two members of Nixon’s cabinet were arguing against adding an institute on alcoholism to the federal bureaucracy.

  Sober drunks across the country were convinced that their moment had come. AA does not endorse legislation. But by the early 1970s, there were more than five hundred thousand AA members worldwide, and many in the United States rallied strongly behind the Hughes bill. Calls and letters poured into the House Rules Committee, forcing the bill onto the floor where it was approved by another voice vote. Sober alcoholics in the Republican Party urged Nixon to sign the bill, including Thomas P. Pike, a prominent party member from California who had served in the Eisenhower administration, and James S. Kemper Jr., the president of Kemper Insurance Company.

  R. Brinkley Smithers may have played the decisive role. Smithers was the son of an IBM founder who had devoted much of his time and fortune to the alcoholism movement since getting sober at Towns Hospital in 1954. He persuaded D
on Kendall, the head of PepsiCo, to call the president, who was a close friend. Although Nixon was not happy about it, he signed the bill.

  Passing a bill didn’t matter much if there were no funds for implementing it. In 1971, Congress appropriated only $12 million of the $100 million authorized by the Hughes bill. Another $100 million had been earmarked for 1972, but the appropriations committee approved only $25 million. Olson reported that Hughes “blew his stack” and complained so loudly that he was finally invited to address the committee.

  During the walk to the hearing room, Olson and her boss were grumbling over the appropriation when Hughes suddenly stopped. “Listen to us, Nancy, son of an alcoholic dirt farmer in Iowa and the daughter of an alcoholic laboring-class man in Pennsylvania, carrying on about a ‘lousy $25 million,’” Hughes said. The sound of their laughter echoed in the marble hall.53

  CHAPTER NINE

  Boom and Bust

  BETTY FORD WAS IN deep trouble by the time her family recognized there was a problem in the spring of 1978. They were all aware that she took a lot of pills and drank martinis before dinner and highballs later. Her husband, Gerry, the former president of the United States, complained that it took her forever to get dressed. Although she was only fifty-nine, she seemed to be slowing down. “You were in second gear,” he said later. Her son Jack didn’t like to bring friends home. “I was always kind of peeking around the corner to see what kind of shape Mother was in,” he said. In the fall of 1977, after the Fords had left the White House, NBC hired Betty to narrate a performance of the Nutcracker ballet that was being televised from Moscow. But not even the embarrassment of bad reviews, including one that called her “sloe-eyed and sleepy tongued,” raised the family’s concern.1

  It was an outsider, Chuck Vance, who sounded the alarm. Vance was a Secret Service agent who often accompanied the former First Lady. He was also secretly dating Susan Ford, the youngest of the Ford children and only daughter. “Susan, you’ve got to do something about your mother, she’s slowly destroying herself,” Vance said. Susan angrily rejected his advice, but she began to see the problem for herself after dropping out of college and moving in with her parents in Rancho Mirage, California. During this time, her mother fell and chipped a tooth. Susan moved to a place of her own and was soon at odds with Betty, who was hurt when Susan stopped visiting frequently. Susan talked to her father about Betty, but neither of them had a solution.2

  Susan finally sought professional help from Dr. Joseph Cruse, Betty’s gynecologist and a recovering alcoholic. “I said, ‘Dr. Cruse, I’ve got this friend, and she’s got a problem,’ and he said, ‘Susan, your friend is your mother, isn’t she?’” Cruse told Susan he could arrange an intervention during which members of the family would confront Betty with examples of how her alcohol and drug abuse was hurting her and everyone around her. Susan discussed it with her father, who agreed to make a decision when he returned from a speaking engagement. While he was away, Susan and Cruse tried to talk to Betty. The doctor spent an hour and a half telling Betty the story of how he got sober, but only succeeded in putting her to sleep. She got angry at the end and insisted she was taking care of the problem herself. “You are all a bunch of monsters,” she said. “Get out of here and never come back.”3

  Susan called her father and urged him to return immediately. The four Ford sons were also summoned, and the family gathered in the former president’s office in Rancho Mirage on the morning of April 1 to plan the intervention with Dr. Joseph Pursch, who directed the alcoholism program at the US Naval Hospital in Long Beach, California. At 8 a.m., Pursch, Cruse, and the members of the family confronted Betty, who was still in her bathrobe. Gerry held his crying wife as they sat on a couch surrounded by their children. Everyone took turns talking, and when it was over, Betty agreed to go to Long Beach for treatment.

  Betty Ford’s hospitalization was big news. During her two years as First Lady, she had endeared herself to millions of Americans for her candor and her commitment to issues that mattered to women. She began to establish her reputation less than two months after her husband became president when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ford revealed that she had undergone a radical mastectomy, encouraging so many women to begin self-examinations that it created a notable increase in reported cases of breast cancer—“the Betty Ford blip.” The press jumped at the announcement that Ford had entered the Long Beach Naval Hospital. One TV station hid a camera in a bread truck so that it could drive onto the hospital grounds to take pictures. Soon Ford was receiving bags full of mail expressing concern and support. “I . . . was astonished at the amount of newspaper coverage, the editorial commending my heroism, my candor and my courage,” she said. “I hadn’t rescued anybody from a burning building, I’d simply put my bottles down.”4

  Betty had no intention of being as forthcoming about her addiction as she had been about breast cancer. The first public statement about her hospitalization said only that she was being treated for “overmedication.” She did not consider herself an alcoholic when she entered the hospital, and she was still denying it ten days later. Pursch grew concerned. He summoned her to his office, along with her husband, Cruse, and Pat Benedict, a nurse in recovery who had been assigned to Betty after the intervention. Pursch described the scene later:

  I said, “So far, you have only talked about drugs, but you are going to have to make a public statement saying you are also dependent on alcohol.” She said, “I can’t do that, I don’t want to embarrass my husband.” I said, “You are hiding behind your husband and if you don’t believe it ask him.” And she kind of looked over at the President and said, “Well?” And he said, “No, you won’t embarrass me.” She was hyperventilating, flushing, blanching, flushing, her blood vessels were going crazy.

  Betty had cried quiet tears during the intervention, but this time she broke down, sobbing loudly. “I had cried so much my nose and ears were closed up, my head felt like a balloon, all swollen,” she said. The next day, she released a second statement. “Due to the excellent treatment I have had here at Long Beach Naval Hospital, I have found that I am not only addicted to the medication I have been taking for my arthritis, but also to alcohol,” it said.5

  The truth is the First Lady was far from happy with her treatment. She was angry at Pursch. Benedict agreed that her boss had been rough, but she had witnessed similar scenes with other patients. “[T]hat’s how Pursch does things. . . . It was very hard on her because he isn’t tender,” she said. Betty was also mad at Gerry for refusing to defend her. She was still convinced that she wasn’t an alcoholic. “What I expected—or hoped—was now they’d all get off my back,” she said. A short time later, Ford found herself in a group session listening to a young woman deny that her drinking had hurt her family. “I knew her drinking had caused her folks a lot of trouble, and it was my turn to speak next and suddenly I was on my feet, and I said, ‘I’m Betty, and I’m an alcoholic, and I know my drinking has hurt my family,’” she said. This was a breakthrough not only because she acknowledged her alcoholism but because she had admitted it to her fellow patients. From the beginning, she had admired those who spoke frankly about their alcoholism, but she did not see herself as one of them.6

  Betty had no intention of saying anything more about it publicly. She had written a memoir, The Times of My Life, which was being prepared for publication in the fall, but she told Pursch that she was not going to add a chapter about her addiction. Later, when he offered her a tape of a well-known politician discussing his alcoholism, she handed it back. “You might as well know, I will never do stuff like that, so don’t count on my running around the country talking about how I am an alcoholic,” she said. Ford’s publisher insisted that she acknowledge what the public already knew, and she finally agreed to add a short postscript. “I am glad I didn’t win the argument,” she said later. “Too many people have written to tell me how that brief chapter gave them the courage to go for help.” Because of the increase in federal
support for alcoholism programs, there was somewhere for them to go. A quarter of a million alcoholics entered treatment in 1978, the year Betty Ford got sober. The number of alcoholism programs had grown from five hundred to twenty-six hundred in just five years. Business was booming.7

  Betty had been given several options during her intervention: she could remain at home and attend AA meetings, enter Pursch’s program at the Long Beach Naval Hospital, or travel to Hazelden, a pioneering rehabilitation center in Minnesota. She chose a rehabilitation program because she was told she would have a quicker recovery, and she selected Long Beach because she wanted to remain close to her family. The hospital was a military facility; reveille sounded in the morning; doctors and nurses wore uniforms, and regular inspections were conducted. Physical exercise was mandatory, and new patients were required to complete a twelve-minute run to test their fitness. Betty was excused from running and volleyball, but she described life in the hospital as “rough.” She was the oldest patient. Most of the others were young men and women who were addicted to alcohol, but she was addicted to pills, too. She had a hard time seeing that she shared the same problem as the young man who had started stealing liquor from his parents when he was eight or the young woman who sniffed the fumes from crankcase grease to get high.

  Betty probably would have been better off at Hazelden, the largest alcoholism rehabilitation center in the country. Located in Center City, Minnesota, forty miles north of Minneapolis, Hazelden occupied two hundred acres of former farmland. The founders, who were looking for a place where alcoholic clergy and other professionals could get sober, were attracted by its gently rolling fields and woodlands and the white-shingled farmhouse with a red roof that was located on a lake. The house had seventeen spacious rooms, including a large living room and dining room, well-stocked library, and sunporch. New buildings were added in the 1960s, providing accommodations for over 150 patients.