Bill Wilson and the Birth of AA

Bill Wilson was first and foremost an alcoholic in recovery. A stinking rotten drunk who by some divine grace was granted sobriety, was empowered to bring to the world this fellowship, this message. But I think like any gift of this magnitude, simply for to protect him, he was not granted. The full knowledge of what the price would be. He was spellbinding on his own story anytime I ever heard him. And I think everybody else had that same sense. Because I think what people realized they were listening to was the founding myth, I guess, would be. It's not a myth. It's reality. Simply a story of a founding. And that's what this was. And it was endlessly wanted and effective. Some of you people may ask, uh, why do these drunks continue to drink in the face of certain destruction? Why can't they stop? Well, this story will illustrate. One day I was sitting in a brokerage shop, and I fell into a conversation with a man. And I was to be the manager. Moreover, I was to have a daddy. The end. You know, the care was so great. Money came in, we began to buy. But now see what happened. One day, some old business acquaintances called me up. They said, Bill, we hear you're sober. They said, well, won't you go over in Jersey and do a piece of work for us? I said, sure. That evening we put up at a small hotel, and one of the boys brings out a jug. I said, well, what you got there? Why, they say that's Applejack, Jersey Lightning. No, no thanks, no, I'm not drinking, I can't handle it. They fall to playing cards. Every now and then the jug comes my way. With ease I say no thanks, because I can see my name on that contract. So quite easily I say no. Until about 10.30 perhaps. Something occurred within me. And if that could be ever fully explained, we would completely comprehend the mystery of this obsession of drinking. Why, Bill Wilson, in all your drinking, in Europe and then never in all your life have you had any Apple Jacks. Not one single drink of Jerry Delighted. And that idea began to take hold of me, so that when that jug was passed to me, a curtain had fallen between me and reality. So I said, thanks very much, I will have one little shot this time, it couldn't hurt me at all. I lay in that hotel drunk for three days. That, I submit, is not the habit of drinking. That is the obsession of drinking. That obsession that has condemned people like us, time out of mind, to insanity and death. You know, at the end of the last century, they were talking about the most important people in the century. From my personal perspective, there's not a more important person in the 20th century than Bill Wilson. I'd be a dead man without him. He had probably 30,000 wonderful opportunities not to go forward with AA. Discouragements that an ordinary man would have taken as sufficient. But he was not that sort. He was not an ordinary man. He looked like one. Well, he was tall, he was rather good looking in a dignified sort of way. But by and large, he didn't seem someone you would say, well, here's a Beethoven or here's a whatever. But he was an absolutely unusual man. There's no question about that, in my opinion. His father left immediately and his mother would soon follow. She left Bill and his sister Dorothy with her parents to become a doctor, never to be fully a part of his life again. Grocery store and I fiddle, fiddle, fiddle until I drove him just nuts. A desire so fierce. Bill would often tell the story. When he used it in instance, something that became... very characteristic of his life from that day forward. Maybe it already had been, but what he called power drives. He would set his eye on something, and he would work like a fiend to get it done. He got to be president of the class, captain of the baseball team, first violinist in the orchestra, but there was still one thing missing from his life. I'd had a terriority of gals until... The minister's daughter took me up. I say took me up because that's the way women do it. He had become enamored of, and apparently was reciprocated, a girl named Bertha Banford. And this has never been very well explained, but apparently the parents and Bertha went off to New York. And the next thing known back in Manchester is Bertha has died in an operation in New York City. This time I couldn't be a number one. I couldn't because the adversary was dead. It was so sudden. And shattering. That it simply took years for him to get over it. And would that be true of a normal boy? Or how abnormal was Bill to have that happen to him? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe my experience can have some value to somebody else. The most powerful thing I will ever have, and a lot of it is what I want to keep in mind, the most powerful The greatest gift that I can give anybody is where I was broken and healed. When I can share with somebody where my life was broken and healed will be the greatest gift I can give any alcoholic and a lot of other people too. I was entered into Norwich University, the military college of the state of Vermont. Meanwhile, I made the acquaintance of Lois Burnham, daughter of a Brooklyn physician. I think Lois came along and picked me up as tenderly as a mother does a child. And I was cured. Bill's love for Lois had a hitch, though. He was a country boy and felt he could never rise up to the level of her family's sophistication. But he was determined to do right by her. Even before they were married, they seemed to have a whole bunch of, you know, ideals that they were planning on living up to and theories about the way to live and be healthy and smart and well-read and educated. And they had all of those plans. And one of them was that they didn't believe in drinking. And then... And he writes to her in the summer of 1917, and she puts a note on the side of the letter that says, first drink, and she stars it. So it says, darling one, I went to a most peculiar party Sunday night. A lady and three daughters entertained us. ...has this experience of finding out that this stuff they're talking about is the elixir of the gods, for heaven's sakes. I mean, it does perfectly marvelous things for you. You talk, the women listen, even the men listen. All went fairly well, you know, everybody's very jolly, it's wartime and a few drinks here and there, as Bill himself said. Writing about it, everybody was drinking and having a grand time, and he was too. The first time I drank, it was a magical experience for me. It was like I had been holding my breath my whole life, and I finally exhaled, and I just felt like I fit in with everyone else. And I finally found my place in life. I felt grown up, mature, and I even was able to interact with guys that night on a level that I had never been able to do so. And so it was a solution for me from the very first night. I remember that there were three of us girls, and we had four drinks, and we each got one, and then there was one left over. And I guarded that drink from the very first night. I had to have more. from the very first time. When Bill came back from the war, it apparently never occurred to Bill to go back to Vermont. From the beginning, and he doesn't even say very much about this, but we are in New York. He connects with some people in the world of finance and had an act for it. Bill Wilson is sometimes referred to as a Wall Street broker and he never really was a broker. He got the idea in the 1920s when people were investing sort of wildly on rumors of going around and investigating these firms and finding out what was really going on. So Bill convinced Lois to quit her job, hop on a motorcycle and risk everything. for a chance at success. He bought shares of stock so he could look at the books of companies that interested him, and then wrote very detailed reports to send to his friends on Wall Street. And one way to find out what was going on in the plant is they're headed for the nearest bar at quitting time and, you know, sort of hoisted a few with the... with the workers who were out to find out what was going on in the factory. And he did this in a lot of places, and I think that his skill was being able to take lots of discrete pieces of information and see what the whole picture was that they made up. What Wilson brought back to the people who hired him was stuff that really allowed them to get rich. These were ordinary Joes that were making a lot of money fast, and Bill was one of them. You know, he had rented an apartment in Brooklyn. And it's not big enough, so he runs to the one next door and knocks down the wall between and has a big living room. And so I don't think they ever had a terrible time personally with each other, except over the booze. And she was forever forgiving of him. I mean, I don't know why I wouldn't. Lois said that she didn't know whether she or Bill wanted to have children more. Lois had had three miscarriages in their early marriage, and at one point they finally tried to adopt, and they waited for this baby to come, and the baby never came. But it was later on in life that her childhood friend fessed up to her that the adoption agency had contacted them for a reference and that she was unable to give a good reference because of Bill's drinking. Alcoholism is a treacherous disease. It is very difficult to admit to being an alcoholic because there's a real barrier to recognizing this. Addiction is this belief that something outside of me can fix something that's wrong. within me. I can find a new medicine, I can find a new woman, I can find a new car, I can find a new boat, I can find a new job, I can find a new... No, the emptiness is still there. The emptiness is still there. My family, his friends, we never saw any and we were just two people against the wall. That's the way it seemed to us. Finally, I'm going to... Around the same time that Bill is starting to really realize that he's powerless over his drinking, she writes a letter to him explaining how awful she's feeling. And she says, It seems each night as if I couldn't go through another, and yet another comes and yet another, till my heart is like a stone within me. It is so heavy and a great dullness spreads over me, till all things good or bad taste alike. She said she had a terrible time staying mad at him because he was so pathetic and so sincere about wanting to quit. Bill had really hit bottom when he met a man who had helped turn his life around. Like Bill, Dr. Silkworth lost everything in the crash of 29, but he found a home in a drying-out place called Towns Hospital. He had a knack for working with drunks, and though he couldn't offer a cure for alcoholism, he treated it as a disease. No formal introduction today. I agreed to abide by myself. Bill, do you want to... when you founded AA? Yes. If you don't mind, I'll start a little bit in the middle. All right. In the summer of 1934, I lay in a drying-out hospital on Central Park West. My wife was downstairs talking to the doctor, and she was asking the doctor why I couldn't stop drinking. And the good man was obliged to tell her that I had an obsession of the mind that condemned me to drink against my will. so that if the drinking was continued, I would be destined to go mad or to die. In fact, he told her, frankly, that she would soon have to lock me up if my life was to be saved. When the psychiatric asylums became almost the only resource that alcoholics had outside of jails in the opening decades of the 20th century, There was a sense, there was a kind of belief that there was no such thing as alcoholism as a primary disorder. There was only untreated underlying psychiatric illness. So what that meant was alcoholics were subjected to mandatory sterilization laws along with the mentally ill. It meant they were subjected to the heydays of electro and chemo convulsive therapies. It means they were subjected to psychosurgery, particularly prefrontal lobotomies. Theory that there was an alcoholic personality, and if they altered that personality by brain surgery, that it would cure their alcoholism. Then came that day when you had to work in the department store. It was November 11th, 1934, Armistice Day. And I proposed to go to Staten Island to play some golf all by myself. So Bill gets out to Staten Island, where this public golf course is, and he's riding on a bus. And the guy sitting next to him has got a rifle, a target rifle of some sort, and they get in a conversation about this. This wonderful rifle the guy's got and they're having a conversation and all of a sudden, accident. Latin farmer speaking. Obsession. He's telling this guy this story, and drinking his ginger ale. The new bus arrives, they get on the bus, they go to wherever they were gonna go, the end of the line, and now it's lunchtime. The guy says, why don't we go in and have some lunch? I think he was at a point where he really, really thought that self-knowledge was going to keep him sober. Understanding the problem, understanding how it worked in him was going to keep him sober. I mean, it wasn't even that his nose was rubbed in it. It was like he was smacked up the side of the head with a bat. You know, it was just, it was so clear that he believed in the depths of his soul the last thing he should be doing. The last thing he should be doing is picking up a drink. Next up, a drink. My name is Phil, and I'm an alcoholic. I had a brief period in New York City where I got good jobs and lost them, which is sort of the story of my life. I would get very good jobs. People would have a lot of confidence in me. I was able to not drink. I knew that I had to watch my drinking, and not really stop, but watch my drinking. But I would always pick up the drink and destroy everything. And I would always say, never, never, never again. Somewhere along the way, I picked up the drink, and the whole thing happened all over again, except worse. I hustled 42nd Street. I did just about anything with anybody, as long as a drink was involved. And finally wound up at the Bowery at the men's shelter at 3rd Street. And by the time I got there, I had pretty much determined that I couldn't function, that this world was not a place for me. And I think I had just about bottomed out. I didn't know what was wrong with me. I didn't know from alcoholism, but I was ready to listen and maybe not debate so much inside my head because I was a great debater, especially if anybody said anything about my drinking. I could always justify it, you know. I went on drinking. Quarter bathtub of debris. Bathtub, my friend. Species of gin, man. When one a- See nations free on the march for God. What Ebi brought to Bill was the whole Oxford Group message, which was you become part of our group and you acknowledge the existence of higher power and clean house, meaning clean up your life and so on. Something like that, which ultimately, of course, is expressed exquisitely in the AA program in the 12 steps. Lois comes home one day and finds this letter on her coffee table from Bill and it says, Dear Lois, I think I said that if matters approach to crisis, the inevitable result of the first drink, I should go to town. I am going there. I shall not delay a moment. Yours, you do not know how dearly, Bill. Nothing more, nothing less. No particular hope or faith. If there is a... lit up in a great glare. At length, of course, I'm in a different world. A great peace has settled down. Well, for me, that was the beginning. A feeling that everything was completely all right. That indeed, now I was up at last. That I had touched the ultimate reality of a loving God. The kind of thing that Bill had is a thing that absolutely takes the entire human... Persona, or the complex of mind, body, soul, psychology, the whole thing. And shakes it up and sets it down again, and it's all new. It's different. It is life change. And Bill said, I knew I was a free man. Oh boy, it would be fun to have such an experience, wouldn't it? That whatever is wrong, it's all right. God is in his heaven, all is well with the world. That is the bottom line of this kind of experience. And you go forth as Bill Wilson did, and you do what you can to make things better. And he spends months. Wandering around in and out of bars, grabbing hold of drunks, telling them they gotta get this. Well, it's very nice if they can, but of course none of them could. He didn't get a single soul to sober up doing that. And that's when Silkworth dragged him in and said, you're going at this wrong. This isn't gonna work. You can't get people to sit down and have your kind of spiritual experience. It isn't gonna happen. Tell them how bad it is. Go back to the precondition. Tell them they're hopeless. At this point, Bill was offered the chance to go to Akron, Ohio, to take control of a rubber machine corporation there. If he could win the confidence of its shareholders, he would become president and, more importantly, start making money again. We get to Akron. The deal, my friend is departing disgust. I'm in the Mayflower Hotel. For the first time since that experience in Towns Hospital, I began to be afraid. It was Saturday afternoon. The bar room was filling up. I found myself walking up and down. And there stood a church director, and absently I kept looking at him. Then suddenly I was seized with a real panic. I said to myself, look, my friend, you are in a fair way to get drunk. And then it occurred to me that even though the effort I had made with other alcoholics had apparently brought nothing to them, it had brought me to the point where I needed another. So that I can forget my troubles by talking to him. I need him as much as he... Bill was famous in telling his stories for making them sound good and not fussing too much with precise detail. And so the version of the story that comes down to us is that he called Reverend Tunks. And I said, I'm an admirer from New York. I'm in a bad way. I'm not... Henrietta has been praying for her good friend, Dr. Bob, who's a chronic alcoholic and can't stop drinking. They're ready to foreclose on his home. His life is a mess. His practice was about defunct. He was out of friends at the time he had gone into the Oxford group. He was reading the Bible. He was praying. He was doing everything the Oxford group said to do, and yet he was facing failure every time. So I think it was really difficult for Bob to have the hope that there would be, that the prayers would be answered. And we'd really make it snappy. There was a knock on the door at 5 o'clock. And there stood Bob and Ann. Bob beat into a pulp just shaking like. And he said, I'm glad to meet you, Bill, but I can only stay by 5. All we know is that apparently Bill told Bob what he knew about alcoholism and what his experience had been. You stop and think of it. Back at that famous meeting in Akron. Bill is sitting there talking to an older man, 15 years older, who isn't a doctor. But where is Dr. Bob? He's lost in the alcoholic labyrinth. Can't get out of it. Trapped. And so Bill Wilson, the little stockbroker from New York, sits down and starts telling him how bad it is. Mom, Dad, Jesus. You're the first guy that's ever come along that's told me what this really is. You seem to know the store on alcoholics. Moreover, you had it, didn't you? I said, that's right. I know you. And something passed between us. Well, Bob stopped drinking. So for a few weeks, things were looking up. Then Bob went off to a yearly medical convention in Atlantic City. He was blind from the start as an occasion for drinking. And he continued to drink on the train home, had sense enough and wit enough to get home. At this point, Bill thought he had bombed, that his new friend, Bob Smith, was not going to make it. And Ann pleaded with him to stay and give Bob one more chance. And now the job was to get Bob ready for this operation. They had these cures. I don't know what stage of the game they involved. Sauerkraut and carob syrup and kind of wild stuff, you know. But they were doing their best. And on the morning of the third or fourth day, daylight was just coming, and I remember how he looked across at me with some kind of a hope in his eyes, in spite of all the pain. He said, I'm going to go through with this thing. God willing. Well, I suppose he meant this operation. No! He said, I'm going to really go through with the kind of thing we've been talking about. I'm a guy who will never make a full revelation about myself to any human being. I'm one of those damn Yankees who just bottle things up and hang on and I can't let go. So I'm going to get a house cleaning and you're going to live. Well, he was still in rugged shape. Ann and I drove him to the hospital. Just outside, he had a final bottle of beer and one gookball. Went inside and performed that operation. Bill and Ann waited back home for word. Hours passed. No call. Dinner time passed. Not a word. And Bob's track record could only mean one thing. And what he's doing. And they don't find this out for some hours, is going around Akron, talking to everybody he's been skulking away from, telling them he's a drunk who has quit drinking and intends to change his life. Bill's success with Bob invigorated both of them. They decided to work together to help as many others as they could. Partnership would only be broken by Bob's death 15 years later. Well, certainly, Bill spent the summer in 1935 in Akron. He was staying with Dr. Bob. And certainly, they were working with drugs. They were doing that. But I don't think that was really the reason that Bill spent as much time as he did in Akron. Bill didn't give up the dream of... being successful with his proxy fight he had going. And I think one of the things that was driving that was that Bill felt his failure in the past had been caused by the fact that he had always given up and given in too easily. So there's some great letters between Bill and Lois during that time frame where she clearly wants him to come home. She misses him. And he says, I really have to stay here. He hung in there and he fought and he fought and he fought until finally it was absolutely clear that there was no possibility of him being successful in this. And once he'd done that, it was okay for him to back up and go back home to New York. Bill goes back to New York with a great deal of enthusiasm, starts carrying this message in a new way and very quickly picks up two new recruits. Hank P. and Fitz M. And Henry G. Parkhurst was the first drunk Bill sobered up in Townes Hospital after he returned from Akron in September of 1935. So there was a special bond with Hank. Red brick every floor. The next few years were a great experiment. Bill was willing to try anything to help people get sober. By this point, Hank Parkhurst had become Bill's right-hand man in New York. And together they fought through the failures to find out what worked. I had got back into business briefly. But again, Wall Street collapsed and took me with it, as usual. Failure, failure, failure was our constant companion. Wilson fundamentally understood was the issue with alcoholism in terms of recovery is not stopping drinking, it's not starting drinking. So this is the first society that made a significant distinction between the act of stopping drinking and building a life that allowed you not to return to drinking. I had found out about this meeting. Of all things, they had a woman speaker. And I kept thinking, these people drink like I do, and yet they're staying sober. How do they do it? And she said, the way we do it. She said, as we turn our life and our will over to the care of God, as we understand Him, for 24 hours at a time. She said, just one day at a time. And I looked at the clock, and it was about 10 o'clock. Tomorrow night, Thursday night at 10 o'clock, McGuire's will still be open. I don't know how I might feel, but I'm going to turn my life and my will over to him. Up to this time, AA was utterly simple. We didn't even have a name. Just called ourselves a bunch of drunks trying to get sober. But it wasn't until one late fall afternoon we began to put down the names of those people in Akron, in New York, and a little sprinkling in Cleveland. who had been dry a while and despite the large numbers of failures it finally burst in on us that 40 people had really significant dry time behind them i shall never forget that great and humbling hour of realization that a new light had begun to shine upon the children of the night Bill rushed back to New York to raise money so they could spread the word about their new answer for alcoholism. But he couldn't find anyone willing to help. I got one hell of a freeze from the gentleman in the well. He complains to his brother-in-law, who turns out his brother-in-law is a very successful doctor. And his brother-in-law says, you know, I know this guy who works for the Rockefellers. Could there be a better... connection for a guy who's in New York City and he's looking for funding for a project that's going to get people sober. The Rockefellers had been pulling A lot of money into this temperance movement for years and years and years. You want your sweet, innocent girls to take to booze so they can be enticed into honky-tonks by slick-haired vultures who prey on the flower of American womanhood. I say alcohol must go! Even though prohibition eventually failed, Rockefeller was still interested in the problem, and Bill was able to meet with some of his closest advisors, who took a real interest in helping Bill find a way to spread the word. Part of a year, Bill and Bob, along with Hank in New York, tried to solve this problem. Finally, the answer came in writing a book to show others how they learned to stay sober. But writing a book wouldn't put food on the table. So the story goes that Hank went down to the stationery store and got a blank stock certificate pad and started making out stock certificates for Works Publishing. We ride across the Works Publishing Company. Car value, $25. So we take a pan of these stocks at them, or you shouldn't. New York City, that could... They could fork over $25, so they came up with a time payment plan, $5 a month for five months to pay for your $25. And they started selling shares of stock. Now, there's these legendary stories that there were. Huge, huge, huge fights over the words and the verbiage used. Well, the fact of the matter is, in the beginning, that was not the case. Your chapters talk about alcoholism as they understand the problem. And I don't think there was a lot of over how they understood the problem. The arguments came up, we understand the solution. And we're putting on. I was really interested in what You know, I think one of the things I love about Alcoholics Anonymous is the fact that it's without dogma. It's without theology. There's no requirement to have any religion at all. The phrase, God as we understood him, was included in the steps to make the program available to everyone. Bill was looking for more of an open-ended thing, opening up the solution to more and more possibilities, so that it's a bigger tent. a bigger umbrella for people to get under. One of the things that intrigues me historically about the steps is how well those steps have held up in time. Part of that is... They're to be able to be reinterpreted over time. I'm talking historically now, but they're also broadened to be reinterpreted over the life of long-term recovery. In other words, the same 12 steps that people can understand hours and days into their recovery are reinterpreted for people in five years and reinterpreted for people who are 10 and 15 and 20. and 30 and 40 and 50 years into recovery. So that what began as a program of how do I stop drinking are the same steps that will be used by other people for profound spiritual growth long after the point of any appetite for alcohol as long ago disappeared. I was in prison, and I went to a meeting one day, and a fellow came in from outside, and he spent the entire meeting talking about that process of inventory. The fourth step in our program is the inventory step. Fourth and fifth have to do about identifying what we call causes and conditions, sort of examining my life. You know, what is it that drives me in such a strange kind of way? And so I listened to that fellow and went back and I said, I'm going to do that. And I sat down on the bunk in the cell, and I intended to write a little story about what a victim of circumstances I was, and I really wasn't this kind of guy, you know. That's what I had in mind. But literally, what happened, I wrote two lines about that. And then it wasn't a clap of thunder or anything, but all at once I think that delusion came to an end and I saw with clarity who I was. That day I surrendered. And I acknowledged deep, deep down that I can't drink. That war's over. It is over. And 50 years later, I have never doubted for one second. I... Understood from the beginning that I was listening to uncommon wisdom. I had that very word. These people know something that I didn't know. I mean, even such idiotically simple things, this is the first drink that does it. I didn't know that. One of the last two or three drunks I went on, I made a formal resolve that I would have but two drinks. Well, you have the first one, and the fellow making the next decision is a different fellow. He's chemically changed from the first, the guy who bought the first drink, you see. I didn't understand that. I didn't know that. I thought you were the same fellow all along. No, no, you're different. It was a rough haul to get there, but the book was finally finished. Nearly 5,000 copies sat in a warehouse, held hostage for lack of payment. Then a huge radio star agreed to have an AA friend of his on his show and promote the book. Bill and Hank saw golden opportunity in this and sent postcards to 20,000 doctors. In Akron, New York, Cleveland, the ears were to the radio. We visioned the books going out in carloads. Little Ruthie Hawk, Hank Parkhurst, and I just couldn't wait to get over to see what was coming into that box. We stuck it out for four days. And finally we went and looked in the box and you could see a few of these cards. I had a terrible thinking sensation. But Hank was an incorrigible optimist. He said, well, they couldn't put them all in the box. He said they got several mailbags full out there. So the clerk came with the cards. Hank said, ain't there any more? We took them over to the desk and we counted them. And there were 12. And ten of them were from doctors, obviously stewed themselves, who lambasted the hell out of us, and we had exactly two orders for the book Alcoholics Anonymous. And at that very opportune moment, the house in which Lois and I lived was foreclosed, and we and our furniture were set out in the street. And that was the state of the book Alcoholics Anonymous in the summer of 1939, and the state of grace that the Wilsons were in. As Lois put it, she and the drunks and Bill all had to go. They lost the only home she had ever known, the home she had been born in. They lived, as Bill put it, entirely at the goodwill of AA members for two years. What? It was really very confusing and difficult time. We're very lame. Say what Bill had a couple of job offers. One was from Townes, and then he had another one as well. And he was ecstatic. God, I'm finally getting back to work, and I can support my wife and buy food and put food on the table. And he went into the group and explained this, and they all just were frowning back at him. And they were like, Bill, don't do this. You can't do this. And so he was put in the place of having No money, no job, and then being asked to continue to have no money and no job and a wife to feed and himself to feed. But Bill thought it would only be for a few more years, expecting that he could then move on because the fellowship would be strong enough to survive on its own. Well, I think one of the biggest shocks to early Alcoholics Anonymous, and I think to Bill Wilson, was the fact that five months after the book comes out... Hank Parkhurst is drinking. That must have been a crushing and painful thing for Bill Wilson. I mean, they've been business partners together. They're in the same office together. They put this book project together. They've talked to the Rockefeller people together. I mean, Hank was a really critical, critical factor in the success of Alcoholics Anonymous. And Bill Wilson can't do anything to get him sober. I was full of fear, and I didn't know how to live life on life's terms. I didn't know how to face the world. I didn't know how to work. And so I did what anybody's going to do when they're that completely miserable, because I started drinking again. And I was off and running immediately, but it wasn't the same. It was more physical. Like, I just absolutely, you know, it was, I mean, sure, I don't like to think too much. I don't like to be present, but it was really, really, like, I couldn't physically stop drinking. And I went. Did the detox round and I would be out and I would call AA people and they would come pick me up and take me to a meeting and I would get to the meeting and I would walk out the back door. I wouldn't even stay for the meeting. I was just trying to get a ride across town and I tried to get money off of them or they'd come pick me up and take me and make me take a shower because apparently I stunk too bad to go to the meeting. So they'd make me take a shower and then take me to the meeting and every day they'd pick me up. They would act like that's the first time I was going to get sober. You know, like they never got sick of me. They never got sick of me. They never acted like I was wearing them out or I was whatever. It was always new. It's very interesting the change, I think, that took place in Bill Wilson's understanding of what alcoholism was. And where this change began was that story again going back that's retold so often. Bill's at the 24th Street Clubhouse. He's told there's another drunk who wants to see him. All time. Father Dowling, by the way, a non-alcoholic, was a chronic arthritic who really spent the whole of his life in great pain. And so to find a situation where there can be shared honesty, where two people let each other know how much they hurt, it's only in that setting, it seems, that healing can take place. This healing of the spirit, of the soul, of whatever part is being torn apart inside of us. And part of Bill's working with alcoholics was he had this thirst for more always. And he tells Dowling how this thirst is just something that, you know, will it ever be quenched? And Dowling's answer is no, never, Bill, because we are meant to thirst. The question is, where do we aim what we thirst for? And that his thirst to help alcoholics was surely an expression of his seeking of God. So what happened when AI began to be successful? It was electrifying, I kid you not. It was electrifying to the people in the program and to anybody who came up and looked at it. For example, like Jack Alexander, who in 41 did the article for Saturday Post. He came to scoff, he came to deride. He was sent to blow up this crazy notion that this spiritual program was going to work. He stayed to honor it. In fact, you'll see a picture of the club and a flock of us sitting before the fire. And with the advent of that piece, there was a prodigious rush of info. A Mrs. Helen Griffith appeared at our clubhouse meeting at 24th Street. She began to talk of a house in Westchester. She said we couldn't live forever in the club. We'd need a place like that. The woman was 48 years old when she became homeless. When they finally did make it to Stepping Stones, Bill writes a letter to Dr. Bob where he says, thank God that girl's finally being taken care of at last. My name is Nell Wing and I have no years of sobriety. I just want to tell you, I started doing Bill's work in 50 and then in 54 I started going up to bed for it. On Friday afternoon, Bill would pick me up in the station. Then we'd go home and Bill would say, let's sit down and do some of the old chestnuts. With the violin and the cello. On Saturday morning, that was the work day, and Bill would be dictating, which he liked to do. That's why he got up, because he liked to dictate at home. He didn't like to come down to the office and do all that dictating. And however, I was to learn later on what was going on in this era of the 40s. That was supposed to be an era of unity, and most of the time it was an era of disunity. Groups began to spring up everywhere, like mushrooms. We began to be bombarded by group problems. Bill was the lightning rod. People were always sending him letters. Oh, you know, our group's fighting about this, and what are we going to do about that? And he would send back some sort of solution. then there would be somebody would be charging for alcoholics anonymous admission and somebody else would complain and send him a letter so he'd write about that. We had an AA group in Richmond, Virginia that drinks beer at their meeting. We have women coming into the fellowship. Dr. Bob thought that if there were women around the men wouldn't get sober and one of Dr. Bob's famous sayings was under every skirt there's a slip. We have the we have the first attempts to racially integrate groups. Bill had gone out to the Rockland State Hospital and met a couple of black alcoholics there, and he invited them to come to the meeting in New York when they got out of the hospital. Well, when they showed up, members objected. So they took a vote on whether these two members could belong to the group. Now, these were AA members, people who had the 12 steps and the spiritual program and everything else, and they voted to exclude these two black men. that Bill had invited to the meeting. Well, instead of having a knock-down, drag-out fight about it, Bill asked him to take another vote. And this vote was whether black people should be, should have the program, whether they were entitled to have the AA program. And so they did vote and agreed that they should have the program. Well, then Bill got them to let the two men come to the meeting as observers. And Bill began to think about what are we going to do? Because he had, if you will, if I may put it this way, he had solved the problem of the individual drunk getting sober. Now. How do these individual drunks hang together long enough to stay sober? And that's where the traditions come in. Bill saw that AA as a movement would cease to exist if there weren't some set of practices to guide it. But he also knew how loud the objections would be to the thought of any kind of structure. So he made great use of AA's national newsletter, The Grapevine, to explain the concepts behind the 12 traditions. Now, it wasn't all going forward with great guns. There was a lot of dissension, a lot of second thoughts, a lot of disagreement and anger, and Bill was not one to give in. As I say, he could do a little arm-twisting when it was necessary. Bill knew he needed to have the fellowship's approval to move forward with the Twelve Traditions, and with Bob's blessing, he set out on a cross-country trip to get it. Alcoholics are really very explosive material, and they still are even sober. So the problem of the future for us is this. Will the disruptive influences among us finally tear us apart? I am supremely confident they won't. Not because we are a better people, but because we are a weaker people. And out of that group conscience, I believe will evolve the traditional principles. You know, he went three years to the school of law. And he never picked up his degree. He was drunk the time he was supposed to do it. But I always thought it paid off because AA is a brilliant instance, in my opinion, of the design of structure of an organization for survival. A genius. A genius is not a word I use lightly. I think the man is a genius for what he did with the 12 traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous. We just would not be here without the 12 traditions. We would not be here. I just didn't talk about alcoholism all the time to people. He talked about depressions. I've heard people come up to him and say thank you for saving my life twice. With the passing of Dr. Bob in 1950, Bill lost the only person who really understood his position and could help him carry the weight of AA's success. Bill Wilson was really worried about how Alcoholics Anonymous was going to continue to run into work. He was writing pieces saying, I need a real life. I just can't be doing this anymore. This thing should be self-sustaining. So, in 1955, Bill was preparing for St. Louis, where he formally turned over leadership of AA to the members themselves. Back in 1948, Dr. Bob and I wrote a joint piece in the grapevine, and we said, why can't we join AA too? Well, this is the day we join AA. This is the day you'll come of age. Bill formally handed over the leadership of AA to the Fellowship. He had wanted this for ten years, and finally the time had come. But the constant demands of AA had drained Bill and placed a strain on his marriage to Lois. The Hill House became not just a haven for Bill and Lois, but also a refuge from the unrelenting adoration of the fellowship. Always have trouble letting go of A.A., but A.A. refused to let go of him. He had become number one man in the one place he didn't want it. A society where everyone was equal, but him. Here's the man who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, but he couldn't be a player in A.A. Because he was just turned into some sort of icon, some sort of god. It came home to me strongly when my sponsor went to Mexico several years ago. And he mentions the fact that he had met Bill Wilson and shook his hand. And everybody in the meeting lined up and shook my sponsor's hand because that was the hand. that shook Bill Wilson's hand. I mean, I just, I don't know how, I don't know how Bill Wilson dealt with that. Of course, everybody is fairly familiar with the fact that I once suffered alcoholism, but I suffer also from split personality. I have a personality, say, as a patriarch of AA, floundering father, if you like. You see, a founding father must endorse anything or anybody or even say good things about your friend. But I am an anarchist. I am what I damn please if you will. One of the poor old drugs still trying to get on. There's a renegade quality to Bill Wilson that at the time, everybody else is ready to celebrate the achievements of AA. Bill's obsessed with the people who still aren't making it in AA. And that obsession is going to lead him into some boundary areas that could bring great controversy to AA. Bill Wilson's experiments with LSD. LSD. Those three letters conjure up such decadent imagery. Timothy Leary and the heyday of Haight-Ashbury. But this was before then, when it was still a drug of promise, not a drug of abuse. One sure way to prove the value of testing under doctor... That's why I'm commensurate. Take Comeback. Comeback eases... This was the 1950s. A time when the wonders of modern medicine seemed able to fix anything that was wrong with us. We have early reports coming from two psychiatrists, Hoffer and Osmond, really proclaiming this as a potential breakthrough in the treatment of alcoholism. And in the context, they're describing some alcoholics beginning to have a spiritual breakthrough under the influence of these LSD-guided experiences. that are really contributing to their development of sustained sobriety in individuals where many other methods had failed. My name is Norm. I'm an alcoholic. Well, I went to AA in an effort to quit. I wanted to quit. And AA just didn't work for me. I heard about LSD, a drug that some doctors in Western Canada had found out about and felt that it might help. I took it. Several times in hospital settings, in doctors' offices. Each experience lasted for several hours and did cause me to do a lot of thinking about myself. And then the doctor asked me if I would like to take LSD again. And my experience was instant. It changed my life, it changed my thinking, it changed the way I look at things. And that happened in seconds. And it was over, the whole experience was over. I never wanted LSD again, I went back to AA and worked very hard at it for a long time. And he really did go through a period of deep infatuation with this drug and the thought that this might both revolutionize the treatment of alcoholism and also be a tool for great spiritual enlightenment. It's unimaginably difficult to be that person. whom so many recovering alcoholics are looking up to with such expectancy, with such unspoken demands, and this was an extraordinary burden to carry. I think as his life went on, his spirituality was being drained by the thing he created. And more importantly, as the years went on, he felt himself to be farther and farther removed from that experience, that spiritual, that enlightenment that gave him the gift that he gave to us. Bill used LSD on and off for over five years as a way to explore his own spirituality, to recharge himself. But when LSD became a drug of abuse, Bill, like the doctors who had helped him, had to back away from using it. So Bill's search for what he called emotional sobriety continued. He wanted to be free of the depression and anxiety that plagued him. Then Dr. Abram Hoffer introduced him to niacin, also called vitamin B3, as a possible solution. After about two weeks, he was well. He lost his tension, anxiety, depression, his insomnia. He was able to sleep. And of course, he was therefore very much happier than he had been. He saw niacin as some kind of a cure or an aid in dealing with depression. And he started handing it out to people. He wrote the equivalent of three small books about vitamin B3. And I think this was part of the entrepreneur in him. He needed something new to work on. So he became very enthusiastic. And he became so enthusiastic, he made the international headquarters pretty angry at him. Bill develops a professional relationship with a woman, Helen Nguyen, who is occupied with Bill and the vitamin B3 therapy and Bill's experimentation with LSD. Is there a way of ending the thing with Helen then in 62? No, no, that's over. Bill didn't necessarily want to talk that much about Helen's relationship, but what she did say was that in most of Bill's darkest moments, Helen pretty much comforted him and brought him back to life, you know, possibly even Bill's wanting to commit suicide, Bill's wanting to just, you know, crawl underneath the bed and never come out. And Helen Wynne just helped him through that, helped him through his darkest days. Her soul was Helen Wynne. She was a very inspiring human being. She was very joyful, she was very light-giving, she was very intelligent, she was very gracious. She was very good at what she did, and she'd had some publicity when she was an actress, probably for some of her drinking escapades too, I think. He and you and Jed think I'm a bum. You're just a perfect woman, just a lily-white... Stop! Helen Wynne was a very competent editor of the Grapevine, and she wrote to me in the mid-50s and asked me to write an article with her, and we seemed to get along real well, and I met her in 1958. And she was just moving up to Pleasantville. She had a young son, but it was her relationship with Bill that apparently terminated her employment. I think from the very start, they were extremely aware that their attraction to each other was fraught with difficulty because... Both of them, particularly Bill, was extremely concerned about the future of AA. I do know that cost them a great deal. The very essence of AA is about this spirituality of imperfection and the idea that within that you would elevate one of the co-founders as sort of the perfect person. I don't think there's any allusion to that. I think if anything, it sort of adds testament that this recovery thing is complex, that we're going to... that people can stay sober and have other flaws that they're still going to continue to wrestle with and work on. That's the nature of recovery. And in this particular instance, my mother also suffered from depression and doubt and fear. So it was a blessing and a revelation to build to be able to be so open and trusting and fearless with another human being who loved him for whom he was. For sure he recognized who and what my mother was and took enormous pleasure in her company and I... Bless them. It's hard for me to believe that she couldn't have known about it. Lois was a very practical woman and I think she could have understood this about Bill and accepted it in her way. Bill and Lois had had 53 years together when he died and she was really devoted to him. He was the man in her life. It would have been very hard for them to separate, I think. You know, Bill adopted the St. Francis prayer in his later years. Got it from Father Dowling, his spiritual advisor. And it's almost a formula. I've often said I don't know that Bill was being at all pious in taking this prayer up. If you present me with hate, what's my response? My normal, natural human response is to hate you. Good and solid. But what old Francis said was, when you confront that, and Bill Wilson confronted a lot of this in his life later on, people who didn't like him and were jealous of him, you turn around and you spill back over them benignity, kindness, compassion, love, you know? It's an absolutely marvelous, marvelous thing. And Bill did it. Bill's visibility as the leader of AA began to reach society at large. He was offered an honorary degree from Yale University. But Bill turned it down because he felt he needed to set the best possible example for anonymity. Concerned that ego-driven members might follow and threaten AA's very survival. Likewise, he turned down Time Magazine's offer for a cover story. The impact of this thing could have been enormous, involving great numbers of people. So the saying no was something to keep awake nights about, and I did. I hope and believe that this was the right decision. It is the best that I can do. I leave it to you and to the future for whatever it may be worth. Bill's concerns for AA's future were tied to the state of his own health. Lifelong smoker. Developed emphysema. Much respect at fall. From ever afterwards he was a little more hesitant and a little slower and so on. Progressively so. I must tell you about his last appearance at these international conventions down in Miami, Florida. And he came Sunday and... There's a closing part of the program, and as we were all in this great big room, I got up on the stage, the curtains part, and of course the place just went wild with applause and cheers and what have you. And he, with effort, got himself to his feet and just made a very, very short talk. Dear folks, there's always something new in one's AA life. And what do you think it is with me this morning? It is that I'm speechless. So I can only say, may God bless and keep you, and Alcoholics Anonymous forever. He had an oxygen mask on. He could hardly breathe. And I held his hand for a few minutes. My mother was there, some other people. And I think everyone stood at the brink of powerlessness and bewilderment and just stood there watching. In thinking about how sick Bill was before he died, I don't think the average person realizes how sick you can be when you have emphysema, and when your lungs aren't working, and when you're not getting any air. It's torture. He was so suffering from lack of oxygen to his brain that he was actually hallucinating. The story came out that on his deathbed, Bill asks for alcohol. There's nothing to be surprised at. This is the most natural thing in the world for an alcoholic who's under the influence of drugs, obviously. Some of the brain cells and chemicals are not acting normally, and I find nothing unusual and nothing to be scandalized in it. This is the nature of alcoholism. This is the nature of alcoholism. Alcoholism is, Bill referred to alcohol in the book Alcoholics Anonymous as cunning. baffling and powerful. I saw this extraordinary man who had given this extraordinary gift to the world doing battle with his personal demons, who came to haunt him, to attack him at the end of his life, fighting for his breath, fighting to stay conscious, fighting to keep eye contact, hold one's hand to... to say I'm still here. The co-founder of the most successful effort ever to help alcoholics stay dry died late Sunday and as he had provided then gave up his anonymity. He was William G. Wilson, billed for the thousands of drunks who found help in his example and when he died at 76 he had not had a drink in 36 years. And he once explained why AAs stay anonymous. Not to avoid a stigma, he said, but to keep our fool egos from running hog wild after money and fame at AA's expense. It's not anything I'm inclined to spill over about, but I am eternally grateful the man lived and did what he did. You say, well, somebody else might have done it. Yeah, but he's the one who did it for me, you see. He piloted this course out of the very deep woods that alcoholism is. I think his contribution to the human race is of an order that has not yet been fully realized. This whole story a lot, but I got to be editor of the grapevine and not very long sober. I think I was editor from 63 to 68 and I was sober only four years when I got the job. So I got into it and went along fine for all of five years. I think I was something of a fair-haired boy because I was the first editor in some years who hadn't caught up and carried on. And so we put a The issue that had on the cover winds of change, well that's not a great word to use around AA circuits. If I had it to do over, I think I'd have thought that one through again. You talk about issues that didn't make the grade. I realized within a few days of the emergence of this on the scene that I had created a storm. But the thing I got from it was a lasting permanent memory of Bill Wilson operating in a crisis. The crisis was me, and they had to muzzle this bird who was about to run away with their magazine. I thought I was in for a dropping, you know, but not at all. He suggested that I had perhaps been a tad imprudent, and then we wandered off talking about the Oxford Group and its difficulties and this and that. Just a lovely conversation. That's all there was to it. It was my exit interview. But... At this point, all I'm doing is recording that he was a very great guy to get fired by. BF-WATCH TV 2021 BF-WATCH TV 2021

He was spellbinding on his own story anytime I ever heard him. And I think everybody else had that same sense. Because I think what people realized they were listening to was the founding myth, I guess, would be. It's not a myth. It's reality.

Simply a story of a founding. And that's what this was. And it was endlessly wanted and effective. Some of you people may ask, uh, why do these drunks continue to drink in the face of certain destruction? Why can't they stop?

Well, this story will illustrate. One day I was sitting in a brokerage shop, and I fell into a conversation with a man. And I was to be the manager. Moreover, I was to have a daddy. The end.

You know, the care was so great. Money came in, we began to buy. But now see what happened.

One day, some old business acquaintances called me up. They said, Bill, we hear you're sober. They said, well, won't you go over in Jersey and do a piece of work for us?

I said, sure. That evening we put up at a small hotel, and one of the boys brings out a jug. I said, well, what you got there?

Why, they say that's Applejack, Jersey Lightning. No, no thanks, no, I'm not drinking, I can't handle it. They fall to playing cards. Every now and then the jug comes my way. With ease I say no thanks, because I can see my name on that contract.

So quite easily I say no. Until about 10.30 perhaps. Something occurred within me. And if that could be ever fully explained, we would completely comprehend the mystery of this obsession of drinking.

Why, Bill Wilson, in all your drinking, in Europe and then never in all your life have you had any Apple Jacks. Not one single drink of Jerry Delighted. And that idea began to take hold of me, so that when that jug was passed to me, a curtain had fallen between me and reality. So I said, thanks very much, I will have one little shot this time, it couldn't hurt me at all. I lay in that hotel drunk for three days.

That, I submit, is not the habit of drinking. That is the obsession of drinking. That obsession that has condemned people like us, time out of mind, to insanity and death. You know, at the end of the last century, they were talking about the most important people in the century. From my personal perspective, there's not a more important person in the 20th century than Bill Wilson.

I'd be a dead man without him. He had probably 30,000 wonderful opportunities not to go forward with AA. Discouragements that an ordinary man would have taken as sufficient.

But he was not that sort. He was not an ordinary man. He looked like one.

Well, he was tall, he was rather good looking in a dignified sort of way. But by and large, he didn't seem someone you would say, well, here's a Beethoven or here's a whatever. But he was an absolutely unusual man.

There's no question about that, in my opinion. His father left immediately and his mother would soon follow. She left Bill and his sister Dorothy with her parents to become a doctor, never to be fully a part of his life again. Grocery store and I fiddle, fiddle, fiddle until I drove him just nuts. A desire so fierce.

Bill would often tell the story. When he used it in instance, something that became... very characteristic of his life from that day forward.

Maybe it already had been, but what he called power drives. He would set his eye on something, and he would work like a fiend to get it done. He got to be president of the class, captain of the baseball team, first violinist in the orchestra, but there was still one thing missing from his life. I'd had a terriority of gals until...

The minister's daughter took me up. I say took me up because that's the way women do it. He had become enamored of, and apparently was reciprocated, a girl named Bertha Banford. And this has never been very well explained, but apparently the parents and Bertha went off to New York. And the next thing known back in Manchester is Bertha has died in an operation in New York City.

This time I couldn't be a number one. I couldn't because the adversary was dead. It was so sudden.

And shattering. That it simply took years for him to get over it. And would that be true of a normal boy?

Or how abnormal was Bill to have that happen to him? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe my experience can have some value to somebody else. The most powerful thing I will ever have, and a lot of it is what I want to keep in mind, the most powerful The greatest gift that I can give anybody is where I was broken and healed.

When I can share with somebody where my life was broken and healed will be the greatest gift I can give any alcoholic and a lot of other people too. I was entered into Norwich University, the military college of the state of Vermont. Meanwhile, I made the acquaintance of Lois Burnham, daughter of a Brooklyn physician.

I think Lois came along and picked me up as tenderly as a mother does a child. And I was cured. Bill's love for Lois had a hitch, though. He was a country boy and felt he could never rise up to the level of her family's sophistication.

But he was determined to do right by her. Even before they were married, they seemed to have a whole bunch of, you know, ideals that they were planning on living up to and theories about the way to live and be healthy and smart and well-read and educated. And they had all of those plans.

And one of them was that they didn't believe in drinking. And then... And he writes to her in the summer of 1917, and she puts a note on the side of the letter that says, first drink, and she stars it.

So it says, darling one, I went to a most peculiar party Sunday night. A lady and three daughters entertained us. ...has this experience of finding out that this stuff they're talking about is the elixir of the gods, for heaven's sakes. I mean, it does perfectly marvelous things for you. You talk, the women listen, even the men listen.

All went fairly well, you know, everybody's very jolly, it's wartime and a few drinks here and there, as Bill himself said. Writing about it, everybody was drinking and having a grand time, and he was too. The first time I drank, it was a magical experience for me.

It was like I had been holding my breath my whole life, and I finally exhaled, and I just felt like I fit in with everyone else. And I finally found my place in life. I felt grown up, mature, and I even was able to interact with guys that night on a level that I had never been able to do so. And so it was a solution for me from the very first night.

I remember that there were three of us girls, and we had four drinks, and we each got one, and then there was one left over. And I guarded that drink from the very first night. I had to have more.

from the very first time. When Bill came back from the war, it apparently never occurred to Bill to go back to Vermont. From the beginning, and he doesn't even say very much about this, but we are in New York. He connects with some people in the world of finance and had an act for it.

Bill Wilson is sometimes referred to as a Wall Street broker and he never really was a broker. He got the idea in the 1920s when people were investing sort of wildly on rumors of going around and investigating these firms and finding out what was really going on. So Bill convinced Lois to quit her job, hop on a motorcycle and risk everything.

for a chance at success. He bought shares of stock so he could look at the books of companies that interested him, and then wrote very detailed reports to send to his friends on Wall Street. And one way to find out what was going on in the plant is they're headed for the nearest bar at quitting time and, you know, sort of hoisted a few with the... with the workers who were out to find out what was going on in the factory.

And he did this in a lot of places, and I think that his skill was being able to take lots of discrete pieces of information and see what the whole picture was that they made up. What Wilson brought back to the people who hired him was stuff that really allowed them to get rich. These were ordinary Joes that were making a lot of money fast, and Bill was one of them. You know, he had rented an apartment in Brooklyn.

And it's not big enough, so he runs to the one next door and knocks down the wall between and has a big living room. And so I don't think they ever had a terrible time personally with each other, except over the booze. And she was forever forgiving of him.

I mean, I don't know why I wouldn't. Lois said that she didn't know whether she or Bill wanted to have children more. Lois had had three miscarriages in their early marriage, and at one point they finally tried to adopt, and they waited for this baby to come, and the baby never came. But it was later on in life that her childhood friend fessed up to her that the adoption agency had contacted them for a reference and that she was unable to give a good reference because of Bill's drinking.

Alcoholism is a treacherous disease. It is very difficult to admit to being an alcoholic because there's a real barrier to recognizing this. Addiction is this belief that something outside of me can fix something that's wrong. within me.

I can find a new medicine, I can find a new woman, I can find a new car, I can find a new boat, I can find a new job, I can find a new... No, the emptiness is still there. The emptiness is still there.

My family, his friends, we never saw any and we were just two people against the wall. That's the way it seemed to us. Finally, I'm going to... Around the same time that Bill is starting to really realize that he's powerless over his drinking, she writes a letter to him explaining how awful she's feeling. And she says, It seems each night as if I couldn't go through another, and yet another comes and yet another, till my heart is like a stone within me.

It is so heavy and a great dullness spreads over me, till all things good or bad taste alike. She said she had a terrible time staying mad at him because he was so pathetic and so sincere about wanting to quit. Bill had really hit bottom when he met a man who had helped turn his life around. Like Bill, Dr. Silkworth lost everything in the crash of 29, but he found a home in a drying-out place called Towns Hospital. He had a knack for working with drunks, and though he couldn't offer a cure for alcoholism, he treated it as a disease.

No formal introduction today. I agreed to abide by myself. Bill, do you want to... when you founded AA?

Yes. If you don't mind, I'll start a little bit in the middle. All right.

In the summer of 1934, I lay in a drying-out hospital on Central Park West. My wife was downstairs talking to the doctor, and she was asking the doctor why I couldn't stop drinking. And the good man was obliged to tell her that I had an obsession of the mind that condemned me to drink against my will.

so that if the drinking was continued, I would be destined to go mad or to die. In fact, he told her, frankly, that she would soon have to lock me up if my life was to be saved. When the psychiatric asylums became almost the only resource that alcoholics had outside of jails in the opening decades of the 20th century, There was a sense, there was a kind of belief that there was no such thing as alcoholism as a primary disorder.

There was only untreated underlying psychiatric illness. So what that meant was alcoholics were subjected to mandatory sterilization laws along with the mentally ill. It meant they were subjected to the heydays of electro and chemo convulsive therapies.

It means they were subjected to psychosurgery, particularly prefrontal lobotomies. Theory that there was an alcoholic personality, and if they altered that personality by brain surgery, that it would cure their alcoholism. Then came that day when you had to work in the department store.

It was November 11th, 1934, Armistice Day. And I proposed to go to Staten Island to play some golf all by myself. So Bill gets out to Staten Island, where this public golf course is, and he's riding on a bus. And the guy sitting next to him has got a rifle, a target rifle of some sort, and they get in a conversation about this.

This wonderful rifle the guy's got and they're having a conversation and all of a sudden, accident. Latin farmer speaking. Obsession. He's telling this guy this story, and drinking his ginger ale. The new bus arrives, they get on the bus, they go to wherever they were gonna go, the end of the line, and now it's lunchtime.

The guy says, why don't we go in and have some lunch? I think he was at a point where he really, really thought that self-knowledge was going to keep him sober. Understanding the problem, understanding how it worked in him was going to keep him sober.

I mean, it wasn't even that his nose was rubbed in it. It was like he was smacked up the side of the head with a bat. You know, it was just, it was so clear that he believed in the depths of his soul the last thing he should be doing.

The last thing he should be doing is picking up a drink. Next up, a drink. My name is Phil, and I'm an alcoholic. I had a brief period in New York City where I got good jobs and lost them, which is sort of the story of my life. I would get very good jobs.

People would have a lot of confidence in me. I was able to not drink. I knew that I had to watch my drinking, and not really stop, but watch my drinking.

But I would always pick up the drink and destroy everything. And I would always say, never, never, never again. Somewhere along the way, I picked up the drink, and the whole thing happened all over again, except worse. I hustled 42nd Street.

I did just about anything with anybody, as long as a drink was involved. And finally wound up at the Bowery at the men's shelter at 3rd Street. And by the time I got there, I had pretty much determined that I couldn't function, that this world was not a place for me. And I think I had just about bottomed out. I didn't know what was wrong with me.

I didn't know from alcoholism, but I was ready to listen and maybe not debate so much inside my head because I was a great debater, especially if anybody said anything about my drinking. I could always justify it, you know. I went on drinking.

Quarter bathtub of debris. Bathtub, my friend. Species of gin, man. When one a- See nations free on the march for God.

What Ebi brought to Bill was the whole Oxford Group message, which was you become part of our group and you acknowledge the existence of higher power and clean house, meaning clean up your life and so on. Something like that, which ultimately, of course, is expressed exquisitely in the AA program in the 12 steps. Lois comes home one day and finds this letter on her coffee table from Bill and it says, Dear Lois, I think I said that if matters approach to crisis, the inevitable result of the first drink, I should go to town. I am going there.

I shall not delay a moment. Yours, you do not know how dearly, Bill. Nothing more, nothing less. No particular hope or faith.

If there is a... lit up in a great glare. At length, of course, I'm in a different world. A great peace has settled down. Well, for me, that was the beginning.

A feeling that everything was completely all right. That indeed, now I was up at last. That I had touched the ultimate reality of a loving God. The kind of thing that Bill had is a thing that absolutely takes the entire human... Persona, or the complex of mind, body, soul, psychology, the whole thing.

And shakes it up and sets it down again, and it's all new. It's different. It is life change. And Bill said, I knew I was a free man. Oh boy, it would be fun to have such an experience, wouldn't it?

That whatever is wrong, it's all right. God is in his heaven, all is well with the world. That is the bottom line of this kind of experience. And you go forth as Bill Wilson did, and you do what you can to make things better. And he spends months.

Wandering around in and out of bars, grabbing hold of drunks, telling them they gotta get this. Well, it's very nice if they can, but of course none of them could. He didn't get a single soul to sober up doing that.

And that's when Silkworth dragged him in and said, you're going at this wrong. This isn't gonna work. You can't get people to sit down and have your kind of spiritual experience.

It isn't gonna happen. Tell them how bad it is. Go back to the precondition.

Tell them they're hopeless. At this point, Bill was offered the chance to go to Akron, Ohio, to take control of a rubber machine corporation there. If he could win the confidence of its shareholders, he would become president and, more importantly, start making money again.

We get to Akron. The deal, my friend is departing disgust. I'm in the Mayflower Hotel. For the first time since that experience in Towns Hospital, I began to be afraid. It was Saturday afternoon.

The bar room was filling up. I found myself walking up and down. And there stood a church director, and absently I kept looking at him.

Then suddenly I was seized with a real panic. I said to myself, look, my friend, you are in a fair way to get drunk. And then it occurred to me that even though the effort I had made with other alcoholics had apparently brought nothing to them, it had brought me to the point where I needed another.

So that I can forget my troubles by talking to him. I need him as much as he... Bill was famous in telling his stories for making them sound good and not fussing too much with precise detail. And so the version of the story that comes down to us is that he called Reverend Tunks. And I said, I'm an admirer from New York.

I'm in a bad way. I'm not... Henrietta has been praying for her good friend, Dr. Bob, who's a chronic alcoholic and can't stop drinking.

They're ready to foreclose on his home. His life is a mess. His practice was about defunct.

He was out of friends at the time he had gone into the Oxford group. He was reading the Bible. He was praying. He was doing everything the Oxford group said to do, and yet he was facing failure every time. So I think it was really difficult for Bob to have the hope that there would be, that the prayers would be answered.

And we'd really make it snappy. There was a knock on the door at 5 o'clock. And there stood Bob and Ann. Bob beat into a pulp just shaking like.

And he said, I'm glad to meet you, Bill, but I can only stay by 5. All we know is that apparently Bill told Bob what he knew about alcoholism and what his experience had been. You stop and think of it. Back at that famous meeting in Akron.

Bill is sitting there talking to an older man, 15 years older, who isn't a doctor. But where is Dr. Bob? He's lost in the alcoholic labyrinth.

Can't get out of it. Trapped. And so Bill Wilson, the little stockbroker from New York, sits down and starts telling him how bad it is.

Mom, Dad, Jesus. You're the first guy that's ever come along that's told me what this really is. You seem to know the store on alcoholics. Moreover, you had it, didn't you?

I said, that's right. I know you. And something passed between us. Well, Bob stopped drinking.

So for a few weeks, things were looking up. Then Bob went off to a yearly medical convention in Atlantic City. He was blind from the start as an occasion for drinking. And he continued to drink on the train home, had sense enough and wit enough to get home. At this point, Bill thought he had bombed, that his new friend, Bob Smith, was not going to make it.

And Ann pleaded with him to stay and give Bob one more chance. And now the job was to get Bob ready for this operation. They had these cures. I don't know what stage of the game they involved. Sauerkraut and carob syrup and kind of wild stuff, you know.

But they were doing their best. And on the morning of the third or fourth day, daylight was just coming, and I remember how he looked across at me with some kind of a hope in his eyes, in spite of all the pain. He said, I'm going to go through with this thing.

God willing. Well, I suppose he meant this operation. No!

He said, I'm going to really go through with the kind of thing we've been talking about. I'm a guy who will never make a full revelation about myself to any human being. I'm one of those damn Yankees who just bottle things up and hang on and I can't let go.

So I'm going to get a house cleaning and you're going to live. Well, he was still in rugged shape. Ann and I drove him to the hospital.

Just outside, he had a final bottle of beer and one gookball. Went inside and performed that operation. Bill and Ann waited back home for word. Hours passed. No call.

Dinner time passed. Not a word. And Bob's track record could only mean one thing.

And what he's doing. And they don't find this out for some hours, is going around Akron, talking to everybody he's been skulking away from, telling them he's a drunk who has quit drinking and intends to change his life. Bill's success with Bob invigorated both of them. They decided to work together to help as many others as they could.

Partnership would only be broken by Bob's death 15 years later. Well, certainly, Bill spent the summer in 1935 in Akron. He was staying with Dr. Bob. And certainly, they were working with drugs. They were doing that.

But I don't think that was really the reason that Bill spent as much time as he did in Akron. Bill didn't give up the dream of... being successful with his proxy fight he had going. And I think one of the things that was driving that was that Bill felt his failure in the past had been caused by the fact that he had always given up and given in too easily.

So there's some great letters between Bill and Lois during that time frame where she clearly wants him to come home. She misses him. And he says, I really have to stay here. He hung in there and he fought and he fought and he fought until finally it was absolutely clear that there was no possibility of him being successful in this. And once he'd done that, it was okay for him to back up and go back home to New York.

Bill goes back to New York with a great deal of enthusiasm, starts carrying this message in a new way and very quickly picks up two new recruits. Hank P. and Fitz M. And Henry G. Parkhurst was the first drunk Bill sobered up in Townes Hospital after he returned from Akron in September of 1935. So there was a special bond with Hank. Red brick every floor. The next few years were a great experiment. Bill was willing to try anything to help people get sober.

By this point, Hank Parkhurst had become Bill's right-hand man in New York. And together they fought through the failures to find out what worked. I had got back into business briefly.

But again, Wall Street collapsed and took me with it, as usual. Failure, failure, failure was our constant companion. Wilson fundamentally understood was the issue with alcoholism in terms of recovery is not stopping drinking, it's not starting drinking. So this is the first society that made a significant distinction between the act of stopping drinking and building a life that allowed you not to return to drinking.

I had found out about this meeting. Of all things, they had a woman speaker. And I kept thinking, these people drink like I do, and yet they're staying sober. How do they do it?

And she said, the way we do it. She said, as we turn our life and our will over to the care of God, as we understand Him, for 24 hours at a time. She said, just one day at a time.

And I looked at the clock, and it was about 10 o'clock. Tomorrow night, Thursday night at 10 o'clock, McGuire's will still be open. I don't know how I might feel, but I'm going to turn my life and my will over to him.

Up to this time, AA was utterly simple. We didn't even have a name. Just called ourselves a bunch of drunks trying to get sober. But it wasn't until one late fall afternoon we began to put down the names of those people in Akron, in New York, and a little sprinkling in Cleveland.

who had been dry a while and despite the large numbers of failures it finally burst in on us that 40 people had really significant dry time behind them i shall never forget that great and humbling hour of realization that a new light had begun to shine upon the children of the night Bill rushed back to New York to raise money so they could spread the word about their new answer for alcoholism. But he couldn't find anyone willing to help. I got one hell of a freeze from the gentleman in the well. He complains to his brother-in-law, who turns out his brother-in-law is a very successful doctor. And his brother-in-law says, you know, I know this guy who works for the Rockefellers.

Could there be a better... connection for a guy who's in New York City and he's looking for funding for a project that's going to get people sober. The Rockefellers had been pulling A lot of money into this temperance movement for years and years and years. You want your sweet, innocent girls to take to booze so they can be enticed into honky-tonks by slick-haired vultures who prey on the flower of American womanhood.

I say alcohol must go! Even though prohibition eventually failed, Rockefeller was still interested in the problem, and Bill was able to meet with some of his closest advisors, who took a real interest in helping Bill find a way to spread the word. Part of a year, Bill and Bob, along with Hank in New York, tried to solve this problem. Finally, the answer came in writing a book to show others how they learned to stay sober. But writing a book wouldn't put food on the table.

So the story goes that Hank went down to the stationery store and got a blank stock certificate pad and started making out stock certificates for Works Publishing. We ride across the Works Publishing Company. Car value, $25. So we take a pan of these stocks at them, or you shouldn't.

New York City, that could... They could fork over $25, so they came up with a time payment plan, $5 a month for five months to pay for your $25. And they started selling shares of stock. Now, there's these legendary stories that there were.

Huge, huge, huge fights over the words and the verbiage used. Well, the fact of the matter is, in the beginning, that was not the case. Your chapters talk about alcoholism as they understand the problem. And I don't think there was a lot of over how they understood the problem. The arguments came up, we understand the solution.

And we're putting on. I was really interested in what You know, I think one of the things I love about Alcoholics Anonymous is the fact that it's without dogma. It's without theology. There's no requirement to have any religion at all. The phrase, God as we understood him, was included in the steps to make the program available to everyone.

Bill was looking for more of an open-ended thing, opening up the solution to more and more possibilities, so that it's a bigger tent. a bigger umbrella for people to get under. One of the things that intrigues me historically about the steps is how well those steps have held up in time. Part of that is... They're to be able to be reinterpreted over time.

I'm talking historically now, but they're also broadened to be reinterpreted over the life of long-term recovery. In other words, the same 12 steps that people can understand hours and days into their recovery are reinterpreted for people in five years and reinterpreted for people who are 10 and 15 and 20. and 30 and 40 and 50 years into recovery. So that what began as a program of how do I stop drinking are the same steps that will be used by other people for profound spiritual growth long after the point of any appetite for alcohol as long ago disappeared.

I was in prison, and I went to a meeting one day, and a fellow came in from outside, and he spent the entire meeting talking about that process of inventory. The fourth step in our program is the inventory step. Fourth and fifth have to do about identifying what we call causes and conditions, sort of examining my life. You know, what is it that drives me in such a strange kind of way?

And so I listened to that fellow and went back and I said, I'm going to do that. And I sat down on the bunk in the cell, and I intended to write a little story about what a victim of circumstances I was, and I really wasn't this kind of guy, you know. That's what I had in mind. But literally, what happened, I wrote two lines about that. And then it wasn't a clap of thunder or anything, but all at once I think that delusion came to an end and I saw with clarity who I was.

That day I surrendered. And I acknowledged deep, deep down that I can't drink. That war's over. It is over. And 50 years later, I have never doubted for one second.

I... Understood from the beginning that I was listening to uncommon wisdom. I had that very word.

These people know something that I didn't know. I mean, even such idiotically simple things, this is the first drink that does it. I didn't know that.

One of the last two or three drunks I went on, I made a formal resolve that I would have but two drinks. Well, you have the first one, and the fellow making the next decision is a different fellow. He's chemically changed from the first, the guy who bought the first drink, you see. I didn't understand that.

I didn't know that. I thought you were the same fellow all along. No, no, you're different.

It was a rough haul to get there, but the book was finally finished. Nearly 5,000 copies sat in a warehouse, held hostage for lack of payment. Then a huge radio star agreed to have an AA friend of his on his show and promote the book. Bill and Hank saw golden opportunity in this and sent postcards to 20,000 doctors. In Akron, New York, Cleveland, the ears were to the radio.

We visioned the books going out in carloads. Little Ruthie Hawk, Hank Parkhurst, and I just couldn't wait to get over to see what was coming into that box. We stuck it out for four days.

And finally we went and looked in the box and you could see a few of these cards. I had a terrible thinking sensation. But Hank was an incorrigible optimist. He said, well, they couldn't put them all in the box. He said they got several mailbags full out there.

So the clerk came with the cards. Hank said, ain't there any more? We took them over to the desk and we counted them. And there were 12. And ten of them were from doctors, obviously stewed themselves, who lambasted the hell out of us, and we had exactly two orders for the book Alcoholics Anonymous. And at that very opportune moment, the house in which Lois and I lived was foreclosed, and we and our furniture were set out in the street.

And that was the state of the book Alcoholics Anonymous in the summer of 1939, and the state of grace that the Wilsons were in. As Lois put it, she and the drunks and Bill all had to go. They lost the only home she had ever known, the home she had been born in. They lived, as Bill put it, entirely at the goodwill of AA members for two years. What?

It was really very confusing and difficult time. We're very lame. Say what Bill had a couple of job offers. One was from Townes, and then he had another one as well.

And he was ecstatic. God, I'm finally getting back to work, and I can support my wife and buy food and put food on the table. And he went into the group and explained this, and they all just were frowning back at him.

And they were like, Bill, don't do this. You can't do this. And so he was put in the place of having No money, no job, and then being asked to continue to have no money and no job and a wife to feed and himself to feed. But Bill thought it would only be for a few more years, expecting that he could then move on because the fellowship would be strong enough to survive on its own.

Well, I think one of the biggest shocks to early Alcoholics Anonymous, and I think to Bill Wilson, was the fact that five months after the book comes out... Hank Parkhurst is drinking. That must have been a crushing and painful thing for Bill Wilson. I mean, they've been business partners together.

They're in the same office together. They put this book project together. They've talked to the Rockefeller people together. I mean, Hank was a really critical, critical factor in the success of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And Bill Wilson can't do anything to get him sober. I was full of fear, and I didn't know how to live life on life's terms. I didn't know how to face the world.

I didn't know how to work. And so I did what anybody's going to do when they're that completely miserable, because I started drinking again. And I was off and running immediately, but it wasn't the same.

It was more physical. Like, I just absolutely, you know, it was, I mean, sure, I don't like to think too much. I don't like to be present, but it was really, really, like, I couldn't physically stop drinking.

And I went. Did the detox round and I would be out and I would call AA people and they would come pick me up and take me to a meeting and I would get to the meeting and I would walk out the back door. I wouldn't even stay for the meeting. I was just trying to get a ride across town and I tried to get money off of them or they'd come pick me up and take me and make me take a shower because apparently I stunk too bad to go to the meeting.

So they'd make me take a shower and then take me to the meeting and every day they'd pick me up. They would act like that's the first time I was going to get sober. You know, like they never got sick of me.

They never got sick of me. They never acted like I was wearing them out or I was whatever. It was always new.

It's very interesting the change, I think, that took place in Bill Wilson's understanding of what alcoholism was. And where this change began was that story again going back that's retold so often. Bill's at the 24th Street Clubhouse. He's told there's another drunk who wants to see him.

All time. Father Dowling, by the way, a non-alcoholic, was a chronic arthritic who really spent the whole of his life in great pain. And so to find a situation where there can be shared honesty, where two people let each other know how much they hurt, it's only in that setting, it seems, that healing can take place.

This healing of the spirit, of the soul, of whatever part is being torn apart inside of us. And part of Bill's working with alcoholics was he had this thirst for more always. And he tells Dowling how this thirst is just something that, you know, will it ever be quenched?

And Dowling's answer is no, never, Bill, because we are meant to thirst. The question is, where do we aim what we thirst for? And that his thirst to help alcoholics was surely an expression of his seeking of God.

So what happened when AI began to be successful? It was electrifying, I kid you not. It was electrifying to the people in the program and to anybody who came up and looked at it.

For example, like Jack Alexander, who in 41 did the article for Saturday Post. He came to scoff, he came to deride. He was sent to blow up this crazy notion that this spiritual program was going to work. He stayed to honor it. In fact, you'll see a picture of the club and a flock of us sitting before the fire.

And with the advent of that piece, there was a prodigious rush of info. A Mrs. Helen Griffith appeared at our clubhouse meeting at 24th Street. She began to talk of a house in Westchester. She said we couldn't live forever in the club. We'd need a place like that.

The woman was 48 years old when she became homeless. When they finally did make it to Stepping Stones, Bill writes a letter to Dr. Bob where he says, thank God that girl's finally being taken care of at last. My name is Nell Wing and I have no years of sobriety.

I just want to tell you, I started doing Bill's work in 50 and then in 54 I started going up to bed for it. On Friday afternoon, Bill would pick me up in the station. Then we'd go home and Bill would say, let's sit down and do some of the old chestnuts.

With the violin and the cello. On Saturday morning, that was the work day, and Bill would be dictating, which he liked to do. That's why he got up, because he liked to dictate at home.

He didn't like to come down to the office and do all that dictating. And however, I was to learn later on what was going on in this era of the 40s. That was supposed to be an era of unity, and most of the time it was an era of disunity.

Groups began to spring up everywhere, like mushrooms. We began to be bombarded by group problems. Bill was the lightning rod.

People were always sending him letters. Oh, you know, our group's fighting about this, and what are we going to do about that? And he would send back some sort of solution. then there would be somebody would be charging for alcoholics anonymous admission and somebody else would complain and send him a letter so he'd write about that.

We had an AA group in Richmond, Virginia that drinks beer at their meeting. We have women coming into the fellowship. Dr. Bob thought that if there were women around the men wouldn't get sober and one of Dr. Bob's famous sayings was under every skirt there's a slip.

We have the we have the first attempts to racially integrate groups. Bill had gone out to the Rockland State Hospital and met a couple of black alcoholics there, and he invited them to come to the meeting in New York when they got out of the hospital. Well, when they showed up, members objected.

So they took a vote on whether these two members could belong to the group. Now, these were AA members, people who had the 12 steps and the spiritual program and everything else, and they voted to exclude these two black men. that Bill had invited to the meeting. Well, instead of having a knock-down, drag-out fight about it, Bill asked him to take another vote. And this vote was whether black people should be, should have the program, whether they were entitled to have the AA program.

And so they did vote and agreed that they should have the program. Well, then Bill got them to let the two men come to the meeting as observers. And Bill began to think about what are we going to do?

Because he had, if you will, if I may put it this way, he had solved the problem of the individual drunk getting sober. Now. How do these individual drunks hang together long enough to stay sober? And that's where the traditions come in.

Bill saw that AA as a movement would cease to exist if there weren't some set of practices to guide it. But he also knew how loud the objections would be to the thought of any kind of structure. So he made great use of AA's national newsletter, The Grapevine, to explain the concepts behind the 12 traditions. Now, it wasn't all going forward with great guns. There was a lot of dissension, a lot of second thoughts, a lot of disagreement and anger, and Bill was not one to give in.

As I say, he could do a little arm-twisting when it was necessary. Bill knew he needed to have the fellowship's approval to move forward with the Twelve Traditions, and with Bob's blessing, he set out on a cross-country trip to get it. Alcoholics are really very explosive material, and they still are even sober.

So the problem of the future for us is this. Will the disruptive influences among us finally tear us apart? I am supremely confident they won't. Not because we are a better people, but because we are a weaker people.

And out of that group conscience, I believe will evolve the traditional principles. You know, he went three years to the school of law. And he never picked up his degree. He was drunk the time he was supposed to do it.

But I always thought it paid off because AA is a brilliant instance, in my opinion, of the design of structure of an organization for survival. A genius. A genius is not a word I use lightly. I think the man is a genius for what he did with the 12 traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous. We just would not be here without the 12 traditions.

We would not be here. I just didn't talk about alcoholism all the time to people. He talked about depressions. I've heard people come up to him and say thank you for saving my life twice.

With the passing of Dr. Bob in 1950, Bill lost the only person who really understood his position and could help him carry the weight of AA's success. Bill Wilson was really worried about how Alcoholics Anonymous was going to continue to run into work. He was writing pieces saying, I need a real life. I just can't be doing this anymore.

This thing should be self-sustaining. So, in 1955, Bill was preparing for St. Louis, where he formally turned over leadership of AA to the members themselves. Back in 1948, Dr. Bob and I wrote a joint piece in the grapevine, and we said, why can't we join AA too? Well, this is the day we join AA.

This is the day you'll come of age. Bill formally handed over the leadership of AA to the Fellowship. He had wanted this for ten years, and finally the time had come.

But the constant demands of AA had drained Bill and placed a strain on his marriage to Lois. The Hill House became not just a haven for Bill and Lois, but also a refuge from the unrelenting adoration of the fellowship. Always have trouble letting go of A.A., but A.A. refused to let go of him. He had become number one man in the one place he didn't want it.

A society where everyone was equal, but him. Here's the man who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, but he couldn't be a player in A.A. Because he was just turned into some sort of icon, some sort of god. It came home to me strongly when my sponsor went to Mexico several years ago. And he mentions the fact that he had met Bill Wilson and shook his hand.

And everybody in the meeting lined up and shook my sponsor's hand because that was the hand. that shook Bill Wilson's hand. I mean, I just, I don't know how, I don't know how Bill Wilson dealt with that.

Of course, everybody is fairly familiar with the fact that I once suffered alcoholism, but I suffer also from split personality. I have a personality, say, as a patriarch of AA, floundering father, if you like. You see, a founding father must endorse anything or anybody or even say good things about your friend.

But I am an anarchist. I am what I damn please if you will. One of the poor old drugs still trying to get on. There's a renegade quality to Bill Wilson that at the time, everybody else is ready to celebrate the achievements of AA. Bill's obsessed with the people who still aren't making it in AA.

And that obsession is going to lead him into some boundary areas that could bring great controversy to AA. Bill Wilson's experiments with LSD. LSD.

Those three letters conjure up such decadent imagery. Timothy Leary and the heyday of Haight-Ashbury. But this was before then, when it was still a drug of promise, not a drug of abuse.

One sure way to prove the value of testing under doctor... That's why I'm commensurate. Take Comeback. Comeback eases... This was the 1950s.

A time when the wonders of modern medicine seemed able to fix anything that was wrong with us. We have early reports coming from two psychiatrists, Hoffer and Osmond, really proclaiming this as a potential breakthrough in the treatment of alcoholism. And in the context, they're describing some alcoholics beginning to have a spiritual breakthrough under the influence of these LSD-guided experiences.

that are really contributing to their development of sustained sobriety in individuals where many other methods had failed. My name is Norm. I'm an alcoholic.

Well, I went to AA in an effort to quit. I wanted to quit. And AA just didn't work for me.

I heard about LSD, a drug that some doctors in Western Canada had found out about and felt that it might help. I took it. Several times in hospital settings, in doctors' offices.

Each experience lasted for several hours and did cause me to do a lot of thinking about myself. And then the doctor asked me if I would like to take LSD again. And my experience was instant. It changed my life, it changed my thinking, it changed the way I look at things. And that happened in seconds.

And it was over, the whole experience was over. I never wanted LSD again, I went back to AA and worked very hard at it for a long time. And he really did go through a period of deep infatuation with this drug and the thought that this might both revolutionize the treatment of alcoholism and also be a tool for great spiritual enlightenment. It's unimaginably difficult to be that person. whom so many recovering alcoholics are looking up to with such expectancy, with such unspoken demands, and this was an extraordinary burden to carry.

I think as his life went on, his spirituality was being drained by the thing he created. And more importantly, as the years went on, he felt himself to be farther and farther removed from that experience, that spiritual, that enlightenment that gave him the gift that he gave to us. Bill used LSD on and off for over five years as a way to explore his own spirituality, to recharge himself.

But when LSD became a drug of abuse, Bill, like the doctors who had helped him, had to back away from using it. So Bill's search for what he called emotional sobriety continued. He wanted to be free of the depression and anxiety that plagued him. Then Dr. Abram Hoffer introduced him to niacin, also called vitamin B3, as a possible solution.

After about two weeks, he was well. He lost his tension, anxiety, depression, his insomnia. He was able to sleep.

And of course, he was therefore very much happier than he had been. He saw niacin as some kind of a cure or an aid in dealing with depression. And he started handing it out to people.

He wrote the equivalent of three small books about vitamin B3. And I think this was part of the entrepreneur in him. He needed something new to work on. So he became very enthusiastic.

And he became so enthusiastic, he made the international headquarters pretty angry at him. Bill develops a professional relationship with a woman, Helen Nguyen, who is occupied with Bill and the vitamin B3 therapy and Bill's experimentation with LSD. Is there a way of ending the thing with Helen then in 62? No, no, that's over.

Bill didn't necessarily want to talk that much about Helen's relationship, but what she did say was that in most of Bill's darkest moments, Helen pretty much comforted him and brought him back to life, you know, possibly even Bill's wanting to commit suicide, Bill's wanting to just, you know, crawl underneath the bed and never come out. And Helen Wynne just helped him through that, helped him through his darkest days. Her soul was Helen Wynne.

She was a very inspiring human being. She was very joyful, she was very light-giving, she was very intelligent, she was very gracious. She was very good at what she did, and she'd had some publicity when she was an actress, probably for some of her drinking escapades too, I think.

He and you and Jed think I'm a bum. You're just a perfect woman, just a lily-white... Stop! Helen Wynne was a very competent editor of the Grapevine, and she wrote to me in the mid-50s and asked me to write an article with her, and we seemed to get along real well, and I met her in 1958. And she was just moving up to Pleasantville. She had a young son, but it was her relationship with Bill that apparently terminated her employment.

I think from the very start, they were extremely aware that their attraction to each other was fraught with difficulty because... Both of them, particularly Bill, was extremely concerned about the future of AA. I do know that cost them a great deal. The very essence of AA is about this spirituality of imperfection and the idea that within that you would elevate one of the co-founders as sort of the perfect person. I don't think there's any allusion to that.

I think if anything, it sort of adds testament that this recovery thing is complex, that we're going to... that people can stay sober and have other flaws that they're still going to continue to wrestle with and work on. That's the nature of recovery. And in this particular instance, my mother also suffered from depression and doubt and fear. So it was a blessing and a revelation to build to be able to be so open and trusting and fearless with another human being who loved him for whom he was.

For sure he recognized who and what my mother was and took enormous pleasure in her company and I... Bless them. It's hard for me to believe that she couldn't have known about it.

Lois was a very practical woman and I think she could have understood this about Bill and accepted it in her way. Bill and Lois had had 53 years together when he died and she was really devoted to him. He was the man in her life. It would have been very hard for them to separate, I think.

You know, Bill adopted the St. Francis prayer in his later years. Got it from Father Dowling, his spiritual advisor. And it's almost a formula.

I've often said I don't know that Bill was being at all pious in taking this prayer up. If you present me with hate, what's my response? My normal, natural human response is to hate you.

Good and solid. But what old Francis said was, when you confront that, and Bill Wilson confronted a lot of this in his life later on, people who didn't like him and were jealous of him, you turn around and you spill back over them benignity, kindness, compassion, love, you know? It's an absolutely marvelous, marvelous thing. And Bill did it.

Bill's visibility as the leader of AA began to reach society at large. He was offered an honorary degree from Yale University. But Bill turned it down because he felt he needed to set the best possible example for anonymity.

Concerned that ego-driven members might follow and threaten AA's very survival. Likewise, he turned down Time Magazine's offer for a cover story. The impact of this thing could have been enormous, involving great numbers of people. So the saying no was something to keep awake nights about, and I did.

I hope and believe that this was the right decision. It is the best that I can do. I leave it to you and to the future for whatever it may be worth.

Bill's concerns for AA's future were tied to the state of his own health. Lifelong smoker. Developed emphysema.

Much respect at fall. From ever afterwards he was a little more hesitant and a little slower and so on. Progressively so. I must tell you about his last appearance at these international conventions down in Miami, Florida.

And he came Sunday and... There's a closing part of the program, and as we were all in this great big room, I got up on the stage, the curtains part, and of course the place just went wild with applause and cheers and what have you. And he, with effort, got himself to his feet and just made a very, very short talk.

Dear folks, there's always something new in one's AA life. And what do you think it is with me this morning? It is that I'm speechless. So I can only say, may God bless and keep you, and Alcoholics Anonymous forever. He had an oxygen mask on.

He could hardly breathe. And I held his hand for a few minutes. My mother was there, some other people. And I think everyone stood at the brink of powerlessness and bewilderment and just stood there watching.

In thinking about how sick Bill was before he died, I don't think the average person realizes how sick you can be when you have emphysema, and when your lungs aren't working, and when you're not getting any air. It's torture. He was so suffering from lack of oxygen to his brain that he was actually hallucinating. The story came out that on his deathbed, Bill asks for alcohol. There's nothing to be surprised at.

This is the most natural thing in the world for an alcoholic who's under the influence of drugs, obviously. Some of the brain cells and chemicals are not acting normally, and I find nothing unusual and nothing to be scandalized in it. This is the nature of alcoholism.

This is the nature of alcoholism. Alcoholism is, Bill referred to alcohol in the book Alcoholics Anonymous as cunning. baffling and powerful.

I saw this extraordinary man who had given this extraordinary gift to the world doing battle with his personal demons, who came to haunt him, to attack him at the end of his life, fighting for his breath, fighting to stay conscious, fighting to keep eye contact, hold one's hand to... to say I'm still here. The co-founder of the most successful effort ever to help alcoholics stay dry died late Sunday and as he had provided then gave up his anonymity.

He was William G. Wilson, billed for the thousands of drunks who found help in his example and when he died at 76 he had not had a drink in 36 years. And he once explained why AAs stay anonymous. Not to avoid a stigma, he said, but to keep our fool egos from running hog wild after money and fame at AA's expense. It's not anything I'm inclined to spill over about, but I am eternally grateful the man lived and did what he did.

You say, well, somebody else might have done it. Yeah, but he's the one who did it for me, you see. He piloted this course out of the very deep woods that alcoholism is. I think his contribution to the human race is of an order that has not yet been fully realized.

This whole story a lot, but I got to be editor of the grapevine and not very long sober. I think I was editor from 63 to 68 and I was sober only four years when I got the job. So I got into it and went along fine for all of five years. I think I was something of a fair-haired boy because I was the first editor in some years who hadn't caught up and carried on. And so we put a The issue that had on the cover winds of change, well that's not a great word to use around AA circuits.

If I had it to do over, I think I'd have thought that one through again. You talk about issues that didn't make the grade. I realized within a few days of the emergence of this on the scene that I had created a storm. But the thing I got from it was a lasting permanent memory of Bill Wilson operating in a crisis.

The crisis was me, and they had to muzzle this bird who was about to run away with their magazine. I thought I was in for a dropping, you know, but not at all. He suggested that I had perhaps been a tad imprudent, and then we wandered off talking about the Oxford Group and its difficulties and this and that. Just a lovely conversation.

That's all there was to it. It was my exit interview. But...

At this point, all I'm doing is recording that he was a very great guy to get fired by. BF-WATCH TV 2021 BF-WATCH TV 2021

Transcript for:Bill Wilson and the Birth of AA

Transcript for:
Bill Wilson and the Birth of AA