Excerpt & Giveaway: OF BULLETINS AND BOOZE by Bob Horton

In 2015 Texas Tech’s College of Media and Communications enrolled fifteen hundred students, some perhaps attracted by promises described on the college’s website: “Change the face of advertising. Reach millions from the nightly news. Uncover the real story. Capture the world in photos. Mold public perception. Communications is all about passion.” All are valid possibilities that can give a person access to icons of influence or wealth—connections tending to generate exaggerated ideas of self-importance. When I was growing up in West Texas I often heard what is probably a time-tested admonition about the danger of “getting too big for your britches.” The hunger for success can lead one to swallow more ambitious notions than he is capable of digesting. Or, as a West Texas friend of mine once put it rather crudely: “Don’t let an alligator mouth overload your hummingbird ass.”

I was a news correspondent in Washington, DC, for almost a quarter of a century. During that time I was assigned to places most any eager journalist might wish to cover—Congress, the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House at times—all but, odd as it might seem in view of my rural upbringing in Texas, the Department of Agriculture. I met men of prominence, including five who were or would become president, a half-dozen who were in charge of the Pentagon or the State Department, leaders in Congress, and others who wielded levers of power in the federal government. I was no familiar face on television, but my byline appeared atop stories carried in hundreds of newspapers throughout the United States and around the world. Early in my career I received a national award for a reporting performance related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Later, an Associated Press cohort and I were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for our coverage of the Pentagon. Those were heady, intoxicating times, and I drank to celebrate my successes. I also drank to ease deep-seated fears that I was not only unqualified but also incapable of sustaining the charade for long. I drank my way into alcoholism.

The more I thought I achieved, the less secure I felt. I became obsessed with the idea that I had to outperform any other journalist reporting the story of the moment. I was my own worst competitor. I competed with a relentless notion that I always had to outrun the pack. Alcohol fueled the race.

Drinking became a routine occupying long lunches, resuming after work, and often continuing late into the night, when I might wind up gambling recklessly at poker in a game room at the National Press Club. I lost more than I won. I lost a devoted wife. I lost a sense of direction. I lost enthusiasm for a profession I believed was my true calling. I had arrived in Washington in January 1965 with a strong sense of being where I was meant to be. By 1989, however, I had changed jobs not once or twice but five times. I had lost that sense of being where I belonged. Something was wrong with the picture.

I eventually decided to remove myself from that place of monuments and monumental ambitions. Leaving Washington and all the promise it once held for me was painful, but Texas would welcome me home. I returned to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, this time not the rookie reporter I had been while a student at Texas Tech but as an editorial writer and columnist. Times were good. Times were bad. Most of the decade of the1990s was a repetitive cycle of drinking, sobering up, drinking again. By 1998 I had become so dispirited and incapable of dealing with an alcoholic behavior that I left the Avalanche-Journal. After drying out at a rehab facility I began living with my mother, who was nearing eighty in failing health. So began several years of sobriety benefiting both mother and son. She needed a caregiver. I needed daily meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous to abstain from liquor. I enrolled at Texas Tech and in 2003, at age sixty-four, I received a master’s degree in mass communications.

Armed with the new degree I could have chosen to teach a younger generation what I knew about the news business. I was reluctant to pursue that path. I suspected—wrongly, no doubt—that I might be required to follow some paint-by-the-numbers lesson plan in a textbook written by an academic who had never been a reporter. If I were to lead a class of young people envisioning a sparkling career in communications or in any other field I would have my own firmly held thoughts to share. I might have little to say about alcoholism per se, but I certainly could emphasize that striving for success can be as intoxicating as the highest-proof booze and equally susceptible to an addiction.