Pieces of Advice for Pete Hegseth, From Someone Who’s Struggled With Drinking
Trump’s defense nominee says he won’t take a sip of booze if confirmed. As a recovering alcoholic, I immediately recognized those words.
THE HEADLINES OVER THE LAST SEVENTY-TWO HOURS about Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, the former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, have been eyebrow-raising to say the least.
“Pete Hegseth’s drinking worried his Fox News colleagues,” according to NBC News.
“Hegseth’s history with alcohol shadows Pentagon selection,” the Washington Post reported.
“Defense head pick Pete Hegseth now dogged by questions over alcohol use,” writes the Guardian.
All fairly standard, newsy stuff—but a bit more eyebrow-raising for recovering alcoholics like myself, two-and-a-half years sober after an on-again, off-again love affair and battle with booze that went on for nearly twenty-five years. But then, I saw a headline that struck me between the eyes: “Hegseth says he would stop drinking if confirmed,” Forbes and other outlets reported.
Excuse me? That’s not how any of this works, I thought. If Hegseth is an alcoholic, a vow to “stop drinking” is not enough. Unlike other medical ailments and mental health disorders, alcoholism is a disease that can only be diagnosed by the person suffering from it. Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut set of circumstances that makes this diagnosis possible. Each person must come to the conclusion on their own. And Hegseth says that he is not an alcoholic. “I’ve never had a drinking problem,” he told Megyn Kelly on Wednesday. “No one’s ever approached me and said ‘Oh, you should really look at getting help for drink[ing]’—never. I’ve never sought counseling, never sought help.”
It’s not up to me, Trump, or the senators who are vetting Hegseth for confirmation as secretary of defense to determine whether the designation “alcoholic” suits Hegseth, but the allegations about him that have come out in recent weeks suggest a person who has what our society calls “a problem” with alcohol. This is a bit of a misnomer: For alcoholics, alcohol is the solution to our problems. It allows us to cope with the stressors of life. It becomes problematic when we reach the point where we require it to deal with life, when we no longer have control over our drinking, and our lives have become unmanageable. One could make the argument that Hegseth’s drinking escapades as reported in the press—which include a possible drunken sexual assault, being carried out of events by coworkers, and concerns from his colleagues at Fox News—could qualify as unmanageable.
Alcoholics and addicts routinely make promises to sober up only to never keep them. I have promised to stop drinking more times than I can count—in the face of problems at work, legal troubles, failed relationships, and overall life failures. Each time, the challenges of life itself brought me back to drinking.
It seems implausible that an alcoholic faced with one of the most high-pressure and stressful jobs in the world would be able to simply will their way into sobriety in order to keep a promise to senators.
If Hegseth is an alcoholic, he’ll likely need what I needed when I made the decision to get sober in June 2022: a support system, education, perhaps professional medical and rehabilitation treatment, and a twelve-step program. An alcoholic attempting to navigate early sobriety without treatment and (for me and many others at least) the help of a twelve-step program is like a cancer patient without chemotherapy—the disease must be attacked and treated in a deliberate, responsible, and wholehearted fashion.
HEGSETH’S ALLEGED EXCESSIVE DRINKING isn’t in and of itself necessarily an automatic disqualifier. There are plenty of politicians who are heavy drinkers, and if you think there haven’t been cabinet officials down through the decades with alcohol problems you’re fooling yourself.
Richard Nixon, while president, infamously abused alcohol, even during crucial moments.
Still, untreated alcoholism would leave Hegseth vulnerable to calamity. That’s because alcoholics simply do not have control once they take the first drink. We have both a physical allergy and a mental obsession, as twelve-step programs explain, that do not allow us to control our drinking for long.
Without treatment and help, the bottle always wins. Many people live full, happy, successful and productive lives in active addiction and as functioning alcoholics, but the malady is, at best, a limiting factor. At worst, it’s a straight-up liability—and one that certainly can’t be afforded to the secretary of defense.
Despite the gains made over the decades in public awareness of alcoholism and addiction, many people still don’t understand how all of this actually works. I fear that the senators vetting Hegseth don’t have the information required to ask him the necessary questions about his drinking, and therefore could be putting lives at risk.
Amid the anecdotes to emerge in the press about Hegseth is one that struck home for me in a very uncomfortable way, as is often the case for those of us in recovery who are working to overcome the misdeeds of our past. In one of the stories about Hegseth’s drinking, some colleagues at Fox News reportedly mentioned that they smelled alcohol on him in the mornings, before he went live on the air. It immediately took me back to a situation from my days as a young reporter, covering crime and courts for a small-town newspaper in northern Minnesota.
One day, I arrived at the courthouse to look over recent filings. As was the case just about every day, I was dragging from a barstool session the night before. I checked in with security and shuffled through the dockets, taking notes and leaving to head back to the newsroom and write up what I’d found. Then I received an email from a judge at the courthouse. He was a nice man whom I had written about before and seen in court several times. He politely told me that the bailiffs had smelled alcohol on me when I’d gone through security, and expressed his concern. At the time, I laughed it off as the inevitable result of being a hard-drinking reporter. Now, I’m mortified by this memory.
Looking back on it, I’m struck by the lack of respect I had not just for the important job I had as a journalist, but for the flippancy with which I considered my drinking in relation to the profound responsibilities of this work. I can’t remember what I told the judge in response, but I do think I at least apologized. At least I hope I did. Still, it would be another ten years before I finally sobered up.
That email from the judge is what those of us in recovery call a “bottom,” even though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time. Hegseth may be experiencing a similar bottom now, as his drinking exploits are front-page news across the country. If he truly does have a “problem” with drinking—or, as I did, is using alcohol as his “solution”—I hope he gets the help he needs. That’s my wish for him as someone who understands where he might be. But as an American, I also hope that he is not confirmed to oversee our armed forces—not because his drinking makes him a bad person, but because, if it’s as bad as the reports suggest, it’s an unconscionable liability for a position as important as this one.
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