True Ambition

Today’s passage comes from Bill W.’s essay on Step Twelve in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions. It closes the essay’s pages on importance, power and ambition, the last of the affairs the essay takes in turn (December 3 maps them all); after it, the essays on the Steps close with the Serenity Prayer. Those pages open on a boy who dreams of being President, “his country’s number one man.” Grown, he is content to play the hand he’s dealt. Alcoholics, the essay says, were another matter.

Bill used the phrase of himself, and the dream was his own. As AA Comes of Age printed his talk at AA’s convention in St. Louis in 1955, he had resolved as a boy to come out on top (November 17 tells more), and sobriety didn’t cure the wish at once. His drive in his first months sober, he said, was “one part of genuine spirituality and one part of my old desire to be a Number One man.” By May 1935 he was in Akron with business friends, in a proxy battle over a company there: “I could already see myself as its new president.” His side lost the vote, and in Akron he met Dr. Bob S.

Then there were the doctors. When AA was young, the essay says, some well-known psychologists and doctors studied a good number of problem drinkers and found most of them “still childish, emotionally sensitive, and grandiose.” It doesn’t say who they were. Members took it hard. Bill had said as much of himself. In the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine, in December 1944, answering a mother whose son drank, he recalled how a doctor used to talk about his case: in the doctor’s telling, Bill was a “bankrupt idealist” gone broke on his dreams. Then Bill owned that he “may have put some of these words into the doctor’s mouth.”

Since then, the essay says, most members had come round to the doctors’ view, and had found fear underneath: “We simply had to be number one people to cover up our deep-lying inferiorities.” Whatever each had done about it, all of them, it says, had come close to drowning “in a sea of alcohol.” In February 1954, the year after the book came out, Bill turned down an honorary degree from Yale. His letter said his life story had long turned on “an implacable pursuit of money, fame, and power,” until he nearly sank in that same sea.

The passage’s last words have an older ring. In the King James Bible, the prophet Micah asks what the Lord requires of anyone “but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

More on Bill’s boyhood resolve: The boomerang, in Number One Man. On his first months sober: The voice on the subway. On the degree he turned down: Legacy.