Wilson, Bill

Bill W. co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous.

At a time when his doctors believed his only viable path to abstinence might be long-term institutionalization, Bill Wilson had an awakening late in 1934.

It spurred him not only into sobriety but ignited a life-long desire to help other alcoholics get sober and stay sober.

Religious influences

The folks who helped Bill were members of the Oxford Group, a Christian group seeking personal growth through their faith. He tested his religious options, particularly in the early portion of his sobriety, but the long-term religious theme for his life was agnosticism.

Dr. Bob

Five months into his sobriety, after disappointing attempts to help other alcoholics, Bill met Dr. Bob. A physician whose practice was failing due to his years of alcoholism, Bill was instrumental in bringing a fresh approach to sobriety into Bob’s life.

They joined forces in expanding the Oxford Group’s outreach to help other alcoholics.

Founding of AA

Ultimately, the Oxford Group and its alcoholic contingent parted ways, and Bill and Dr. Bob’s voices grew clearer and more determined. Although not named as such until a couple of years afterward, the start of Bob’s long-term abstinence in June 1935 has been marked as the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Author of the 12 Steps and the Big Book

Bill was the initial drafter of the 12 steps as part of his authorship of the first 11 chapters of the Big Book, published in 1939.

He visualized AA as a movement which would help alcoholics everywhere with the concepts he molded, and yet with an organizational structure driven by principles, not personalities, requiring him to lead by consensus-building.

Gentle, human giant

Respected by his peers in AA as a gentle giant, Bill was known as a man who welcomed all and liked nothing better than talking things out one-on-one with an alcoholic in need.

Succeeding in recovery still left him human and challenged, as recounted by Francis Hartigan on page 2 of Bill W.: A Biography of Alcoholics Anonymous Cofounder Bill Wilson:

Even after he quit drinking, Wilson had a number of personal problems, and he regarded as moral failings his inability to deal with them successfully. His financial situation never truly righted itself, his womanizing continued, and no matter how severely it affected his health, he could never manage to quit smoking. There was also the fact that he could not find any effective means of dealing with his cripping depression.

Bill’s lesser-known thoughts

Although skeptical about moderate drinking as a long-term solution, Bill encouraged folks who didn’t find their lives to be unmanageable to work on controlled drinking. In the description of the first step in 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, he noted that some of the folks trying out AA were “scarcely more than potential alcoholics”, and:

To the doubters we could say, “Perhaps you’re not an alcoholic after all. Why don’t you try some more controlled drinking, bearing in mind meanwhile what we have told you about alcoholism?” This attitude brought immediate and practical results. It was then discovered that when one alcoholic had planted in the mind of another the true nature of his malady, that person could never be the same again. Following every spree, he would say to himself, “Maybe those A.A.’s were right…”

He was painfully aware of, and frustrated by, the large numbers who had not been reached or helped by AA. From the Afterward of his autobiography Bill W: My First 40 years, p. 167:

While the overall AA program moved toward stability and maturity, Bill still seemed obsessed with those who somehow weren’t able to make AA work for them. Warning of the dangers of pride and complacency, he challenged AA members at AA’s thirtieth anniversary meeting [in 1965] with a question: “What happened to the 600,000 who approached AA and left?”

That concern was tied to the friends who had been instrumental in Bill’s path to sobriety, yet unable to sustain it themselves. One of them was Ebby Thacher, who had led Bill to the Oxford Group, but relapsed a couple of years later and many more times before his death by emphysema in 1966. As recounted in the Hartigan bio:

Whenever a grateful AA member asked Bill if there was anything he could do for him, Bill invariably replied, “Well, I just wish there was something we could do to help Ebby.”