For William C. Moyers, the lowest point in his long struggle with addiction was the morning he was rescued from a crack house in Atlanta by off-duty police and his famous father, journalist and former presidential adviser Bill Moyers.

"I had walked out on my wife Allison and our two small boys," he recalled in a recent interview. "I had walked away from a very promising career in journalism."

Drug use had led to the end of an earlier marriage, and he had relapsed before, prompting frantic searches by his family and lengthy periods of rehabilitation. As he left the crack house, he felt his father hated him -- and he hated himself as well.

But since that crushing incident in October 1994, he has lived without abusing alcohol or drugs. And he now draws on his experiences to highlight the power of addiction and the possibility of breaking free.

Mr. Moyers, 48, will share his story at Gateway Rehabilitation Center's Hope Has a Home fundraising gala on Dec. 13.

"William Cope Moyers truly shares Gateway's passion for spreading the word about recovery," said Dr. Ken Ramsey, the agency's president and chief executive officer. "His story represents hope and is a wonderful example of how treatment works and can turn lives around."

Now a vice president of the Hazelden Foundation, the Minnesota-based treatment center where he was once a patient, Mr. Moyers said he also plans to celebrate the work at Gateway in his remarks and issue a call to action to help end the stigma of addiction and promote the possibility of recovery.

His own struggles with addiction are portrayed vividly in his best-selling 2006 memoir, "Broken," written with Katherine Ketcham and now available in paperback.

The book describes a privileged childhood in a loving, churchgoing family headed by his father, a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson. There were Easter egg hunts at the White House, weekends at Camp David and trips on Air Force One.

Still, he felt uneasy, even as a child. "I wasn't comfortable in my own skin," he wrote, "and I was constantly trying to get attention to soothe some deep ache inside."

He also had a crisis of faith after witnessing a family killed by lightning during a summer vacation.

But when an adult invited him to try marijuana as a teenager, the drug provided immediate relief from anxiety or self-doubt.

Hard drinking and other drug use followed when he went on to Washington and Lee University.

After one night of drinking, he broke into a business and was quickly caught by police. Still, family members and friends did not suspect the seriousness of his addiction. Even as he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge, he was using alcohol and drugs daily.

His drug problem grew after he graduated from college and began working as a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald and, a few years later, at Newsday, though he hid the depth of his addiction from co-workers, his wife and other family members.

And after an acquaintance introduced him to crack cocaine, "nothing mattered except reaching that peak of rapture over and over again."

The book suggests that his drug problem was linked in part to his uneasiness with his father's fame.

"Dad was the trigger I always pulled when I wanted to get high," he wrote.

"It fed the disease, no doubt about it," Mr. Moyers said recently, "but I don't think it would have mattered if I had a well-known father or didn't know who my father was." Addiction is an illness that does not discriminate, he said, noting it affects people from many backgrounds and professions.

"My disease is less about the drugs I took," he wrote, "than the reason I took them -- to blot out pain, to alter reality, to change perception, to numb my fear."

As his love affair with crack cocaine grew, he quit his Newsday job and went to work for his parents' television production company. And his behavior grew more erratic.

He left home to hole up and smoke crack with another man in Harlem, staying six days before he finally called his wife. His mother and a family friend tracked him down and persuaded him to go home, and he was soon admitted, in the summer of 1989, to a psychiatric ward, then sent to treatment at Hazelden in Minnesota.

Still, the craving for drugs didn't go away.

He relapsed on a trip to New York, ending about six months of sobriety. Even as he landed a job at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, he was soon commuting by plane to New York to smoke crack on weekends.

He also made drug connections back in St. Paul, spending a week with a group smoking crack before his family found him. In early 1991, he was back for more treatment at Hazelden.

The following year, he began work as a writer for CNN in Atlanta and married his second wife, Allison. They weathered serious health problems affecting their first child, Henry.

Mr. Moyers stayed drug-free for three years, but relapsed again in the summer of 1994, renewing an old drug connection while on a trip to New York. Soon after his second son, Thomas, was born, his connection was mailing crack to him in Atlanta.

Before long, he walked away from his family to spend days in an Atlanta crack house, prompting his wife to come pleading for him to come home. After another stint in treatment, he returned for what would be his final stay in a crack house in October 1994.

Back in treatment, barely able to eat and on suicide watch, his first thoughts were of wanting to die. But gradually, he began to have hope.

He came to realize that he would never understand a number of aspects of life that troubled him, such as why others in his family were not addicted. And in that surrender, he found his faith renewed.

"Part of that spiritual awakening was a sudden awareness that, for me at least, it wasn't about believing in God; it was about trusting in God," he said recently. "I can't recover by myself; I have to take responsibility for recovery, but it's bigger than me."

God, he believes, led him soon after to leave journalism and to return to the Twin Cities area, where he landed a job at Hazelden after answering a newspaper ad.

Asked today how he could walk away from his family to abuse drugs, Mr. Moyers said that addiction is a "cunning, baffling and powerful illness that causes good people to do bad things, period. That's not an excuse for what I did, not at all. But it is an explanation."

To families caught in the grip of addiction, he advised:

"It's never too late. There's always hope. Hold on; trust the process. Stay the course. Recovery is possible."

Gateway Rehabilitation Center's Hope Has a Home Gala will take place Dec. 13 at the Hilton Pittsburgh, Downtown. A reception and entertainment will begin at 6:30 p.m., with dinner and the evening's program at 7 p.m. Tickets are $150, and proceeds benefit Gateway's youth programs. Information and tickets are available by calling 1-800-472-1177, ext. 1234.