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Of Bulletins and Booze: A Newsman’s Story of Recovery
Bob Horton began his journalism career as a reporter for the Lubbock Avalanche- Journal. Innate skill and good fortune took him from a modest Texas farm upbringing to Washington, DC, where he was thrown into the high-pressure world of the wire service, first as a correspondent for the Associated Press, and later for Reuters news agency. The stress was intense, but he found the rush to be intoxicating.
From his early days covering the Dallas murder trial of Jack Ruby, through three colorful decades as a newsman, Horton often found himself witnessing history in the making. He covered the Pentagon during the early days of the Vietnam War, was on board a Navy ship in the Mediterranean awaiting Israel’s expected attack on Egypt, was witness to the Watergate burglary trial, and attended a Beverly Hills church service with then- President-elect Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy.
The success Horton enjoyed as a journalist mostly hid the dark side of his career: a gradual descent into alcoholism. Of Bulletins and Booze candidly recounts the unforgettable moments of Horton’s career, as well as more than a few moments he would just as soon forget.
From his early days covering the Dallas murder trial of Jack Ruby, through three colorful decades as a newsman, Horton often found himself witnessing history in the making. He covered the Pentagon during the early days of the Vietnam War, was on board a Navy ship in the Mediterranean awaiting Israel’s expected attack on Egypt, was witness to the Watergate burglary trial, and attended a Beverly Hills church service with then- President-elect Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy.
The success Horton enjoyed as a journalist mostly hid the dark side of his career: a gradual descent into alcoholism. Of Bulletins and Booze candidly recounts the unforgettable moments of Horton’s career, as well as more than a few moments he would just as soon forget.
248 pages, Hardcover
Published March 1, 2017
20 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 26, 2016
Enjoyed reading this, in fact I couldn't put it down after I got into it. Will post my review on my blog as a part of the Lone Star Book Blog Tour on the 27th.
January 6, 2017
Of Bulletins and Booze is an engaging account filled with history (from a newsman’s perspective), personal success, and personal defeat. With a ringside seat to many global events stretching across several US presidencies, Bob Horton looks back on a life punctuated by amazing moments of journalistic opportunities and achievements, enviable acquaintances, and unique encounters. He also provides a look back on his childhood and family and personal life. But all this is only part of Horton’s journey. He shows stark bravery in telling how he painstakingly came to terms with his escalating downward spiral into alcoholism, denial, and misplaced ego.
What makes this a 5-star book (for me, at least) is the overall feeling of humility that builds and culminates at the end of this memoir as well as the eventual gratefulness for an amazing career and a fervent desire to tell the world that even the most successful and accomplished person can corkscrew out of control and make wrong and even off-the-wall decisions sometimes.
While Horton clearly owns his mistakes and bad choices, his story offers a unique and exciting glimpse into the world of journalism when journalism meant being on the front lines and at the right place at the right time and getting that tip off or that scrap of news and running with it. Unlike today, where we’re bombarded with information from every angle, most of Horton’s journalism career spanned the years when people had to wait for the morning or evening paper to get the latest news or wait for news broadcasts on the radio and TV, all an exercise in patience most people today couldn’t even fathom.
But it’s not only about bulletins and bylines. While booze and other substances were negative influences on Horton’s life, career, and marriages, this guy always seems to land on his feet. I have to say the story jumps unexpectedly every now and then; however, intended or not, I think that style fits perfectly. Horton is a journalist used to pitching out a story at a moment’s notice, and the sometimes clipped delivery mimics that fast-paced life of fast news, fast drinking, and fast edge-of-your-seat connections in that bygone era. Well done!
***
Here are some of my favorite quotes:
"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 eventually learned that one doesn't win at everything."
"Achieve little victories and people expect bigger things."
"The wrong use of a word or phrase might set off tremors in other world capitals or fail to communicate properly the American stance on an important issue."
hmmm
"It never occurred to me that drinking might determine where I was headed."
What makes this a 5-star book (for me, at least) is the overall feeling of humility that builds and culminates at the end of this memoir as well as the eventual gratefulness for an amazing career and a fervent desire to tell the world that even the most successful and accomplished person can corkscrew out of control and make wrong and even off-the-wall decisions sometimes.
While Horton clearly owns his mistakes and bad choices, his story offers a unique and exciting glimpse into the world of journalism when journalism meant being on the front lines and at the right place at the right time and getting that tip off or that scrap of news and running with it. Unlike today, where we’re bombarded with information from every angle, most of Horton’s journalism career spanned the years when people had to wait for the morning or evening paper to get the latest news or wait for news broadcasts on the radio and TV, all an exercise in patience most people today couldn’t even fathom.
But it’s not only about bulletins and bylines. While booze and other substances were negative influences on Horton’s life, career, and marriages, this guy always seems to land on his feet. I have to say the story jumps unexpectedly every now and then; however, intended or not, I think that style fits perfectly. Horton is a journalist used to pitching out a story at a moment’s notice, and the sometimes clipped delivery mimics that fast-paced life of fast news, fast drinking, and fast edge-of-your-seat connections in that bygone era. Well done!
***
Here are some of my favorite quotes:
"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 eventually learned that one doesn't win at everything."
"Achieve little victories and people expect bigger things."
"The wrong use of a word or phrase might set off tremors in other world capitals or fail to communicate properly the American stance on an important issue."
hmmm
"It never occurred to me that drinking might determine where I was headed."
February 15, 2020
“A new day dawned and once more I could be grateful for not feeling that obsession for pouring alcohol into my body to banish a fear or some other unknown demon.”
Fear is something we all deal with in different ways. Gary Horton poignantly takes a reader down his road on how he dealt with it in both his professional and personal life. He turned to alcohol.
Of Bulletins and Booze is a well-written conservational toned book that details the life of a reporter and what drinking did to its author. Mixed with personal growing up occurrences and his reporting it is an uncomplicated memoir of the evolution from his growing up in a small West Texas community to working in Washington, D.C.
Readers get a glimpse of his work from being a reporter with the Associated Press to working with the Post Master General Information Staff, Reuters, US News and World Report, and even the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. With Horton's keen eye he noticed a single man carrying a brown case in the hospital where President Kennedy laid who carried a case to Lyndon Johnson which contained the codes to bombs and nuclear weapons. It's an unknown, simple part of history. It's these single moments in time that made Horton a good reporter and journalist. Through this memoir, Horton offers a realistic look into his journalism career and alcoholism and how it affected his life.
Want to learn bits of history? How in the end did alcoholism affect his life? Who was the man carrying the brown case? What in the world are "whore doves?" Well – you’ll have to read the book to find out. Horton states at the end, “He survived. He did live.” He survived to share his story, along with the history he experienced.
Fear is something we all deal with in different ways. Gary Horton poignantly takes a reader down his road on how he dealt with it in both his professional and personal life. He turned to alcohol.
Of Bulletins and Booze is a well-written conservational toned book that details the life of a reporter and what drinking did to its author. Mixed with personal growing up occurrences and his reporting it is an uncomplicated memoir of the evolution from his growing up in a small West Texas community to working in Washington, D.C.
Readers get a glimpse of his work from being a reporter with the Associated Press to working with the Post Master General Information Staff, Reuters, US News and World Report, and even the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. With Horton's keen eye he noticed a single man carrying a brown case in the hospital where President Kennedy laid who carried a case to Lyndon Johnson which contained the codes to bombs and nuclear weapons. It's an unknown, simple part of history. It's these single moments in time that made Horton a good reporter and journalist. Through this memoir, Horton offers a realistic look into his journalism career and alcoholism and how it affected his life.
Want to learn bits of history? How in the end did alcoholism affect his life? Who was the man carrying the brown case? What in the world are "whore doves?" Well – you’ll have to read the book to find out. Horton states at the end, “He survived. He did live.” He survived to share his story, along with the history he experienced.
March 14, 2019
A wonderfully raw, spell-binding book. The humility with which the author portrays a love of triumph and tragedy is both gripping and thought-provoking. One can’t help but wrestle through the chapters, asking oneself hard questions.
November 6, 2025
This was a fascinating read. How this journalist went from shaking hands with presidents and high ranking government officials to dating crackheads half his age in his 60s.
April 25, 2017
MEMOIR
Bob Horton
Of Bulletins and Booze: A Newsman’s Story of Recovery
Texas Tech University Press
Hardcover, 978-0-8967-2990-2, 248 pgs., $26.95
March 31, 2017
“. . . striving for success can be as intoxicating as the highest-proof booze and equally susceptible to addiction . . . ”
Bob Horton grew up outside of Lubbock in dusty West Texas, the son of dirt farmers trying to eke a living out of cotton. An ambitious, smart, mischievous child whose competitive spirit was nurtured by his mother, Horton was encouraged to excel. “Achieve little victories and people expect bigger things,” Horton writes of his school days. “They speak about how you have potential and can achieve even more.”
He did excel, but, as he found, “the hunger for success can lead one to swallow more ambitious notions than he is capable of digesting.” Horton was a reporter in Washington, D.C., for almost twenty-five years, covering the Pentagon, Congress, the State Department, and the White House for the Associated Press and Reuters, among other news outlets. He won national awards and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. “I drank to celebrate my successes,” Horton writes. “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.”
Of Bulletins and Booze: A Newsman’s Story of Recovery is Bob Horton’s memoir of early success— perhaps too early—in the hothouse of our nation’s capital with a lovely (and patient) wife and young children, and how he did, in fact, lose it all. A midlife crisis began early and lasted late: “old questioning about who I was and where I should be headed … it never occurred to me that drinking might determine where I was headed.” This is also Horton’s story of reinvention and the ongoing struggle of a sober life.
Horton’s narrative weaves forward and back in time, but is roughly chronological. He seems to feel a need to return to his West Texas touchstone. The narrative begins to lose structure two-thirds of the way along, mirroring the downward spiral of his life.
Horton is sometimes introspective (“Something about the world changed the instant the alcohol in the blood hit my brain. Things become extremely pleasant. Any uneasiness or guilt that I might have had faded like the setting sun”), sometimes folksy (“plump as a pampered pup”), and frequently wryly funny (“a lost ball in high weeds”). He writes movingly of his mother’s death at home in hospice care.
There’s a good deal of history here. Details of how the news business worked in the late 1950s and 1960s are fascinating, and will be of interest to both old hands and whippersnappers who don’t know what a teletype machine is.
Illustrations and photographs, both posed and candid, enhance the telling, including an invitation (“a high-level y’all come”) to the White House from President and Lady Bird Johnson, a very young Horton in the Pentagon press room sporting horn-rimmed glasses and a burr haircut, and an impressive collage of his press credentials spanning decades.
Horton remains a work in progress, as does any alcoholic, as this painfully honest memoir makes clear.
Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.
Bob Horton
Of Bulletins and Booze: A Newsman’s Story of Recovery
Texas Tech University Press
Hardcover, 978-0-8967-2990-2, 248 pgs., $26.95
March 31, 2017
“. . . striving for success can be as intoxicating as the highest-proof booze and equally susceptible to addiction . . . ”
Bob Horton grew up outside of Lubbock in dusty West Texas, the son of dirt farmers trying to eke a living out of cotton. An ambitious, smart, mischievous child whose competitive spirit was nurtured by his mother, Horton was encouraged to excel. “Achieve little victories and people expect bigger things,” Horton writes of his school days. “They speak about how you have potential and can achieve even more.”
He did excel, but, as he found, “the hunger for success can lead one to swallow more ambitious notions than he is capable of digesting.” Horton was a reporter in Washington, D.C., for almost twenty-five years, covering the Pentagon, Congress, the State Department, and the White House for the Associated Press and Reuters, among other news outlets. He won national awards and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. “I drank to celebrate my successes,” Horton writes. “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.”
Of Bulletins and Booze: A Newsman’s Story of Recovery is Bob Horton’s memoir of early success— perhaps too early—in the hothouse of our nation’s capital with a lovely (and patient) wife and young children, and how he did, in fact, lose it all. A midlife crisis began early and lasted late: “old questioning about who I was and where I should be headed … it never occurred to me that drinking might determine where I was headed.” This is also Horton’s story of reinvention and the ongoing struggle of a sober life.
Horton’s narrative weaves forward and back in time, but is roughly chronological. He seems to feel a need to return to his West Texas touchstone. The narrative begins to lose structure two-thirds of the way along, mirroring the downward spiral of his life.
Horton is sometimes introspective (“Something about the world changed the instant the alcohol in the blood hit my brain. Things become extremely pleasant. Any uneasiness or guilt that I might have had faded like the setting sun”), sometimes folksy (“plump as a pampered pup”), and frequently wryly funny (“a lost ball in high weeds”). He writes movingly of his mother’s death at home in hospice care.
There’s a good deal of history here. Details of how the news business worked in the late 1950s and 1960s are fascinating, and will be of interest to both old hands and whippersnappers who don’t know what a teletype machine is.
Illustrations and photographs, both posed and candid, enhance the telling, including an invitation (“a high-level y’all come”) to the White House from President and Lady Bird Johnson, a very young Horton in the Pentagon press room sporting horn-rimmed glasses and a burr haircut, and an impressive collage of his press credentials spanning decades.
Horton remains a work in progress, as does any alcoholic, as this painfully honest memoir makes clear.
Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews