20/20's Elizabeth Vargas My Secret Battle with Alcoholism.

Plagued by anxiety and panic attacks, the ABC News Anchor used drinking to cope—and nearly lost everything. Now she’s sober, grateful and sharing her story in the hope of helping others.

- Emily Strohm

It’s two weeks before her son Sam’s 10th birthday,and Elizabeth Vargas is smiling at the gift list he’s left on a table in their Manhattan apartment. At the top is basketball shoes and video games, but the item that most excites Vargas is a mother-son visit to Six Flags. Just two years ago another birth-day trip for Sam was ruined by her drinking—the 20/20 anchor drank so much in the Malibu rent-al house she and her sons were sharing that her family had to come and take her to a detox facility. As she recounts in her new memoir Between Breaths, out Sept. 13 (see excerpt on page 73), the incident was a turning point. “All those years when I was drinking, I missed so many moments,” says Vargas, 54. “I made destructive choices that hurt a lot of people.” In recovery since, she admits that she “can’t tell the future—I can just do everything possible to make sure I stay sober. Every day I am exquisitely aware of how lucky I am.”

From the outside her life has always looked lucky. Bright and ambitious, Vargas parlayed a University of Missouri journalism degree into on-air positions at NBC’s Dateline and the Today show before jumping to ABC,where she became a 20/20 anchor in 2004. But inside she struggled with anxiety and panic attacks, which began when she was 6 and her dad, an Army colonel, was sent to serve in Vietnam. “The panic would envelop me, drown me,” she writes. “I was defenseless in the face of it.”