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Morton Kondracke is known as a no-nonsense, independent-thinking journalist who, in addition to writing, appears on shows like The McLaughlin Group and Fox's The Beltway Boys. But through his wife his life has been touched by Parkinson's, a disease that affects over a million Americans. Kondracke's book on the subject, Saving Milly: Love, Politics, and Parkinson's Disease, is published by Ballantine and is now available in paperback.

You start your book at a point where you're totally focused on yourself.

I had dreams of glory. I thought maybe I should marry a Supreme Court Justice's granddaughter or something like that, and that this would be my companion up the ladder. I met this woman, Millicent Martinez, who is beautiful, olive skinned, self-assured, smart, and streetwise. But poor, working her way through college. I was smitten, but I thought, "This woman doesn't fit into my life's plan." We went skiing one time at a bunny slope near Chicago, and she crashed into me. I thought, I want a woman who is at home at Aspen. I don't want somebody who can't even negotiate a bunny slope. So I contrived a breakup with her.

We didn't see each other for four months, but one day, in late May, 1967, I went to the beach, and there I saw Milly with some boyfriend of hers. I sort of skulked around so she wouldn't see me. The next thing you know I was agreeing to take her to the movies. Then we're leaving her apartment and it's raining. We're under an umbrella and we're kissing under a street lamp. And I said, okay, God, I give up. This could never have happened but by God's design. This was meant to be.

This is a story of Milly's journey, but it's also a story of your journey.

Absolutely.

You say, "Of all Milly's many projects, her anti-alcohol campaign is one of those about which I am most grateful. It may have saved my life and my marriage."

I wasn't a falling-down drunk, but I was a regular drunk. I mean, I drank a bottle of wine every weekday and basically just passed out. I was just in a zone most of the time. And on weekends I got pretty drunk, and I would drive dangerously.

How she put up with it I don't know, but she didn't put up with it ultimately. She said, "Listen, you're an alcoholic." And it was true. She started pouring all the booze down the sink. And I'd say, "Go ahead I'll buy some more." She said, "I don't care. Buy some more, and I'll pour that down the drain, too."

She just hounded me, and she finally convinced me. Finally, one day I had a dinner party, and I couldn't remember what had happened. The Sunday after Christmas 1986 was the last drink I had. I went to AA that night and haven't had a drink since.

A year and one month from the day you quit drinking, the first signs of Milly's Parkinson's disease appeared.

She had beautiful handwriting, and she was writing a check and couldn't form the letter k right. I didn't appreciate that there was any difference. It looked fine to me. But she insisted that, no, there was something wrong.

Later she had a tremor in the little finger of her right hand, and then her foot would sort of wobble on the brakes when she was driving.

She had been a counselor at the neurology center in Bethesda, Maryland, helping families with patients with chronic neurological diseases. She was given Symmetrel—which is a Parkinson's medicine—by this doctor, and he didn't tell her what it was. But she called me up at work one day, totally distraught and hysterical in a way that I'd never heard Milly before. She said, you have to come home right away. Something terrible has happened. And I thought that one of the kids had been in an auto accident or something, so I raced home.

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August (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46