The redemption of Timothy Michael Murtaugh

Tim Murtaugh, author of “Swing Hard In Case You Hit It.” (provided photo)

Let’s get this out of the way at the outset: Tim Murtaugh and I agree on little when it comes to politics, particularly his most famous boss: Donald Trump.

I’ve known Tim for three decades. Early on, he was a member of the Virginia Capitol Correspondents Association by virtue of his job as Richmond correspondent for Charlottesville’s NBC affiliate, WVIR-TV.

Then he hopped the fence into Republican Party politics, serving a variety of roles with candidates and GOP organizations in Virginia and beyond. We came into each other’s orbits most closely when he was the chief spokesman for George Allen’s successful 2000 U.S. Senate campaign. We would intersect frequently in his spokesman roles with Jerry Kilgore’s attorney general office and Kilgore’s unsuccessful gubernatorial bid.

Tim’s sharp mind made him one of the best at what he did when he was on his game. And by “on his game,” I mean sober. Because much of the time, he wasn’t, a fact as plain as it was tragic. He went through more high-profile political jobs in a few years than most people can hold in a lifetime and many ended badly, victims of his rapacious alcoholism.

I couldn’t help but like Tim. He is engaging and witty. We share an affinity for the niche film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and would frequently greet each other with lines from it. We bonded over a mutual love of sports, a family legacy for him. His grandfather, Danny Murtaugh, managed the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1960s and ’70s when they won two World Series championships, and it’s a stain on the Baseball Hall of Fame that he’s still not in it.

Then, covering Virginia government for The Associated Press, I had to keep my political leanings locked in a vault and out of my copy. There were times when I agreed with Tim and others when I did not. Differences aside, I respected him and what he could be professionally if only he could put the bottle aside.

There were times from 2000 to 2012 when I saw Tim alarmingly drunk. Turns out, I didn’t know the half of it. This month, he raised the curtain on his grim, long-running addiction and the resolute struggle that ultimately brought him to lasting sobriety in an unsparing autobiography titled “Swing Hard In Case You Hit It.”

His book starkly recounts his two arrests for driving under the influence, many more for public intoxication, and days spent incarcerated because of it. He writes unflinchingly of his five stints in rehab and how, after each, he quickly put a drink in his hand. One cringes as he chronicles one firing after another and the disqualifying behavior that led to each. It’s a litany of opportunities gained and subsequently squandered. Reading those accounts is like watching a train hurtling toward a washed-out bridge over a deep gorge — awful to behold, helpless to stop, impossible to look away.

The book — indeed, much of the credit for the redemption of Tim Murtaugh — he attributes to his patient, loving and steadfast wife, Dena, who somehow stood beside him at his worst.

“I would be dead or in jail if it weren’t for Dena,” he said in a Zoom interview this week from the home the couple share with their two young sons near Leesburg. “That’s obvious to me, knowing the state that I was in at the time.”

It was not always something she did gladly. The destruction his drinking wrought was hard to endure.

“Why she decided I could be saved — or was worth saving — I don’t know,” he said.

The book, he said, could never have been written while he was still in alcohol’s daily grip, even to the point of having to start each day swilling Jägermeister and continue drinking through the day just to function.

His moment of clarity came in May 2015 when he awoke in the Fairfax County Jail after being arrested for public intoxication from a blackout-level bender at a bar along U.S. 1 near Alexandria. The offense was a misdemeanor, but it would have violated terms of his probation from his second DUI conviction and subjected him to 80 days behind bars, something he recognized as fatal to both his career and his marriage. His attorney convinced a prosecutor that this time, Murtaugh would change for good, and the public drunkenness charge was dropped with the stern warning never to appear in court again for an alcohol-related offense or face the full wrath of the law.

Next month marks nine years since Tim last tasted alcohol. Since then, he has held communications posts for the U.S. secretary of agriculture and as the chief spokesman for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, appearing frequently on national telecasts defending his boss.

Through it all, even when alcohol held the upper hand, Murtaugh said he was drawn to books other alcoholics had written about their battles with addiction — the success stories as well as the tragedies. Once he got sober and stayed that way, he said, the idea of writing his own memoir appealed to him as a way to help others with their journey.

“I thought that if I ever wrote a book, then I would write one of those because those books helped me a lot,” he said. “If somebody is having a hard time and they pick up my book for 10 minutes, if, in that time that they’re holding my book, they don’t pick up a drink, then it was worth writing, even if that only happens one time.”

Dena, whom he first met when she was on the U.S. House staff of then-Rep. Thelma Drake, R-Va. whose reelection campaign he was advising, also made the wise argument that a thorough confession could inoculate him from having his past used against him in the Machiavellian world of partisan politics. The decision to proceed, he said, was surprisingly easy.

“For years, I did regard it as deep, dark secrets that I would protect at any cost. I was deathly afraid of anybody finding out about the true depths of the trouble that I’d been in. But over time, I’d talk about it in (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings … in rehab, at home where my wife knows all about it. It became less of a scarlet letter and more just part of my background and part of who I was,” he said. “Now, it helps a lot that I wasn’t doing those things anymore and that I could accurately talk about them as though they were things of the past because they were.”

After Trump grudgingly left the White House in January 2021, Murtaugh said he sought to leverage his high-visibility post serving a former president into work outside politics but found his association with Trump made him too much of a liability for major corporations. So he stuck with the field he knows and formed his own company, Line Drive Public Affairs, that advises political clients on a contract basis.

Tim is a man more at ease now: his eyes clear, his future instead of a drink in his hands. He knows that resisting alcohol’s whispered seductions will be a day-to-day fight for the rest of his life. He appreciates what he’s gained and knows how easily he could lose it.

“My two little boys have never seen their dad take a drink,” he said, “and I want it to stay that way.”

Editor’s note: If you or someone you love needs help with alcohol addiction or other substance use disorders, you may find resources and support through the Virginia Office for Substance Abuse Prevention, the Substance Abuse and Addiction Recovery Alliance of Virginia, the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services’ local Community Services Boards or by contacting an alcohol treatment center in your community.   

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