Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism.

ON a June day in 1968, as Senator George McGovern prepared the eulogy he was to give in honor of the slain presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy, he picked up the Los Angeles Times to find the following headline: "Senator's Daughter Arrested on Drug Charge." It was Terry.

In this tender and harrowing account of his daughter Teresa's battle against alcoholism, George McGovern, the father, searches in vain for an answer. Why, after Terry's numberless attempts at sobriety, after psychiatric hospitalizations, de-toxes, treatment centers, half-way houses, and AA, did Terry die intoxicated? Why was her loving and cohesive family unable to help? What self-destructive madness consumed this apparently bright, altruistic, and friendly young woman?

We do not find the answer in this poignant memoir, for there has never been a complete answer to the puzzling course of chronic alcoholism. Genetic factors there may be: there is a history of depression in Eleanor McGovern's family and of alcoholism in George McGovern's. Birth order? Terry was the middle child of the McGoverns' five and felt isolated there: "How lonely and guilty and ugly I felt in my family," she writes in one of her many journal entries. Was it her involvement with an unstable, drug-using boyfriend? The abortion at age 15? The many different schools Terry was sent to in her teen years as her parents sought in vain to protect her from the consequences of her drug-using and drinking? Was it her busy, ambitious (abandoning) father?

"I wish that I had held her closer as she was and judged her less by what I wanted her to be," McGovern writes in grief, and yet as he takes the reader through Terry's torn life, we, too, begin to feel impatience with her. For except for a seven-year-period of sobriety, when Terry holds a job, has a home, and bears two daughters, she torments her family with crisis after crisis. "I guess," says her sister Ann, "the best way to get attention in this family is to be an alcoholic."

The separation from her children's father precipitates Terry's final bingeing years. During the last four years of her life, she is admitted to the Tellurian Detox Center in Madison, Wisconsin, a total of 68 times. In one of the final, most grueling chapters of the book, McGovern simply lists the entries of the detox center and the Madison Police Department:

April 14, 1994 -- Time 1:12 PM.

Subject was found passed out sitting up against a fence. She was very intoxicated, she had a hard time keeping her balance. Her speech was slurred, she smelled very strong of intoxicants. She informed me that if she was taken home she would go back to a liquor store and buy some more alcohol. Said she had been drinking vanilla extract. -- Sgt. Bruce Beckman

Why did Terry, despite her valiant, life-long struggles, die of her disease? If George McGovern, citing up-to-date medical research, examining and re-examining the events of her life, cannot tell us the reason, we come away from this touching book with one piece of sure knowledge: that Terry was blessed above all with a loving father and family. The answer lies elsewhere, in a young woman's tortured and fragile psyche. "Better to freeze -- who can hurt me when I'm frozen?" wrote Terry, four years before her death, drunk, found frozen in a bank of snow.