Mills’s lost week-ends

Press, 23 August 1977, Page 8

Mills’s lost week-ends

NZPA-Reuter Washington The former United States Congressman, Mr Wilbur Mills, whose political career ended after he was discovered drunk with a striptease dancer called Fanne Foxe in 1974, says he sometimes got so drunk he had no recollection of White 1 House meetings with then President, Gerald Ford. • “I would get up in the' morning and read in the paper that I’d been at the Oval Office the day before with President Ford,” Mr Mills, who is 68, said in a newspaper interview, “I would read that I had suggested this and that. Yet I would have absolutely no recollection of being at the White House,” he told the “Washington Post.” Mr Mills, who was chairman of the powerful House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, retired from politics last year. The former Democrat and Congressman from Arkansas recalled how he used to go to clubs in Washington with Miss Foxe.

“I’d get drunk on weekends and, good God Almighty, everything in the world would happen to me,” he said. Mrs Mills, who is 70, is also a recovering alcoholic, the “Post” said.