First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  Betty and Jerry Ford share a private moment in the White House. Betty used “pillow talk” to persuade Jerry to appoint numerous women to high posts.(Ford Library)

  Early in 1975 President Ford affirmed his support by issuing an executive order establishing a national commission on the observance of International Women’s Year. The Fords hoped this would create a positive aura that would reinforce the ERA’s chances for ratification.

  At the time of Betty’s announcement, the ERA was struggling to win approval from three more states to reach the two-thirds required for a constitutional amendment before the ten-year deadline for its adoption expired. Betty Ford became the first First Lady to “work the phones,” as the professional pols call it, direct from the White House to state capitals like Jefferson City, Missouri, urging legislators to vote for the ERA.

  Betty tried to make her approach as low-keyed as possible. She claimed she just wanted to let wavering legislators know that she and the President were “considerably interested” in ERA. She told recalcitrant antis she admired “the sincerity” of their opposition but hoped they would change their minds. Unfortunately, no matter how hard she tried to avoid it, Betty found herself in the middle of a raging political conflict.

  Opposition to the ERA ran deep in many parts of the country, from Phyllis Schlafly’s conservative followers to huge swatches of the southern and midwestern Bible Belt, where Protestant clergy—and quite a few Catholic priests—saw the amendment as an attempt to loosen moral standards and ratify abortion rights. Letters to the editor blossomed in papers around the country, accusing Betty of “arm-twisting” tactics. Marchers paraded in front of the White House chanting: “Betty Ford is trying to press a second-rate manhood on American women.” The mail flooding the White House post office was three to one against her.

  Betty tried to reef her sails in this political squall. She made it clear that she was not a member of NOW or any other branch of the women’s movement. She denied she was a “wild-eyed liberal” and reminded people she had four grown children and had enjoyed being a wife and mother. She was not trying to denigrate women who stayed home and raised their children. She saw the ERA as a fight for equal opportunity, equal freedom of choice, for women in the future.

  Straddling was good politics for the First Lady but not for the ERA. The amendment won in Nevada but lost in Missouri and other swing states as the apostles of the status quo carried the day. Betty turned her attention to a better deal for women inside the Ford administration. She played no small part in persuading her husband to appoint Carla Hills his secretary of housing and urban development—and Anne Armstrong the ambassador to Great Britain. She spent a lot of what she called “pillow talk” hours trying to get him to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.

  Betty’s ERA exercise in political outspokenness had identified her as a new kind of First Lady. That made an invitation to CBS’s top-rated news show, 60 Minutes, virtually inevitable. She appeared on August 21, 1975, eleven days after her husband had announced he was going to seek the GOP nomination in 1976.

  Betty told me she went on the air with no inkling that her host, Morley Safer, had any controversial questions in mind. Suddenly she found herself being asked what she thought of the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion rights. She said it was “the best thing in the world… a great great decision.” Safer asked what she thought about smoking marijuana. If it had been available in her youth, Betty replied, she would have tried it. What did she think of premarital sex? She did not “personally favor it,” Betty said. But she thought it might lower the divorce rate.

  What would she say if her seventeen-year-old daughter Susan told her she was having an affair? Betty said she would not be surprised. “She’s a perfectly normal human being.” She added that she would counsel Susan on the matter and would want to know a lot about the young man.

  At the marijuana remark, Jerry Ford, watching with Betty in Vail, Colorado (the show had been taped earlier), reportedly gasped: “You just cost me ten million votes!” At the premarital sex reply, he groaned: “Twenty million!” When I discussed this episode with Betty, she described these remarks as “facetious.” Alas, there was nothing humorous about the public’s reaction to the show.

  The next morning, newspaper headlines across the country told people what Betty had said, and the White House post office was buried in an avalanche that made the number of letters received on the ERA seem like a light dusting, to use weatherman lingo. Twenty-eight thousand Americans told Betty Ford they were very, very mad at her. A paltry seven thousand supported her frankness.

  A Dallas preacher roared that Betty had descended to a “gutter type of mentality.” A New Hampshire newspaper editor howled that she had “disgraced the nation.” A Texan informed her that she was “not an individual. You are, because of the position your husband has assumed, expected and officially required to be PERFECT!” America’s foremost evangelist, Billy Graham, swayer of umpteen million mostly Republican votes, said his wife would have wept if one of his children confessed to using drugs or having an affair.

  The Ford White House reeled in this media firestorm. Betty’s answers had challenged the core of Jerry Ford’s political persona. As President watchers such as Richard Reeves pointed out, being Mr. Nice Guy, doing his best to avoid making people angry at him, had been the basic idea of his career. His positions on abortion, drugs, and premarital sex reflected the largely conservative Republican Michigan constituency he had represented for almost thirty years.

  Most accounts of Betty as First Lady skip this part of the story and blithely tell their readers that people eventually got around to admiring Betty for her frankness. These writers never spent any time inside the White House. Twenty-eight thousand negative letters do not make for laughs or blithe dismissals. If that many people are mad enough to sit down and write a letter, it suggests there may be another 2,800,000 out there sounding off to their friends and relatives. “The President,” Ron Nessen told Betty’s press secretary, in what was almost certainly an understatement, “is very upset.”

  What to do? Betty being Betty, she had no intention of changing her convictions. She was—and is—exactly what one of her surgeons described her as: “a gutsy lady” She remained convinced that a majority of Americans agreed with her remarks—or at least felt she had a right to express her opinions. But how to reach them? As she discussed the crisis with her staff, they began to suspect the heart of the problem was a clash between TV and newsprint. Chatting with Morley Safer, Betty had expressed the same personal opinions she might have offered in a conversation with any visitor to the White House. Safer had not debated these issues with her. They had passed on to other subjects. If the remarks had been left in verbal form, they might have caused far less fuss. But the print journalists had turned them into issues and blasted them into people’s faces with headlines and reams of analysis.

  Betty and her staff decided the only thing to do was fight print with print. They spent weeks drafting what they eventually called “the letter.” It is a very interesting document, a veritable masterpiece of First Lady spin control. It also happened to be an accurate description of Betty Ford’s views:

  Thank you for writing about my appearance on the 60 Minutes interview. The concern which inspired you to share your views is appreciated. I wish it were possible for us to sit down and talk, one to another. I consider myself a responsible parent. I know I am a loving one. We have raised our four children in a home that believes in and practices the enduring values of morality and personal integrity.

  As every mother and father knows, these are not easy times to be a parent. Our convictions are constantly being tested by the fads and fancies of the moment. I believe our values to be eternal and I hope I have instilled them in our children.

  We have come to this sharing of outlook through communication, not coercion. I want my children to know that their concerns—their doubts and difficulties—whatever they may be, can be discussed with the two p
eople in this world who care the most—their mother and father.

  On 60 Minutes the emotion of my words spoke to the need of this communication, rather than the specific issues discussed.

  My husband and I have lived twenty-six years of faithfulness in marriage. I do not believe in premarital relations, but I realize that many in today’s generation do not share my views. However, this must never cause us to withdraw the love, the counseling and the understanding that they may need now, more than ever before.

  This is the essence of my responsible parenthood. It is difficult to adequately express ones personal convictions in a fifteen minute interview. I hope our lives will say more than words about our dedication to honor, to integrity, to humanity and to God. You and I, they and I, have no quarrels.

  The letter went out over Betty’s signature to those thousands of angry First Lady watchers. One of them sent it to the Associated Press, who put it on its ubiquitous wires, and it was picked up by hundreds of other newspapers, including The New York Times.

  Slowly, very slowly, Betty’s poll numbers began turning around. On November 19 a Harris Poll reported more people now approved of her remarks on 60 Minutes than disapproved. Other polls reported she had come from a bare fifty percent (low for a First Lady) general approval rating to seventy-five percent. At the end of the year, the Gallup Poll ranked her the most admired woman in America. People magazine listed her as one of the three most intriguing women in the country.

  But this bonanza of goodwill did her husband little good. By the end of the year, his poll numbers had dropped to a subterranean forty-one percent. Was there a connection between Betty’s rise and Jerry’s decline? No one can say for certain. But there was a rising conservative tide out there, which would crest with Ronald Reagan in 1980. Betty was, according to some headline writers at least, swimming against it—and conservatives have very retentive memories. Perhaps it is no accident that the elephant is the Republican symbol.

  By the time Jerry Ford ran for President in 1976, the Ford administration decided Betty was an asset and distributed campaign buttons saying, ELECT BETTY’S HUSBAND. KEEP BETTY IN THE WHITE HOUSE. In the New Hampshire primary campaign, she was a sensational success. Television and print showered praise on her candor, her freshness.

  Early on Betty told several reporters that she would campaign for Jerry but might differ with her husband on some issues. “Wow,” gasped Ford speechwriter John Casserly in his diary. When the campaign got going, she did no such thing. The Republican platform called for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, for instance. Betty did not say a word against it.

  Instead, like the loving, loyal partner that she was and still is, Betty poured everything she had into her husband’s campaign. She tried extremely hard to convince the nation that the decent man she loved deserved to become President in his own right. But she did not like political campaigning. She hated making speeches. Conversation, not oration, was her métier. I suspect she also felt she was out there, doing not her own thing but her husband’s thing—and Betty slowly crumbled under this sense of loss of self and the sheer exhaustion that overtakes everyone in a presidential campaign.

  The Fords leave the Truman house in Independence, Missouri, after a visit with my parents. My husband, Clifton Daniel, is walking with the President. My mother admired Betty’s forthright style. (Ford Library)

  Betty began to mess up speeches—at one point she referred to herself as President. At another point, during Jerry’s fight with Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, she called Reagan the President. She broke down and wept tears of shame and exasperation in hotel rooms. She became more and more dependent on drugs and alcohol to keep going.

  As almost everyone knows, Jerry Ford did not win the presidency in 1976. He lost by a heartbreaking two percent of the vote to Jimmy Carter, who had come out of nowhere to win the Democratic nomination as an outsider running against the Washington establishment. The loss sent Betty Ford spinning into a black pit of depression. I am not about to play amateur psychiatrist with a woman I admire and like, but I cannot help but wonder if part of Betty’s collapse was caused by a feeling—a fear—that she may have contributed to the loss.

  Looking back on it from the perspective of twenty years, Betty does not think this feeling played a part in her depression. In discussing it with me, she pointed—correctly—to many other factors in Jerry’s defeat: the overall stench of Watergate; the burden of the Nixon pardon; Jerry’s bad luck to be golfing in Palm Springs on the day in 1975 when South Vietnam began its swift collapse, giving the TV news a chance to juxtapose images of a President at play with scenes of blood and horror. But Betty admitted to me that if she regretted anything in her tenure as First Lady, it was the 60 Minutes interview.

  For Betty Ford in 1976, no explanations, however valid, did much to assuage the pain of her husband’s defeat—which was also her defeat. Perhaps her best advice came from a previous First Lady, supposedly nonpolitical—certainly one who never said a word in public that disagreed with her presidential husband. In her large scrawl, Mamie Eisenhower wrote:

  Dear President and Mrs. Ford:

  Words are inadequate from your friends but you can always say: “God I have done my best” Amen

  For the time being, Betty Ford could not say that prayer. As we shall see, it would take another struggle to be honest—this time with herself about her dependency on drugs and alcohol—before she could resume a normal life.

  Chapter 11

  —

  PUBLIC

  PARTNER NO. 1

  NOT LONG AFTER JIMMY AND ROSALYNN CARTER TOOK OVER THE White House, a reporter obtained an interview with both of them on the same day. The newsman headed for the mansion with visions of a front-page story dancing in his head. Maybe he could get the new President and his First Lady to disagree over some major issue. Instead, as the scribe shuttled from the Oval Office to the First Lady’s office in the East Wing, he found she and her husband agreed on everything—often down to giving the same answers, practically word for word! The bewildered would-be scooper reeled onto Pennsylvania Avenue and gasped to a friend: “I’ve just met two Jimmy Carters!”

  Much of Rosalynn Carter’s effectiveness—let’s use the blunt word, her power—as First Lady derived from her unique relationship with her husband. She was the first First Lady to go forthrightly, fearlessly public in the role of partner-wife. Other Presidents may have listened to their spouses’ political advice behind the scenes, but Jimmy and Rosalynn made a point of their partnership. Not that anyone doubted it. They thought and spoke alike to an almost unnerving degree.

  Rosalynn Carter was one of the few First Ladies who enjoyed the job from the moment she entered the White House. One reason may be that she started with a win. For years her friend Betty Bumpers, wife of Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, had been pushing a project to immunize children against measles. She had made very little progress in a discouraging struggle with red tape and federal bureaucracy. With the new First Lady behind her, Mrs. Bumpers soon had access to the wheels within wheels of the Department of Health Education and Welfare. “The results,” Rosalynn says, “were astounding.” In two years they immunized ninety percent of the children in the nation. By the time Rosalynn left the White House, measles had been virtually eliminated in the United States.

  It was a stunning demonstration of the power of the First Lady in the era of big government and big television. Almost casually, Rosalynn mentions another factor in this tour de force—a direct order from President Jimmy Carter to the secretary of HEW Not many First Ladies could rely on such hands-on cooperation from the Oval Office.

  Rosalynn had a solid claim to her almost coequal role. More than any other First Lady except Hillary Rodham Clinton, if push came to shove in the private quarters of the White House (I am sure it never did) Rosalynn could say: “Without me you wouldn’t be here!” For almost eighteen months before the Carters reached the White House, she had been out on the campaig
n trail, asking surprised Americans to vote for Jimmy Carter.

  “Jimmy who?” was the early response. Seldom if ever has a candidate started so fat back on the list. Not even his own mother thought Jimmy could win. When he told Lillian Carter he was going to run for President, she reportedly said: “President of what?” In my talk with her, Rosalynn recalled, with a nostalgic smile, how Jimmy walked into their bedroom at the Georgia governor’s mansion and said: “I’m thinking of running for———-.”

  “He couldn’t even say the word, the idea was so awesome,” Rosalynn said.

  With only a single term (1971-1975) as governor of Georgia and two terms in the state senate on his political resume, Jimmy Carter was the ultimate long shot In 1974, when he appeared on the TV show What’s My Line, he almost stumped the panel.

  Rosalynn began her campaign with a staff of exactly one, a friend who drove with her to Florida in 1975 to begin buttonholing Democratic politicians. By the time the primary campaign ended, she had visited thirty states and played a crucial role in piling up the delegates who won Jimmy the Democratic nomination. In the general election against Gerald Ford, she went out on her own again, flying in a chartered Lear jet, speaking in over a hundred cities. “It was like having two candidates,” her son Jack said.

  Even then reporters noticed something unusual about this small, smiling woman with the soft southern accent: she was tireless—eighteen-hour days seldom fazed her—and she was tough. She could handle any question from the floor, whether it was intelligent or just sarcastic. Very early in her campaign, she encountered a fair number of people who shared Eleanor Roosevelt’s opinion that it was “unseemly” for a wife to campaign for her husband and an even larger number of really old-fashioned traditionalists who thought she should be home taking care of her ten-year-old daughter, Amy.