Betty Ford: First Lady

by Lisa McCubbin

  When Jerry became minority leader, Mike and Jack were attending T. C. Williams High School, in Alexandria; Susan and Steve went to nearby Douglas MacArthur Elementary. The boys played football and baseball, while Susan had dance lessons, and had taken up horseback riding. There were orthodontist appointments, eye doctor visits, and, when you least expected it, always at the worst possible time, a broken bone or a tooth through a lip that required an urgent trip to the emergency room. Four kids, all going in different directions, with Betty in charge of juggling carpools, PTA meetings, and teaching Sunday school, as well as her ever-increasing responsibilities as wife of one of the most powerful men in Republican politics. The older boys “were going through adolescence and all that means,” Betty wrote, “and I was having problems of my own with the change of life.” On top of all that, the pain in her neck kept getting worse.

  “I hated feeling crippled,” she wrote. She was forty-seven years old, but she felt much older. The pills dulled the pain, and she realized that a drink or two in the evening helped her to relax at the end of a stressful day. The children saw that, at times, she was not always thinking straight.

  “We kids took advantage of that,” Steve said. “We learned how to get away with little things.” The little things sometimes turned into big things, and Betty began to feel like she was “a doormat to the kids.” It was all about to come to a head.

  It was a Tuesday in August 1965. Jerry had been in meetings at the White House, and President Johnson had invited him to go for a cruise on the presidential yacht Sequoia that evening with a contingent of other congressmen. He’d called Betty to let her know he wouldn’t be home until ten or eleven that night.

  Clara had been at the house all day, and left at five, as she normally did. The school year hadn’t started yet, all four kids were home, and Jack was pushing Betty’s buttons.

  “Jack’s the son with whom I’ve crossed swords most often,” Betty wrote. It wasn’t uncommon for them to have bitter arguments, and this day was one of them. They were going at it back and forth upstairs. Downstairs, Susan, Steve, and Mike had come in from the pool. They heard the yelling, and then the sound of their mother sobbing behind the closed door of the master bedroom.

  Jack came stomping down the stairs. “Mom’s really upset,” he announced. They’d had their scuffles before, but this time it seemed a line had been crossed. There was something different. He looked at Susan and said, “You need to go fix it.”

  Even though she was the youngest, somehow Susan was always the one that could calm down their mother.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” she’d say. “We love you, Mom.” That had become her role. The fixer.

  Before anyone could do anything, Betty appeared at the foot of the stairs. Her hair was disheveled, like she’d been trying to pull it out, and her eyes—swollen and red from crying—were wild.

  “That’s it! I can’t take it anymore!” she cried. “I’m taking Susan, and we’re going to the beach!”

  Susan, just eight years old, was terrified. She had never seen her mother like this before. What does she mean? Where are we going? Are we going to stay in a hotel? What about Dad and the boys?

  And then the thought that always came next: How can I fix it?

  But Betty was inconsolable. She was ranting and pacing, gathering things together, getting ready to leave. Later, she would admit that her intention was to let the “whole ungrateful family worry about where I was and whether I was ever coming home.”

  Mike realized they needed help. He snuck out the back door and raced across the street to their neighbors Harriet and Wendell Thorne’s house.

  “I need to get hold of my dad,” Mike said. “And Clara. We need Clara.” As the oldest child, Mike fell into the role of protector. He knew his mother would be mortified if anyone outside the family saw her like this.

  Meanwhile, back at the house, Betty was packing her and her daughter’s things. Susan was crying, scared to death. It wasn’t long—although it seemed an eternity—before Clara showed up.

  She took charge, in her calm, soothing way. “There, there,” she said, as she wrapped Susan in her arms. “Let me go talk to Mother. Everything’s gonna be all right.”

  Clara went upstairs and knocked on the door to the master bedroom.

  “Mrs. Ford, it’s Clara.” Betty let her into the room, and while Clara would never reveal what was said or what she did, whatever it was, it was exactly what Betty needed to hear.

  Clara had called Jerry, fortunately reaching him before the Sequoia left the pier.

  More than fifty years later, Susan remembered the trauma of that evening as vividly as if it had happened the day before. “Dad went up with Mom, and then a doctor came. Clara came downstairs and took Steve and me and said, ‘Come. Let us go for a walk.’ ”

  Clara knew that Mike and Jack were old enough to realize what was going on, but Susan and Steve needed to be reassured. They walked up Crown View Drive as the late summer sun dropped below the horizon, and Clara tried to explain to them in terms an eight-year-old and a nine-year-old would understand.

  “Your momma is sick,” she said. She told them that Betty had been seeing a doctor—a psychiatrist—and he was going to help her get better. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “She loves you very much. But she just needs a bit of help right now.”

  After that, Susan remembered feeling scared of her mother, and embarrassed. She was afraid to bring friends home, and, more and more, she clung to Clara.

  For Betty, going to therapy helped her realize that she couldn’t be everything to everybody. “I’d been too busy trying to figure out everyone else’s needs, that I’d had no time for Betty,” she wrote. “I had to start thinking I was valuable, not just as a wife and mother, but as myself. And to myself.”

  Over time her self-esteem began to improve, and those feelings of uselessness and emptiness faded. She realized that her mental state had a lot to do with her exacerbating physical pain.

  She wasn’t alone. In 1963, Betty Friedan authored The Feminine Mystique about “the problem that has no name.” The book, which would sell more than one million copies its first year in print, focused on the increasing unhappiness and empty feelings of women in America. Friedan wrote, “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’ ”

  And while the visits to the psychiatrist helped, Betty didn’t realize—and the doctor didn’t ask—that she was using alcohol to cope. “I saw no reason to discuss my drinking,” she would say years later. “I preferred to pretend everything would get better if I went back to dance class, or did some shopping, or took an afternoon off to write letters.”

  Meanwhile, each member of the family unconsciously slipped into roles to cope with something they didn’t understand, but which only served to enable Betty’s addiction.

  Jerry would become a classic enabler, making excuses for his wife when she was late or had imbibed one drink too many at a social event, blaming it on an overzealous bartender.

  Mike, the oldest, would quietly take over when his mother wasn’t able to function. “I had to step in either indirectly or directly with my siblings to help with things like homework or driving Susan and Steve around once I got my license,” Mike recalled. He’d run errands and do the grocery shopping—even fill in for Betty at church functions, in an effort to protect her.

  “I didn’t want her to look bad or feel like she hadn’t done her job,” he explained. “I didn’t want her to feel that way.”

  Quite often in the families of an alcoholic, the second-oldest child becomes the scapegoat: one who develops angry and defiant behaviors. Jack would fall into that role.

  “I think most of my family would say that she and I were, in a lot of respects, most alike,” Jack acknowledged. “And so, that meant probably that we butted heads more often. I plead guilty to egging things on, at times.”

  Steve, a middle child, became the med
iator. “No doubt that my role was to try to find a compromise to make peace,” he reflected.

  And Susan, the youngest, was the fixer.

  From the outside, they were the perfect American family. And on the inside, they truly loved one another and were close. But the disease was there, lurking beneath the surface.

  9

  * * *

  The Nixon White House

  With the help of her weekly therapy sessions, Betty was feeling much better about herself and her situation in life. She realized there was nothing “terribly wrong” with her. “I just wasn’t the Bionic Woman,” she wrote. “And the minute I stopped thinking I had to be, a weight fell from my shoulders.”

  In March 1968, President Lyndon Johnson stunned the nation by announcing he would not seek reelection, and that year, after the tragic assassination of Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy, the presidential election was ultimately between the Republican candidate, former vice president Richard M. Nixon, and Democrat Hubert Humphrey, with anti-integrationist Alabama governor George Wallace siphoning votes as the choice of the newly formed American Independent Party.

  When Nixon won the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami that August, he had asked Jerry Ford if he’d consider running as vice president on the ticket. But Jerry saw that there was a chance the Republicans might capture enough seats to win the majority, which would make him Speaker of the House—his ultimate goal, and what he’d been working toward the past twenty years. He thanked Nixon for the confidence in him but declined the offer. He just wasn’t interested.

  Nixon chose the relatively unknown governor of Maryland, Spiro T. Agnew, as his running mate, and as it turned out, the Republican ticket of Nixon and Agnew barely won the presidency—edging out Humphrey and Maine senator Edmund Muskie, but the Democrats retained control of the House and Senate. Ford would remain the minority leader.

  Betty had always been very active, but after being diagnosed with the pinched nerve, she was reluctant to take part in many of her favorite activities, for fear of making things worse. She had always loved to ski, especially with Jerry and the children, but flying down a steep mountain on narrow wooden slats was far too risky. “That, and by the time she got four kids dressed and boots laced, she was exhausted!” Susan Ford recalled.

  Still, the Christmas ski trips to Boyne Mountain in Michigan had become tradition, and now all four children, whom Jerry remembered picking out of countless snowbanks when they were seven or eight years old, were “zooming down the slopes and shouting gleefully, ‘Hi, Dad! We’ll see you later!’ ”

  Unfortunately, one Christmas they went to Boyne, and there was barely any snow. It put a real damper on the trip and got them thinking about alternatives. Jerry had learned that Ted Kindel, one of his childhood friends from Grand Rapids—Ted’s father had been Jerry’s scoutmaster when Jerry became an Eagle Scout—had opened a hotel in Vail, Colorado. Kindel had gone out to Vail when it first opened in 1962 and, although there was just one gondola and two chairlifts, he saw potential. In 1963 Kindel built the town’s first hotel, the Christiana, and in 1966 he became Vail’s first mayor.

  “Come on out to Vail,” Ted urged his old friend. “You will love it.”

  So, for Christmas vacation 1968, the Fords flew to Denver, piled everybody into a rented station wagon, and drove west along the treacherous and windy Route 6, up and up and up. Around each new bend, there was an even more stunning view of craggy mountains so enormous that they made the mountains of Michigan seem like sand dunes. It was a much longer drive back then, before the completion of Interstate 70 and the Eisenhower Tunnel, but the Fords all agreed it was totally worth it.

  Remembering that first year skiing in Vail, Susan Ford recalled, “It was amazing. The mountains were so much bigger, and there was so much snow.”

  Nestled at the base of the majestic snow-drenched mountains was the charming village of Vail. It was just a few blocks long at that time, and it looked like someone had taken a little town from Austria or Switzerland and plopped it right in the middle of Colorado. Ted Kindel and his wife, Nancy, introduced the Fords to everyone they knew, and within a couple of days, Vail already felt like home.

  January 20, 1969, Betty and Jerry had prime seats for Richard M. Nixon’s inauguration. Rows of tiered seats were set up on the inauguration platform on the east side of the US Capitol. The seats were assigned by a time-honored tradition, and as a member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, Jerry Ford would be seated in the front row, stage left of the podium where Nixon would be sworn in, while Betty, as his wife, had an assigned seat across the aisle, in the third row. Under threatening skies, and the tightest security ever for a presidential inauguration, Betty watched her longtime friend Pat Nixon standing proudly next to her husband as he placed his left hand on, not one, but two family Bibles, and took the Oath of Office to become the nation’s thirty-seventh president.

  “I, Richard Milhous Nixon, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.”

  One of President Nixon’s goals was to open diplomatic ties between the United States and Communist China. At that time, there had been no direct relations with China for more than two decades, so it was truly historic when, in February 1972, Richard Nixon and the first lady—accompanied by three hundred staffers, press, and Secret Service personnel—traveled to mainland China and broadcast their journey for all Americans to see. The trip had such remarkable ramifications that Nixon called it “the week that changed the world.” To continue the positive momentum in normalizing relations, Nixon suggested to the Chinese leaders that it was important to increase the number of visitors between the two countries. As it turned out, Majority Leader Hale Boggs and Minority Leader Jerry Ford, along with their wives, were among the first American visitors to be invited by the Chinese government.

  At that time, “the chance to visit China was a rare opportunity indeed,” Jerry said. And Betty, always ready for an adventure, was game to go.

  Five days before they were scheduled to leave, in June, there was a report that five men had broken into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Office Building in Washington. Jerry recognized two of the names—G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord—and he wondered if anybody at the White House was involved. He told a colleague, “I don’t give a damn who’s involved or how high it goes. Nixon ought to get to the bottom of this and get rid of anybody who’s involved in it.”

  Betty read about it in the newspaper, but amid preparing for her trip to China, didn’t think much of it. The Watergate incident—what the White House called a “third-rate burglary” and what she saw as “an inept effort at God knows what”—would not only test the United States Constitution like never before, but also would send Betty and Jerry on a trajectory they never could have imagined.

  On Friday, June 23, 1972, the Fords, the Boggs, and members of their staffs departed Washington and flew to Shanghai. Jerry Ford and Hale Boggs, despite their positions on opposite sides of the aisle, had a great deal of respect for each other and had bonded during their long months together as members of the Warren Commission. Betty and Lindy Boggs were also good friends, and this trip would cement the close relationship between the two families. (Sadly, just a few months after the trip to China, in October 1972, Hale Boggs was killed in a small-plane crash in a remote area of Alaska. Neither the plane nor his body was ever found.)

  Betty found the trip fascinating and at times challenging. “The Chinese are likely to feed you anything,” she recalled. One night, they were served sea slugs, a local delicacy. Sitting at formal dinners with their hosts, it would have been considered impolite to not eat what was served. For Betty, who didn’t care for fish at all, “trying to choke down sea slugs” was a true testament to her diplomatic ability.

  They traveled all o
ver the country, including to Old Manchuria, where they were the first Caucasians to visit in twenty-four years. “The people were enthralled by us,” she said. “Children would see our cars, and they’d come running from the rice paddies at full tilt.”

  It was an enormously educational experience from start to finish, but without a doubt, Betty was most impressed by how the Chinese used acupuncture in place of anesthesia. They were allowed to witness an operation in which the doctors removed a large ovarian tumor from a young girl. Betty was amazed that the girl was wide awake throughout the procedure, sipping tea and orange juice, clearly feeling no pain even as the doctors cut through her skin and sewed her back up. Thin acupuncture needles had been placed in her ankles, and a little machine between her legs made the needles vibrate. That image would remain seared into her mind.

  Nineteen seventy-two was another presidential election year—another chance for the GOP to take control of the House. While Nixon was campaigning for a second term, Jerry was working as hard as he could to help Republicans get elected. From the time he and Betty returned from China in early July, he was gone almost constantly.

  “Jerry and I thought President Nixon was doing a good job his first term in office,” Betty recalled, and indeed, the American public agreed. On Tuesday, November 7, 1972, Nixon won reelection in a landslide against his Democratic opponent, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. In the House of Representatives, however, the Republicans gained only thirteen seats—not enough for a majority. Realizing the opportunity the Republicans had that year wasn’t likely to repeat itself in the foreseeable future, Jerry concluded that he was never going to become Speaker of the House. He had worked so hard toward that goal—in one year alone, he logged 138,000 miles and was gone more than 250 nights—but in doing so had sacrificed precious time with Betty and their four children.

  By this point, the two older sons had reached adulthood and were each finding his own way. Mike, twenty-two, had graduated from Wake Forest University the previous May (Jerry had given the commencement address) and was in graduate school at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. Twenty-year-old Jack had attended college at Jacksonville University in Florida for two years but took time off to work on the Committee to Re-elect the President. Now he was transferring to Utah State University to study forestry.