“Well, I didn’t think it would be very polite to tell you that one of your constituents tried to kill me on the way to your office,” Ford said with a smile.
The entire family was shaken to its core. “I remember Mom telling us we need to be good soldiers,” Steve recalled.
“Don’t let Dad know you’re worried. He’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders, and we can’t let him know how scared we are. We’ll put on smiling faces.”
When the president arrived back at the White House, Betty was waiting, eager to see him, and give him a long embrace.
Looking back many years later, Steve said, “You know, that was a great thing about Mom and Dad. They both knew how to handle situations.”
Agent Larry Buendorf had remained in Sacramento for debriefing by the FBI, but as soon as he returned to the White House, Betty grabbed him and gave him a hug.
“I’m so thankful you were there, Larry,” she said.
“Everyone did the right thing at the right time,” Larry replied, not wanting to accept special recognition. “It’s our job. It’s what we train for.”
From that point on, every time the president left the White House, Betty would go on the balcony and wave goodbye as the helicopter took off from the South Grounds. “It was very scary. I would pray that he came back safely,” she said.
From that day on, Betty was understandably anxious about her husband traveling, and when he had another trip to California two weeks later, she decided to accompany him. It was her first time joining Jerry on a political trip—what Sheila Weidenfeld referred to as a “handshaking” trip in which Betty came as “wife” in the most traditional sense: “a sweet smiler, who beams with pride at the magnificence of the oratorical power of her man.”
“I was appalled,” Sheila recalled. “Don’t take the woman Americans have come to respect as an honest, forthright, intelligent lady who speaks her mind and make her into a podium princess!”
President and Mrs. Ford left Washington Friday afternoon, September 19, and after stopping in Oklahoma City for appearances at several events—including a thousand-person Republican fund-raiser—they flew on to Los Angeles, arriving late that night, where they stayed at the Century Plaza Hotel. The next two days, they were guests of Leonard Firestone, the US ambassador to Belgium, and his wife, Nicky, at their home, Ryomi, in Pebble Beach. The president played golf at Cypress Point Golf Course, and Betty joined him later for a private lunch with the Firestones, as well as a number of prominent guests: former Republican congressman Jack Westland; longtime friend Leon Parma, an executive with Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical Company; and local celebrities such as actor Clint Eastwood, entertainer and television mogul Merv Griffin, and famed photographer Ansel Adams, along with his wife. Betty enjoyed meeting so many interesting people, and despite her press secretary’s view that she was along as a “podium princess,” President Ford always enjoyed having her by his side, and she loved being there.
It had been a jam-packed few days, so when the president had a speech in San Francisco that Monday, Betty decided to spend a relaxing morning in Pebble Beach. She’d meet him later at the airport in San Francisco for the return flight to Washington.
Betty’s plane was scheduled to arrive at the San Francisco International Airport in time for her to transfer to Air Force One and be aboard when the president’s motorcade arrived. During the short flight from Monterey, Secret Service agent Dick Hartwig was trying to make radio contact with San Francisco, but he couldn’t raise anyone. The channels had been closed.
Just before landing, a call came through. “Move Pinafore to Angel with all possible speed.”
In code, that meant, “Get Mrs. Ford to Air Force One as quickly as possible.” But with no other information, Hartwig wasn’t concerned.
When they arrived at the airport, Betty noticed that the Secret Service cars were not lined up as they usually were, and there were agents standing all around the presidential plane. Dick Hartwig and Pete Sorum, her staff advance man, each grabbed one of Betty’s arms and whisked her up the steps and inside Air Force One. She walked into the presidential cabin and was surprised to see Jerry already there, sitting with his staff.
“Well, how did they treat you in San Francisco?” she asked breezily.
President Ford turned to Rumsfeld, “You tell her, Rummy.”
There had been another assassination attempt. And this time, the gun had gone off. Another woman, Sara Jane Moore, a political leftist, fired one shot, but narrowly missed the president.
As soon as Air Force One took off, the stewards were summoned. “Quite a few martinis were consumed on the flight back,” press secretary Ron Nessen recalled.
Susan was upstairs in the White House solarium with a friend who was visiting from Vail. They were lying on the floor watching television. “We had two televisions in there so you could watch two different things at the same time, which we thought was very cool,” Susan recalled. “The phone rang, and it was one of my agents. I got the news just before both stations broke into a news report of the assassination attempt.”
Steve Ford was at his girlfriend’s parents’ house, also watching television. There was an urgent knock on the door. One of his agents, who had been sitting outside in the car, came in and said, “Shots were fired at your father, but he’s okay.” At the same moment, a special news bulletin interrupted the regular programming they’d been watching.
“The country hears, ‘Someone has shot at the president,’ ” Steve reflected. “But we hear, ‘Someone tried to kill your father.’ It’s a dramatic difference.”
On October 25, Betty flew to Cleveland, Ohio, to give the keynote speech at a three-day conference for International Women’s Year. Three thousand people filled the auditorium as Betty stepped up to the podium. She knew that, in the wake of the controversy her remarks on 60 Minutes had sparked, this was an important speech—not just for her personally but also for women all over the world.
For those who knew her, it was evident that speaking before such a crowd was still outside her comfort zone. For those in the audience, she appeared humble, relatable. After thanking the people for the privilege of addressing them, she began to deliver the speech, which she and her staff had crafted meticulously word by word.
“While many new opportunities are open to women, too many are available only to the lucky few,” Betty said. “Many barriers continue to block the paths of most women, even on the most basic issue of equal pay for equal work.”
Within a few sentences, the crowd erupted in applause. Betty smiled appreciatively.
“And the contributions of women as wives and mothers continue to be underrated.” More cheering and applause.
In the twelve-minute speech, Betty said that the limits on women originated from emotional ideas on what women should or shouldn’t do, and that they have been “formalized into law and structured into social custom.”
Despite the backlash from her previous statements on 60 Minutes, she did not hesitate to reference her views on the Equal Rights Amendment.
“But my own support of the Equal Rights Amendment has shown what happens when a definition of proper behavior collides with the right of an individual to personal opinions. I do not believe that being first lady should prevent me from expressing my views.”
The crowd went wild. This was exactly what they wanted to hear from their first lady.
“I spoke out on this important issue because of my deep personal convictions,” Betty continued. “Why should my husband’s job, or yours, prevent us from being ourselves?” She paused, and then delivered a zinger: “Being ladylike does not require silence.”
Betty went on to say that part of their job—and hers—was to remove the “cloud of fear and confusion” from people who found it difficult to accept the national social changes taking place: namely, the idea of the Equal Rights Amendment.
“I have had the best of two worlds: that of a career woman earning my own living, and that of a homemaker and mother r
aising four individual and delightful youngsters. I am equally proud of both periods in my life. We have to take that ‘just’ out of ‘just a housewife’ and show our pride in having made the home and family our life’s work.”
The speech was not long, but it was intended to clarify the issues that were causing the emotional hysteria around the ERA, and to point out why she felt it was so critically important.
“Freedom for women to be what they want to be will help complete the circle of freedom America has been striving for, for two hundred years,” Betty said. “As the barriers against freedom for Americans because of race or religion have fallen, the freedom of all has expanded. The search for human freedom can never be complete without freedom of women.”
The audience roared with approval, bursting into a standing ovation.
“They loved her,” Sheila Weidenfeld remembered. “And she was delighted.”
That December, President and Mrs. Ford made a momentous trip to the People’s Republic of China to tour the sights, learn more about the culture, and foster better relations between the PRC and the United States. Eighteen-year-old Susan got a pass from Mount Vernon College to accompany her parents on what would undoubtedly be a supreme educational experience. It was a four-day trip halfway around the globe during which each member of the Ford family became highly visible ambassadors. Susan set off to photograph the Great Wall, President Ford attended politically important meetings, and Betty wanted to meet Chinese dancers.
It was arranged for Betty to visit the Dance School of the Central May 7 Art College in the capital of Beijing, and she was truly enthralled as she went classroom to classroom watching various dance performances by students of all ages. The dancing was different from anything she had studied, but when the students asked her to join them, she didn’t hesitate.
Betty admitted to being somewhat rusty in her steps, but jumped in to join the fun, much to the surprise of the students. “The wife of a president could never do that,” they whispered, giggling.
Oh, but they hadn’t met this wife of this president. Betty smiled, kicked off her shoes, and gracefully followed along to the instruction of student Yu Chan-ha, who guided her in the northern Chinese folk dance. With her arms raised, toes pointed, a smile too natural to fake, Betty was in her element. As soon as she joined in the rhythm, the press cameras flashed, and in newspapers the next day, some reporters suggested that this moment opened more bridges between the two countries than the talk of the diplomats.
One of the most popular television shows in the 1970s was The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Actress Mary Tyler Moore played a single woman working in the male-dominated world of TV network news, and although it was a comedy, the show addressed many of the same issues Betty had been speaking out about: premarital sex, women’s health, equal pay for equal work. When the show’s producers asked Betty if she’d be willing to do a cameo, she agreed happily.
Betty’s short appearance—she had just six lines—was filmed in the Hay-Adams Hotel across the street from the White House, shortly before Thanksgiving. The premise of the episode is that Mary and her boss, gruff Lou Grant, played by Ed Asner, are attending a broadcast news seminar in Washington, DC. Grant has bragged about introducing Mary to the movers and shakers he knew in the Capitol, but when a social gathering appears to fall apart, Mary is convinced he’d made everything up. In the end, Grant gets a phone call from Betty Ford, inquiring about whether the president had left his pipe in Grant’s hotel room. Grant hands the phone to Mary to speak with the first lady, but Mary, thinking it’s all part of a ruse, hangs up on her. Betty had a wonderful time doing it, and when the show aired the following January, her stock went up even further.
What few people knew was that that scene almost didn’t make it. The morning of the filming, Betty had a last-minute case of stage fright. She was late to the shooting, and, Mary Tyler Moore would recall, “She had trouble remembering her dialogue, even as I helped her out by giving her cues while standing just to the side of the camera. I felt so sad that this lovely, warm lady couldn’t master it on her own.”
Even those closest to Betty Ford were confused by the first lady’s behavior. Something was going on, but no one could quite figure out what it was. Meanwhile, the calendar had turned to 1976—the nation’s bicentennial anniversary, and the year Betty Ford’s husband was campaigning to remain president of the United States.
18
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“Betty’s Husband for President!”
“Nineteen seventy-six is a jumble in my head,” Betty wrote in her memoir, “full of days when I just went quickly from one thing to another, changing my clothes. There were state dinners one right after another, and the bicentennial, and campaigning. Campaigning for a solid year.”
Indeed, 1976 would test Betty like she’d never been tested before. Former California governor Ronald Reagan had announced his candidacy to challenge President Ford for the Republican nomination, forcing the Ford campaign to pull out all the stops. Because President Ford was, as David Kennerly had once put it, “busy being president,” much more pressure fell on Betty, as well as all four Ford children, to actively campaign. The spotlight was on all of them.
In late March, the weather was dreary in the Capitol, and Susan got an invitation to stay at a friend’s house in sunny Jamaica for a long weekend. To convince her parents to let her go, she asked her friend Bay Anderson, who had worked at Holton-Arms and was a few years older, to be a “chaperone.” A couple of days before they were to leave, Bay came to the White House to help Susan pack.
Clothes were strewn across the bed, and the girls were giddy as they planned their adventure. Betty heard the laughter and came walking into Susan’s bedroom.
“Oh, are you two girls getting excited for your trip to Jamaica?” Betty asked as she examined the clothes Susan had laid out.
“Oh yeah,” Susan said nonchalantly. Among the T-shirts and shorts, Betty pulled out a skimpy turquoise bikini that was already tucked in the open suitcase.
“Susan, you are not taking this bikini.”
“But, Mom . . .” Susan complained.
“No, Susan. Your father is president of the United States. You can’t be seen in nothing but strings.”
Grudgingly, Susan set aside the bathing suit. But as soon as her mother walked out of the room, it went right back in.
As it turned out, that same weekend, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was in Montego Bay, Jamaica, too, with her son, John. At fifteen, John F. Kennedy Jr. still had Secret Service protection—after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a law was passed providing Secret Service protection to children of presidents until the age of sixteen—and Susan’s agents were in touch with John’s. Shortly after they arrived, Agent Tommy Pabst told Susan that John Kennedy wanted to meet her.
“I really wanted to meet him too,” Susan recalled. “But I especially wanted to meet his mother because I’d heard so much about her.”
Word had gotten out that Jackie Onassis was on the island, and paparazzi were everywhere. But the agents worked everything out so that Susan, Bay, John, and the former first lady had tea together at the Round Hill Hotel without any photographers getting wind of it.
On another day, Susan wasn’t so lucky. She and Bay were lying on towels at the beach, working on their suntans, with the agents in swim attire next to them. Susan sat up and grabbed the bottle of suntan oil next to her. Bay was a bit too far away, so Susan said casually, “Tommy, can you put some suntan oil on my back?”
It was purely innocent, but the next day, a photo of the Secret Service agent slathering oil on the back of the president’s daughter wearing the forbidden turquoise bikini appeared in the National Enquirer.
“Of course I got in trouble,” Susan remembered. “And I have a feeling Tommy got in trouble too.”
In 1976, CB radios were one of the hottest new trends. Citizens-band radios, with a range of fifteen to twenty miles, had been used by truckers to communicate on the road,
and now they were catching on with average consumers who liked the idea of having a “handle”—a code name of sorts—and talking in a cleverly disguised language. There was even a novelty song about the CB radio craze, “Convoy,” by C. W. McCall, which, in January of that year, was the number one single in the country.
Peter Secchia, a friend from Michigan, who was organizing the campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin, had the idea to use CBs for what he called a “scatter blitz.” They had a caravan of Ford supporters, each vehicle equipped with a CB radio, and when Peter yelled out “Scatter blitz!” over the radio waves, everyone would jump out of the cars, “scatter,” and then “blitz” the area with Ford 1976 flyers and other campaign paraphernalia.
When Betty came to Wisconsin, Peter suggested that she rally the supporters with a send-off over the CB radio. It was new technology, and at first Betty had trouble getting the hang of it. But soon she figured out how to hold down the button while she spoke into the radio. “Keep on talking for President Ford,” she said. “We appreciate your help in keeping the Fords’ ‘10-20’ at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” In CB lingo, 10-20 meant “location.”
Truckers loved it, and the press ate it up. Soon the entire country was talking about Betty joining the CB community, and there were contests to come up with her CB handle. She settled on “First Mama,” and her popularity soared with a group that she probably would not have reached otherwise.
The long-anticipated bicentennial on July 4, 1976, brought many celebrations and events around the country, and President and Mrs. Ford were the grand masters of the nation’s two hundredth birthday celebration.
The president made appearances in Valley Forge and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, before meeting Betty in New York City, where they each landed in separate helicopters aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. From the flight deck, President Ford rang the bicentennial bell thirteen times—one for each of the original thirteen colonies—sparking off a magnificent parade of tall sailing ships in New York Harbor.
Betty Ford: First Lady Page 25