The previous summer, Susan had worked at the White House selling White House guidebooks for the White House Historical Association with a couple of her friends from Holton-Arms—Barbara Manfuso and Lise Courtney Howe. (“We jokingly referred to it as the White House Hysterical Association,” Susan recalled. “I was working there to make money to pay for my car insurance.”) Betty had become acquaintances with Lise Courtney’s mother, Nancy, who supervised the teenage salesgirls. As soon as Jerry’s nomination was announced, Nancy had called and offered her assistance if Betty needed it. Betty immediately took her up on the offer.
It started out as a few hours here and there, but once Jerry was confirmed as vice president, Betty hired Nancy to be her full-time personal assistant.
Meanwhile, in the time between Jerry’s nomination and confirmation as vice president, the Watergate investigation was closing in on the White House. With increased calls for Nixon’s impeachment, there was plenty of speculation swirling around the very real possibility that Gerald R. Ford could assume the presidency. The public wanted to know “Who are the Fords?”
The media became insatiable, and while Jerry had twenty-five years of experience dealing with the press, for Betty and the rest of the family, it was a brand-new experience.
“For all of us, it was fun for about ten and a half seconds,” Susan said. “And then it wasn’t.”
Television talk-show host Dick Cavett brought in a crew with lights and cameras to film an entire hour with Vice President Ford, Betty, Steve, and Susan. It was presented that it would be nonpolitical, just a sort of “getting to know you” piece, complete with a tour inside their home. First, the television crew moved most of the furniture out of the living room onto the patio directly beneath a tree brimming with birds—prompting Betty to make a desperate plea to Nancy Howe: “Get down there as fast as you can and tell them to get that stuff covered so the birds don’t decorate it!” But once on camera, Cavett went straight to politics, asking Jerry whether he would make a deal with Richard Nixon if the president were convicted of criminal charges.
“I have no doubt whatsoever that the president is not guilty of any criminal charges that might be forthcoming. I’m absolutely positive,” Jerry said. But Cavett persisted. And while the vice president remained calm, his growing frustration was evident.
“Really, Dick, I don’t think I ought to comment . . . as a matter of fact, I think the president is being unfairly accused, based on any evidence I’ve seen, for being involved in the execution or the cover-up of Watergate.”
Cavett tried a different technique with Betty: “Is the thought of living conceivably in the White House appalling or overpowering?”
“I would say it is inconceivable,” Betty answered. In an effort to cut off the questioning, Jerry added, somewhat tersely, “We’re very happy here, and I think it’s unwise to speculate on that, Dick. None of us have ever talked about it or thought about it.”
From there, Cavett turned to Steve and Susan and asked a series of incredibly awkward questions.
“Do you know about the birds and the bees?” he asked. “Can you imagine anything more embarrassing than having your parents say, ‘I’m going to have a serious talk with you’?”
Steve was clearly mortified, while Susan laughed nervously. Yes, the only thing more embarrassing than that would be to be asked the question on a television program that’s being broadcast into every living room in America!
It was enough to make anyone cringe. Fortunately, Jerry jumped in and answered for them, stumbling over his words to explain that “somehow boys learn about it, and maybe girls are treated differently.”
Without hesitation, Betty added, “If boys learn about it, girls learn about it too.”
The conversation turned to skiing. Cavett asked Steve, “Would you guess that I’m a skier, to look at me?”
Steve looked at Cavett with incredulity. Another dumb question.
“Uh, well, anybody can ski,” he answered.
“What about the drug scene around school?” Cavett asked Susan and Steve. “Do you see much pot or other hard drugs around school?”
The whole experience was incredibly uncomfortable, and, Betty recalled, “I was never so glad to see a bunch of people get out in my life.”
Betty had little experience dealing with the press, and she would learn by trial and error. It was always a surprise to see how an interview would end up appearing in print or edited for television.
Dorothy Marks of Women’s News Service described Betty as “a thoughtful, pretty woman with the erect carriage, slim figure, and really good legs of the model and professional dancer she once was.” Marks asked her, “How do you see yourself as second lady?”
“I like to think of myself as a feminist,” Betty said, “although I haven’t joined any women’s lib organizations. I guess you would say I have tried to put family first, knowing Jerry has had to put politics first. I have tried to support him by taking active roles in the Republican Women’s Club, the Eighty-First Congress Club, the Congressional Club, and I’m ready to continue that support in this new job.”
Betty agreed to an interview with Barbara Walters of the Today show. Her only stipulation was that she didn’t want to talk about anything political; that was her husband’s realm. After the normal pleasantries, Barbara looked down at her notepad and gave Betty a zinger.
“How do you feel about the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion?”
That January, in the landmark Roe v. Wade case, the Supreme Court had affirmed the legality of a woman’s right to an abortion. It was extremely controversial, and now Betty was being asked to weigh in on it. So much for Walters’s agreement not to ask anything political. Betty could have declined to answer, but she chose to answer honestly. That’s just the way she was.
“I agree with the Supreme Court’s ruling,” Betty said. “I think it’s time to bring abortion out of the backwoods and put it in the hospitals, where it belongs.”
In another interview, she reiterated her approval of a woman’s right to an abortion, adding that it was particularly appropriate for “some high school girls who are forced to marry, have their babies, and end up in marriages that are fiascos.”
Betty’s comments sparked an avalanche of mail, most of it negative. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said it, but I couldn’t lie. That’s the way I feel,” she said later. Her reputation for candor was established.
Time magazine assigned David Kennerly to cover Vice President Ford full-time, and one of his first assignments was to photograph the family at a park near their house in Alexandria one Saturday morning. Being single and twenty-six, Kennerly went out with a friend the Friday night before and, in his words, “basically got hammered.” He woke up with a massive hangover and couldn’t remember what time he was supposed to meet the Fords.
“I had their phone number,” David recalled, “so I just called the house.”
Betty answered, and David said, “Hey, Mrs. Ford, this is David Kennerly. What time am I supposed to be over there?”
She could tell from his incoherent speech that he was hungover, but all she said was, “Ten o’clock. We’ll see you then.”
When David arrived at the house, Betty greeted him at the door.
“Well, good morning, David,” she said with a smile. Before he could say anything, she handed him a cold beer and added, “Here, I think you’re going to need this.”
They both laughed, and in that moment, a very special relationship began.
After falling in love with Vail back in 1968, the Fords had purchased a third-floor, three-bedroom $50,000 condo at the Lodge at Vail the following year. Always budget conscious, Jerry and Betty saw it as a good investment in the growing mountain community. The entire family could stay there every Christmas, while it paid for itself as a rental property throughout the rest of the year.
The Secret Service sent out a call for any agents who knew how to ski and dispatched an advance team, renting a condo across the str
eet from the Fords’ place. There was no room inside for a command post, so they parked a truck on the street below and set up a table outside the front door where the agents would stand post around the clock. Along with the Secret Service, the Fords would be trailed by a small contingent of press.
“In fact, I learned how to ski courtesy of Time magazine,” Kennerly recalled with a grin, “back when you could put that on an expense account.” Betty had given up skiing at this point, but Kennerly recalled that the rest of the family were all good skiers. Though they didn’t always ski together: the kids enjoyed the moguls and steeper terrain, while Jerry preferred the groomed intermediate runs.
“I’d go up on the chairlift or the gondola by myself, and no one knew who I was,” Steve remembered. “There were a lot of people talking about how the vice president’s up here . . . it was kind of amusing to hear what people have to say about your dad.”
While Jerry and the kids were skiing, Betty shopped for Christmas decorations and last-minute gifts. This was her favorite time of the year. She loved Christmas, especially in Vail, and she did everything she could to make lasting family memories.
The condo had a two-story vaulted family room with a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace and Betty insisted on a live Christmas tree that nearly touched the ceiling. She had saved every construction paper and egg carton ornament the kids had made since their kindergarten days, and those were mixed in with fragile glass balls and assorted ornaments they’d collected from foreign trips.
It was during this trip that David Kennerly began getting to know the family on a more personal basis. “They were so warm and friendly. Just a normal family,” he recalled.
Kennerly was only three years older than Mike Ford, so he connected with the kids, but he and Betty hit it off too. “It wasn’t like she was a motherly figure,” the photographer said, “because she had a very young spirit. We really connected with humor.”
Near the end of the trip, the Fords invited David to join them at a Chinese restaurant. They were all laughing and having a good time, when at the end of the meal, everyone got a fortune cookie. There were about fourteen people there, and they went around the table reading their fortunes aloud. When it came to Jerry’s turn, he cracked open his cookie, read it silently to himself, and then slammed it down on the table.
Kennerly remembered that “he looked kind of shaken.”
“So, what does it say?” Kennerly asked.
“Aw, nothing,” Ford said.
Kennerly pried it out from under his hand and read it aloud. “You will undergo a change of residence in the near future.”
Everybody had been laughing and carrying on, but suddenly the table went silent. Betty looked at Jerry, wide eyed.
“No, no, I hope not,” Jerry said dismissively.
He certainly didn’t believe a message in a fortune cookie had any bearing on his future, but there was no doubt both he and Betty were in sheer and utter denial. They seemed to think that if they didn’t let their minds wander down that path, it just wasn’t going to happen.
Susan Ford would remember that “It was our last private Christmas. The last one where we could just be ourselves.”
Meanwhile, back in Washington, picketers were marching in front of the White House. One person held a placard that said “Pick Out Your Curtains, Betty.”
In early March 1974, the Secret Service received some intelligence information that caused immediate concern. Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst had been kidnapped from her Berkeley, California, apartment by a left-wing revolutionary organization that called itself the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), and the FBI had obtained intelligence that Susan Ford was on the group’s target list as well. Vice President Ford was notified, and he immediately called Betty to tell her there was a credible threat against Susan and that the Secret Service was assigning agents to her. It was a Friday afternoon, and Susan was being driven home from school. The agents would be there by the time Susan got home.
This was highly unusual because, at that time, the Secret Service was not required to protect the vice president’s family.
Betty was understandably frightened. The thought that something could happen to one of her children because of Jerry being the vice president had never occurred to her.
“I was so excited for the weekend,” Susan recalled. Her boyfriend Palmer Holt was coming up from Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. “We had a hot weekend planned,” she said.
When Susan arrived home from school, Betty calmly explained what the agents had told her.
“But Mom, I’ve got plans this weekend! Palmer’s coming up. I don’t want Secret Service agents following us around! No way!”
“Just go talk to the agents in the command post, Susan. It’s for your own safety.”
“Daddy is ruining my life!” Susan cried. She pulled a cigarette out of her purse and proceeded to light it, even though she knew her mother disapproved of her new habit. She took a long drag and then grabbed a can of Coke out of the fridge before stomping down the two steps that led to the garage turned command post.
Bob Innamorati, the agent assigned to Susan, recalled opening the door and seeing this tall, blonde, jeans-clad teenager with a Coke in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“I honestly did not know what to expect,” he said. “But I quickly realized that she was very smart and mature beyond her years.”
After initial pleasantries, Agent Innamorati explained that yes, indeed, he and one other agent would be with Susan at all times, wherever she went.
“We’ve got tickets to see a concert in Georgetown tomorrow night,” she said.
“Unfortunately, everything you do this weekend must be spontaneous,” Innamorati said. “Nothing preplanned. You can’t go to the concert.”
For a sixteen-year-old, it was life shattering. “They were shutting down my social life,” Susan recalled. “And I was pissed.”
That spring, Mike came home with the wonderful news that he and his girlfriend, Gayle Brumbaugh, were engaged to be married. Betty wanted to give her daughter-in-law-to-be something that was precious to her and held meaning, so she presented her with a turquoise cross made by a Zuni Indian artist.
In a letter to Mary Lou Logan, a longtime friend from Grand Rapids, Betty wrote, “Mike is marrying a lovely girl from Maryland that he met in college. I could not have picked out a nicer young lady if I had done it myself.”
Mike and Gayle were thinking about August 10, 1974, as a wedding date, but something inside Betty told her that August would not be a good time. Even though she still wouldn’t allow herself to imagine any scenario that would put her and Jerry in the White House, she suggested to Mike and Gayle that they get married in July so they could enjoy the rest of the summer before they had to go back to school. They agreed and picked July 5.
It would be the same weekend as Susan’s seventeenth birthday—and Susan wasn’t happy about sharing it—but Betty followed her gut instinct. It was one of those times she would look back on and say, “Somebody up there has been looking out for me for years.”
On April 6, 1974, Betty Ford made her first solo trip outside Washington as second lady. The occasion was to launch a unique arts program that started in Michigan called the Artrain. Six railroad cars full of visual and performing arts exhibits were set to launch on a tour that would stop in twenty-four small towns in six southern states, beginning with Georgia.
Georgia’s governor, Jimmy Carter, and his wife, Rosalynn, had invited Mrs. Ford to stay the night at the governor’s mansion in Atlanta, where they would have a reception for her, and then a parade and dedication ceremony for the Artrain the following day.
Unbeknownst to Betty, her hostess was “really worried” about this visit. Rosalynn knew that her husband, a Democrat, was thinking of running for president in 1976, and his opponent might very well be Vice President Ford. “But, of course, I didn’t tell her that,” Rosalynn recalled years later. And her anxiety dissipated as soon as she met
Betty.
“She was so warm and cordial,” Rosalynn remembered. “She just put me at ease from the beginning.”
The only staff Betty brought with her on this trip was her personal assistant, Nancy Howe. Having been around Betty for five months at this point, Nancy had seen how the pain medication Betty took caused some changes in her. For one thing, she moved very slowly, as if in a constant state of slow motion. Nancy knew the trip’s schedule was timed to the minute, and no doubt she worried that if Betty was late, it would reflect poorly on her boss.
Shortly after arriving at the governor’s mansion, once everyone was introduced and Mrs. Ford was settled in her room, Nancy pulled one of Mrs. Carter’s staff aside and told her quietly, “Just so you know, Mrs. Ford takes medicine for a pinched nerve, and it often has an effect on her. It takes her a long time to get ready. So, for the parade tomorrow, we need to tell her that everything begins an hour earlier than it actually does.”
That evening, at the appointed time for the reception, Governor and Mrs. Carter greeted guests as they arrived at the front door of the mansion. Everyone was eager to get a glimpse of, and hopefully the chance to speak to, the wife of the new vice president. This was, in a way, Betty Ford’s debutante ball. And she was late.
The marble-floored Circular Hall was filled to capacity, and people were buzzing, wondering when the guest of honor would make an appearance. Thirty minutes after the reception had begun, Betty appeared, wearing a long, yellow knit dress she had borrowed from Nancy Howe, and as she glided down the long, winding staircase that looked like a set out of Gone with the Wind, the room fell to a hush. And then, suddenly, the crowd burst into applause.
Betty Ford Page 15