First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (12 page)

Press aide Barbara Coleman remembers getting a call at home through the White House switchboard from Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, who was with the President aboard Air Force One on the way back from a campaign trip to Chicago. “He wanted me to be on hand at the White House as soon as they landed,” she said. Salinger said the President had a cold and needed to come home on doctor’s orders. Salinger did not tell her the real reason for the President’s abrupt return, but he suggested something was amiss when he told her to cancel any plans she had for the weekend.

“It was soon that I became aware that something was happening,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was; I knew it had something to do with Cuba.” Throughout the crisis there was always someone in the press office, and some aides even brought clothes to the White House and slept in the bomb shelter.

In his televised address the President spoke from the Oval Office and announced the naval quarantine of Cuba. “Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace,” he declared, crystallizing the essential dilemma of the Cold War. “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard
any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

Finally, on October 28, Khrushchev issued a statement that the Soviet missiles would be removed from Cuba. Jackie watched surveillance video showing Soviet ships approaching the U.S. blockade and turning back, and she breathed a sigh of relief. If the crisis had gone on for just two more days, a Kennedy adviser told her, the outcome could have been different because everyone was reaching total exhaustion and maybe irrational decisions would have been made.

Throughout those tension-filled days, Jackie retained her faith in her husband and in her own ability to calm and center him. “I always thought with Jack that anything, he could make—once he was in control, anything, all the best things would happen. In this childish way, I thought, ‘I won’t have to be afraid when I go to sleep at night or wake up.’” She wept when her husband presented her with the same sterling-silver Tiffany calendar that he gave to the members of ExComm, with those thirteen frightening days highlighted in bold. Her initials were engraved next to his, “J.B.K.” and “J.F.K.”

Less than two weeks after her husband’s assassination, on December 1, 1963, Jackie penned one of the last letters she would ever write on White House stationery. It wasn’t to a close family friend or to one of her husband’s many political advisers. It was to the man who her husband said had committed a “clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace” and in turn gave her a distinct and powerful role to play in the White House. During those thirteen days she was more than a beautiful, devoted wife; she was a partner. She recognized that one of
her husband’s greatest triumphs was breaking through to Soviet Premier Khrushchev and saving the world from nuclear war. “You and he were adversaries, but you were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up. You respected each other and could deal with each other,” Jackie wrote. “While big men know the needs for self-control and restraint—little men are sometimes moved more by fear and pride. If only in the future the big men can continue to make the little ones sit down and talk, before they start to fight.”

T
HERE IS SEEMINGLY
nothing out of the ordinary about the black-and-white White House photograph taken on September 27, 1974. First Lady Betty Ford is giving a tour of the President’s bedroom to Lady Bird Johnson, who had been first lady five years before her. Joining them are Lady Bird’s two daughters, Lynda and Luci; and Lynda’s husband, Charles Robb, who had come to Washington for the dedication of the Grove, President Johnson’s memorial park along the Potomac River. In the photograph, Betty Ford leans in toward Luci as though listening to a question; Luci’s hand is outstretched, pointing at something out of the camera shot. Betty, playing the role of gracious hostess, smiles serenely. The only clue that something is amiss lies at the foot of the satin tufted bed—it is a small black suitcase. The suitcase is there because Betty Ford was just told the day before the Johnsons’ visit that she likely had breast cancer. She would leave for Bethesda Naval Hospital as soon as her guests departed. Betty never said a word about her condition to her guests; she did not want to ruin their special day.

“You were so calm and hospitable to us last Friday that it shocked the four of us even more than the rest of the nation when we heard the news that you had gone to the hospital,” Lady Bird
wrote in a handwritten note delivered to Betty’s hospital room. Luci, the Johnsons’ younger daughter, remembers rushing to catch the six o’clock news that night to see if there was anything about the dedication ceremony earlier that day. She was shocked to see images of Betty Ford, with that small black suitcase in her hand, leaving the White House. “All of our collective mouths dropped. We were dumbfounded.” Because they had spent more than five years in the White House themselves and were all too familiar with the grueling schedule, the Johnsons of all people would have understood if the First Lady had wanted to cancel the tour. “I just think there was such a strong sense of communion. They felt this was Mother’s big day, Daddy was gone, and they weren’t going to do anything to take away from that,” Luci says. “I think it was very much who Betty Ford was.”

Betty Ford did not become a public person until she was fifty-six years old but she embraced the role completely. She was a dedicated mother and housewife when her husband was in Congress for twenty-five years. Steve Ford, the third of the Fords’ four children, says, “As kids, we just watched our mother blossom when she was given the chance after all those years of bringing up us kids. It was a wonderful thing to see.” When Betty was a little girl she went to a fortune-teller who told her that one day she would meet kings and queens, which she took to mean that she would become a great dancer. And she did—she had been a modern dancer with Martha Graham’s prestigious company. When she married Gerald Ford, she said, she thought she was marrying a lawyer and that they would raise a family in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But in 1955 the Fords settled in a four-bedroom, two-bathroom redbrick colonial on Crown View Drive in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac from the White House. They even lived there when Ford unexpectedly became vice president
in 1973. Their phone number was listed in the phone book, and Betty Ford could be found most days with a pot of tea on the stove and wearing a long housecoat.

In early August 1974, days before President Nixon resigned, the Fords were getting ready to move into the official vice presidential residence at One Observatory Circle, less than three miles from the White House. But just before Vice President Ford and his wife arrived at the beautiful Victorian-style house to talk with interior decorators, he learned that President Nixon would be resigning and he would be taking over. Somehow, Ford managed to sit calmly through a series of meetings about décor with Betty by his side. Finally, when they had a moment alone he whispered to her, “Betty, we are never going to live in this house.”

Less than two months after she and her husband were thrust into the White House, and only eighteen days after the President’s controversial pardon of President Nixon, the new First Lady was being told the devastating news that she might have breast cancer. The day before the Johnsons’ visit, on September 26, Betty spontaneously decided to accompany her close friend Nancy Howe to see a doctor. Howe was having a routine checkup and Betty thought she might as well have her six-month appointment then, too. When the doctor performing Betty’s mammogram excused himself to bring in the chief of surgery, Betty thought nothing of it. “Doctors had been checking portions of my anatomy for so long . . . I could take quite a bit of poking and prodding and hearing murmurs of ‘Mmmmm,’ and go right on wondering when I was going to be able to attack the huge pile of mail which was waiting on my desk.” This time the news was not good.

Around noon the President’s doctor, William Lukash, made the unusual request for the President to meet him at seven that evening in his ground-floor office at the White House. Lukash
had called in the chairman of surgery from George Washington University Medical School and had asked the new First Lady to come down a few minutes before seven for another breast exam. When Lukash sat down with the President and the First Lady, he told them they had found a lump that could be cancer. “Well, you can’t operate immediately. I have a full day tomorrow,” Betty said. Her response was unusual but, Lukash told her, surgery could wait for a day or two. Their seventeen-year-old daughter, Susan, had red-rimmed eyes when she came in for dinner in the second-floor private living quarters that evening. She had heard the news before her parents did. She had stopped by Dr. Lukash’s office looking for some cold medicine earlier that day. “He pulled me in and sat me down, and I thought,
What have I done wrong now?
” Lukash told her, “Your mother has a lump in her breast, there’s a good chance it’s cancer, and she doesn’t know, so hush, hush, don’t say anything to anybody.” Susan was so scared that she might lose her mother. The next day, Betty kept a harrowing schedule: she went to the groundbreaking of the Grove, made a speech at a Salvation Army luncheon, and hosted the afternoon tea and White House tour for the Johnsons. Her car pulled up to the hospital at 5:55 p.m. and at 6:00 p.m. her illness was broadcast around the world.

At the time, cancer was referred to as the “C” word, almost as if it were contagious, and it was usually not discussed at all. And no one said “breast.” Ever. Even though beloved child star and diplomat Shirley Temple Black had disclosed her mastectomy in 1972, it was Betty Ford who brought national attention to the importance of early detection. At a state dinner, after Betty’s mastectomy, Black and Betty shared a private moment. Black, with tears welling up in her eyes, put her arms around the First Lady and whispered something. “Yes, we understand,” Betty replied. Over the next few weeks, more than fifty thousand letters poured into the First Lady’s
office. Many of the letters were from women who credited the First Lady with saving their lives, and some were from men who wanted her to know that they found their wives beautiful after their mastectomies. Happy Rockefeller, the wife of Ford’s vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, had a breast exam after hearing about Betty’s cancer and discovered a lump and had surgery. Like so many others, Happy credited Betty with saving her life. (When President Reagan had colon cancer surgery years later, Happy sent a single red rose to Nancy Reagan. Among all the cards and flowers it was the only thing Nancy took upstairs to the residence with her that evening.)

Betty was a brave patient who was determined to beat the disease. She checked into the presidential suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital and had a quiet dinner there with her family before the surgery that was scheduled for the next morning. She told them she would be fine, to go home and get some rest. President Ford, who was deeply committed to his wife, told her he was never lonelier than that evening on his way back to the White House. Before he left her, they held hands and prayed. Unlike the Nixons, the Fords were very affectionate and they were the first presidential couple to openly share a bedroom since the Coolidges. In a note President Ford wrote to his wife before surgery he said, “No written words can adequately express our
deep
,
deep
love. We know how
great
you are and we, the children and Dad, will try to be as strong as you. Our Faith in you and God will sustain us. Our total
love
for you is everlasting.”

For Betty, it was one in a string of challenges that she knew she would overcome. When she was just sixteen years old her father died in an apparent suicide. (He was an alcoholic, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.) “I faced the situation rather matter-of-factly,” she wrote of her cancer diagnosis in her memoir. “This is one more crisis, and it will pass.” If the biopsy showed that the
lump was benign, there would be no need for the mastectomy, but she knew in her heart that she had cancer as they wheeled her into the operating room. It was the Fords’ daughter, Susan, who first learned that the lump was cancerous. “Susan, they had to go ahead,” Dr. Lukash told her as her knees buckled. “But she’s all right.” When the President found out that the lump was malignant he broke down in tears in the Oval Office.

The President’s political advisers had told Betty that she didn’t have to go public with such a personal matter, but she insisted. Once she found out the number of women who were dying from the disease, she told staffers that if it was cancer they should release a statement while she was on the operating table saying that she was having a mastectomy, instead of something amorphous like she was dealing with a “health issue.” When President Ford and his son Mike flew on Marine One to visit Betty after the surgery, Mike got on his knees with his father and they prayed in the aisle for her recovery. After the surgery, Betty wrote a letter to Lady Bird explaining why she had not told her the news. “I wanted you to enjoy your visit as much as I did.” She added a bit of levity and thanked Lady Bird for the pink robe she had sent her in the hospital. “I just loved the design and color. As a matter of fact, I chose it for my first public picture after my operation.”