First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (26 page)

Betty kept her painful secret private during her time in the White House. Finally, on a Saturday morning in 1978, after the glare of the White House years was gone and the Fords had retired to Rancho Mirage near Palm Springs, California, her addiction was hard to ignore. For decades President Ford had looked the other way and refused to acknowledge it. The family staged
an intervention at Susan Ford’s insistence. Betty was thinking of calling her son Mike and his wife, Gayle, who lived in Pittsburgh, when the doorbell rang and Mike walked in. Suddenly she found herself sitting on the living room couch with her children sitting in chairs in a semicircle around her. Betty was stunned. “They went from one to another saying how I had let them down, how I had disappointed them. And, of course, this just was cutting to me. I was so hurt. I felt I had spent my whole life devoted to them, and they were telling me I was failing them.”

They confronted her with the mornings when she had forgotten what they had told her the night before because she had had too much to drink. They went over the times when they had to turn to Clara when they were growing up because their mother wasn’t acting like herself. Her son Jack said he avoided bringing friends home because he was never sure whether she would be slurring her words or not. Mike and Gayle told her they wanted her to be healthy for her grandchildren. Steve talked about a weekend not long before when he and his girlfriend had made dinner but Betty refused to come to the table and eat with them when they asked her to. “You just sat in front of the TV and you had one drink, two drinks, three drinks. You hurt me.” She felt humiliated and strangely alone, and she burst into tears. “It’ll be a day we’ll never forget, but let me say this very affirmatively: it was the only thing that saved Betty’s life,” President Ford said.

Betty had trouble admitting that she was an alcoholic but she acknowledged her dependence on pills and partly blamed the doctors who had been overmedicating her for so many years. “It was easier to give a woman tranquilizers and get rid of her than to sit and listen to her.” In 1978, two days after she turned sixty, Betty entered Long Beach Naval Hospital’s alcohol and drug
rehabilitation unit. When she went to drop off her things, she was astounded to discover four beds in her room. She said she would not sign in unless she was given her own room. “If you insist on a private room, I will have all these ladies move out,” said Captain Joe Pursch, a navy doctor. “No, no, I won’t have that,” she told him, and within an hour she was moved in and a statement was being read to reporters.

It took Betty several days in treatment to acknowledge that she was not only dependent on pills, but also an alcoholic. “You’re trying to hide behind your husband,” Pursch said. “Why don’t you ask him if it would embarrass him if you say you’re an alcoholic?” She began to cry and her husband took her hand in his and said, “There will be no embarrassment to me. You go ahead and say what should be said.” She sobbed uncontrollably and that night, lying in bed, she wrote a statement revealing the whole truth for the first time. “I have found that I am not only addicted to the medications I have been taking for my arthritis, but also to alcohol.” Every evening the Fords would have a drink before dinner, but when Betty left treatment President Ford gave up his Jack Daniel’s Silver and replaced it with club soda with lime. Betty had supported him through all those years; now it was his turn to support her.

After President Ford’s death in 2006, Betty was depressed and was having trouble coping with life alone. Ford was the first president to reference his wife in his inaugural address when he said, “I am indebted to no man, and only to one woman.” When Betty stayed at Blair House during her husband’s state funeral she cried herself to sleep each night. (President George W. Bush was in office, and he told a staffer who was planning the funeral, “Whatever they need, we’ll do.”) “Do you think this is going okay?” Betty asked her assistant Ann Cullen. “I’ve got
to tell you,” Cullen replied, “I think you are doing absolutely a magnificent job.” Betty started to cry and said, “Well, I have to because I’m doing it for him.” President Bush, who was to escort Betty down the long aisle to her seat at Washington’s National Cathedral at the state funeral, asked her if she wanted to use her wheelchair. She was eighty-eight years old and frail, and would have to endure days of national mourning and ceremonies, but she refused. She told friends, “I just did what my husband would have wanted me to.”

When she was at President Ford’s burial site at his museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan (Ford’s presidential library is in Ann Arbor), her family kept asking her if she wanted to use her wheelchair, but again, she refused. She had walked along the river with President Ford near the exact spot where he was to be buried, and she wanted to make the walk with him one last time. With everyone worried about her health, all she could think about was her husband and the deep love they shared for more than fifty-eight years of marriage. She insisted on making the long walk from the car to the burial site, and told anyone who objected, “This is the last time I’ll make this walk.” After the funeral, she kept white Christmas lights plugged in year-round on an olive tree in front of their house. She did it, she told friends and family, so that her husband could see her from heaven and know that she was all right. When the Fords’ personal chef, Lorraine Ornelas, saw Betty after her husband’s death, they sat on the edge of the Fords’ bed and Betty pushed a photo of her late husband closer to the edge of the nightstand toward them. “There he is,” she said wistfully. “I just want to go be with my boyfriend,” she told her children. “I don’t know why I’m still here, I don’t want to be here. I’m ready to go.”

L
IKE
P
AT
N
IXON,
Rosalynn Carter acted as a mother figure early on in her life. She knew aching loss as a young girl when her father, Edgar, died in 1940 when she was only thirteen. Wilburn Edgar Smith was a cotton and peanut farmer and a mechanic and he was a strict disciplinarian. But at the end of the day, he loved getting down on the floor and roughhousing with his brood of four children. “We had as much as anybody else in town and so we didn’t realize we were poor,” she said. Rosalynn helped milk cows and her father would flavor the milk with vanilla or chocolate and sell it at five cents a bottle. She also pruned watermelons and put arsenic on cotton to combat the boll weevil beetles that destroyed crops. During harvesttime, she picked cotton and harvested peanuts by pulling them up from under the ground and shaking the dirt off them. When her father died of leukemia at age forty-four, her whole life changed and she had to help her mother, Allie Smith, who was only thirty-four years old. Rosalynn’s mother recalled the painful day when her husband gathered the children together to tell them he wasn’t going to get better. He told his small children—the youngest was just four years old when he died—that he wanted them to look after their mother. “They all started screaming,” Rosalynn’s mother said. “Of course, I started crying, too.” Rosalynn recalled, “My mother depended on me to help her with the smaller children. I worked in a beauty shop in Plains for a while but, looking back, I didn’t help her nearly as much as I should have.” She did the cooking, laundry, and cleaning so that her mother could go to work at the post office and support their family.

Rosalynn threw herself into her schoolwork. She was her school’s valedictorian, and in seventh grade she got five dollars from a man in town who said he would give the cash reward
(which is the equivalent of approximately eighty-five dollars today) to the student with the highest grade point average because he didn’t pass the seventh grade.

It is not surprising that Rosalynn crossed paths with Jimmy Carter, who also grew up in Plains, Georgia, a small town with dirt roads and a population of fewer than seven hundred people. They grew up at a time when a bag of candy cost a nickel and everyone in town knew each other. The closest movie theater was in Americus, about ten miles away, which meant if they went, they would go for the whole day. There were nine girls and six boys in Rosalynn’s high school class. She was on the basketball team, and because her school was so small the girls on the team became cheerleaders after they played.

Rosalynn’s mother was a true southern lady (during the births of her four children she said, “I tried to be as quiet as I could”), and she raised Rosalynn to be a feminine, shy little girl who liked to play with dolls. “Some children get out and get so dirty, but she was right neat and all,” her mother recalled.

Rosalynn and Jimmy met through Jimmy’s sister, Ruth, who was Rosalynn’s closest friend. Jimmy’s mother, Lillian (a tart-tongued woman affectionately referred to as “Miss Lillian” by almost everybody), was a nurse in town and was helping to care for Rosalynn’s father during the year and a half that he was sick before he passed away. Lillian knew that Rosalynn’s mother had four children to care for, so she would occasionally bring Rosalynn home with her to stay at their house after she took care of her father. Rosalynn’s mother sometimes asked her to go get the doctor when her father could not take the pain any longer. Once, Rosalynn ran to the doctor to get the medicine herself instead of waiting for him to come. She ran so hard and so fast that she was out of breath by the time she got to his house and couldn’t tell him
what was wrong, so he took her back home in his car. “It was a terrible time,” Rosalynn’s mother recalled.

Like Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Rosalynn and Jimmy did not know each other well before they got married, but they wrote to each other every day while he was at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and she was at Georgia Southwestern College. They were married in 1946 in a small ceremony with no attendants, when Rosalynn was eighteen and Jimmy was twenty-one. By then they were both itching to leave Plains. “When we got married I think I was kin to everybody that Jimmy wasn’t,” Rosalynn said. “Once we got married, we were kin to everybody in town.” Rosalynn became a navy wife and gave birth to three sons while Jimmy was away at sea. They moved around the country, from bases in Virginia to Hawaii to Connecticut. Each of their three sons was born in a different state, and Rosalynn raised them and kept track of all the family’s bills, a job she maintains today. She made most of her children’s clothes and all of her own. (Years later, when she was in the White House, she brought a sewing machine with her, which she kept in her dressing room and used to do quick repairs on dresses for herself and for their daughter, Amy.) Jimmy was accepted into an elite nuclear submarine program but turned it down after his father died so they could return to Plains in 1953 to look after the family’s peanut farm. But he didn’t bother to consult his wife about the decision, and about relocating the family yet again after his seven years as a naval officer. Rosalynn was so furious that she refused to talk to him during their entire trip from where they were living at the time, in Schenectady, New York, to Plains. “I didn’t particularly want to come back. I thought I was seeing the world,” Rosalynn said. After that, Carter learned his lesson: to always consult his wife on major decisions.

Back home in Plains, Rosalynn helped run the peanut farm and raised her family there. She remembers arriving in Plains shortly before the landmark
Supreme Court case
Brown v. Board of Education,
in which the Court decided unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. “It was a hard time for us,” Rosalynn said, since some of their neighbors treated them badly because of their support for integration. “I remember going to church when people wouldn’t speak to you, you’re kind of outcasts.” Sometimes, when they pulled up at a gas station, nobody would come out to fill up their car.

Soon Jimmy began his first political campaign. In 1962 he won election to the Georgia Senate, and in 1971 he was elected governor of Georgia. By the time he announced his presidential campaign in December 1974, Rosalynn was a seasoned politician herself. She would number her husband’s jokes so that he wouldn’t repeat any to the same group, she typed thank-you notes to people her husband met on the campaign trail, and she even started taking memory classes to remember faces and names. Rosalynn worked tirelessly and stayed up until the early hours of the morning rehearsing campaign speeches.

Carter ran for president against Gerald Ford in 1976 as a Washington outsider. Before he won the Democratic nomination, he had a group of Georgia volunteers, known as the Peanut Brigade, who campaigned door-to-door for him. Rosalynn hit the road with a vengeance, and when she arrived in a small town she would scope out the tallest antennae and head straight there to the local television and radio stations to offer herself up for an interview. Some of the stations were so small that they had only one employee, who usually had no idea who Jimmy Carter was. Rosalynn came prepared with a list of five or six questions she
wanted asked. Nine times out of ten, she said, the station used the questions she suggested. “I was getting my message across.”

Carter won a narrow victory over President Ford in 1976, capturing just 51 percent of the popular vote and 297 electoral votes (Ford won 241 electoral votes). After his inauguration, Carter, who was a Baptist Sunday school teacher, banned hard liquor from being served at White House formal dinners. Because he thought it was too pompous, he insisted that “Hail to the Chief” no longer be played, a tradition that dated back to 1829. He took the oath of office wearing a $175 business suit from Georgia, pledged to cut back on chauffeured cars for staff members, and sold the presidential yacht, the
Sequoia
, in his effort to be a citizen-president.