Kati Marton (35 page)

Jerry did not deny the problem or abandon his wife because she was proving “difficult.” He accepted some blame. “I wasn’t aware …. I thought she had been a wonderful mother. I felt we had had a fine marriage. I felt our lives were developing very constructively.” Never again
did Jerry take his wife for granted as he had in the period leading up to her breakdown. In a move considered bold in the sixties, Betty sought psychiatric help. Their marriage was dangerously close to being destroyed, as was their family life and Jerry’s dream of becoming Speaker of the House. “I think we were all so really tied up in his career,” Betty said later, “that we weren’t looking at each other the way we should look at each other.”

After more than a decade and a half together, Betty and Jerry now recast their marriage into something more textured and very much in keeping with their times. Unlike most political couples, the Fords did not merely endure, they assimilated changing currents and evolved. Jerry responded to his wife’s needs. Ford’s balanced personality, his lack of self-absorption, may not have ultimately helped his political career, but it certainly made him a better husband than most presidents.

A decade later the Fords faced a greater personal challenge when, within an eight-month period in 1974, they went from Congress to the vice presidency to the White House. Now Jerry was caught in a sudden blaze of attention and Betty had to define her own role and identity. She found the answer in the most unexpected place. During the first month of the Ford presidency, a routine checkup revealed a lump in one of her breasts. Surgeons eventually performed a radical mastectomy. Breast cancer was a subject only whispered about in the seventies. Lying in the hospital recovery room, Betty was seized with the idea that from her platform she could save lives. If the most prominent woman in the country talked openly about her cancer, others could. She could encourage women to put their health ahead of their vanity, as she had, and to go for checkups.

In a widely read February 1975
McCall’s
magazine article, she openly expressed her fears regarding her appearance and her husband’s reaction. “Jerry and I had a chance to talk alone that afternoon in the hospital,” she wrote of the day of her surgery. “I think Jerry’s real concern was to make me as comfortable as possible—and to express his love. Perhaps even more so because he realized I might feel disfigured or mutilated. He wanted to reassure me that it made no difference to him; that after all we still loved each other and were just as happy after twenty-six years of marriage.”

Jerry described the night before his wife’s surgery as “the loneliest of my life …. The thought that the woman I loved might be taken away from me was almost too much to endure. Before I went to bed, I asked the florist to send three dozen red roses—Betty’s favorite—to the hospital.” The president described his emotions upon hearing that doctors found a cancerous lump. “I put down the phone and tried ineffectually to focus on the speech [on the economy] again. But too many emotions were churning inside me. Excusing myself, I stepped into a small bathroom adjacent to the office and attempted to wrestle those emotions under control. After a minute or so I returned to my desk. [Speechwriter Bob] Hartmann looked at the expression on my face and understood immediately. ‘Go ahead and cry,’ he said. ‘Do cry.’ All my tensions and fears poured out in a brief flood of tears.”

There was a new atmosphere of informality and unpretentiousness in the White House. Staff, under orders to be silent in the Nixons’ presence, were amazed by the new occupants’ friendliness. Betty’s director of correspondence, Gwen King, recalled Betty, working in her slip, getting a call from a presidential aide. The first lady was late for the swearing-in of the new attorney general. “You just tell Jerry to hold his horses!” the first lady breezily instructed.

Betty, who did not expect to like being first lady, took to the role with relish. “Truthfully,” she recalled, “I flowered. Jerry was no longer away so much. And I was somebody. The First Lady. When I spoke, people listened.” Some mysterious alchemy between the time, the place and the woman made her tenure memorable. The seventies were, of course, famously charged. The
Roe v. Wade
decision had made abortion legal, giving women an unprecedented feeling of control over their bodies. While still only 14 percent of working women were in the professions—most worked because they had to—more and more were moving into the workforce; women’s salaries were still far less than those of their male counterparts. But role models were suddenly everywhere: on television, in politics, in films and in sports. In 1971, Billie Jean King had been named
Sports Illustrated’s
first-ever Sportswoman of the Year. There were more choices for women than ever before. By 1975, there was one divorce for every two marriages.

Intuitively more than intellectually, Betty grasped the enormity of
these changes on American life. Rather than turn her back on them as Pat Nixon had, she decided to encourage them. For unlike Pat, Betty knew her husband stood behind her, pleased rather than anxious at her sudden high profile. The fact that her husband had never been a controversial public figure also freed his wife to be herself. Seemingly bemused by his wife’s candor, he was not looking for a political Stepford Wife. As with most healthy couples, his happiness was very much tied to hers. He had learned the hard way how much he had to gain by having a fulfilled woman at his side. Ford, former Yale quarterback and Grand Rapids’ most eligible bachelor, was fearless about sharing the limelight with his wife.

Their daily life in the White House resembled the Trumans’. They relished living and working under the same roof. On most evenings they sat side by side talking and working together. “They were a playful couple,” David Kennerly, their official White House photographer, recalled. “They joked around with each other. They enjoyed each other. His idea at the end of the day was to sit around with her, have dinner with her, just be with her.” Betty had converted Richard Nixon’s bedroom into a little study. Like the Trumans, the Fords shared a bedroom and a bed. With typical candor, Betty told a reporter she liked to “sleep with my husband as often as possible.” Given their open relationship and their twenty-six-year history, there was little they did not discuss. Getting more women appointed to high office was one of her regular topics. “I kept pushing, trying to influence him,” she remembered. “I used everything, including pillow talk at the end of the day, when I figured he was most tired and vulnerable.” Betty is credited with the appointment of Carla Hills as secretary of housing and urban development and Anne Armstrong as ambassador to London.

Because she was in many ways a traditional homemaker, as well as a mother of four children, she had credibility in advocating passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Betty worked the phones with congressional legislators, an unprecedented role for a first lady. “Feminist” was still a dangerous label for a politician, and her campaign was not without political risk for her husband. “Betty Ford,” one anti-ERA public information advertisement ran, “will be remembered as the unelected First Lady who pressured second-rate manhood on American women.” After seeing
that ad on television, “I went to bed laughing,” she claimed. “Jerry did too.” Though her mail was running three to one against her outspoken feminism, she knew she had her husband’s support. She regretted only that the wife of a rising California politician named Ronald Reagan opposed making the ERA the law of the land. “I couldn’t understand,” she wrote, “how a woman who had had a professional life could show so little interest in working women.”

Betty’s mantra, “It is time for abortion to come out of the backwoods and into our hospitals,” was her own idea and was widely quoted. She called the still controversial
Roe v. Wade
decision “great.” “Jerry has never stepped on my toes,” she wrote. “He’s never turned around and complained, ‘Well,
that
was a dumb thing to say.’” The president may not have “stepped on her toes,” but his advisers were concerned about the first lady’s activism. Presidential aide Ken Cole drafted a memo advocating a sharp line between the president’s and the first lady’s views on the subject of abortion. “As you are well aware,” Cole wrote on September 6, 1974, “the controversy … is one of the most emotional and volatile issues this year and could become even more so as the elections approach.” Cole signaled the danger of having Betty take a stand similar to Ford’s liberal vice president, Nelson Rockefeller.

Why didn’t Ford, a pragmatic centrist, rein in his wife, as other presidents have? He certainly liked being president. He hoped to be reelected. But he was not as consumed as those who have spent their lives fighting for it. He was unwilling to sacrifice his relationship with his wife for the office. And he knew how important it was for Betty to have a sense of her own autonomy. They had paid a high price for his earlier neglect. He needed her, and he needed her to be happy. He was—and this, too, seems refreshingly unpresidential—a little bit afraid of his wife. “If she got unhappy,” Kennerly noted, “or frustrated, she would certainly tell him about it. Like most men, he liked to avoid those situations.”

BETTY, A BORN PERFORMER
, loved the role. Like Jacqueline Kennedy, though from another world, she understood the symbolic power of her undefined position. She grasped what Pat Nixon did not: that it wasn’t
the number of hands she shook or the letters she personally answered but the image she projected to the country that mattered. So, like Jackie, Betty established who she was in just a handful of appearances and through the canny use of her platform.

She loved to entertain and she loved to party. She quickly transformed the White House into a lively place. Jackie’s small, round tables returned, replacing the Nixons’ long ones. The First Couple were often the last to leave the dance floor after state dinners. Betty did the bump with Tony Orlando and the dignity of the republic was not shattered. The presidential couple stomped to “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” at a state dinner for King Hussein of Jordan, and the country relaxed a bit. The poison of Watergate was oozing out of the nation’s bloodstream.

While President Ford was meeting with the heads of thirty-five nations on the question of security and cooperation in Europe and hammering out the historic Helsinki Accord on Human Rights, Betty’s profile soared to a new level. In August 1975, she sat down with
60 Minutes
correspondent Morley Safer and overnight became the most talked-about woman in America. “I expected a much earthier first lady than any previous ones,” Safer recalled, “but not as earthy as I got. I found an attractive woman who was the first politician I have ever met who absolutely let her guard down. It was a conscious thing with her. This was going to be Betty’s moment. She declared who she was.” Safer did not think Betty had “cleared” her answers with her husband. “The interview liberated all those Republican women who nodded appreciatively at every Neanderthal statement made by the party,” said Safer. “She was not out for self-aggrandizement or self-promotion. Betty Ford said, We’re real people in this house.”

Safer asked all the “hot button” questions first ladies generally evade with puffery. Betty took each one head-on. Infidelity: “He doesn’t have time for outside entertainment. I keep him busy.” Her breakdown: “I was giving too much of myself and not taking any time out for Betty …. I was a little beaten down and he [the psychiatrist] built up my ego.” The secret of their successful marriage: “You go into it, both of you, as a seventy-thirty proposition. In other words, here I’m giving seventy, he can give thirty, he’s giving seventy, I give thirty. When you’re going overboard trying to please each other, you can’t help but be happy.” Abortion:
“I feel strongly that it was the best thing in the world when the Supreme Court voted to legalize abortion …. I thought it was a great, great decision.” The possibility that her seventeen-year-old daughter was having an affair: “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Marijuana: “I’m sure they [her children] have all tried it …. I probably would have been interested to see the effect …. It’s the type of thing young people have to experience, like your first beer or your first cigarette ….”

Reaction to the interview was as unprecedented as the interview itself. The American people saw an open, honest woman talking about issues they were dealing with every day. Suddenly, the distance between the White House and their houses melted away. The White House was barraged with thousands of letters, with those opposing her at first running two to one. But that soon changed.
Newsweek
named Betty Ford “Woman of the Year” and claimed, “Not since Eleanor Roosevelt championed civil rights and organized labor in the 1930s has a First Lady spoken out more freely—or aroused more controversy …. In a year when women are continuing their climb into public visibility, Betty Ford seems the symbolic Woman of the Year. But her soft, hesitant voice seems to speak as much from her heart as her politics.” A Harris poll found her post-
60 Minutes
approval rating soaring twenty-five points from 50 percent to 75 percent.