Kati Marton (36 page)

She appeared immune to controversy because of who she was: a seemingly ordinary American housewife and mother. She had come to be seen as the woman every child wanted as a mother, every man as a wife. She was smart, warm, funny, whimsical and she could even do the bump. When Rabbi Maurice Sage suffered a heart attack on the podium in the middle of a June 1976 benefit for the Jewish National Fund, Betty took charge. Pandemonium erupted in the New York hotel ballroom as hundreds of guests stood up to see the commotion. The Secret Service tried to lead Mrs. Ford off the dais. She refused to leave and stepped up to the microphone and asked people to bow their heads. The noisy room fell suddenly quiet as she led the guests in a spontaneous prayer. Rabbi Sage did not survive his massive heart attack. And no one present ever forgot the first lady’s spontaneous humanity and presence of mind.

The still unanswered question was whether support for Betty translated into support for the president. Or was it a zero-sum game? Did
greater support for
her
mean less for
him?
Many of President Ford’s aides, notably his press spokesman Ron Nessen, were concerned that his wife’s extraordinary candor would damage his reelection chances. Ford took it all with his customary good humor. “You’ve just lost me ten million votes!” Ford said, watching the
60 Minutes
interview. “No,” he said, correcting himself, “twenty million,” and threw a pillow at his wife. Later he wrote, “I was under no illusions as to what the reaction to her remarks would be …. Conservatives grumbled, their grumbles swelled to a roar.” But it was not Ford’s way to silence his wife. “I had admired her candor from the moment we met and had always encouraged her to speak her mind,” he wrote. “We had few disagreements, but when we differed, we respected the other’s opinion.” This level of tolerance was something new in presidential history. Was the country ready for it? The extremely conservative New Hampshire daily, the
Manchester Union Leader,
said no. “President Ford showed his own lack of guts by saying he had long ago given up commenting on Mrs. Ford’s interviews. What kind of business is that?”

But Betty’s struggle to carve out her own identity alongside a high-profile spouse had wide appeal. “Why should my husband’s job or yours prevent
us
from being ourselves?” she asked the hundreds of women gathered in Cleveland to celebrate International Women’s Year. “Being ladylike does not require silence. The best way to celebrate International Women’s Year is to examine the very real problems women face today, not the progress of
yesterday.
” Men and women alike are inhibited by out-of-date ideas of what they each can do, she said. “But the limits on women have been formalized into law and structured into social custom …. 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.” Americans sensed this was no mere politician’s wife, reading someone else’s script. “Change by its very nature is threatening, but it is also often productive. And the fight of women to become productive, accepted human beings is important to all people of either sex and whatever nationality.” In 1976, the American people pronounced Betty one of her husband’s strongest assets, with 71 percent of those polled expressing a favorable opinion of her.

The country did not know how hard she had struggled against her demons for the confidence to pronounce such brave words. Though she had made great strides since her breakdown a decade before, the woman the president loved still walked near the edge. As much as she took to the role of first lady, she often felt isolated in the White House. “She was very lonely,” Chief Usher Scouten remembered. “She had been very close to her kids, and now they were gone. She always wanted to talk. She’d say, ‘Let’s go over the schedule while I’m having lunch.’ And she’d go on and on. I used to think, I have so many things I ought to be doing. But then I thought, if that is what makes her happy …. We’d talk about her kids, events around town, people in politics, Grand Rapids ….”

There were clues along the way that this suburbanite with the immaculate bouffant hairdo and winning smile was not exactly what she seemed. She was taking painkillers for a pinched nerve and arthritis, and Valium to take the edge off her high-velocity life—all washed down with alcohol. Barbara Walters noticed that Betty’s speech was “heavy and slow” when Walters arrived at the White House before an interview. Betty’s press secretary, Sheila Weidenfeld, at the time refused to accept her boss’s condition—despite overwhelming evidence. “She was out of it a great deal of the time. I was stupid about it. I didn’t know what was wrong. I used to see her with a drink, but everybody had a drink. But I did not know she popped a lot of pills. I knew she had osteoarthritis, that she was under the weather a lot. A nurse was constantly with her, traveled with her.”

Betty did not acknowledge her own condition. “My makeup wasn’t smeared, I wasn’t disheveled, I behaved politely, and I never finished off a bottle. So how could I be alcoholic?” After all, cocktails were as American as a Saturday game of golf. “At home my parents always served cocktails, come five o’clock,” Betty wrote. “It was a habit, like brushing your teeth in the morning …. I can see alcohol did not agree with me, but in those days, we didn’t even know alcoholism was a disease, or that it might be inherited …. My father was an alcoholic, though I never knew it until after he died, and so was my brother Bob.”

And so, it turned out, was Betty. Despite the overwhelming fact that for close to thirty years she had been mixing a variety of painkillers with
alcohol, her husband and children had been avoiding the painful truth. President Ford’s longtime political aide Stuart Spencer was not blind to her addiction.

It was not until 1987, eleven years after she left the White House, that Betty acknowledged to herself, her family and the country her true condition. Once again, she spoke for many. “I had a great deal of pain and back pain, so the medications that I was taking for my back and my neck became considerably multiplied … [and] I had always used alcohol.” Again she turned private adversity into public good by destigmatizing a common disease. She started a clinic for drug and alcohol abusers that has made her name better known than her husband’s. Just as he did not try to silence her outspoken activism when he was in the White House, he encouraged her to be open about her addiction to drugs and alcohol.

BETTY AND JERRY FORD DID NOT
consciously set out to make the presidency less imperial. It happened because of who they were. The presidency did not change them. Betty did not deliberately blur the lines between the public and the private sides of the presidency. By speaking out on issues never before touched upon by a first lady, she opened that door. She was not interested in making policy. But by boldly speaking out, she made controversial social issues an acceptable part of the national conversation.

“Elect Betty’s Husband” became a favorite campaign slogan in Jerry’s bid for the presidency in 1976. But the public seemed to prefer
Betty to her husband. Ford had too many obstacles in his way. Unlike his wife, he was no performer. His plain words and slow speaking style did not fire up a hall. He came across as somewhat dim, rather than the solid, methodical thinker he was. Ford had a habit of bumping into things in full view of the cameras. Once he became the focus of a
Saturday Night Live
skit, there was no shaking his image as a clumsy, oafish kind of guy. Most damningly, he had pardoned the man whose betrayal most Americans had not yet forgiven. And the Republican Party’s right wing, left cold by the Fords, had already begun its love affair with Ronald Reagan. By a slim margin, Ford lost to an unknown southern governor who promised a fresh start. Considering that the Republican Party had been shattered only two and a half years earlier by Nixon’s resignation, there was nothing shameful in Ford’s narrow loss.

The Fords ended their brief tenure the way they had begun: the picture of a solid, united couple. The morning after his defeat, Jerry woke up with a bad case of laryngitis, unable to deliver his concession speech. He asked Betty to give his final speech as president. Her composed, heartfelt message from her husband to the nation stood in contrast to the bitter memory of Richard Nixon’s final moments, his final public humiliation of his wife. The Fords walked away holding hands.

Betty and Jerry Ford dance at the National Symphony Ball, December 4, 1976. Jimmy Carter has already won, and the Fords are lame ducks.

It is hard not to conclude from the Fords’ fulfilled partnership and failed presidential bid that devoted husbands rarely make successful presidents. But the same qualities that made Gerald Ford a good husband—compassion, the ability to engage in the real give-and-take, the controlled ego—are not necessarily the qualities of a great leader. History is driven by needy, dominating, narcissistic personalities who let nothing and no one stand in their way. “Everything trends towards catastrophe and collapse,” Winston Churchill wrote his wife on the eve of World War I. “I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?” Ford was not built like that. Lacking Churchill’s drive and ruthlessness, he did not achieve a Churchillian career. Together the Fords did, however, play their part for history. At a confusing time for the nation, their sheer straightforwardness reminded Americans of who they were: imperfect, honest and hardworking.

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