First Ladies (19 page)

For the next six months, Edith continued to be the gatekeeper of his room. In the 1970s her story was dramatized in a TV show entitled
The First Woman President
. Edith Wilson would have objected strongly to such a term. She described her regime as a “stewardship.” She said that first, Woodrow Wilson was “my beloved husband” and, second, he was “President of the United States.” She insisted she never made a “single decision” on public affairs, she only decided “what was important and what was not.”

However, anyone who has ever worked in the White House knows that the power to make such decisions can often be tantamount to running the country—or letting it run itself and hoping for the best. During the early months of his illness, Wilson’s cabinet officers, spooked by the rise of Communism in Russia and left-wing agitation elsewhere in Europe, sided with big business in breaking a miners’
strike and numerous other union walkouts, alienating millions of workers from the Democratic Party. The attorney general, Mitchell Palmer, expelled thousands of “aliens” with total disregard for their civil rights, dismaying influential liberals. By doing nothing to stop these disastrous policies, Edith gave them the President’s tacit approval.

As Wilson’s condition improved, Edith almost certainly played an important role in a decision that had a devastating impact on the President’s public image. The First Lady regarded Secretary of State Robert Lansing with loathing because he had shown up at the White House soon after Wilson’s collapse and insisted the President be replaced immediately. While Wilson lay paralyzed, the secretary had chaired some twenty cabinet meetings over a four-month period to deal with the nation’s business; he had not received a word of reproach from the second floor of the White House. Suddenly, in February 1920, a note from the Wilson asked him how he dared to do such a thing without the President’s authority—and demanded Lansing’s resignation. The newspapers exploded with outrage. One called it “Wilson’s Last Mad Act.”

Cut off from Tumulty, who sent letter after letter of advice that Edith discarded, Wilson’s political judgment grew almost pathetically bad. Although the President was incapable of working for more than a half hour a day, he became a candidate for a third term, hoping to make the election a referendum on the lost treaty and league. The Democratic Party spurned its crippled leader. Undeterred, he issued a statement calling the election of 1920 a referendum, even if he was not running. The American people responded by giving Woodrow Wilson a historic kick in the teeth. With women, supposedly more idealistic, voting for the first time, the Republicans won in a stupendous landslide.

I am not blaming Edith Wilson for this sad close to her political partnership. She was an intelligent woman, and she must have known Wilson was no longer capable of making sound decisions. Her dilemma is summed up in an undated note on a scrap of paper, found among Woodrow Wilson’s papers:

That says it all. Love was First Lady Edith Wilson’s triumph—and her immolation. Maybe—a really unnerving thought—love and politics do not mix very well.

—

I
AM NOT SUGGESTING LOVE SHOULD BE BARRED FROM THE
W
HITE
House. On the contrary, it is an inescapable part of the President-First Lady equation. How it operates varies immensely from couple to couple. In the case of Betty and Gerald Ford, love was the secret ingredient in a First Lady’s readiness to unleash controversial opinions that made national headlines. She and her husband remained loving political partners even though at one point he told her she had cost him twenty million votes.

Betty Bloomer Ford’s vivid performance as our most candid First Lady has made her memorable. To further understand her meteoric trip through the political stratosphere, we need to remember how she reached the White House. Gerald Ford was the first unelected President in American history. He was appointed vice president by Richard Nixon to replace the disgraced Spiro Agnew little more than ten months before President Nixon himself was forced to resign or face the threat of impeachment in the Watergate scandal. No President
and First Lady ever entered the White House with a more tenuous grasp on their legitimacy. Neither the Fords nor their advisers nor the American people expected them to be there for more than the remaining two and a half years of Richard Nixon’s term.

This sense of being temporary played a strong part in encouraging Betty Ford to be herself and to express unorthodox opinions. She did not feel that she was harming her husband’s political career—which seemed to be ending with this fillip of honor and prestige. She had already extracted a “blood oath” that he would retire from Congress in 1976. On that hot August day in 1974, as she gripped the Bible on which her husband vowed to uphold the Constitution, Betty thought, “My God, what a job I have to do!”

Note the use of the first person singular. At that point, Betty saw herself as the partner with more freedom to influence events. It was not clear that an unelected President could be more than a caretaker. It took Jerry Ford several months to acquire a sense of himself as President and begin thinking that he might be good enough at the job to run for election. By that time Betty had acquired a reputation for candor that was unique among First Ladies.

In his inaugural remarks, Jerry Ford testified to his bond with Betty. He declared he came to the presidency “obligated to no man and to only one woman, my dear wife.” Unquestionably, Betty Ford returned that love. But when you examine her life, you discover a woman who had trouble loving some aspects of being a political wife. As leader of the Republican minority in the House of Representatives, Jerry Ford was on the road, speaking at fund-raisers and party gatherings over two hundred nights a year, leaving Betty to raise their four children pretty much on her own. Jerry’s great ambition was to elect enough Republicans to make him Speaker of the House of Representatives—a job he is not alone in rating the second most powerful post in the federal government.

In 1970, while Jerry continued to pursue this elusive prize, Betty found herself talking to a psychiatrist. Eighteen months with an understanding therapist helped her deal with her anger and loneliness and convinced her it was important to express her own thoughts
and feelings more often—a conclusion that strongly influenced her performance as First Lady.

Another factor was Americans’ low opinion of the prevailing level of honesty in Washington, D.C. in 1974. With Spiro Agnew pleading nolo contendere to charges of bribery and President Nixon engulfed by the labyrinthine cover-ups of Watergate, there was a strongly felt need for some frank talk in our nation’s capital. Betty Ford was ready to supply it.

Her decision perfectly fitted her personality and inclinations. But most people forget she was also acting on the principle that her husband, in his inaugural remarks, declared would be the bedrock of his presidency: “I believe truth is the glue that holds government together,” he said. “Not only our government but civilization itself…. I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end.”

Although she is another First Lady who seemed to be the antithesis of Bess Truman in many ways, Betty has told me that my mother was one of her inspirations in the White House. She admired her because Bess did not let eight years in the glare of the presidential spotlight change her. She remained “humble.” That is not an adjective I would volunteer to describe my mother, who was the granddaughter of one of the richest men in Independence, and in private did not hesitate to tell people exactly what she thought about a lot of things. I think what Betty shared with Bess Truman was a midwestern dislike for any and all kinds of pretentiousness.

While Betty never tried to hide her views—during the few months her husband was vice president she startled reporters by casually admitting she took a Valium a day—she also did not go looking for confrontations. When she was asked if she had a favorite good cause, she shook her head and ran through a veritable laundry list of “interests,” from the ballet (she had been a dancer in her youth) to handicapped children to better treatment for senior citizens. As First Lady she gave time to all these things. But she never even mentioned the cause that meant the most to her: woman’s rights in general and the Equal Rights Amendment in particular.

On other issues in the early months of the Ford presidency, Betty was often more cautious than her husband. When he decided to pardon President Richard Nixon, putting an end to talk of prosecuting him for his Watergate malfeasances, the First Lady warned him not to do it She foresaw the political uproar that ensued. But Gerald Ford insisted he was acting in the country’s—not Richard Nixon’s—best interest. During his first month in the Oval Office, Jerry spent twenty-five percent of his time wrestling with questions surrounding Nixon’s fate. He decided it was time to put Watergate and its attendant nightmares behind us. When he issued the pardon, Betty Ford said nothing about their disagreement.

Then Betty had an experience which profoundly strengthened her inclination toward candor. In September, a little more than a month after she and Jerry took over the White House, she was diagnosed as suffering from breast cancer. Living in those “eighteen acres under glass,” it was impossible to hide the illness from the press. But it could have been handled in hush-hush fashion. After talking it over with Jerry and her children, Betty decided to be as frank and forthcoming as possible. Members of the press were given all the information they needed to report the course of her surgery and recovery.

As 55,800 cards and letters from women who had survived the disease or feared they might have it flooded into the White House, Betty realized the power of what she likes to call “the office of First Lady.” Her forthrightness had apparently encouraged millions of worried women to seek breast examinations. She had also emboldened doctors to talk more frankly about this form of cancer than ever before. Betty admitted to me that she was uncomfortable with this publicity about her surgery at first: “I felt people were asking whenever I appeared in public: ‘Which one did she lose?’ But I got over it by reminding myself how much good I’d accomplished.”

There is a side story to Betty’s struggle with cancer which explains why I and so many other people like her so much. It demonstrates her courage and makes it clear that she did not publicize her illness out of any neurotic desire for sympathy. On her schedule, before she learned the bad news, was an engagement with Lady Bird Johnson and her
daughters to dedicate the LBJ Memorial Grove, a cluster of white pine trees planted along the Potomac in memory of the Lone Star State’s only President. Betty insisted on keeping this date and invited the Johnsons back to the White House for tea and a tour of the private quarters without saying a word about her condition. Only after they parted did she hurry to Bethesda Naval Hospital to prepare for her surgery the next morning.

Not long after the operation, Betty Ford held a press conference at which she announced to 150 reporters that she was going to support the Equal Rights Amendment. It had taken a lot of midnight floor pacing and long talks with her husband to reach this turning point in the history of First Ladies. Forty-two years earlier, when Eleanor Roosevelt had held the first ever press conference by a President’s wife, she had promised to avoid serious issues and any and all comment on pending legislation.

A lot had changed since the 1930s. The woman’s rights revolution of the 1960s had made it far less shocking for a First Lady to take a
stand. But Betty’s declaration was still an act of considerable political courage. When we discussed it, however, she scotched the idea that she was disagreeing with her husband. On the contrary, she stressed the way the Ford partnership had supported her decision. “Jerry had rounded up crucial votes to get the ERA onto the floor of Congress when it was passed in 1972,” she told me. “He felt I had a perfect right to speak out on the issue. The Republican Party had included the ERA in its platform at many national conventions.”

Betty and Jerry Ford share a private moment in the White House. Betty used “pillow talk” to persuade Jerry to appoint numerous women to high posts.
(Ford Library)

Early in 1975 President Ford affirmed his support by issuing an executive order establishing a national commission on the observance of International Women’s Year. The Fords hoped this would create a positive aura that would reinforce the ERA’s chances for ratification.

At the time of Betty’s announcement, the ERA was struggling to win approval from three more states to reach the two-thirds required for a constitutional amendment before the ten-year deadline for its adoption expired. Betty Ford became the first First Lady to “work the phones,” as the professional pols call it, direct from the White House to state capitals like Jefferson City, Missouri, urging legislators to vote for the ERA.