First Ladies (20 page)

Betty tried to make her approach as low-keyed as possible. She claimed she just wanted to let wavering legislators know that she and the President were “considerably interested” in ERA. She told recalcitrant antis she admired “the sincerity” of their opposition but hoped they would change their minds. Unfortunately, no matter how hard she tried to avoid it, Betty found herself in the middle of a raging political conflict.

Opposition to the ERA ran deep in many parts of the country, from Phyllis Schlafly’s conservative followers to huge swatches of the southern and midwestern Bible Belt, where Protestant clergy—and quite a few Catholic priests—saw the amendment as an attempt to loosen moral standards and ratify abortion rights. Letters to the editor blossomed in papers around the country, accusing Betty of “arm-twisting” tactics. Marchers paraded in front of the White House chanting: “Betty Ford is trying to press a second-rate manhood on
American women.” The mail flooding the White House post office was three to one against her.

Betty tried to reef her sails in this political squall. She made it clear that she was not a member of NOW or any other branch of the women’s movement. She denied she was a “wild-eyed liberal” and reminded people she had four grown children and had enjoyed being a wife and mother. She was not trying to denigrate women who stayed home and raised their children. She saw the ERA as a fight for equal opportunity, equal freedom of choice, for women in the future.

Straddling was good politics for the First Lady but not for the ERA. The amendment won in Nevada but lost in Missouri and other swing states as the apostles of the status quo carried the day. Betty turned her attention to a better deal for women inside the Ford administration. She played no small part in persuading her husband to appoint Carla Hills his secretary of housing and urban development—and Anne Armstrong the ambassador to Great Britain. She spent a lot of what she called “pillow talk” hours trying to get him to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.

Betty’s ERA exercise in political outspokenness had identified her as a new kind of First Lady. That made an invitation to CBS’s top-rated news show,
60 Minutes
, virtually inevitable. She appeared on August 21, 1975, eleven days after her husband had announced he was going to seek the GOP nomination in 1976.

Betty told me she went on the air with no inkling that her host, Morley Safer, had any controversial questions in mind. Suddenly she found herself being asked what she thought of the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion rights. She said it was “the best thing in the world… a great great decision.” Safer asked what she thought about smoking marijuana. If it had been available in her youth, Betty replied, she would have tried it. What did she think of premarital sex? She did not “personally favor it,” Betty said. But she thought it might lower the divorce rate.

What would she say if her seventeen-year-old daughter Susan told her she was having an affair? Betty said she would not be surprised. “She’s a perfectly normal human being.” She added that she would
counsel Susan on the matter and would want to know a lot about the young man.

At the marijuana remark, Jerry Ford, watching with Betty in Vail, Colorado (the show had been taped earlier), reportedly gasped: “You just cost me ten million votes!” At the premarital sex reply, he groaned: “Twenty million!” When I discussed this episode with Betty, she described these remarks as “facetious.” Alas, there was nothing humorous about the public’s reaction to the show.

The next morning, newspaper headlines across the country told people what Betty had said, and the White House post office was buried in an avalanche that made the number of letters received on the ERA seem like a light dusting, to use weatherman lingo. Twenty-eight thousand Americans told Betty Ford they were very, very mad at her. A paltry seven thousand supported her frankness.

A Dallas preacher roared that Betty had descended to a “gutter type of mentality.” A New Hampshire newspaper editor howled that she had “disgraced the nation.” A Texan informed her that she was “not an individual. You are, because of the position your husband has assumed, expected and officially required to be PERFECT!” America’s foremost evangelist, Billy Graham, swayer of umpteen million mostly Republican votes, said his wife would have wept if one of his children confessed to using drugs or having an affair.

The Ford White House reeled in this media firestorm. Betty’s answers had challenged the core of Jerry Ford’s political persona. As President watchers such as Richard Reeves pointed out, being Mr. Nice Guy, doing his best to avoid making people angry at him, had been the basic idea of his career. His positions on abortion, drugs, and premarital sex reflected the largely conservative Republican Michigan constituency he had represented for almost thirty years.

Most accounts of Betty as First Lady skip this part of the story and blithely tell their readers that people eventually got around to admiring Betty for her frankness. These writers never spent any time inside the White House. Twenty-eight thousand negative letters do not make for laughs or blithe dismissals. If that many people are mad enough to sit down and write a letter, it suggests there may be another
2,800,000 out there sounding off to their friends and relatives. “The President,” Ron Nessen told Betty’s press secretary, in what was almost certainly an understatement, “is very upset.”

What to do? Betty being Betty, she had no intention of changing her convictions. She was—and is—exactly what one of her surgeons described her as: “a gutsy lady” She remained convinced that a majority of Americans agreed with her remarks—or at least felt she had a right to express her opinions. But how to reach them? As she discussed the crisis with her staff, they began to suspect the heart of the problem was a clash between TV and newsprint. Chatting with Morley Safer, Betty had expressed the same personal opinions she might have offered in a conversation with any visitor to the White House. Safer had not debated these issues with her. They had passed on to other subjects. If the remarks had been left in verbal form, they might have caused far less fuss. But the print journalists had turned them into issues and blasted them into people’s faces with headlines and reams of analysis.

Betty and her staff decided the only thing to do was fight print with print. They spent weeks drafting what they eventually called “the letter.” It is a very interesting document, a veritable masterpiece of First Lady spin control. It also happened to be an accurate description of Betty Ford’s views:

The letter went out over Betty’s signature to those thousands of angry First Lady watchers. One of them sent it to the Associated Press, who put it on its ubiquitous wires, and it was picked up by hundreds of other newspapers, including
The New York Times
.

Slowly,
very
slowly, Betty’s poll numbers began turning around. On November 19 a Harris Poll reported more people now approved of her remarks on
60 Minutes
than disapproved. Other polls reported she had come from a bare fifty percent (low for a First Lady) general approval rating to seventy-five percent. At the end of the year, the Gallup Poll ranked her the most admired woman in America.
People
magazine listed her as one of the three most intriguing women in the country.

But this bonanza of goodwill did her husband little good. By the end of the year, his poll numbers had dropped to a subterranean forty-one percent. Was there a connection between Betty’s rise and Jerry’s decline? No one can say for certain. But there was a rising conservative tide out there, which would crest with Ronald Reagan in 1980. Betty was, according to some headline writers at least, swimming against it—and conservatives have very retentive memories. Perhaps it is no accident that the elephant is the Republican symbol.

By the time Jerry Ford ran for President in 1976, the Ford administration decided Betty was an asset and distributed campaign buttons saying,
ELECT BETTY
’
S
HUSBAND. KEEP BETTY IN THE WHITE HOUSE
. In the New Hampshire primary campaign, she was a sensational success. Television and print showered praise on her candor, her freshness.

Early on Betty told several reporters that she would campaign for Jerry but might differ with her husband on some issues. “Wow,” gasped Ford speechwriter John Casserly in his diary. When the campaign got going, she did no such thing. The Republican platform called for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, for instance. Betty did not say a word against it.

Instead, like the loving, loyal partner that she was and still is, Betty poured everything she had into her husband’s campaign. She tried
extremely hard to convince the nation that the decent man she loved deserved to become President in his own right. But she did not like political campaigning. She hated making speeches. Conversation, not oration, was her métier. I suspect she also felt she was out there, doing not her own thing but her husband’s thing—and Betty slowly crumbled under this sense of loss of self and the sheer exhaustion that overtakes everyone in a presidential campaign.

The Fords leave the Truman house in Independence, Missouri, after a visit with my parents. My husband, Clifton Daniel, is walking with the President. My mother admired Betty’s forthright style.
(Ford Library)

Betty began to mess up speeches—at one point she referred to herself as President. At another point, during Jerry’s fight with Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, she called Reagan the President. She broke down and wept tears of shame and exasperation in hotel rooms. She became more and more dependent on drugs and alcohol to keep going.

As almost everyone knows, Jerry Ford did not win the presidency in 1976. He lost by a heartbreaking two percent of the vote to Jimmy Carter, who had come out of nowhere to win the Democratic nomination as an outsider running against the Washington establishment. The loss sent Betty Ford spinning into a black pit of depression. I am not about to play amateur psychiatrist with a woman I admire and like, but I cannot help but wonder if part of Betty’s collapse was caused by a feeling—a fear—that she may have contributed to the loss.

Looking back on it from the perspective of twenty years, Betty does not think this feeling played a part in her depression. In discussing it with me, she pointed—correctly—to many other factors in Jerry’s defeat: the overall stench of Watergate; the burden of the Nixon pardon; Jerry’s bad luck to be golfing in Palm Springs on the day in 1975 when South Vietnam began its swift collapse, giving the TV news a chance to juxtapose images of a President at play with scenes of blood and horror. But Betty admitted to me that if she regretted anything in her tenure as First Lady, it was the
60 Minutes
interview.

For Betty Ford in 1976, no explanations, however valid, did much to assuage the pain of her husband’s defeat—which was also her defeat. Perhaps her best advice came from a previous First Lady, supposedly nonpolitical—certainly one who never said a word in public
that disagreed with her presidential husband. In her large scrawl, Mamie Eisenhower wrote:

For the time being, Betty Ford could not say that prayer. As we shall see, it would take another struggle to be honest—this time with herself about her dependency on drugs and alcohol—before she could resume a normal life.