Betty Ford, a self-proclaimed “ordinary” woman who never cared for political life but made a liberating adventure out of her 30 months as first lady, died Friday at age 93.
“I decided that if the White House was our fate,” she once said of Gerald Ford’s brief presidency, “I might as well have a good time doing it.”
To the surprise of some and the consternation of others, Ford evolved as an activist first lady whose nonthreatening manner coupled with her newfound celebrity provided the women’s movement an impressive ally. Undaunted by critics, she campaigned for ratification of the ill-starred Equal Rights Amendment, championed liberalized abortion laws and lobbied her husband to name more women to policymaking government jobs.
“Perhaps it was unusual for a first lady to be as outspoken about issues as I was, but that was my temperament, and I believed in it,” she said in an interview at her Rancho Mirage, Calif., home in 1994. “I don’t like to be dishonest, so when people asked me, I said what I thought.”
Her husband, who died in 2006, was a longtime Michigan congressman who became House minority leader. He served as Richard Nixon’s vice president before the Watergate scandal led him to succeed Nixon, who resigned Aug. 9, 1974, and become the nation’s 38th president. Ford had not wanted her husband to be president, but once he took office, she was determined that Americans know him as one with integrity.
“I was against a pardon,” she said of Ford’s decision to release Nixon from his Watergate offenses, which critics viewed as a secret deal between the two men in exchange for Nixon’s resignation.
Fearing the pardon would undermine Ford’s still-fragile presidency, she said she argued that “it would be very detrimental. I saw the anger as far as Watergate was concerned and the anger at President Nixon. I said, ‘It’s not going to be popular, it’s not going to look good.’ And I wanted him to look good.”
In the end, she acquiesced to Ford’s rationale that he needed to “get the country going.”
Within weeks after Watergate claimed Nixon’s political life and the Fords were settled at the White House, she soared from nonentity to national heroine because of her candid disclosure that she had a nodule in her right breast and was entering Bethesda Naval Medical Command.
When a biopsy showed the lump to be malignant, she underwent a radical mastectomy.Women across the country began seeking checkups for breast cancer.
“Circumstances made it appropriate for us to speak up about what was happening to me because we were in such a spotlight. I became the conduit, and I was very glad to be one,” Ford said.
Although she once characterized political wives as dutiful “appendages” and early in her husband’s career had reconciled herself to being simply “Congressman Ford’s wife,” the Betty Ford whom Americans eventually came to know was no shrinking violet.
When interviewers asked brash questions about the family’s private lives, Ford ingenuously responded in kind. She quipped that she slept with her husband “as often as I can,” would try marijuana if she were young again and she “wouldn’t be surprised” if her teenage daughter Susan were to have a premarital affair.
“I always had a more liberal view,” she said. Just because she was first lady didn’t mean she felt any different, Ford said at one point. It could happen to anyone. “After all,” she said, “it has happened to anyone.”
For Ford, a frank, plain-spoken Midwesterner, going public became a pattern of action that would also punctuate her post-White House years. In 1978, she disclosed that her use of alcohol and mood-altering prescription drugs had become a serious dependency.
In what she has described as a painful “intervention” when her family confronted her with her problem, she agreed to enter the drug and alcohol rehabilitation program at Long Beach Naval Hospital. Of that experience came the momentum to establish the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, a live-in treatment program for alcoholics and drug abusers.
Although she eventually thought she was “born alcoholic” and the pressures in her life had not suddenly transformed her into one, in “Betty: A Glad Awakening” (1987), she wrote that she always saw herself as a “controlled drinker, no binges.”
She was also an early proponent of help for AIDS victims and continued her support for women’s rights.
