Betty Ford: First Lady

by Lisa McCubbin

  Only Steve and Susan were still at home. Betty had dealt with Mike and Jack going through puberty, and now it was Steve and Susan. Jerry had been in charge of telling the boys about the birds and the bees, and one day, when Susan was about twelve or thirteen, Betty told her only daughter they needed to have a little talk.

  Susan was about to go to camp for the summer, and Betty was concerned that she might get her period for the first time while she was away.

  “Come sit up here,” Betty said, tapping the kitchen counter. Susan hurled her body up onto the counter, so that even though her legs were dangling, she was nearly face-to-face with her mother.

  Betty handed her a pamphlet that showed the differences in male and female anatomy, explained all about menstruation, and the mechanics of sex.

  “It’s really about the relationship between a man and a woman,” Betty said. “One day you will kiss a boy . . . but whatever you do, don’t ever let a boy stick his tongue in your mouth.”

  It was all Susan could do to keep from bursting out laughing.

  “I can remember it to this day!” she recalled. “Because about ten days before, I had been French-kissed by some boy.” You are so late, Mother, Susan was thinking. You missed the boat.

  Susan kept quiet, trying to maintain a straight face, as her mother continued.

  “You know,” Betty said, “a boy did that to me once, and I bit his tongue and got on the trolley and went home.”

  “God, I’d have loved to have seen that!” Susan recalled. “And I don’t doubt she did it.”

  It wasn’t a long conversation, but at the end, Betty said, “Now, if you have any questions, please ask me.”

  In the late sixties and early seventies, the Alexandria public school system was going through a transition, as the city tried to achieve a racial balance among its three high schools. In grades nine and ten, Steve was bused to the predominantly black George Washington High School, where he was co-captain of the junior varsity football team, playing center and linebacker.

  “Mother would come to all my games,” Steve recalled with a smile.

  During one game, Steve went down and was clearly in pain. The coach pulled him out and had him sit on the sidelines with an ice pack on his wrist. Betty, who was watching from the bleachers, had seen the hit and went into mother bear mode. She raced down to the field, and to Steve’s horror, hoisted herself up and over the waist-high chain-link fence to get to the bench where he was sitting.

  “Mom!” he hissed. “What are you doing?”

  “What happened? What hurts?” Betty asked.

  At sixteen, in the presence of his teammates and, more important, the cheerleaders, Steve was mortified. “Mom, get out of here. You can’t be down here!” he said through clenched teeth. As soon as the game was over, Betty drove Steve straight to the emergency room, where it was determined he had broken his wrist.

  Decades later, he looked back on the memory with a laugh and not a hint of embarrassment. “She was just a great mother that way,” he said.

  In 1972, his junior year, Steve was assigned to T. C. Williams High School, along with all the district’s eleventh- and twelfth-grade students. There was a tremendous amount of racial tension, as depicted in the 2000 movie Remember the Titans, which was based on the 1971 T. C. Williams football season.

  “We lived it,” Steve Ford recalled. “Bricks were being thrown at windows, kids were getting into fistfights and smoking pot in the hallways.” And while the Fords felt their six-foot-one son Steve could handle it, Betty and Jerry were concerned about sending their “baby girl” into such a volatile environment.

  Susan had been best friends with “the Golubin twins”—Reagan and Elison—since elementary school, and the Golubin girls’ parents were also concerned about the atmosphere at T. C. Williams. So, the Fords and the Golubins decided to have their daughters apply for admission to Holton-Arms, a private boarding school in Bethesda, Maryland.

  “We all got in,” Susan recalled. The girls stayed at school Monday through Friday and came home on weekends. One of the parents would pick up the girls Friday and one would take them back on Sunday.

  By this point, Clara was no longer working for the Fords. A couple of years earlier, she had gone to Betty and told her that her father was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She couldn’t bear to put him in a home, and she needed to care for him full-time. Of course Betty and the family understood. Mike had gone to college, and the other kids were self-sufficient, able to help with household chores. Two or three times a week, the kids would visit Clara at her dad’s house, which was only about ten minutes away. “Susan would come up, and we used to sew,” Clara remembered. She was no longer at their home every day, but she was no less important to the Ford family.

  This was their situation as the calendar turned from 1972 to 1973, and Richard Nixon was beginning his second term in office. Betty had been supportive of Jerry’s political career ever since that first day he’d told her he wanted to run for Congress, before they were even married, and Jerry was well aware that she, too, had sacrificed a great deal. They’d always thought of each other as equal partners—more so than many other couples of that era. Perhaps it was because of the relatively older age at which they’d met and married, but any decision they made, they’d always made together. One of the many things Jerry had found attractive about Betty from the beginning, and still attracted him now, was her honesty and candor. She didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear; she always told him how she really felt.

  Recognizing that becoming Speaker of the House was most likely not going to happen, and that in less than three years their youngest children would both be off to college, they sat down to discuss plans for the future.

  “We agreed that I would run one more time in 1974, then announce my retirement from public life in early 1975,” Jerry recalled. At that point, he would be sixty-three years old—“still active enough to practice law or enter into a business partnership with friends”—and after so many years living on a congressman’s salary, the opportunity to earn additional income as a private citizen was attractive to both of them.

  “He promised me he would retire at the end of President Nixon’s second term,” Betty said. After twenty-four years as a congressman’s wife, living in the Washington bubble, the thought of retiring, whether it be to Grand Rapids, or perhaps Florida or California, was something Betty found herself looking forward to with each passing month. She knew Gerald R. Ford’s word was good as gold. There was no reason to think it wouldn’t happen just like they’d planned.

  10

  * * *

  A Five-Dollar Bet

  If it wasn’t for two Washington Post reporters following the story of the Watergate break-in, Jerry Ford might have been able to keep his promise. But no one could have imagined how, in the year 1973, America was about to be turned on her head, our Constitution tested beyond anything since the Civil War, and Gerald R. Ford, representative of the Fifth District from the great state of Michigan, would be smack dab in the middle of it all.

  Around the dinner table at 514 Crown View Drive, everyone in the Ford family was expected to keep abreast of what was happening in the world, from politics to sports, and it made for lively debates. Betty and Jerry had always encouraged their children to ask questions and speak openly about how they felt. In 1973 there was much to discuss.

  On January 30, 1973, former Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. were convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping in the Watergate incident. Five other men pleaded guilty, but questions remained. Three months later, after Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward revealed a tangled web of secret funds and lies, Nixon’s top White House staffers, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, all resigned suddenly. At the same time, President Nixon fired White House counsel John Dean.

  In May the Senate Watergate Committee began hearings that were broadcast live on television. It was a national
soap opera with potentially dire consequences. Revelations from top officials appeared to be linking a Watergate cover-up to President Nixon.

  When it came to Watergate, and Nixon’s involvement, Jerry and Betty were convinced that their longtime friend had nothing to do with it.

  Meanwhile, separate from Watergate, Vice President Spiro Agnew was being investigated for kickbacks and bribes he had allegedly received as governor of Maryland.

  On October 10, 1973, Agnew, after months of denying any wrongdoing, admitted that he had failed to report $29,500 of income in 1967 while he was governor. He pleaded no contest to a single charge of tax evasion, was fined $10,000, and formally resigned the office of vice president of the United States, “effective immediately.”

  That night, Jerry and Betty were at home, when the phone rang around ten o’clock.

  It was Mel Laird. Mel and Jerry had known each other a long time, having served in Congress together for many years. Mel had served as Nixon’s secretary of defense, and, after Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s resignations, he had stepped in to become one of Nixon’s advisors at the White House. A phone call from him at ten o’clock in the evening, however, was unusual.

  Sitting in the family room, Betty could hear only Jerry’s side of the conversation. “Let us think about it, and I’ll call you back,” he said.

  Jerry hung up the phone and said, “That was Mel Laird. He wanted to know, if I was asked, would I accept the vice presidential nomination.”

  For the next hour, Jerry and Betty debated the pluses and minuses. First of all, Jerry wasn’t sure he would be happy in the position. Traditionally, the vice president’s job was chiefly ceremonial, with little impact on legislation, and Jerry couldn’t imagine working at a slower pace. Then they talked about how it would impact the children, and the invasiveness of the press.

  On the other hand, Jerry realized the vice presidency was an honor and would be a “splendid cap” to his career—a recognition of his long service in Washington.

  “What about your promise?” Betty reminded him.

  “That’s the best part,” Jerry said. He’d have to serve as vice president only until the end of Nixon’s term: January 1977. Then he would leave public office, just as they’d planned.

  “But it is highly unlikely Nixon would choose me,” Jerry assured Betty. “I’m too valuable to him on Capitol Hill.” Besides, there were other Republicans with national reputations and higher ambitions who seemed to be much likelier choices, such as John Connally, a former Democratic governor of Texas and US Treasury Secretary who’d recently switched parties; Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York; and the governor of California, Ronald Reagan.

  Betty agreed. It seemed there was only a very small chance Jerry would be chosen.

  Jerry called back Laird. “We’ve talked about it and agreed that, if I were asked, I’d accept,” he said. “I’ll do whatever the president wants me to do, but we won’t do anything to stimulate any campaign. I’m not promoting myself. We have made our plans, and we’re happy with what we’ve decided to do.”

  The phone at 514 Crown View Drive had been ringing nonstop for the past two days, and Betty had put up with about as much as she could take. It was one reporter after another asking all kinds of ridiculous questions.

  “Has your husband told you to get your hair done?”

  “No,” Betty replied with a smile. “I just had it done yesterday.” Then she quipped, “And if you think my husband’s worried about my hair, you have a wrong idea of my husband.”

  Another anxious reporter had called and asked, “Has your husband told you to go out and get a new dress?”

  That one made her laugh. The small master bedroom closet in their split-level Alexandria home had become so overstuffed that they’d installed a rack that ran the entire length of one side of the bedroom to hold the collection of suits, gowns, and dresses Betty had accumulated over the years. She still loved fashion, and while Jerry rarely denied her anything, her ever-expanding wardrobe was sometimes a source of contention. The last thing he would ever suggest was for her to go out and buy a new dress.

  Besides that, Betty thought, these reporters were barking up the wrong tree. There was no way President Richard M. Nixon was going to choose Jerry Ford as his vice president.

  Ever since Agnew’s departure two days earlier, rumors had been swirling about who Nixon would nominate to take his place. Only once before, in 1832, had a vice president resigned (and that was due not to personal scandal but to John C. Calhoun’s clashing politically with President Andrew Jackson and deciding to vacate the office with just months left in the term to run for an open Senate seat in his native South Carolina), and Washington was abuzz as reporters tried to glean information from anyone possible. Ford’s name had been mentioned among a dozen or so likely candidates, but in all honesty, Betty did not think her husband was a serious contender.

  Jerry had promised her this was his last term in office, and he’d even told Nixon that was a “blood oath.” No more campaigns, no more weeks on end with him traveling all over the country. Come January 1977, a little more than three years away, they were retiring, and Betty would finally have her husband back. Surely Nixon wouldn’t choose a vice president who already had his sights set on leaving politics.

  David Kennerly, a lanky, bearded, twenty-six-year-old photographer working for Time magazine, had been assigned to Vice President Agnew for the past year. When Agnew resigned in disgrace, Time sent out a bunch of reporters to cover the top candidates for his replacement, and as David recalled, “I drew the Gerald Ford straw.”

  Friday, October 12—the day the White House had said Nixon would reveal his pick—Kennerly called Ford’s office to see if he could come in and take a few photos of him. Jerry’s press secretary Paul Miltich said, “Sure. Come on in at eleven o’clock.”

  David had never met Jerry Ford before, but as he walked into the office, cameras slung across his body, he didn’t bother to introduce himself by name. He said simply, “I’m here for Time magazine. You’re on the list.”

  “Well, you’re wasting your time,” Ford replied good-naturedly. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and at that time, the congressman was telling the truth. He hadn’t received any indication that he would be chosen.

  “Well,” Kennerly said, “I’ll just get a few shots, and at the very least, you’ll have a nice picture for your wall.”

  Ford laughed. There was something about the photographer’s nonchalant attitude that appealed to him. Kennerly spent about ten or fifteen minutes taking some photos with the natural light in the room—he called it “Rembrandt lighting.”

  At that moment, Kennerly was convinced that Ford truly did not think he would be the nominee. “He did not seem like a guy who was waiting by the phone for this call,” Kennerly said.

  That afternoon, at 514 Crown View Drive, Betty was just beginning to prepare dinner when Susan came striding into the kitchen. Home for the weekend from Holton-Arms, the sixteen-year-old was eager to find out if the rumors she’d been hearing were true. Even at school, she watched the news and read the papers; she knew her father was on the short list, but when she’d called and asked him, he’d been unusually quiet. Almost secretive.

  “Mom, do you think President Nixon is going to choose Dad as vice president?”

  “No, Susan, honestly I don’t,” Betty said. “Your father is much too valuable in the House getting legislation through. The president would never take him out. It wouldn’t make any sense at all.”

  “Well, I think it’s going to be him,” Susan replied. “I’ll bet you five dollars Daddy is the nominee.”

  Betty was so confident that Jerry was not going to be the nominee, she didn’t hesitate one moment. “All right,” she said with a confident smile. “You’re on. Five dollars.”

  One of the perks of being minority leader was that Jerry had been assigned a government car, along with a wonderful driver named Richard Frazier. With Frazier behind the
wheel, he could work in the car between meetings and on the way home.

  Betty was in the kitchen when she heard the car pull into the driveway. She looked at the clock on the oven. It was just before six thirty. That’s unusual, she thought. With everything going on, she hadn’t expected him to be home until at least eight.

  As soon as Jerry walked into the house, Susan bounded up to him. “What’s happening, Dad? Do you know who Nixon’s gonna choose?”

  Betty came walking out of the kitchen, eager to hear the answer too. “Do you know who it is, dear?”

  Stone-faced, Jerry said, “The only thing I know is that the president is going to telephone his man soon.” He checked his watch and said, “I’m going to go for a swim before dinner, and then I’ll have to get back to the White House for the announcement.”

  While Jerry swam laps, Betty broiled a few steaks, and Susan set the table. Steve came downstairs and asked, “Does Dad know who it’s going to be?”

  “He says he doesn’t know,” Susan said. “I still think Nixon’s going to choose him.”

  Betty shook her head. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to to get that idea, but it’s not going to be your father.”

  After his fifteen-minute swim, Jerry went upstairs to dry off and get dressed.

  “I’ll be right down,” he said. “I’ll have to eat quickly and then get back to the White House.”

  Susan helped Betty serve the plates, and as soon as Jerry came down, they all sat down at the table. It was seven o’clock.