Betty Ford: First Lady

by Lisa McCubbin

For Betty, it felt as if the nightmare had just begun. She would recall August 9, 1974, as the saddest day of her life.

  During normal transitions, one presidential family moves out of the White House, and the new family moves in the same day. In this case, it was impossible. The Nixons’ daughter Julie and her husband, David Eisenhower, had stayed behind to pack their family’s things; Jerry had told them to take their time. So, after photos were taken with the family in the Oval Office, Jerry went straight to work assembling his Cabinet and prioritizing the needs of the country while the rest of the family returned to their home in Alexandria.

  When Jerry came home around eight o’clock that evening, tailed by the press, the neighbors were standing in the street cheering. “Way to go, Jerry!” “Great new government job!”

  Betty had invited a dozen or so close friends to join them for a casual celebratory dinner of ham, salad, and lasagna, and by the time Jerry walked in, people were laughing and having a great time.

  “The morning had begun with tears, lives being broken, people being broken, and now there was laughter,” Betty wrote. Everybody wished them well, and “Jerry was in his shirtsleeves pouring champagne.”

  Betty had on an apron, and as she pulled a tray of lasagna out of the oven, she quipped, “Jerry, something’s wrong here. You’re president of the United States, and I’m still cooking!”

  It was crazy but true.

  One of the kids had invited photographer David Kennerly to join them that evening too. He had been around so much the past ten months that he’d almost become part of the family. He could always make Jerry laugh, and he and Betty had become especially close.

  “She had a fantastic sense of humor,” he recalled. “I could tell her all the off-color jokes that I would never tell President Ford because he wouldn’t get them or he’d be offended. She wanted to hear it all; she wanted to hear the gossip.”

  When the party started to break up, Jerry said, “David, I want you to stay after everyone else leaves.”

  The kids were still there, talking in the kitchen, but once all the other guests had left, Jerry and David sat down in the living room. “We sat on the couch, and he was smoking his pipe,” David remembered.

  “How would you like to be my chief photographer at the White House?” Ford asked.

  David had thought about this. He had wondered if perhaps President Ford might offer him the job, but he wasn’t sure about it. Kennerly had seen how Nixon’s chief photographer, Ollie Atkins, had limited access. He had to make appointments with Nixon’s secretary, and there were many times when Nixon just shut him out. David didn’t want any part of that.

  “I’d like to do it,” the photographer said, “but on two conditions: one, I report directly to you, and, two, I have total access to everything that’s going on all the time.”

  President Ford took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at him. David suddenly regretted opening his mouth. “Here I was twenty-seven years old,” he recalled, “and I thought, Okay, I’m going to call my parents up and tell them how the president offered me a job, and I told him to shove it.”

  But that didn’t happen. The new president started laughing. “You don’t want Air Force One on the weekends?” David breathed a sigh of relief and laughed along with him.

  Ford said he was fine with the arrangement David had proposed, but he wanted to inform Al Haig, his chief of staff, and make sure they handled the new appointment appropriately with Ollie Atkins.

  The president looked at his watch and said, “Hey, let’s go watch the eleven o’clock news.”

  They went into the den, but when Jerry flipped the power switch on the television, it wasn’t working.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” he said. “Come on upstairs. We’ve got a TV in the bedroom.”

  Susan and Betty had changed into their nightgowns and robes and already had the television on.

  “He’s been president for ten hours, and there I am in the master bedroom,” David recalled, “sitting on the edge of the bed with the first lady and Susan, watching the swearing-in and the long-national-nightmare-is-over speech on TV.”

  At the end of it, David stood up and said, “Well, I’ve got to go . . . and”—he added as an afterthought—“um, you’ve got a big day of being president tomorrow.”

  Everybody burst into laughter. Betty stood up and gave him a hug, and then Jerry grabbed him by the hands. “Will working for me be a problem for your colleagues?” he asked. “Because of everything that’s happened with Nixon?”

  “No, no, Mr. President,” David said. “Not at all. They all like you and will be glad to have me as an advocate for them in the White House.” It almost brought tears to his eyes—that at the end of this long, emotion-filled day, the president would be concerned about him.

  Finally, everyone was gone, and it was just Jerry and Betty, alone in their bed. Holding hands, they drifted off to sleep, knowing that, indeed, they had a big day of being president and first lady ahead.

  The next morning, David Kennerly was at the Time office across from Lafayette Square, when an announcement came over the intercom.

  “David Kennerly, call the operator.”

  David got on the phone, and it was President Ford. Not a secretary; the president himself.

  “Do you still want to come and work for me?” President Ford asked.

  “Yeah, I’m ready to go.”

  “Well, you better get over here right now,” Ford said. “You’ve already wasted half a day of the taxpayers’ money.”

  “To this day, I think one of the deciding factors in me getting that job,” David said, “was the fact that I got along so well with Mrs. Ford. She had a great deal of influence on him.

  “Being a photographer is an extremely intimate job,” he continued. “There is a trust factor because you are there for a lot of very personal moments.”

  Indeed, within weeks, David Kennerly would find himself taking pictures of the president and first lady during some of the most emotional times of their lives.

  PART THREE

  BETTY FORD, FIRST LADY

  There is no job description for first lady, no guidebook, and for Betty Ford, who had never imagined herself in the role, the only way she knew how to handle the situation was to be herself.

  “Okay, I’ll move to the White House,” she said, “do the best I can, and if they don’t like it, they can kick me out, but they can’t make me somebody I’m not.”

  Outspoken and surprisingly candid, Betty Ford was refreshingly relatable, and as it turned out, she was exactly what America needed. At a time when the women’s rights movement was gaining momentum, there hardly could have been a better spokesperson. Betty’s openness about everything from her personal health issues, to her views on premarital sex and smoking marijuana, sparked important and timely national conversations. After so many years living in Jerry’s shadow, Betty Ford was in the spotlight, and as she began to realize the power of her platform, she became determined to make the most of it.

  13

  * * *

  The Ford White House

  Saturday, August 10, Betty woke up to the sound of people calling out, “Good morning, Mr. President!”

  Her husband had gone downstairs in his baby-blue short pajamas, opened the front door, and picked up the newspaper on the front stoop, only to find a bevy of reporters and photographers waiting to snap his photo. After making himself breakfast—orange juice and a toasted English muffin with peanut butter—the president of the United States got dressed and headed to his new office at the White House.

  Betty took her time getting up. She had never been a morning person, and she wasn’t going to change suddenly just because Jerry had a new job. At ten o’clock, she got a call from a White House aide.

  “Mrs. Ford, we are just wondering what you are going to do about the state dinner.”

  “What state dinner?” Betty asked.

  “King Hussein is coming on the sixteenth.”

  A
state dinner in six days. For the king of Jordan. Fortuitously, Betty and Jerry had entertained King Hussein at the US State Department during the vice presidency, and Betty knew that the White House was filled with people who knew how to give state dinners, but still, it was up to her as the first lady to make a guest list, and choose the menu, flowers, and music.

  Other than Nancy Howe, she didn’t have a staff, and Nancy’s previous experience was supervising teenagers selling guidebooks in the lobby of the White House. Fortunately, several of Pat Nixon’s staff had agreed to stay on, and Betty was going to have to rely heavily on them.

  The phone was ringing constantly with requests from the media. She needed a press secretary. She needed a social secretary. She didn’t even know what else she needed, but she knew she needed help.

  Betty turned to Nancy and said, “Why don’t you go ask a few members of the press who they might recommend for a press secretary? And let’s get some gals in for interviews.”

  There were dozens of reporters camped outside and across the street at the Abbruzzeses’ house. Police had roped off Crown View Drive at the junction with Cloverway, and the Secret Service wouldn’t allow anyone on the Fords’ property, so Peter and Louise Abbruzzese had opened their garage to the press, letting them use it as a makeshift pressroom and for shelter from the rain. They let the reporters and photographers use the electrical outlets in the garage and even welcomed them inside the house to use the bathroom and telephone. Louise kept a pot of coffee brewing all day, and at six o’clock, Peter would come out with a pitcher of martinis.

  Sunday, the Fords went to church at Immanuel Church-on-the-Hill in Alexandria, just as they’d done for over twenty years. That afternoon, Steve pulled out the hose and filled a bucket with dish soap to wash his Jeep. In one sense, nothing had changed. They were still living in their average middle-class neighborhood, doing everyday things. “Literally ten months earlier, my dad was a congressman from Grand Rapids, Michigan, getting ready to retire,” Steve reflected.

  But now the public was fascinated, and everything any member of the family did or said was newsworthy.

  A team of movers arrived at 514 Crown View Drive, and Betty supervised the packing of their household items as they prepared to move into the White House—which things they’d bring, which things would go into storage. She had just carefully folded Jerry’s World War II US Navy uniforms into a box, which had yet to be closed and taped, when her husband walked in. He happened to see the open box and wondered if they were worth keeping.

  “I guess we should send them to Goodwill,” he said.

  Betty looked at him in disbelief. “Jerry,” she said, suppressing a laugh, “I think some of this stuff may be a little important now. We’d better keep them.”

  The Nixons were still moving their possessions out of the White House, but to expedite the Fords’ moving in, Chief Usher Rex Scouten suggested Betty come over for a tour to decide how they might want things changed to suit their family’s needs and lifestyle.

  Betty and Susan arrived at the White House at the appointed time on August 13 and were met by Scouten, Curator Clem Conger, and Mrs. Nixon’s social secretary, Lucy Winchester, whom Betty had asked to stay on for the time being.

  The residential quarters of the White House occupied the top two floors—twenty-five rooms in all, with twelve and a half bathrooms. There was a family kitchen, which had been added by Jacqueline Kennedy, adjacent to the “informal” dining room, the walls of which were covered in antique wallpaper depicting Revolutionary battle scenes. Betty found the wallpaper “depressing” and could hardly wait to tear it down and paint the room a bright, sunny yellow, but she’d already realized that Clem Conger felt strongly about the historical continuity of the house. Mindful of his feelings, she decided to wait to have that conversation once they’d moved in. She had no intention of changing the public rooms on the ground and first floors, but she was determined to make their living quarters as comfortable for the family as possible.

  Scouten showed them to the room that had been Tricia Nixon’s, and suggested Susan might like to take that one.

  “It was Pepto-Bismol pink,” Susan remembered. “And I am not a pink girl.” Of course, any of the rooms could be painted or decorated any way the family desired, but that all came out of their own pocket. Besides, the pink room didn’t have an attached bathroom. Up until the recent Secret Service renovations in which a portion of her closet was turned into a half bath, she had shared a bathroom with her three older brothers her entire life, and the one thing she was looking forward to most was having a bathroom entirely to herself. Susan wound up choosing the bedroom that Julie and David Eisenhower had used, which did have its own bath as well as a sitting room.

  But Betty knew there was one other thing that would make her daughter happy.

  “Susan has always wanted a brass bed,” she said to Rex Scouten.

  Conger looked aghast. “Oh, a brass bed really doesn’t fit the era of the house.”

  Betty smiled at the curator and said, “If you have a brass bed in storage, that would be lovely.”

  Conger didn’t reply, but apparently he got the message from his new boss. It didn’t take him long to find an exquisite brass bed that a family in Missouri was more than happy to donate on a temporary basis to the daughter of the president.

  Ever since the Eisenhowers, the previous presidents and first ladies had separate bedrooms, and Conger assumed that President and Mrs. Ford would do the same. It was the wrong assumption.

  After walking through what had been known as the president’s bedroom and the first lady’s bedroom, Betty decided that the “president’s bedroom” would make a wonderful den. They’d have Jerry’s favorite blue leather chair and footstool in there, his exercise bike, his pipes and pipe rack, and their old television set. She’d hang on the walls their family photos that showed the children growing up. And the first lady’s bedroom? That’s where she and the president would sleep—together.

  “Jerry and I have shared the same bed for nearly twenty-six years, and we’re not going to change now,” she said. She planned to bring their own bed—two twin-size mattresses attached to a king headboard—along with their own sheets, bedding, and pillows. From the reaction in the room, she thought her wishes were viewed as the equivalent of deciding to sleep in a tent on the South Lawn.

  “Clem Conger’s taste was impeccable,” Betty wrote, “but he was more in tune with Pat Nixon than with me.” Ever the professional, Conger took detailed notes and set the wheels in motion to make the necessary arrangements.

  Dick Hartwig, the special agent in charge of Mrs. Ford’s Secret Service detail, recalled it was during that meeting that he realized how grounded she was. “She didn’t want to have the presidency make her something she wasn’t. She wasn’t a rock star; she didn’t want to be a rock star. She just wanted to be Betty Ford.”

  After viewing all the rooms, Betty and Susan were offered iced tea, and they stayed a while longer, chatting idly with the staff. Soon Betty was informed that there were some press people waiting outside to ask her a few questions. In fact, they’d been waiting outside in the heat for quite some time, and Betty felt awful that she hadn’t been told earlier.

  She walked quickly outside to answer all their questions about the tour and plans to redecorate. “I really don’t consider it my house,” she responded to one query. “I consider it the house of the people.” And, “No, we won’t be selling our home in Alexandria.”

  It wasn’t long before word got out that the new first lady intended to share a bedroom with the president.

  “People started saying I was disgraceful and immoral,” Betty recalled. “I didn’t care. I wanted to be a good first lady, I was perfectly willing to be educated about the duties of a first lady, but I didn’t believe I had to do every single thing some previous president’s wife had done.”

  One thing Betty Ford was good at was throwing parties. With the help of Nancy Howe, and the talents of
the White House employees who had been there through several administrations and had thrown dozens of state dinners, exactly one week after her husband took office, Betty managed to orchestrate a memorable evening honoring the king and queen of Jordan that would set the tone for this new administration.

  It was a black-tie affair for 120 guests, and Betty looked exquisite in a long-sleeved, flowing white gown designed by an Alexandria, Virginia, boutique owner named Frankie Welch. It was tied at the waist and had light strands of feathers from elbow to wrist that added a modern, elegant flair. Betty had chosen a four-course menu that began with cold poached salmon, followed by roast sirloin of beef bordelaise with mushrooms and artichokes, a Bibb lettuce salad with Brie cheese, and chocolate mousse for dessert. She and the president had gone over the seating chart together to match people with others they thought would spark good conversation.

  After dinner, President Ford and Mrs. Ford led the guests into the East Room for dancing to the tunes of Howard Devron’s Orchestra. There was no stuffiness to this event. Newspaper headlines the next day said it all: “Fords Bring Dancing Back to White House.”

  Reporters who had covered White House parties for years said they hadn’t seen anything as open and relaxed in recent times. Betty was in her element as both she and the president danced with one guest after another until midnight. At one point, everyone was laughing and clapping as President Ford took center stage on the dance floor to the Jim Croce hit “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”

  “It was one of the liveliest parties in the executive mansion since the Johnson administration,” one guest said.

  Three days later, Betty joined Jerry on his first trip outside Washington—to Chicago—where he spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars about working out an amnesty program for Vietnam conscientious objectors. It was their first trip on Air Force One, and it was also the day they’d be moving into their new home. After the president’s speech, they returned to Andrews Air Force Base and then transferred to a helicopter, which flew over the congested Washington traffic and landed directly on the South Lawn of the White House.