Betty Ford

by Lisa McCubbin

  President Ford could not imagine doing this to his beloved wife. He knew it would tear her apart. “Joe,” he said, “can’t you go do it by yourself?”

  “He didn’t want to do it,” Cruse recalled. “What do you say to the president?”

  Meanwhile, the new house on Sand Dune Road was complete, and Betty was excited to finally be moving in. The single-story, five-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bath, 6,300-square-foot house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac on nearly one and a half acres of land overlooking the thirteenth fairway of the prestigious Thunderbird Country Club, with stunning views of the mountains in the distance. The Firestones’ home was next door on one side, and President Ford’s office was in the home previously owned by movie legend Ginger Rogers on the other side.

  A thirty-foot-tall olive tree at the front of the property had been saved, so that as you entered the front door, the tree’s branches reached out like welcoming arms. Inside, high ceilings and large, open spaces filled with natural light. The guest bedrooms, kitchen, and dining room wrapped around the backyard where a swimming pool was under construction. Eventually the yard would be landscaped with palm and citrus trees, and a row of rose bushes along one wall, but when they first moved in, there was just a big hole in the ground.

  Next to the master bedroom was a cozy den for watching television, lined with bookcases to be filled with family photos, books, and memorabilia, and the president’s favorite blue leather chair and ottoman. The center of the house was the expansive sunken living room decorated in soothing blue, green, and white.

  All the new furnishings were in place, but then three moving vans arrived with their additional furniture and belongings from Grand Rapids, Crown View Drive, and the personal items from the White House, all of which had been in storage. The truckloads of boxes were unloaded into the garage. Every morning, Caroline would meet Betty at the new house, and they’d tear through boxes, trying to find places for everything. It was a monumental chore, Jerry was traveling, and with no end in sight, Susan suggested they fly Clara out to Palm Springs to help set up the house. Clara agreed and was there within a week.

  Finally, Betty had everything she’d wanted for so many years: her husband was retired, and they’d moved into their dream home. She’d picked out everything: the bathroom faucets, the light fixtures, the fabrics for drapes and furnishings. The huge John Ulbricht painting of Betty was hung in the living room, and it looked exquisite. Why then, if all her dreams had come true, did she feel so empty inside?

  To cure the emptiness, she turned to her gourmet collection of drugs. “I did a little self-prescribing,” she would admit later. “If one pill is good, two must be better—and when I added vodka to the mix, I moved into a wonderful, fuzzy place where everything was fine, I could cope.”

  23

  * * *

  The Intervention and Treatment

  Betty seemed to be getting worse day by day. In a moment of frustration, Susan called Dr. Cruse and said, “We have to do something now. We can’t wait to get everyone together.”

  So the next morning, Susan, Dr. Cruse, and Caroline attempted the “mini-intervention.”

  It didn’t work. They hadn’t caught her early enough before she’d taken her pills, and the three of them weren’t strong enough to handle her resistance.

  “You are all a bunch of monsters!” Betty yelled. “Now, get out of here! Get out of my house and never come back!”

  “I was devastated,” Susan said. “Here Dr. Cruse had promised me that we were going to help my mother, and all we’d done was fall flat on our faces, and my mother had kicked me out of her house.”

  “It was a big mistake,” Cruse admitted. “The Secret Service escorted me out and told me I wasn’t welcome back on the property.” Later that evening, President Ford called Dr. Cruse and said that Betty had called him. “She’s clearheaded,” President Ford said, “and she told me she wants half of our house, and she’s going to New York.”

  “It gave me goose pimples,” Cruse said. But then Ford added, “Don’t worry, she’s said that before.”

  Susan went home, and later that night, just like she’d done so many times as a little girl, she turned to Clara to help figure out what to do. “Boy, was I glad she was there,” Susan said. “Because at that point, Clara was the only person Mother would talk to.”

  “Don’t worry,” Clara said. “Mother’s fine. I’ve got her settled down.”

  In the meantime, Dr. Cruse had called psychiatrist Joseph Pursch. A captain in the US Navy, Dr. Pursch headed the Alcohol Rehabilitation Service at the navy’s Regional Medical Center in Long Beach. Together he and Cruse decided they had to do a proper intervention, and it had to be done as soon as possible; Betty Ford’s life was at stake.

  “Captain Pursch was quite a personality,” Caroline Coventry recalled. A Chicago native, Pursch had been raised in Yugoslavia but returned to the United States as a World War II refugee during his teens. Now in his midforties, he spoke with a noticeable Eastern European accent, and “he commanded your attention,” Caroline said. “And you listened.”

  Dr. Pursch brought in Pat Benedict, a navy nurse who worked with him, and met with Susan, Clara, and Dr. Cruse. Susan was terrified about how it would work, but Benedict reassured her everything would be okay.

  “When I met Pat Benedict, it was like somebody had taken a hundred-pound weight off my head,” Susan recalled. “Because she understood what I was going through. I’d tell her stories, and she’d heard them all before.” The nurse explained to Susan that her mother had a disease, and it could be cured—if they could convince her to go through treatment.

  For the intervention to work, they had to have the entire family there. Everyone had agreed, except Jack. He had given up hope that the problem would ever be corrected, and he worried they’d only be hurting her.

  Clara was the one who finally convinced him. “We’ve got to do this for Mother,” she said. “If we lose, we lose; but we will have given it our best shot.” Finally, Jack came around.

  Plans were made for everyone to meet in Rancho Mirage. The intervention would take place April 1, one week before Betty’s sixtieth birthday.

  “You felt very, very guilty,” Caroline Coventry recalled. “Because we were all working behind her back, making arrangements for everyone to fly in and make sure they had a place to stay in Palm Springs for this intervention. And Mrs. Ford didn’t have a clue.”

  Everyone met in President Ford’s office for some coaching and to understand how their mother had gotten to this point.

  “The doctors literally gave us a set of instructions,” President Ford recalled. They told the family how Betty was going to resent it, and that she was going to cry, but everyone had to be firm and united. In the process, Jerry, and all of them, realized how they had actually been enablers.

  “I would make all kinds of alibis about why we were late getting someplace, or why Betty didn’t show up at all,” Jerry said. “And it was getting worse, not better. My pleading with her was exacerbating the situation, because she would resent it, as though I was being a nitpicker.”

  “We began to understand the nature of chemical dependence and how it had taken over her life,” Mike Ford recalled. “And at that point, I was really prepared to march in there and lay it on her.”

  “It was so tense,” Caroline recalled. “But as we all walked from the office to the house that morning, I knew God was with us.”

  The intervention was brutal. For nearly two hours, the family spoke about things they’d been holding inside for years. It was like walking through fire, feeling the scorching pain throughout your entire body; and when you got to the other side, you had searing, open wounds—wounds that would eventually heal and turn into scars—but, by the grace of God, you were still alive, and no one had died.

  At first, Betty was strong, her iron will front and center. But eventually she succumbed to reality, and the tears came out in sobs. “No one had ever seen her cry like that before. It took
every ounce of energy in her body,” Caroline recalled.

  Betty had been blindsided, and she couldn’t come to terms with what she was hearing.

  “I had given my whole life to my family,” she remembered thinking. “My whole idea was being a super mom and perfect wife. I had played a role that I thought was a very good one, and dedicated many hours and all my time to it, and to think I had failed? That was a terrible thing.”

  Then Dr. Pursch took over. “Mrs. Ford, are you willing to go into treatment?” he asked. Betty nodded and tried to smile like she meant it. “Yes,” she said through tears, “I want to get well.”

  Dr. Pursch explained the first thing that needed to happen was for her to be detoxed from all the drugs she was taking. He was confident she could stay at home during the detoxification process, as long as she allowed the navy nurse Pat Benedict to move in and supervise everything. It would probably take a week, and while it was going to be the most difficult thing she’d ever done, it was essential.

  After that, Betty had a choice. She could choose to go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and learn how to live a sober and drug-free life, but that would take months, if not years, to have the effect she could get in a four-to-six-week intensive in-patient treatment program. There was one at the pioneering Hazelden center, outside of Minneapolis, or special arrangements could be made for her to be committed to Dr. Pursch’s program at the naval facility in Long Beach.

  The nurse knelt beside her and said, “Betty, I have had a problem too. I took a lot of amphetamines in Vietnam, and then Valium to level the nerves. I will help you.”

  She could tell she wasn’t really getting through. Betty didn’t want to hear about Pat’s problems. And then, Pat added, “I’ve also had a breast removed.”

  That resonated. Betty reached out and patted her on the cheek.

  By this point, everyone was emotionally drained. Dr. Pursch suggested they take a break for lunch. He and the others would leave so that Betty could have some time alone with her family. After that, everyone would reconvene in the living room. The doctor suggested that Mrs. Ford get dressed, and, he told her, they’d be collecting all her medications and disposing of them.

  Betty nodded. She understood. As everyone got up, Betty went into her bedroom.

  “I got dressed and put myself together to prove how really well I was,” she said. And then she went to the drawer in her bathroom, pulled out the four or five pills she normally took at noon, and swallowed them with a glass of water.

  After lunch, Dr. Pursch returned with a whiteboard and an easel. He began writing the names of each drug Betty was taking and how many milligrams a day of each. When he added them up, the amount was so staggering, it shocked Betty herself.

  Even though she was “sedated to the teeth,” the message got through loud and clear. “When they confront you with that kind of evidence, you have to be a real dummy not to realize you’re in trouble,” she would say later.

  President Ford was stunned. He saw the pharmacy bills each month, and while his apprehension about the amount of medication had been growing, he’d never actually counted the pills.

  “I was more concerned with the pills than the alcohol, because the amounts she was drinking didn’t seem abnormally high,” he said. “It was a couple of vodkas before dinner, and maybe she’d want a couple of bourbons after dinner.” But neither he nor anyone else had understood how the combination of alcohol and pills magnified the effect—until Dr. Pursch laid it all out for them in black and white.

  Pursch brought in a movie projector, and they watched educational films about alcohol and drug dependency. It was a crash course that made the family realize how they’d all been in denial. Everyone was lost in his or her own thoughts, remembering incidents over the years that now were so clearly warning signs of Betty’s growing dependence on alcohol and prescription drugs. The first step, before anything else, was to get all the drugs and alcohol out of the house.

  Dr. Cruse, Caroline, and Susan took anything and everything they could find—even the over-the-counter stuff.

  “There were bottles and bottles and bottles,” Susan recalled.

  “I took out an entire grocery bag filled with bottles,” Dr. Cruse said. “We found more later. She had hidden them.”

  That night, Clara cooked pot roast, and the family had dinner together. “It was like the family was a family once again,” Susan recalled. “It was like everything had been torn down, and there was nothing to hide anymore.”

  They’d walked through the fire and come out alive. Now, it was time for the truly hard work to begin.

  It was decided that Betty would go through the detoxification process at home, with Pat Benedict administering the detoxification medication and supervising her around the clock.

  “It was horrible what that body went through. Just horrible.” Caroline shuddered at the memory. “She was worse off than they thought. She spent the whole first day throwing up, just trying to get it out of her system. She had the shakes, her body ached, she got the twitches. She had a lot of massage. They did everything they could to try and keep her comfortable, but it was holy hell.”

  “It was miserable. Horrible,” Susan remembered. “I would stop by, but she really wanted to be in her bedroom where it was dark and desensitized. I’d give her a hug and a kiss and leave.”

  Betty would later write: “I shook so much I didn’t need an electric toothbrush. And in bed at night, my legs kept moving, I couldn’t lie still.” She knew the only way she was going to get through this was to turn to God.

  Over and over, as she lay in bed, she repeated the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”

  “President Ford was very strong,” Caroline remembered. “But can you imagine him watching all of this? He was just finding himself, too, because this was new territory. He took care of her. He cherished her; it was obvious. It wasn’t like he ever slept in the other bedroom. He was always there for her all night.”

  Privately, President Ford was deeply worried. He went to the nurse and asked, “Why does she keep throwing up? When will it stop?”

  “Mr. President, this is the worst day she’ll ever have,” Pat told him. She promised to have her up and bathed and walking the next day.

  True to her word, Pat got Betty dressed in a blue skirt and a bandana around her head, and out they went for a walk on the golf course. Pat carried Valium and a syringe in her pocket in case of an emergency. They went past the president’s office, and Betty waved. Then, as they continued along the path, all of a sudden Betty reached over and put her arm around Pat.

  In that moment, Pat realized Betty was going to be okay. “She wanted to get well, and that’s half the battle.”

  Betty was weaned off her pills slowly, while Pat administered measured doses of the powerful sedative Librium to help ease the withdrawal symptoms. Day by day, the symptoms diminished, and at midnight on April 7 she took her last Librium.

  “Steve was there,” Betty recalled. “And he and Pat and I celebrated in the kitchen with glasses of Cranapple juice.”

  The next day, Saturday, April 8, was Betty’s sixtieth birthday. The Firestones had planned a small dinner party with just Leonard, Nicky, Dolores Hope, the president, and Mrs. Ford, but Betty didn’t want to go. Her pinched nerve was bothering her, and without medication, she said she was miserable. What she didn’t say out loud was that she knew there’d be a cocktail hour, and she wasn’t ready to face it.

  Pat Benedict had been in constant contact with Dr. Pursch about Betty’s progress. When she called to tell him of Betty’s unwillingness to go to the dinner party, Pursch said, “I want her up and dressed and at that party.”

  Not only did Betty make it through the cocktail hour, but she also stayed through dinner. “I marveled that I was able to eat some soup without shaking and slopping it all over the table,” Betty recalled.

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sp; “It had been a brutal week,” Caroline recalled. “And then we got in the car and drove to Long Beach.”

  The Secret Service had arranged for Betty to enter the hospital through the back entrance to avoid the possibility of any press, but beyond that, Dr. Pursch had made it clear to everyone that Betty Ford was not to be given any special treatment. “I believe you have to treat VIPs like any other patients, so there were no officers wearing their medals to greet her when she arrived, as there had been at Bethesda, when her husband was president. And I think this frosted her,” he said.

  Pat and Caroline accompanied the former first lady, while two agents stayed close but inconspicuous. There was silence as they rode in the cavernous elevator designed for hospital gurneys, up to the third floor. The doors opened, and the first thing Betty saw was a big plaque that said Alcohol Rehabilitation Center.

  “I almost turned right around and got back into the elevator,” Betty reflected. “I was not ready for that.” She’d admitted she had a pill problem. But alcohol? No way. She was not an alcoholic. Her image of an alcoholic was a homeless man on the street drinking out of a paper bag.

  According to Caroline, “She was a wreck. I don’t think she ever anticipated what it was going to be like. First of all, the hospital was not luxurious. It’s run by the navy. It’s not the Ritz-Carlton. And then they took her to her room and there were four beds.”

  Four hospital beds—more like cots, really—military grade. The US Navy’s drug and alcohol rehabilitation program had started quietly in 1965, using the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous to help active-duty navy personnel and their dependents. But it wasn’t until 1974 that the navy admitted alcohol addiction was a serious problem, and the program was given its own space in the Naval Regional Medical Center, Long Beach.

  Betty’s apprehension had been building, and when she walked into that room, saw the stark facilities, and realized she was going to be sharing a room and one bathroom with three other women, her emotions reached a crescendo. Gritting her teeth, she turned to Dr. Pursch and said, “I am accustomed to having a private room.”