AFTER SEVERAL DAYS of therapeutic golf with Arnold Palmer at Pebble Beach, the newly retired president flew back to Rancho Mirage at the end of January 1977 and started remapping the rest of his life.
“I thought that leaving the White House was terrible,” he admitted to me in March of 1993. “I tried hard to stay. But that was a closed chapter, so I plunged right in.”
That was a classic Jerry Ford understatement. For more than a third of a century, until he began to falter, he and Betty reveled in a comfortable, exhilarating lifestyle. To varying degrees, we talked about that in all our interviews.
As every writer understands, sometimes useful insights and vignettes that help illuminate a person’s life don’t fit neatly into a chapter.
What follows, then, are random human glimpses, including some of my favorite moments with Ford, that deserve a better home than the cutting-room floor.
In 1997, Ford unexpectedly broached the subject of marital infidelity, a contact sport he’d watched only from the sidelines.
“You know, Tom, next year will be fifty years, knock on wood, without any fooling around—unlike my friend Frank Gifford.”
Pro football icon Gifford was all over the tabloids for having been caught in a fling with a former TWA flight attendant.
“I called Frank yesterday,” he said, “just to say, ‘Betty and I are thinking about you, you’re in our thoughts and prayers and we hope everything works out.’ We’re going to see him in Beaver Creek in three weeks.”
He felt bad for his old friend and worked hard not to be judgmental about the tryst, which he obviously believed was ill-advised. I told him what one of his closest political allies had once said: Jerry’s the only guy I’ve ever worked for who never strayed.
“You have to think of the ten bad things that could happen to you from something like that and the one good thing,” Ford philosophized, “and tell yourself the one good thing will get taken care of some other way.”
In Rancho Mirage in 2000, I asked him, “When you go out, what do you do?” He responded with an eclectic dissertation on the Fords’ social life.
“Last week we went to a fundraiser for our Episcopal church here. They have an annual dinner. The next night we went to a fundraiser for the McCallum Theatre, which is a local civic theater. We try to cut back on those, but we probably go to one or two of those a week, because I’m on the church vestry, I’m on the McCallum Theatre board. Then Betty’s got a golf tournament here this week. All these LPGA girls stay over, thirty of them do, and play in the Betty Ford Center Tournament, and the Betty Ford Center makes about $300,000 because they charge the amateurs $2,000 to play. We have the sponsors for dinner, and they have a big dinner Monday night, but they raise enough to pay each of the pros $2,500. And then they net for the Center about $300,000. That keeps her busy. But it’s good for her, and of course the Center does a helluva job.”
(He’d been touting his wife’s center since it opened. “Have you ever been over to the Betty Ford Center?” he asked in 1993. “In the first ten years, twenty-two thousand people went through, and their record is tremendous. She is a hands-on chairman, she works at it, and I support her. Sometimes they keep her so damn busy I get irritated, but nevertheless, it’s for the good.”)
“I haven’t had a drink in twenty-two years, she hasn’t had one in twenty-three years. And neither of us smoke anymore. I’ve got a few of ’em [his once-ubiquitous pipes] around here, but I never use ’em. She stopped drinking in 1978. I kept drinking for a year; then I got tired of drinking alone, so we drink [chuckle] tonic and lime at night.”
He said his favorite dining-out spot in the desert was Jillian’s. I teased him about ever having liver and onions there, as he was known to do at the Left Bank in Vail, his mountain favorite.
“No, whitefish. He has a delicious whitefish. I’ve shifted to more fish now.”
He was also making other lifestyle adjustments:
“I’ve cut back to three corporate boards. I make one speech a month instead of three or four. I’ve been doing about four of the Peter Lowell events. This organization will rent a hall and they have speakers from eight in the morning until six at night, and I’m one of twelve or fourteen. They had Margaret Thatcher, they had me, they had Barbara Bush. I did one in San Diego, I’m gonna do one in Seattle, I’m gonna do one in Detroit. I do about four a year. Those are easy—you give the same speech. They have twelve to fourteen thousand people there. They provide a private plane, which makes it easier.
“I finally capitulated to my wife and children: I on occasion wear hearing aids. I don’t wear ’em all the time, I don’t have ’em on in the office here, but if I’m going out to a party I wear them. If I’m going to make a speech I wear them. But that’s the only change in my physical condition.”
At this point Ford was still swimming laps twice a day and trying for nine to twelve holes of golf three times a week, having finally stopped playing eighteen holes at a clip. “At going on eighty-seven, your legs get a little weary,” he admitted. “If I play eighteen, boy, those legs are shot for a couple of days, so I enjoy nine holes. I’m what they call a nine-holer. The truth is, I’m playing better. I’m hitting the ball straighter; it doesn’t go as far, but I won’t wander all over the ballpark like I used to do.”
Like all sane adult males, Ford started keeping closer track of his prostate health for telltale early warning signs of cancer. Unsurprisingly, his prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test scores had started creeping up as he aged.
“I’m gonna go to my urologist tomorrow,” he volunteered in February 2000. “I have to watch my PSI, PSA. My old urologist retired; I’ve got a new one tomorrow. I’ll be curious what my latest PSA says.
“You know, I learned something about prostate cancer. At my age, they say you’re better off living with it than dying from it. So unless it [gets worse]…”
“Dying from the operation, perhaps?”
“Yeah, yeah. But I have no symptoms aside of getting up four times a night to go to the can.”
“But that’s a symptom of age.”
“It is. Other than that, my hearing aids—I’ve finally capitulated. My eyesight is—now I have to have reading as well as distance glasses, but my eye doctor says other than that, my eyes are great.
“I’m lucky—I feel good, Betty feels good—although she, the back bothers her occasionally. But we’re happy and healthy, considering eighty-seven and eighty-one—eighty-two, she’ll be eighty-two in April.”
I asked him if he was planning a blowout bash for his ninetieth birthday in 2003.
“I’m not counting on that far down the road yet,” he said, laughing.
When I saw him in July, I reminded him he’d raised the prostate issue in February and asked how he’d fared with the plumbing doctor.
“Oh, yeah, I had a checkup just before I came up here, and—stable. I have a new urologist ’cause the fellow I’ve been with for fifteen years retired, and we got a new, young urologist, so he approached it from a totally fresh point of view. He had all the old records, of course, but he said things looked stable. In the month before I came up here, my general physician is so thorough—he had me take a CAT scan, a bone scan, a colonopathy [colonoscopy], MRI, something else—and I got an A-plus on all of them.
“Now, I must say this: my endurance isn’t what it used to be, and my, oh, strength isn’t what I used to be, but as far as the doctors are concerned, I’m fine.”
Particularly considering that he would celebrate his eighty-seventh birthday in three days.
“I know it,” he earnestly replied. “No, I’m damn lucky—Betty and I both are.”
Apparently, his prostate numbers remained stable. In 2002, he told me about his latest checkup:
“I just went yesterday to my urologist, and my PSA was a little higher, but he said it’s nothing to worry about. And he took the physical exam and said it had not enlarged, and he didn’t urge anything except to come back in about six months, which is what I have been doing.”
The general scrutiny level diminishes significantly once a president is out of office, but an ex-leader still has to cope with constraints as a formerly well-known person. “You’re still in the public spotlight, Tom, and you have to act accordingly,” he said in 1992. “Not that I would ever do anything illegal or unethical anyhow, but you just have to be overly cautious.”
Especially since, by his own choice, he was in the public eye more than most because of his herculean travel schedule.
“I’ve probably worked too hard,” he mused. “I was supposed to retire, and when all these things came up—that’s not retirement. But I’m healthy, so I guess it didn’t do me any harm.”
As an aside, he showed me the scar from his knee-replacement surgery, which had landed him in the hospital for eight days and required crutches for five weeks but was pronounced successful. “I have more flexibility than I do with the other one,” he bragged.
The surgery wasn’t enough, however, to get him back on the ski slopes.
“The doctor would shoot me if I did.” He laughed. “To tell you the truth, I’m trying to convince Betty I don’t want to take a [vacation] trip in the fall because I know I’m gonna get asked to campaign and I don’t want to be in the Mediterranean when the White House says, ‘Where’s Ford? Won’t he help us?’ Because I think it’s gonna be a close election.”
By 1992, Ford was significantly pruning his political work. He’d campaigned for Bush in Grand Rapids and had stumped for just seven congressional hopefuls that fall. A decade before, he’d done at least forty events.
He was also down to four corporate boards, and had pared his speaking schedule from forty talks to twelve.
“I would say everything is cut back at least fifty percent,” he said in 1993. “I’ll be eighty in July, for Christ’s sake.”
As the 2002 midterm elections approached, Ford was fervently committed to staying off the campaign grind. “I’m gonna do minimal,” he said. “I got a call from [former congressman] Bud Brown day before yesterday. His son is running for Congress in Ohio, and I said, ‘Bud, I’m just not getting involved.’ He understood it. I got a letter from a congressman today, a Republican who must be nameless, who wanted my support and asked me to contribute $2,000 [chuckle]. My answer to him was, ‘I don’t contribute to candidates, I contribute to national committees and state committees.’ I didn’t even know who the hell he was. Been in Congress about six years.”
Football Flashback: He reminisced in 1995 about ceremonies at a Michigan football game where his number 48 was retired. He was so thrilled by the honor that a picture of the festivities adorned the cover of the Ford Christmas card that year.
“It was a great occasion,” he said nostalgically. “You know, they gave you the number in those days. The equipment manager threw you a jersey and that was your number. But that was the year—’48—that I started in politics.”
Eventually, football and old age caught up with his shoulder. In 1995, it was giving him fits. He said that even though he’d be returning from two board meetings in New York, he was determined to play in the Bob Hope Desert Classic.
“It all depends on how my shoulder is…what really irritates me is this damn shoulder.”
More than a decade into our off-the-record conversations, I’d never asked him about his controversial 1975 decision to deny federal loan guarantees to New York City. That seemingly flinty judgment prompted one of the more famous headlines in the history of my current employer, the New York Daily News: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
By Ford’s account, the headline should have read, “I Saved New York.”
“The truth is,” he told me in 2002, “by our firm position, New York City changed its irresponsible fiscal policy, where they were giving pay increases to employees and committing to pensions that were outrageous. They tightened their belts, and when they did that I [eventually] authorized the federal government to loan them money.”
He never understood why New Yorkers thought he hated their city. Manhattan always held some of his fondest memories. When he was at Yale Law School, coaching football on the side, he remembered, “I had this very beautiful gal [Phyllis Brown] as a close-to-three-year romance. I used to drive down to New York most every weekend. We didn’t have the interstate, but they had a pretty good highway and it took about two and a half, three hours. But as a result, I got acquainted with a lot of the things you do in New York—the theater, et cetera.”
In retirement, Ford returned to the Big Apple several times a year for corporate board meetings, mixing work with Broadway plays. Two of his favorites: The Lion King and The Producers.
In 1997, I asked if there was anything about being a former president he didn’t enjoy.
“No, we’ve learned to live with it, and the truth is I’ve been busy enough in other things that I think I handle it responsibly.”
“You mean the celebrity and autograph-signing?”
“If you’re gonna be a former president, that has to happen, and you might as well relax and enjoy it.”
“Anything you can’t do as president?”
“I fortunately have no hidden vices,” he said. “I really don’t feel hemmed in. Fortunately, I don’t have any extramarital experiences,” he added, laughing. “I mean, we’ve got fifty years of marriage a year from now, in October of ’98.”
There was one downside to his status, he admitted. As he aged, he wearied of autograph hounds. In February 2000 we talked briefly about the recent Super Bowl. “Well, I never go to those games, I watch ’em on TV,” he said, although he could have seats for the asking. “Because if I go to the game, everybody wants to ask me a question or shake my hand. I want to watch the damn game.”
“I get the feeling that you don’t like to do autographs as much as you used to.”
“I do it, but it’s not with enthusiasm.”
Ford had mentioned more than once over the years that he was an incurable pack rat. So in our February 2000 interview, I asked him about a story I’d heard a few years before that his compulsion was worse than advertised. I wanted to know if it was true that in his early years as a young congressman, every time he was invited to the White House he’d stuff his suit pockets with presidential matchbooks and take them back to his constituents. As he moved up the congressional ladder, he spent more time at the White House, under Republican and Democratic presidents, meaning more opportunities for matchbook-pilfering.
“Well”—he laughed, a bit sheepishly—“I always picked up a couple, starting with Truman. We kept them in the house, and I guess if we had guests, we would pass them out as little mementos.”
Which explains why, one day at Camp David, when he spied a reporter cramming matchbooks into his sports jacket, he just smiled indulgently.
Ford was a resolutely old-fashioned guy, never much into newfangled gadgetry. Like computers. In 1998 I asked him if he’d gotten around to buying himself a personal computer yet.
“I don’t have one,” he replied, “but Betty and I talk about going over to the College of the Desert to get a beginner course, but we never get around to doing it.”
Two years later, in a February 2000 conversation, I asked him, “Have you learned any new tricks? For instance, the one thing I never see in this office is a computer.”
“Well, that’s interesting,” he responded. “Betty has one of these laptops over at the house, and she has become sort of an enthusiastic fanatic. She corresponds with people [chuckles], and she’s tweaked my interest. So I’m thinking of getting one for my desk. I feel out of the circuit not knowing how to operate one. That’s the only way I can learn; I can’t learn using hers. I’ve got to have one, so the next time you come, I’ll have one.”
He was true to his word. During our Beaver Creek interview in July of that year, a laptop was prominently perched on the side of his office desk. I asked him how his computer skills were progressing.
“So far Betty’s taught me to do the fundamentals,” he said, pointing at the laptop. “We brought it up from California and we’ll take it back when we go.”
“You spend time on it every day?”
“I try to.”
“What have you learned?”
“Well, I’m very preliminary. I’ve learned how to play solitaire and hearts. My next step is to learn how to write letters and receive them. Betty has her own computer, and she’s good.”
“This is a laptop, right?”
“Yes, it’s a Microsoft. [!] I probably fool around with it about every other day. I have not mastered it, I can tell you that, but I’ve gotten so I enjoy it.
“I enjoy playing bridge on it because I’m an old bridge advocate and that’s easy to do,” he added.
Clearly, his computer immersion was still in its infancy. Where it always remained: he once agreed to do an online interview from a computer in his office. When the first question arrived, he mused about his answer for a moment. Then he started barking into the monitor. Suppressing a smile, an aide had to explain that he could just speak his answer in a normal tone of voice and she’d type it up and send it along via the magic of the Web.