Years later, when asked about Clara, Susan Ford’s voice cracked, and tears welled in her eyes. “She was my mom when my mom wasn’t home,” she reflected.
Indeed, all four of the Ford children regarded Clara as their second mother. “We embraced her that way,” Steve said. The kids didn’t know a time when Clara wasn’t part of their household, since she had started working for the family just before Mike’s birth.
As a young girl, growing up in Arlington, Virginia, Clara had dreamt of becoming a nurse. But like so many black girls who grew up during segregation and came from broken homes, dreams rarely turned into reality. Raised by her grandmother, Clara dropped out of high school to go to work and married Raymond at seventeen. “I really didn’t have a chance to nurse,” she said, in Betty’s 1978 memoir, “but I’ve been nursin’ ever since.”
Whether it was the flu or chickenpox, being sick meant you got one-on-one time with Clara. “You loved it,” Susan said, “because Clara wouldn’t clean the house. She stopped. She’d make chicken soup and then cuddle up with a book and read to you. She made you feel special.”
Every weekday morning at nine o’clock prompt, Clara would arrive at 514 Crown View Drive. For many years, she didn’t have a driver’s license, so Raymond would drive her from their home in Bailey’s Crossroads, drop her off, and return to pick her up at five.
Betty and Clara worked together to keep the busy household running as smoothly as possible, and over the years, the two women developed a close bond.
“She and I used to laugh about everything and nothing,” Betty recalled. At times, they’d be working alongside each other, Clara scrubbing the floor in one room, and Betty on her hands and knees in another. Betty would put on a record, and they’d be singing at the tops of their lungs. One time, they were both literally on their hands and knees singing along to the spiritual “Get Down on Your Knees and Pray.” They looked at each other and doubled over with laughter.
“She was wonderful,” Mike Ford recalled. But she was also a disciplinarian. “My parents gave Clara permission to actually use her slipper on us, and she did when it was justified. She had to use it only once or twice, and from then on she would just grab her slipper, and we would comply.”
With four kids in the house, there were always meals to make, dishes to wash, and endless loads of laundry. Every morning there’d be a fresh pile of dirty clothes at the bottom of the chute in the basement, and by afternoon, they’d be cleaned, pressed, folded, and back in the drawers upstairs. Most afternoons, you could find Clara in the basement doing the ironing. When Steve was beginning to outgrow his naps, he would sneak out of his room and slide down the two flights of stairs on his behind, trying to be as quiet as possible so Clara wouldn’t notice him.
But you couldn’t put anything past her. Like all mothers, she had eyes in the back of her head.
“Now, Steve Ford,” Clara would say—“She always called me Steve Ford,” Steve recalled with a laugh—“Now, Steve Ford, if you’re not going to take a nap, you’re going to go to work.”
“She taught me how to iron,” he said. “She started me on Dad’s handkerchiefs, and eventually I moved up to other things.”
Ironing the handkerchiefs was a rite of passage for all the Ford children, but Clara made each one of them feel like it was his or her special thing.
When the kids got home from school, Clara was always there, often pulling a freshly baked batch of cookies out of the oven or prepping dinner so that all Betty had to do when she got home after driving kids from practice or dance class or the orthodontist was heat and serve.
“My mom made the best meatloaf,” Susan said, “but because Mother was always at luncheons and stuff all the time, Clara was the one who taught me how to cook and keep a house.”
“Clara was a mainstay in raising the children,” Jerry Ford wrote in his memoir. He often said, “If Clara leaves us, I’ll have to quit Congress.”
On the occasions when Betty would join Jerry on a trip somewhere, Clara would stay with the children at Crown View Drive. At night, the Ford kids recalled, “we’d all pile into Mom and Dad’s bed because everyone wanted to sleep with Clara.”
They’d sit in bed watching Cassius Clay boxing matches—back before he was Muhammad Ali—and “wrasslin’ ” on television. “It was ‘wrasslin’,” Susan recalled with a laugh, “not wrestling.’ ” When it was time to go to sleep, Clara would get them calmed down, and as they all cuddled up together, she’d begin to sing:
“Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home . . .”
“She was an incredible woman,” Susan recalled. “My goal in life was always to be more like Clara.”
Neither Betty nor Jerry was demonstrably affectionate with the children. “You’d get a hug and a squeeze,” Susan recalled, “but Clara was very affectionate. Mom was always so busy, but Clara always made time.”
“Whatever void needed to be filled, that’s what she did,” Clara’s goddaughter, Lynette Williams Thomas, said. And while Clara didn’t talk to her own family about the Fords’ personal issues—“She respected their privacy,” Lynette said—as the years went on, it was clear there was a growing problem. It wasn’t Clara’s place to say anything, but she’d see an empty vodka bottle in the trash bin, knowing there’d been no party the night before, and she couldn’t help but feel compassion for both Betty and the children.
“Clara recognized that there were times Betty wasn’t emotionally available to the children, and she stepped right in,” Lynette said. “She pretty much raised those kids, and they embraced her.”
Because of the age difference between the two older boys and Susan and Steve, it was almost like the Fords had two sets of children. As soon as Mike and Jack were old enough, Jerry and Betty wanted to take them to Boyne Mountain in Michigan to learn to ski. Between the school calendar and Congress’s schedule, the only time available was Christmas. So Betty and Jerry would take Mike and Jack skiing, leaving Steve and Susan to stay with Clara and Raymond at their home in Bailey’s Crossroads.
“It wasn’t punishment,” Susan said, as she remembered the pictures of her and Steve sitting in front of the Christmas tree at Clara’s house. “We loved Clara. It was fun!”
Because Clara didn’t have children of her own, she kept scrapbooks of the Ford children as they were growing up, and every memento they gave her. “And she knew everything,” Steve Ford recalled. “Clara knew when you hid anything in your room when you were a kid.”
One Christmas, when he was about nine years old, Steve had saved about $25, which was a lot of money for a young boy in the 1960s.
“I took my money, and I snuck down in the basement where she kept her purse, and I put the money in her purse and didn’t tell her,” he said. “I just wanted her to have a little money at Christmas.”
The next day, Clara confronted him. “Steve Ford, I know where you keep your money, and I had an extra twenty-five dollars in my purse, and your money wasn’t under your bed.”
“She got really mad at me,” Steve said. She refused to take the money. “The heart of her was just beautiful.”
Betty joked that she stayed home most of the times when Jerry traveled to Michigan because she didn’t want the children to think Clara was their mother. “But,” she wrote, “in a way, she was their mother. In a way, she was my mother.”
Without judgment, and with unconditional love, Clara quietly wrapped her arms around each member of the family, providing comfort and security, like a child’s favorite blanket.
“All of us loved her as one of us because she was one of us,” Jerry Ford wrote. “She was always there to help when a family crisis arose.” One such crisis—a turning point in Betty’s life—would happen in the wake of a national tragedy.
In the fall of 1963, Jack Ford was in the fifth grade and appeared to be struggling in school. “He seemed so much brighter than his marks indicated,” Betty said. They had him tested, and, as it turned out, he had a “terrifically high IQ, but he was always reading Time or Newsweek or Sports Illustrated when he should have been cracking his school books.”
To figure out how best to support their second oldest son, Betty and Jerry set an appointment to meet with an education counselor in the district. It was a Friday afternoon, November 22, a date that would forever stick in their minds, as it would for everyone who was alive at the time. When they came out of the meeting and got into their car, Jerry automatically turned on the radio. And that’s when they learned that President John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated in Dallas.
“The news was crushing,” Betty said. “It was inconceivable to every one of us that this could happen in our country, to our president.” Jerry was shocked. It affected him not only because of his personal friendship with President Kennedy but also because he just “couldn’t believe that somebody would assassinate an American president.”
Over the next three days, Betty recalled, they “seemed to move through a haze of pomp.”
On Saturday they drove to the White House in the drizzling rain and met privately with members of the Kennedy family before kneeling to pray beside the president’s flag-draped casket in the East Room. When the body was moved to the Capitol on Sunday, November 24, Betty remembered the haunting sound of the muffled drums, the vision of the six gray horses pulling the artillery caisson that held the casket, and the eerie silence of the crowds along Pennsylvania Avenue.
“There weren’t many tears,” Betty recalled. “Faces were blank. I think most people must have been like me, too deep in shock to cry.”
For the funeral on Monday, November 25, buses were arranged to transport members of Congress and their spouses to Arlington National Cemetery. Jerry attended the Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, while Betty went directly to Arlington with two close friends, the wives of Congressmen John Byrnes and Walter Norblad. From a vantage point up on a hill, they witnessed the somber ceremony: the massive collection of kings and queens and heads of state from more than one hundred countries standing alongside the black-veiled Jacqueline Kennedy, as the Scottish Black Watch bagpipes wailed, and fifty jet aircraft flew overhead, with the final team in the missing-man formation. There was the roar of Air Force One flying low, and when the pilot dipped one wing in salute to the fallen commander in chief, it was a sight no one there would ever forget. Betty watched as Jackie Kennedy, just thirty-four years old, now a widow, took a candle and lit what would be an eternal flame. But it wasn’t until Betty witnessed the president’s casket being lowered into the ground that she truly realized he was dead. “Up until that moment, it had been a nightmare,” she wrote. “Now it was real.”
Because of the uncertainty of the circumstances surrounding the assassination, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, swiftly appointed a commission to conduct a thorough investigation. The official title was the Presidential Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, but it became known unofficially as the Warren Commission, led by Earl Warren, chief justice of the US Supreme Court. Johnson chose six other members—all men he felt that both he and the American people could trust without reservation. One of those men was Congressman Jerry Ford. For the next nine months, Betty recalled, “Jerry attended meetings religiously, trying to digest hours of testimony and stacks of research produced by the commission’s lawyers.” This was on top of his increasingly demanding schedule as a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee and chairman of the House Republican Conference—the primary forum for communicating the party’s message with its members. Betty was proud that her husband had been entrusted with such an important task, but it meant that he was home less than ever before.
When the 888-page report was released in September 1964, Jerry was confident in the commission’s findings that Lee Harvey Oswald alone had fired the shots that killed President Kennedy, as well as Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, and there was no evidence of a conspiracy. “Beyond a reasonable doubt, I felt Oswald killed both President Kennedy and Officer Tippit,” he wrote.
Betty was immensely proud of Jerry’s contribution. “I would imagine that Jerry knows as much as anybody in the country about that assassination,” she wrote. Of course, the Warren Report would be criticized for decades to come, and it irked her that “people who have no facts whatsoever are always coming around and saying Oswald never shot Kennedy at all, or it was a conspiracy.”
Every summer, the Fords returned to Michigan to see family and spend time on Lake Michigan. During the summer of 1956, Jerry and his three brothers had built a log-sided, one-story cottage on a lot that had been purchased by their parents. It was a simple house, but the focal point—the pure white sand beach that stretched for miles—was just steps away. Each of the brothers took turns using the cottage with their families; Jerry’s turn was always in August to coincide with the congressional recess.
The entire family always looked forward to these annual vacations. Just as Jerry and Betty had spent carefree summer days at various lakes throughout their childhoods, they loved being able to provide their own children the same experiences and memories. Betty would sit in a low folding chair on the beach, a wide-brimmed hat shielding her face from the sun, while Jerry joined the kids in swimming and sailing races, throwing Frisbees and balls on the beach until the sun set along the water’s edge.
Decades later, Jack Ford would say, “Some of my fondest memories were spending summers at Ottawa Beach.”
Nineteen sixty-four was a presidential election year—President Lyndon B. Johnson was running against Barry Goldwater, the conservative senator from Arizona—and Jerry would be spending most of his time up until November in Michigan. Still, he had set aside two weeks in August to spend with the family, and that year, for the first time, instead of returning to Ottawa Beach, they rented a cottage at Bethany Beach in Delaware.
Two days before they were to leave, Betty woke up in the middle of the night in excruciating pain.
It came on suddenly: a stabbing pain that ran from her neck all the way down her left arm. She’d had pain before—plenty of strained muscles and cramps when she was dancing eight hours a day at Bennington and in New York—but never had Betty felt anything like this, and it scared her. She didn’t want to disturb Jerry, so she made her way downstairs, hoping some stretches would make the pain go away. The next morning, however, Jerry found his wife frozen in agony on the living room couch. By that point, Betty’s hand had swollen up, and the pain was unbearable.
“I’m taking you to the emergency room,” Jerry said. He managed to get her in the car and drove straight to the hospital.
The doctors told her she had a pinched nerve in her neck, and that’s what was causing the severe pain. The only thing Betty could attribute to having caused it was when, the day before, she’d reached across the four-foot-wide kitchen counter to raise the window over the sink, and when it wouldn’t budge, she gave it all she had.
Her friend Kay DeFreest said, “I knew exactly how that happened—in a moment of anger, probably—heaven knows what had gotten in there at that point to make her angry. But all dancers feel that they can conquer anything. Nothing is too much for a dancer. If you wish to raise a window, the window will raise, and if it doesn’t raise, you better watch out: it’s liable to get kicked out. If she was stressed and tightened up in the first place, that’s what likely [pinched] the nerve.”
Whatever had caused Betty’s pain, Jerry recalled that the doctors “put her in a soft collar, gave her some Darvon, and told her to go home and relax.”
Relaxing was not possible. The pain was relentless, and Betty ended up back in the hospital. This time the doctors put her in traction and prescribed stronger painkillers.
Knowing how much the kids had looked forward to the vacation, Betty urged Jerry to take them to the beach as planned. Meanwhile, at the hospital, Betty was strung up to various devices, and was given gold shots to treat the pain and inflammation. The doctors had determined that surgery was not an option because the damaged tissues were too close to the spinal cord, so the only choices to manage the pain were drugs and physical therapy.
“The first time the hospital attendants took me for therapy,” Betty recalled, “I cried from the pain.” She couldn’t lie down as they wanted her to, so she sat on a chair, leaning forward across the treatment table as the attendant massaged and stretched her back.
After two weeks in the hospital, Betty was finally able to go home, but the doctors told her she needed to stay in bed for at least two more weeks with a traction setup.
Fortunately, Clara was there holding everything together. She nursed Betty, cooked and cleaned, and made sure the kids had rides and got to where they needed to be. “Clara was indispensable,” Jerry recalled.
For Betty, the only way she could get through the day was to stay on top of the pain with the strong medication prescribed by the doctors. Before leaving the hospital, Betty had expressed her fear about being able to return to normal activities. She was so afraid she’d be out somewhere and the pain would start. The doctor’s response: “Don’t let the pain start. Keep your medication with you and take it every four hours.”
It was doctor’s orders, and Betty followed them. She was on pain meds around the clock, and every evening, at five, she’d have a cocktail, just as she’d always done. There was never a thought that mixing alcohol with the drugs she’d been prescribed would create a problem. She was not alone.
In the 1960s, there were no warning labels on medications, and few studies had been conducted regarding the possible problematic interaction between drugs and alcohol. It was a time when doctors were prescribing amphetamines and tranquilizers to women by the millions. The amphetamines provided a feeling of euphoria and energy, with the added benefit of suppressing appetite, while the tranquilizers such as Valium eased anxiety. The pills were so common, they were known as “Mother’s Little Helpers.”
That November, Americans voted overwhelmingly for Lyndon B. Johnson to remain in the White House, and while Jerry had worked tirelessly to help his fellow Republicans, the Democrats retained their majorities in both the House and the Senate. A group of congressmen approached Jerry and suggested he should run for minority leader. He had earned the respect of his peers during his sixteen years in Congress, and while this would be a great honor, he knew the additional travel it would entail would place even more of a burden on his wife.
That night, he discussed it around the dinner table with Betty and the four children. “If I became minority leader,” Jerry said, “I’d have a real chance to become Speaker someday. On the other hand, the post would require a lot of traveling, and that would mean even less time with the family.” They weighed the pros and cons, and as was always the case in the Ford household, the children were encouraged to speak openly and honestly.
After a lengthy discussion, finally, twelve-year-old Jack said, “Go for it, Dad.” Betty and the three other children all agreed. It was truly a family decision.
That Christmas, the entire family went to the Boyne Mountain resort in Michigan, for what had become an annual family ski vacation. Even seven-year-old Susan was on skis, having learned the year before. Two days after Christmas, Jerry received a call informing him that the vote for minority leader was going to be very close, and he was urged to return to Washington. It wouldn’t be the first vacation interrupted, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Jerry won narrowly, by six votes, and on January 4, 1965, he was sworn in as House minority leader. Looking back, from Betty’s perspective, it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.