With Jerry’s new position as minority leader, his workdays stretched longer and longer. Most mornings, there were early breakfast dates on the Hill; most nights, there were late caucuses or parties involving constituents or lobbyists.
Socially, the Fords were plunged into a whirl of activity that sometimes had them making appearances at as many as three or four receptions in one evening. Betty would get dressed for a business dinner and drive into Washington carrying her long gown, Jerry’s tuxedo, shirt, and shoes. After the dinner, she and Jerry would scramble up to his office on Capitol Hill and change into their formal attire for a black-tie charity gala or fund-raiser.
When Jerry was home, “he was wonderful,” Betty said. “He helped with the dishes, played ball with the boys, watched Susan go through her dance routines, brought me coffee in bed in the morning. But we both knew his job came first.”
As House minority leader, he had to show up in nearly every congressional district around the country where a Republican wanted his help. He was making easily two hundred out-of-town speeches a year. He became so focused on his work and his constituents that he couldn’t see what was happening in his own household.
“Dad had tunnel vision,” Steve Ford said. “He kept going. He expected her to get done whatever she was supposed to get done, and Mother sort of got left by the wayside.” It wasn’t that he didn’t love her, “but because he didn’t understand.”
Betty knew how hard Jerry had worked to achieve this position and was immensely proud of him. She loved being “the wife of Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford,” but at the same time, she was filled with self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy. “I couldn’t accept that people liked me for myself,” she said. And she was always self-conscious about the fact that she didn’t have a college degree—especially at luncheons or dinner parties when conversations turned to where everyone had graduated from college.
As Jerry’s prestige in Washington grew, Betty started becoming resentful. Who do they think is making it possible for him to travel all over the United States giving all those speeches? He gets all the headlines and applause, but what about me?
The more important Jerry became, the more her own self-worth and self-esteem declined. Betty began to resent his being gone so much, but, of course, she couldn’t say anything. She’d been part of the conversation and had agreed to his aspirations. Still, at times she couldn’t help herself. One night, Jerry got into bed and lay down beside her. She rolled over and said, “What are you doing here?”
When Jerry became minority leader, Mike and Jack were attending T. C. Williams High School, in Alexandria; Susan and Steve went to nearby Douglas MacArthur Elementary. The boys played football and baseball, while Susan had dance lessons, and had taken up horseback riding. There were orthodontist appointments, eye doctor visits, and, when you least expected it, always at the worst possible time, a broken bone or a tooth through a lip that required an urgent trip to the emergency room. Four kids, all going in different directions, with Betty in charge of juggling carpools, PTA meetings, and teaching Sunday school, as well as her ever-increasing responsibilities as wife of one of the most powerful men in Republican politics. The older boys “were going through adolescence and all that means,” Betty wrote, “and I was having problems of my own with the change of life.” On top of all that, the pain in her neck kept getting worse.
“I hated feeling crippled,” she wrote. She was forty-seven years old, but she felt much older. The pills dulled the pain, and she realized that a drink or two in the evening helped her to relax at the end of a stressful day. The children saw that, at times, she was not always thinking straight.
“We kids took advantage of that,” Steve said. “We learned how to get away with little things.” The little things sometimes turned into big things, and Betty began to feel like she was “a doormat to the kids.” It was all about to come to a head.
It was a Tuesday in August 1965. Jerry had been in meetings at the White House, and President Johnson had invited him to go for a cruise on the presidential yacht Sequoia that evening with a contingent of other congressmen. He’d called Betty to let her know he wouldn’t be home until ten or eleven that night.
Clara had been at the house all day, and left at five, as she normally did. The school year hadn’t started yet, all four kids were home, and Jack was pushing Betty’s buttons.
“Jack’s the son with whom I’ve crossed swords most often,” Betty wrote. It wasn’t uncommon for them to have bitter arguments, and this day was one of them. They were going at it back and forth upstairs. Downstairs, Susan, Steve, and Mike had come in from the pool. They heard the yelling, and then the sound of their mother sobbing behind the closed door of the master bedroom.
Jack came stomping down the stairs. “Mom’s really upset,” he announced. They’d had their scuffles before, but this time it seemed a line had been crossed. There was something different. He looked at Susan and said, “You need to go fix it.”
Even though she was the youngest, somehow Susan was always the one that could calm down their mother.
“It’s okay, Mom,” she’d say. “We love you, Mom.” That had become her role. The fixer.
Before anyone could do anything, Betty appeared at the foot of the stairs. Her hair was disheveled, like she’d been trying to pull it out, and her eyes—swollen and red from crying—were wild.
“That’s it! I can’t take it anymore!” she cried. “I’m taking Susan, and we’re going to the beach!”
Susan, just eight years old, was terrified. She had never seen her mother like this before. What does she mean? Where are we going? Are we going to stay in a hotel? What about Dad and the boys?
And then the thought that always came next: How can I fix it?
But Betty was inconsolable. She was ranting and pacing, gathering things together, getting ready to leave. Later, she would admit that her intention was to let the “whole ungrateful family worry about where I was and whether I was ever coming home.”
Mike realized they needed help. He snuck out the back door and raced across the street to their neighbors Harriet and Wendell Thorne’s house.
“I need to get hold of my dad,” Mike said. “And Clara. We need Clara.” As the oldest child, Mike fell into the role of protector. He knew his mother would be mortified if anyone outside the family saw her like this.
Meanwhile, back at the house, Betty was packing her and her daughter’s things. Susan was crying, scared to death. It wasn’t long—although it seemed an eternity—before Clara showed up.
She took charge, in her calm, soothing way. “There, there,” she said, as she wrapped Susan in her arms. “Let me go talk to Mother. Everything’s gonna be all right.”
Clara went upstairs and knocked on the door to the master bedroom.
“Mrs. Ford, it’s Clara.” Betty let her into the room, and while Clara would never reveal what was said or what she did, whatever it was, it was exactly what Betty needed to hear.
Clara had called Jerry, fortunately reaching him before the Sequoia left the pier.
More than fifty years later, Susan remembered the trauma of that evening as vividly as if it had happened the day before. “Dad went up with Mom, and then a doctor came. Clara came downstairs and took Steve and me and said, ‘Come. Let us go for a walk.’ ”
Clara knew that Mike and Jack were old enough to realize what was going on, but Susan and Steve needed to be reassured. They walked up Crown View Drive as the late summer sun dropped below the horizon, and Clara tried to explain to them in terms an eight-year-old and a nine-year-old would understand.
“Your momma is sick,” she said. She told them that Betty had been seeing a doctor—a psychiatrist—and he was going to help her get better. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “She loves you very much. But she just needs a bit of help right now.”
After that, Susan remembered feeling scared of her mother, and embarrassed. She was afraid to bring friends home, and, more and more, she clung to Clara.
For Betty, going to therapy helped her realize that she couldn’t be everything to everybody. “I’d been too busy trying to figure out everyone else’s needs, that I’d had no time for Betty,” she wrote. “I had to start thinking I was valuable, not just as a wife and mother, but as myself. And to myself.”
Over time her self-esteem began to improve, and those feelings of uselessness and emptiness faded. She realized that her mental state had a lot to do with her exacerbating physical pain.
She wasn’t alone. In 1963, Betty Friedan authored The Feminine Mystique about “the problem that has no name.” The book, which would sell more than one million copies its first year in print, focused on the increasing unhappiness and empty feelings of women in America. Friedan wrote, “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’ ”
And while the visits to the psychiatrist helped, Betty didn’t realize—and the doctor didn’t ask—that she was using alcohol to cope. “I saw no reason to discuss my drinking,” she would say years later. “I preferred to pretend everything would get better if I went back to dance class, or did some shopping, or took an afternoon off to write letters.”
Meanwhile, each member of the family unconsciously slipped into roles to cope with something they didn’t understand, but which only served to enable Betty’s addiction.
Jerry would become a classic enabler, making excuses for his wife when she was late or had imbibed one drink too many at a social event, blaming it on an overzealous bartender.
Mike, the oldest, would quietly take over when his mother wasn’t able to function. “I had to step in either indirectly or directly with my siblings to help with things like homework or driving Susan and Steve around once I got my license,” Mike recalled. He’d run errands and do the grocery shopping—even fill in for Betty at church functions, in an effort to protect her.
“I didn’t want her to look bad or feel like she hadn’t done her job,” he explained. “I didn’t want her to feel that way.”
Quite often in the families of an alcoholic, the second-oldest child becomes the scapegoat: one who develops angry and defiant behaviors. Jack would fall into that role.
“I think most of my family would say that she and I were, in a lot of respects, most alike,” Jack acknowledged. “And so, that meant probably that we butted heads more often. I plead guilty to egging things on, at times.”
Steve, a middle child, became the mediator. “No doubt that my role was to try to find a compromise to make peace,” he reflected.
And Susan, the youngest, was the fixer.
From the outside, they were the perfect American family. And on the inside, they truly loved one another and were close. But the disease was there, lurking beneath the surface.