With the help of her weekly therapy sessions, Betty was feeling much better about herself and her situation in life. She realized there was nothing “terribly wrong” with her. “I just wasn’t the Bionic Woman,” she wrote. “And the minute I stopped thinking I had to be, a weight fell from my shoulders.”
In March 1968, President Lyndon Johnson stunned the nation by announcing he would not seek reelection, and that year, after the tragic assassination of Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy, the presidential election was ultimately between the Republican candidate, former vice president Richard M. Nixon, and Democrat Hubert Humphrey, with anti-integrationist Alabama governor George Wallace siphoning votes as the choice of the newly formed American Independent Party.
When Nixon won the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami that August, he had asked Jerry Ford if he’d consider running as vice president on the ticket. But Jerry saw that there was a chance the Republicans might capture enough seats to win the majority, which would make him Speaker of the House—his ultimate goal, and what he’d been working toward the past twenty years. He thanked Nixon for the confidence in him but declined the offer. He just wasn’t interested.
Nixon chose the relatively unknown governor of Maryland, Spiro T. Agnew, as his running mate, and as it turned out, the Republican ticket of Nixon and Agnew barely won the presidency—edging out Humphrey and Maine senator Edmund Muskie, but the Democrats retained control of the House and Senate. Ford would remain the minority leader.
Betty had always been very active, but after being diagnosed with the pinched nerve, she was reluctant to take part in many of her favorite activities, for fear of making things worse. She had always loved to ski, especially with Jerry and the children, but flying down a steep mountain on narrow wooden slats was far too risky. “That, and by the time she got four kids dressed and boots laced, she was exhausted!” Susan Ford recalled.
Still, the Christmas ski trips to Boyne Mountain in Michigan had become tradition, and now all four children, whom Jerry remembered picking out of countless snowbanks when they were seven or eight years old, were “zooming down the slopes and shouting gleefully, ‘Hi, Dad! We’ll see you later!’ ”
Unfortunately, one Christmas they went to Boyne, and there was barely any snow. It put a real damper on the trip and got them thinking about alternatives. Jerry had learned that Ted Kindel, one of his childhood friends from Grand Rapids—Ted’s father had been Jerry’s scoutmaster when Jerry became an Eagle Scout—had opened a hotel in Vail, Colorado. Kindel had gone out to Vail when it first opened in 1962 and, although there was just one gondola and two chairlifts, he saw potential. In 1963 Kindel built the town’s first hotel, the Christiana, and in 1966 he became Vail’s first mayor.
“Come on out to Vail,” Ted urged his old friend. “You will love it.”
So, for Christmas vacation 1968, the Fords flew to Denver, piled everybody into a rented station wagon, and drove west along the treacherous and windy Route 6, up and up and up. Around each new bend, there was an even more stunning view of craggy mountains so enormous that they made the mountains of Michigan seem like sand dunes. It was a much longer drive back then, before the completion of Interstate 70 and the Eisenhower Tunnel, but the Fords all agreed it was totally worth it.
Remembering that first year skiing in Vail, Susan Ford recalled, “It was amazing. The mountains were so much bigger, and there was so much snow.”
Nestled at the base of the majestic snow-drenched mountains was the charming village of Vail. It was just a few blocks long at that time, and it looked like someone had taken a little town from Austria or Switzerland and plopped it right in the middle of Colorado. Ted Kindel and his wife, Nancy, introduced the Fords to everyone they knew, and within a couple of days, Vail already felt like home.
January 20, 1969, Betty and Jerry had prime seats for Richard M. Nixon’s inauguration. Rows of tiered seats were set up on the inauguration platform on the east side of the US Capitol. The seats were assigned by a time-honored tradition, and as a member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, Jerry Ford would be seated in the front row, stage left of the podium where Nixon would be sworn in, while Betty, as his wife, had an assigned seat across the aisle, in the third row. Under threatening skies, and the tightest security ever for a presidential inauguration, Betty watched her longtime friend Pat Nixon standing proudly next to her husband as he placed his left hand on, not one, but two family Bibles, and took the Oath of Office to become the nation’s thirty-seventh president.
“I, Richard Milhous Nixon, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.”
One of President Nixon’s goals was to open diplomatic ties between the United States and Communist China. At that time, there had been no direct relations with China for more than two decades, so it was truly historic when, in February 1972, Richard Nixon and the first lady—accompanied by three hundred staffers, press, and Secret Service personnel—traveled to mainland China and broadcast their journey for all Americans to see. The trip had such remarkable ramifications that Nixon called it “the week that changed the world.” To continue the positive momentum in normalizing relations, Nixon suggested to the Chinese leaders that it was important to increase the number of visitors between the two countries. As it turned out, Majority Leader Hale Boggs and Minority Leader Jerry Ford, along with their wives, were among the first American visitors to be invited by the Chinese government.
At that time, “the chance to visit China was a rare opportunity indeed,” Jerry said. And Betty, always ready for an adventure, was game to go.
Five days before they were scheduled to leave, in June, there was a report that five men had broken into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Office Building in Washington. Jerry recognized two of the names—G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord—and he wondered if anybody at the White House was involved. He told a colleague, “I don’t give a damn who’s involved or how high it goes. Nixon ought to get to the bottom of this and get rid of anybody who’s involved in it.”
Betty read about it in the newspaper, but amid preparing for her trip to China, didn’t think much of it. The Watergate incident—what the White House called a “third-rate burglary” and what she saw as “an inept effort at God knows what”—would not only test the United States Constitution like never before, but also would send Betty and Jerry on a trajectory they never could have imagined.
On Friday, June 23, 1972, the Fords, the Boggs, and members of their staffs departed Washington and flew to Shanghai. Jerry Ford and Hale Boggs, despite their positions on opposite sides of the aisle, had a great deal of respect for each other and had bonded during their long months together as members of the Warren Commission. Betty and Lindy Boggs were also good friends, and this trip would cement the close relationship between the two families. (Sadly, just a few months after the trip to China, in October 1972, Hale Boggs was killed in a small-plane crash in a remote area of Alaska. Neither the plane nor his body was ever found.)
Betty found the trip fascinating and at times challenging. “The Chinese are likely to feed you anything,” she recalled. One night, they were served sea slugs, a local delicacy. Sitting at formal dinners with their hosts, it would have been considered impolite to not eat what was served. For Betty, who didn’t care for fish at all, “trying to choke down sea slugs” was a true testament to her diplomatic ability.
They traveled all over the country, including to Old Manchuria, where they were the first Caucasians to visit in twenty-four years. “The people were enthralled by us,” she said. “Children would see our cars, and they’d come running from the rice paddies at full tilt.”
It was an enormously educational experience from start to finish, but without a doubt, Betty was most impressed by how the Chinese used acupuncture in place of anesthesia. They were allowed to witness an operation in which the doctors removed a large ovarian tumor from a young girl. Betty was amazed that the girl was wide awake throughout the procedure, sipping tea and orange juice, clearly feeling no pain even as the doctors cut through her skin and sewed her back up. Thin acupuncture needles had been placed in her ankles, and a little machine between her legs made the needles vibrate. That image would remain seared into her mind.
Nineteen seventy-two was another presidential election year—another chance for the GOP to take control of the House. While Nixon was campaigning for a second term, Jerry was working as hard as he could to help Republicans get elected. From the time he and Betty returned from China in early July, he was gone almost constantly.
“Jerry and I thought President Nixon was doing a good job his first term in office,” Betty recalled, and indeed, the American public agreed. On Tuesday, November 7, 1972, Nixon won reelection in a landslide against his Democratic opponent, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. In the House of Representatives, however, the Republicans gained only thirteen seats—not enough for a majority. Realizing the opportunity the Republicans had that year wasn’t likely to repeat itself in the foreseeable future, Jerry concluded that he was never going to become Speaker of the House. He had worked so hard toward that goal—in one year alone, he logged 138,000 miles and was gone more than 250 nights—but in doing so had sacrificed precious time with Betty and their four children.
By this point, the two older sons had reached adulthood and were each finding his own way. Mike, twenty-two, had graduated from Wake Forest University the previous May (Jerry had given the commencement address) and was in graduate school at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. Twenty-year-old Jack had attended college at Jacksonville University in Florida for two years but took time off to work on the Committee to Re-elect the President. Now he was transferring to Utah State University to study forestry.
Only Steve and Susan were still at home. Betty had dealt with Mike and Jack going through puberty, and now it was Steve and Susan. Jerry had been in charge of telling the boys about the birds and the bees, and one day, when Susan was about twelve or thirteen, Betty told her only daughter they needed to have a little talk.
Susan was about to go to camp for the summer, and Betty was concerned that she might get her period for the first time while she was away.
“Come sit up here,” Betty said, tapping the kitchen counter. Susan hurled her body up onto the counter, so that even though her legs were dangling, she was nearly face-to-face with her mother.
Betty handed her a pamphlet that showed the differences in male and female anatomy, explained all about menstruation, and the mechanics of sex.
“It’s really about the relationship between a man and a woman,” Betty said. “One day you will kiss a boy . . . but whatever you do, don’t ever let a boy stick his tongue in your mouth.”
It was all Susan could do to keep from bursting out laughing.
“I can remember it to this day!” she recalled. “Because about ten days before, I had been French-kissed by some boy.” You are so late, Mother, Susan was thinking. You missed the boat.
Susan kept quiet, trying to maintain a straight face, as her mother continued.
“You know,” Betty said, “a boy did that to me once, and I bit his tongue and got on the trolley and went home.”
“God, I’d have loved to have seen that!” Susan recalled. “And I don’t doubt she did it.”
It wasn’t a long conversation, but at the end, Betty said, “Now, if you have any questions, please ask me.”
In the late sixties and early seventies, the Alexandria public school system was going through a transition, as the city tried to achieve a racial balance among its three high schools. In grades nine and ten, Steve was bused to the predominantly black George Washington High School, where he was co-captain of the junior varsity football team, playing center and linebacker.
“Mother would come to all my games,” Steve recalled with a smile.
During one game, Steve went down and was clearly in pain. The coach pulled him out and had him sit on the sidelines with an ice pack on his wrist. Betty, who was watching from the bleachers, had seen the hit and went into mother bear mode. She raced down to the field, and to Steve’s horror, hoisted herself up and over the waist-high chain-link fence to get to the bench where he was sitting.
“Mom!” he hissed. “What are you doing?”
“What happened? What hurts?” Betty asked.
At sixteen, in the presence of his teammates and, more important, the cheerleaders, Steve was mortified. “Mom, get out of here. You can’t be down here!” he said through clenched teeth. As soon as the game was over, Betty drove Steve straight to the emergency room, where it was determined he had broken his wrist.
Decades later, he looked back on the memory with a laugh and not a hint of embarrassment. “She was just a great mother that way,” he said.
In 1972, his junior year, Steve was assigned to T. C. Williams High School, along with all the district’s eleventh- and twelfth-grade students. There was a tremendous amount of racial tension, as depicted in the 2000 movie Remember the Titans, which was based on the 1971 T. C. Williams football season.
“We lived it,” Steve Ford recalled. “Bricks were being thrown at windows, kids were getting into fistfights and smoking pot in the hallways.” And while the Fords felt their six-foot-one son Steve could handle it, Betty and Jerry were concerned about sending their “baby girl” into such a volatile environment.
Susan had been best friends with “the Golubin twins”—Reagan and Elison—since elementary school, and the Golubin girls’ parents were also concerned about the atmosphere at T. C. Williams. So, the Fords and the Golubins decided to have their daughters apply for admission to Holton-Arms, a private boarding school in Bethesda, Maryland.
“We all got in,” Susan recalled. The girls stayed at school Monday through Friday and came home on weekends. One of the parents would pick up the girls Friday and one would take them back on Sunday.
By this point, Clara was no longer working for the Fords. A couple of years earlier, she had gone to Betty and told her that her father was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She couldn’t bear to put him in a home, and she needed to care for him full-time. Of course Betty and the family understood. Mike had gone to college, and the other kids were self-sufficient, able to help with household chores. Two or three times a week, the kids would visit Clara at her dad’s house, which was only about ten minutes away. “Susan would come up, and we used to sew,” Clara remembered. She was no longer at their home every day, but she was no less important to the Ford family.
This was their situation as the calendar turned from 1972 to 1973, and Richard Nixon was beginning his second term in office. Betty had been supportive of Jerry’s political career ever since that first day he’d told her he wanted to run for Congress, before they were even married, and Jerry was well aware that she, too, had sacrificed a great deal. They’d always thought of each other as equal partners—more so than many other couples of that era. Perhaps it was because of the relatively older age at which they’d met and married, but any decision they made, they’d always made together. One of the many things Jerry had found attractive about Betty from the beginning, and still attracted him now, was her honesty and candor. She didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear; she always told him how she really felt.
Recognizing that becoming Speaker of the House was most likely not going to happen, and that in less than three years their youngest children would both be off to college, they sat down to discuss plans for the future.
“We agreed that I would run one more time in 1974, then announce my retirement from public life in early 1975,” Jerry recalled. At that point, he would be sixty-three years old—“still active enough to practice law or enter into a business partnership with friends”—and after so many years living on a congressman’s salary, the opportunity to earn additional income as a private citizen was attractive to both of them.
“He promised me he would retire at the end of President Nixon’s second term,” Betty said. After twenty-four years as a congressman’s wife, living in the Washington bubble, the thought of retiring, whether it be to Grand Rapids, or perhaps Florida or California, was something Betty found herself looking forward to with each passing month. She knew Gerald R. Ford’s word was good as gold. There was no reason to think it wouldn’t happen just like they’d planned.