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.
“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.”
Her reaction was not unexpected. Pursch had dealt with navy admirals who felt they deserved special treatment too.
“Well, then,” he said, “I’ll have the other women come and get their things. I’ll tell them they have to move out.”
He knew Betty well enough to know that she wouldn’t allow others to be removed just so she could have special treatment. And he was right.
“Oh no, you’re not going to make anyone move for me,” she said as she set down her purse on the one free bed in the room.
Caroline remembered how extremely difficult it was for Betty. “She had lost all her privacy. That was the biggest thing. Her privacy, and her dignity.”
The next rude awakening was what to do with Mrs. Ford’s clothes. She’d worried endlessly about what to pack for an anticipated four-week stay, and had brought several pieces of luggage. The closet space allotted for her was fourteen inches wide.
Knowing the press would inevitably find out, Betty had agreed to a statement that was released once she was safely admitted to the hospital: “Former First Lady Betty Ford was hospitalized Monday at the Long Beach Naval Hospital for an overmedication problem. Mrs. Ford states, ‘Over a period of time, I got to the point where I was overmedicating myself. It’s an insidious thing, and I mean to rid myself of its damaging effects. There have been too many other things I’ve overcome to be forever burdened with this detail.’ ”
There was no mention of an alcohol problem.
Every minute of every day for the next four weeks would be planned out for Betty. She was handed the “Policies and Routine for Patients,” and because this was a naval installation, everything was in military time. It was boot camp for alcoholics. A critical part of the treatment was for patients to work the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
0630 |
Reveille |
0630 – 0730 |
Breakfast |
0745 – 0830 |
Muster/Cleanup |
0845 – 1015 |
Group Therapy |
1030 – 1145 |
Education Sessions |
1145 – 1230 |
Lunch |
1255 |
Muster |
1300 – 1430 |
AA Meeting/Al-Anon |
1430 – 1515 |
Films |
1530 – 1600 |
Jogging |
1800 |
Dinner |
1915 |
AA Meeting |
For group therapy, Betty was placed in Group Six—they called themselves the “Six-Pack.” There were five men, including a twenty-year-old jet mechanic who’d been drinking from the time he was eight; a young officer whose drinking had resulted in two failed marriages; and a naval clergyman “addicted to drugs and drink.” Betty was the oldest in the group, the only female—and the only member with Secret Service agents standing outside the door.
Everyone was required to wear name tags with just first names on them, so wherever Betty went, the sailors would yell out, “Hi, Betty!”
There were far more men than women, and while the rooms were segregated by sex, the sessions were not. At first, it was disconcerting to her. “I was not a model patient,” she admitted. “I had a bit of the celebrity hang-up. I considered myself a very special person who had been married to a president of the United States, and I didn’t think I should have to discuss my personal problems with just anybody.”
But she was expected to do everything everyone else did. “They had to clean the toilets and wastebaskets, and were in meetings almost every minute of every day,” Caroline recalled. It was negotiated that Betty would not, in fact, have to clean toilets—that seemed to cross a line for a former first lady—but other than that, there were few exceptions allowed. “They were kept very busy. That was part of the whole protocol. She would say she was so tired, and they’d say, ‘You never die from being too tired.’ They were tough.”
Betty listened to the others’ stories, but she simply couldn’t relate to them. “I could not say I was alcoholic,” Betty would say later. “I didn’t relate to any of the drunk stories I heard. I had never had an urge to hang out at bars, I wasn’t about to get kicked out of the navy if I didn’t shape up, nobody was suing me for running over their cat while under the influence.”
She knew she had a problem, or her family wouldn’t have even considered the intervention. But she was still in denial. “There’s an enormous difference between other people’s thinking you’re alcoholic and your thinking you’re alcoholic. I was perfectly happy not to drink,” she said. “I was longing for pills, not pilsener.”
There were lots of tears those first few days. Just going through the motions. Betty trying to appease everyone, without admitting her problems were as bad as everyone else’s. One of those first evenings, Dr. Pursch arranged for Betty to attend a women’s AA group in Laguna Beach.
The Secret Service agents drove Betty and Caroline, and then waited outside. At the beginning of every AA meeting, the attendees are required to introduce themselves with first names only, and to admit their addiction to alcohol.
As they sat down, Caroline grabbed hold of Betty’s hand. She knew this was going to be hard for her boss. When it came to Betty’s turn, she stood up and with strength pouring forth and “not a quiver in her voice,” she said, “My name is Betty, and I’m an alcoholic.”
“The hand I held gave me strength and faith,” Caroline wrote in her diary that night. “Only one regret. The president wasn’t there to share a most memorable day.”
“I was very proud of her,” Caroline said. “She was taking these huge steps, and I wished the president could have been there to witness it.”
Within the first week of Betty’s treatment, President Ford, Steve, and Susan arrived to attend a five-day family session. The family members were put in different groups—not with Betty or one another, but in groups with other patients who knew Betty.
“I wasn’t convinced that what I was saying wasn’t going to get back to my mother—my deepest, darkest secrets,” Susan recalled.
In one of the first sessions, President Ford had been in a group, and when he left, Susan took his place. “You kind of go in and tell your story,” she recalled. When somebody made the comment that her father had taken credit for getting the intervention together, “It set me on fire,” she said.
“No he didn’t!” Susan blurted out. “I’m the one that did all the work. I’m the one that put the pieces together. Where does he get off taking all the credit?!”
“The whole family is so raw with emotions as you’re going through it,” she remembered. “It’s just exhausting. It’s wonderful, but exhausting. You get rid of stuff.”
In one group session, the counselor read a short story called “Warm Fuzzies.”
“It was like taking my heart and pulling it out,” Susan remembered. “It was like the way I felt about my mother, and how she had taken everything away from me. I never had a chance to be a kid. I was always covering for her.” Tears poured down Susan’s face as the emotions came pouring out. “When is it going to be my turn?” she wondered aloud.
President Ford attended group sessions with five or six recovering alcoholics, went to some meetings with Betty, and sat in lectures with dozens of other patients and their families. “For the first time, I learned about alcoholism . . . being a disease,” he said. “I learned that I was making all these excuses an enabler does.”
At first, Steve Ford felt a great deal of angst about going to the treatment center. But Pat Benedict reassured him and explained how important it was. The first day, he went to the cafeteria, where his mother was eating lunch with several of the sailors. There were admirals and seamen, and they were telling jokes, and she was laughing and having a good time. As he walked up to the table, he heard one of the sailors telling a dirty joke.
“I was so offended,” Steve recalled. “This is my mother! You can’t tell dirty jokes around my mother!” Later, he complained to Dr. Pursch.
“Steve, this is exactly what your mother needs,” Pursch said. “She is no longer the first lady, she is Betty. She takes that hat off, and she gets to be equal with everybody else.” Pursch made him realize that having been first lady was part of the problem. “Her doctors would prescribe whatever she wanted,” Steve said, “because they didn’t want to make a first lady mad.”
In one group session, they were talking about the fact that if your parents were alcoholics, then it was very likely the children would become alcoholics too.
“I made the dumb statement ‘Oh, no, I’ll never be an alcoholic,’ ” Steve said. “They jumped all over me. ‘Do you think your mother decided to be an alcoholic?’ And I had to accept it that, yes, I have a good chance of becoming an alcoholic because of my family background.”
On April 15 Steve was visiting his mother, when a local television crew approached him. “Steve, is your mother an alcoholic?” the photographer blurted out.
Steve Ford had been raised to be honest. When someone asks a question, you answer it.
“I know that the problem exists,” he said. “My mother does drink, just as many other people do in this country. To what extent, I couldn’t tell you. There always seems to be a problem mixing alcohol with drugs. The Good Lord seems to be challenging her with tasks, and she hasn’t failed yet.”
Betty still had not admitted to a problem with alcohol, and she was less than pleased with her son’s remarks.
“She had begun to pull back and get into her denial again,” Dr. Cruse recalled. “She thought she wasn’t as bad off as a lot of the sailors and wives and so forth. That’s what the disease does. She was scared and angry and frightened and puzzled. She was hoping to continue to reserve for herself the right not only to drink but also not to be labeled a drunk.”
Pursch summoned President Ford, Caroline, Bob Barrett, and Pat Benedict, and another mini-intervention took place.
Dr. Pursch looked Betty straight in the eyes and said, “We are here because something needs to be faced, and that is that you are also dependent on alcohol.”
Betty turned to her husband, hoping for some support—some kind of affirmation that she wasn’t. When he didn’t speak up, she said, “If you’re going to call me an alcoholic, I won’t stand for it.”
Dr. Pursch had spoken with not only President Ford but also with Susan, Dr. Cruse, and other members of the family, and he knew the truth. “So far, you have talked only about drugs, but you are going to have to make a public statement saying you are also dependent on alcohol.”
“I can’t do that,” Betty said, her voice beginning to quiver. “I don’t want to embarrass my husband.”
Pursch stood up, his eyes steeling through Betty. “You’re hiding behind your husband,” he said. “If you don’t believe it, ask him.”
Betty was beginning to hyperventilate. “Well?” she asked, looking at Jerry.
Jerry winced. He didn’t want to cause her any more pain, but after attending the sessions, he’d come to realize that he’d been enabling her for far too long. “No,” he said. “It won’t embarrass me.”
Still, Betty couldn’t agree to making a public statement that she was an alcoholic. But Dr. Pursch was not going to let her get away with it. He kept pushing.
Dr. Pursch was “ruthless,” Pat remembered. “I was sitting next to her . . . her little eyes were filling, her little nose was running, and I put my arm around her and just held her.”
“Betty,” Dr. Pursch glared, “you’re just as alcoholic as anyone can be, and you’re using your husband to hide behind.”
“Pursch was very tough,” Jerry recalled. “I think he felt Betty wasn’t responding, she was in denial . . . and he thought he had to shock her.”
“He knew that if she put it out there, that if she committed to it to the American public, then she’d damn well better live up to it,” Caroline said. “You have to have something to live up to. Some pressure on your back to stay sober.”
Betty was heaving with sobs. Crying inside and out.
“I had cried so hard my nose and ears were closed up, my head felt like a balloon, all swollen,” Betty remembered. She was mad and hurt that Jerry hadn’t spoken up to defend her. “He hadn’t allowed me the out I was looking for.”
Ultimately, Betty agreed to release a statement—a carefully worded statement written with the input of Dr. Pursch, President Ford, and Bob Barrett—and on Friday, April 21, Barrett read it at a press conference held outside the hospital.
Barrett stood at the microphone and said, “Here is the statement from Mrs. Ford: ‘I have found I am not only addicted to the medication I have been taking for my arthritis but also to alcohol. This program is well known throughout the country, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to attend it. I expect this treatment and fellowship to be a solution for my problems, and I embrace it not only for me but all the many others who are here to participate.’ ”
The impact was enormous. America loved and respected Betty Ford, and her announcement brought home, in a powerful way, that this disease could touch virtually any family in the country. On top of that, Pat noted, “she opened the door for women to seek treatment.”
“To the laymen, it was just a statement,” Caroline said. “To us, it was Betty Ford getting well.”
After reading the statement, Barrett and Dr. Pursch answered questions. When asked whether Mrs. Ford would be speaking publicly, Barrett replied flippantly, “We’ve never had too much success in keeping Mrs. Ford’s mouth shut. Somewhere along the line, she’ll be saying what she wants to when she wants to.”
Dr. Pursch added, “Mrs. Ford is a gutsy lady, and I expect her to do very well. We’re taking it one day at a time.”
When asked about details of the drugs she was taking, Pursch declined to give specifics but said they were “medications any of us would get from a family practitioner if we went to him with the pain she had.”
Barrett emphatically denied the problem involved any negligence by doctors treating Mrs. Ford.
Sometime in the second week of treatment, Betty had a revelation. During one group session, a young woman got up and said she didn’t know why her family was making such a big deal about her drinking.
“My drinking hasn’t caused my folks any trouble,” the girl insisted. Betty had been in sessions with some of the woman’s family members, and they had talked about how her drinking had indeed caused trouble for each of them. Betty remembered all the things her own family had told her during the intervention, and in that moment, she realized that by not admitting she had a problem with alcohol, she was in denial every bit as much as that young woman.
It was Betty’s turn to stand up next.
“I’m Betty, and I am an alcoholic,” she said. “And I know my drinking has hurt my family.” As she said it out loud, a wave of relief spread through her.
She realized suddenly that while she couldn’t identify with the habits or backgrounds of the other patients, she could identify with the disease. “We were all suffering from the same thing, and it didn’t matter where we came from or how we got here. If we could have done something about our sickness on our own, we’d have done it.”
Day in and day out, Betty was immersed in therapy and education about alcoholism and drug addiction. There were speakers who shared their own stories of recovery; role-playing sessions that showed how the disease affected loved ones; and films and lectures about the disease and its detrimental effects on the body. Betty learned that although she had detoxed and hadn’t taken drugs or so much as a sip of alcohol since that last handful of pills immediately after the intervention, it would take more than two years before she was completely cleansed of the chemicals that had built up inside her body due to the long half-life of the medications she’d been taking.
“We learned that alcoholism kind of comes in two ways,” Caroline said. “It either is a chemical dependency that is genetic or you build that up. You start drinking in college, and it builds up, and over forty years it catches up with you. You don’t always have the chemical dependency gene.”
The more Betty learned, the more it became clear that her genetics predisposed her to the disease. Both her father and one of her brothers were alcoholics. And she learned that the spouse and children of an alcoholic typically assume various codependent roles in order to cope: enabler, hero, scapegoat, lost child, mascot.
The enabler steps in to protect the alcoholic/addict from the consequences of her behavior, making excuses to prevent embarrassment and thus minimizing the consequences of addiction. The hero attempts to be the model child, excelling in everything he does, and taking over family responsibilities. The scapegoat acts out, is very independent, and is often seen as the “problem child,” as he diverts attention from the alcoholic’s behavior. The lost child demands little and receives little attention, which often results in his inability to develop close relationships. The mascot is the attention seeker, often clowning around to defuse the stressful situations caused by the alcoholic.
As Betty listened and learned, it was as if the counselors were describing her husband and each of her children. Their personalities had formed around her addiction.
Meanwhile, outside the walls of the hospital, people all over the world were reacting to Betty’s admission that she was an alcoholic and was embracing treatment.
“I was astonished at the amount of newspaper coverage, the editorials commending my heroism, my candor, my courage,” she said. “I hadn’t rescued anybody from a burning building, I’d simply put my bottles down. It was my family, not I, who had been ‘candid’ and ‘courageous,’ ” Betty wrote, years later.
Indeed, she wasn’t feeling courageous at all. Three weeks into the treatment, her nerves were raw. “People don’t understand the mood swings of a recovering alcoholic,” Betty explained. She went to the hospital beauty parlor, and when the stylist had cut one side of her hair very short, she looked in the mirror in horror and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Caroline told me you wanted it short so you could swim in the pool,” the hairdresser said.
Betty was furious. As soon as she saw Caroline, she screamed, “I could kill you for doing this to me!”
“She was so angry,” Caroline recalled. “She was frustrated and angry, and she couldn’t take it out on the doctors or Pat, because they’d say, ‘Uh-uh-uh.’ ” There were times it got very ugly, and Caroline received the brunt of her anger.
“Her words hurt,” Caroline acknowledged. “I was under so much pressure to make sure everything was going well, but while President Ford, Susan, and Steve came and went, I was there the whole time.” At night, Caroline would return to her motel room across the street from the hospital and fall into bed, exhausted, and, many times, crying her eyes out. “I was a mess,” she said.
Mike and Gayle Ford came out for a weekend to attend the family sessions. “Part of it was this is a family disease,” Mike said. “And we all had to take responsibility and learn about what are the trigger points and how do you address that as a family. So, we were learning all that. New language, new responsibilities, and how to help Mom.”
Then came another crisis. Betty’s autobiography was in galleys, ready to go to print, and the publisher called and said it wanted her to write another chapter—a chapter about her drug and alcohol addiction, and the treatment at Long Beach.
“No, I won’t do it,” Betty said. “It has nothing to do with the book.”
“It was a crisis,” Jerry said. “The publishers were uptight, and we had to very delicately convince Betty that it was a proper conclusion to The Times of My Life. There was no other responsible way to end the book. I felt the request of the publishers was legitimate, and the problem was to prevail on Betty, make her believe that she could, in her early recovery, be forthright and go public.”
Chris Chase, the writer, flew out from New York. She attended sessions with Betty to understand how the treatment worked, and Betty had to relive the intervention all over again.
After twenty-eight days in treatment, Betty was released from the hospital. More than three dozen reporters and photographers were waiting outside the front door behind a rope line along with a group of spectators.
“Mrs. Ford, how do you feel?” a reporter called out.
Betty smiled and said, “Just fine.” When the crowd began clapping in a show of support, she turned and gave a wave and then got into the back seat of the car.
“I know that she felt so vulnerable,” Caroline recalled. “I wasn’t even the person in rehab, and I felt like this virgin going out into the world. You know, you live in this protective bubble for four weeks, and you don’t talk to anyone for four weeks. And I remember driving out of there, and experiencing this feeling of being so scared because now you have to do it all yourself. And that was me. Just imagine what she felt like.”
President Ford greeted his wife with a long hug and a tender kiss when she arrived back at their home in Rancho Mirage. He was so proud of her. But then he broke the news that a group of Republicans were having a reception at the house, and she was expected to greet them. Not only that, but NBC was coming to do an interview.
Betty broke down and cried. She begged not to have to do it, but the television crew had already arrived from New York.
“Nobody had consulted me, nobody had consulted my doctors,” Betty said. It had been on the schedule, and no one had realized how fragile she would be, still going through drug withdrawal, which would take at least a full year. It was as if everyone thought that after four weeks in rehab she’d be completely well and able to uphold whatever duties were expected of her—just like she’d done at the White House. Feeling like she had no choice in the matter, Betty finally agreed to do it.
She sat next to President Ford in the television room and, gritting her teeth behind the forced smile, said she was “just fine.”
“It was a cruel intrusion,” she said later. “There was no way I should have been put under such pressure. I was upset with my husband, with politics, with everything and everybody.”
What she was feeling inside was not apparent to the public. Across the country, people were lauding her courage.
“What she has done is the most significant advance in the history of alcohol treatment,” said Dr. Luther Cloud, president of the National Council on Alcoholism, in New York. “This might well mark the end of the stigma.”
At Alcoholics Anonymous, there was hope that Betty Ford’s courage would increase the recognition that “alcohol addiction is a physical disease, not a moral sin.”
President Carter had invited President and Mrs. Ford to the White House for the unveiling of their official White House portraits, and on May 24, 1978, barely two weeks after her release from Long Beach, Betty was back at the White House—the first time she’d been there since Inauguration Day the year before.
During the ceremony, President Carter said, “Betty Ford has earned the admiration of our nation for her courage and complete candor. She is the most popular person in our country today.”