It's easy to forget, over time, what was so transcendent about Betty Ford; not her graceful appearances in later life, not all the wondrous things she did to raise awareness about addiction and recovery, but the role she played in our national life from 1974 to 1977 (or, the worst of the Brown Years). Watergate created a national spasm; Betty Ford was a huge part of how we got over it.
Jerry Ford may have been the Accidental President, but Betty Ford was never an Accidental First Lady. We got him by default, but we needed her - we needed her relaxed informality, her frankness, her frank belief in women's equality. She had a remarkable ability, in an age before extensive media savvy, of knowing how to cut through the clutter of American conventionality.
In part, of course, she was so frank and fearless because of her addiction to booze and pills. Later, in recovery, she could be more circumspect, safer, less promiscuous with her words and thoughts. Still passionate and forthright, but exercising restraint (of pen and tongue, as they say in recovery).
She was a quintessentially American story and like nothing that had come before - she was a former model and dancer (with Martha Graham!) who married another former model after her first marriage ended in divorce (and, in so doing, became the first divorcee in the White House, before Ronald Reagan). Unlike Pat Nixon, she was not stiff or formal, or filled with the kind of unspoken resentments the Nixons carried, separately and as a couple.
As a result, she completely transformed our perceptions of the White House and the President's family at a crucial, necessary moment. We could get through the traumas of Watergate - the secret political dealing, the lies and manipulations - and we'd do it the way Americans do: with a bit of can-do spirit, a refreshing lack of pretension, and a sense that we're all in this together. That, in the public's perception, was Betty Ford.
The fact that she did, as she always did, face recovery from addiction with the same candor and frankness and intent to help others, was neither surprising nor world changing. She'd had a drinking problem... and she'd done something about it. And so could you.
Like so many, I admired the hell out of Betty Ford. Among many a Betty, she was my heroine. And that was long before she got sober, and long before her sobriety, and her story, and all that she did to help others with recovery, touched me as personally as it does now. When Gerald Ford died, I knew that losing Mrs. Ford was only a matter of time. Which makes this weekend sadder still. What a great woman - great enough to change the world.
Comments