Ford, Betty

▪ American first lady

née  Elizabeth Anne Bloomer 

born April 8, 1918, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.

      American first lady (1974–77), the wife of Gerald Ford (Ford, Gerald R.), 38th president of the United States, and founder of the Betty Ford Center, a facility dedicated to helping people recover from drug and alcohol dependence. She was noted for her strong opinions on public issues and her candour regarding intimate matters.

      Betty Bloomer was the only daughter of William Bloomer, a salesman, and Hortense Neahr Bloomer. When she was two years old the family, including her two older brothers, moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she attended public schools. At age eight she started dance lessons, reflecting an interest that she would maintain throughout her life. To earn spending money she taught dance to other children, and after graduating from high school in 1936 she spent two summers pursuing a dance career on the East Coast.

      She studied at Bennington College in Vermont, where she came under the influence of the legendary modern dancer, teacher, and choreographer Martha Graham (Graham, Martha). As Betty later wrote, Graham “more than anyone else…shaped my life.” When Graham accepted her into her New York City troupe, Betty moved to Manhattan's West Side. To augment her meager earnings as a dancer, she modeled with the John Robert Powers agency. Although she never became a principal dancer, Betty performed as one of Graham's auxiliaries and delighted in the modern dance technique that had become Graham's trademark.

      At her mother's insistence, Betty left the Graham troupe and returned to live in Grand Rapids, where she worked as a fashion consultant and taught dance to handicapped children. In 1942 she met and married William Warren. Details of the marriage are hazy, as Betty later insisted that she could remember very little about it. After five years, she divorced him.

      Soon after her divorce Betty met Gerald R. Ford, a local lawyer and partner in the law firm of Butterfield, Keeney, and Amberg. Gerald and Betty became engaged in February 1948, but they delayed the ceremony so that he could devote more time to his campaign for a seat in the House of Representatives (Representatives, House of). He arrived for the wedding on October 15, 1948, after a morning of greeting voters. His victory in November sent the young couple to Washington, D.C., where they lived for the next three decades. From 1950 to 1957 Betty gave birth to four children, three sons and one daughter.

      Because Gerald was away campaigning or speaking to Republican groups much of the time, the responsibilities of parenting fell mostly to Betty. She sometimes joked that the family car went to the emergency room so often that it could make the trip on its own. In the mid-1960s, when she developed a pinched nerve and spinal arthritis, doctors prescribed pain medicine, to which she became addicted, as she later admitted. Her own physical discomfort, combined with the stress of raising young children, prompted her to seek psychiatric treatment, which she later described as enormously helpful.

      Her life as the inconspicuous wife of a congressman ended in October 1973 when Vice President Spiro Agnew (Agnew, Spiro T.) resigned and President Richard Nixon (Nixon, Richard M.) named Gerald Ford to the job, the first time that the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (Constitution of the United States of America), which permitted the president to fill a vacancy in the office of vice president (subject to confirmation by a majority vote of both houses of Congress), was invoked. After Nixon was forced to resign over his involvement in the Watergate (Watergate Scandal) affair on August 9, 1974, Gerald became the first president who had never been elected president or vice president.

      Betty always had a reputation for candour, but she later said that the circumstances under which she became first lady underscored that predilection. She understood that, in the wake of Watergate, Americans demanded more honesty from their public officials. Her commitment to openness was soon tested. On September 28, 1974, just weeks after she moved into the White House, her doctors performed a mastectomy, removing her cancerous right breast. Previous president's wives had concealed their illnesses, especially those peculiar to women, but she and her husband decided to disclose the facts. Moved by her example, women all across the nation went to their physicians for examinations; Betty said it was then that she recognized the first lady's enormous power to make a difference. Although chemotherapy followed, she continued to perform her duties as first lady.

      Betty sometimes said that she admired Bess Truman (Truman, Bess) for her down-to-earth style and Eleanor Roosevelt (Roosevelt, Eleanor) for her independence, and she sought to emulate both. Only days after moving into the White House she met with reporters and surprised them by announcing that some of her views, including her support for Wade (Roe v. Wade)—the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion—resembled those of liberal Republicans more than those of her husband. She also vigorously supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), then up for ratification in several state legislatures, lobbying wavering representatives in phone calls and meetings. The amendment failed, however, when the requisite number of states failed to ratify it in the time allotted. Her critics objected that she should not have intervened, though her supporters praised her involvement.

 Betty gained national attention for her appearance on the television news program 60 Minutes in August 1975. When asked about her views on premarital sex, she said that she would not be surprised to learn that her 18-year-old daughter had had an affair. She said that, as a mother, she would counsel her daughter and try to find out something about the “young man.” When the program aired, the print media quoted her out of context, making her sound quite different than she did in the interview. Gerald said that, when he viewed the program, he calculated that it would cost him 10 million votes, but, when he read the printed version, he doubled the damage. His pessimism was unwarranted, however. Betty's popularity soared, and Time magazine later named her Woman of the Year. Although she gave no support to such efforts, buttons appeared promoting her candidacy for national office.

      After Gerald Ford narrowly lost the election of 1976 to Jimmy Carter (Carter, Jimmy), the Fords retired to Rancho Mirage, California, where Betty's dependence on prescription drugs continued. In early 1978, under pressure from her family, she agreed to enter a treatment centre in Long Beach, California. After her successful stay she founded the Betty Ford Center to treat others with similar addictions; the centre became very popular and attracted patients from all walks of life. Although much about her life was traditional, Betty Ford compiled a remarkably independent record as first lady, and she became enormously popular for her honesty and candour.

Betty Boyd Caroli

Additional Reading

Betty Ford and Chris Chase, The Times of My Life (1978), covers her life through the White House years, and Betty: A Glad Awakening (1987), discusses the years after 1977. A short biography is John Pope, “Betty (Elizabeth Ann Bloomer) Ford,” in Lewis L. Gould (ed.), American First Ladies (1996), pp. 536–555. Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, First Lady's Lady: With the Fords at the House House (1979), presents the perspective of Betty Ford's press secretary.

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