How Betty Ford Made History Inside The White House and Beyond

Betty Ford may be the most famous and least known First Lady in history.

Everyone recognizes the name—thanks in large part to the Betty Ford Clinic she co-founded in 1982 after coming out with her own battles with addiction—but few know anything beyond her health struggles, including a breast cancer diagnosis just two months after she became First Lady.

That’s all changing thanks to Showtime’s The First Lady, a limited series telling the real-life stories of three FLOTUSes: Eleanor Roosevelet (Gillian Anderson), Michelle Obama (Viola Davis), and Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer). Now, a new generation of Americans are poised to fall in love with the woman whose national popularity so eclipsed her spouse’s that his supporters wore “Betty’s Husband for President” buttons during his unsuccessful run for president in 1976.

Betty Ford and President Ford pictured in New York City 1975.

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“She’s hard not to love. It’s kind of insane, actually,” says Susanne Bier, who directs all 10 episodes of the series. “She was uncompromising and she was this endless well of charm while still being a deeply troubled person. Your heart goes out to her, but you’re still seduced by her wit and her warmth and her directness and her candor.”

That candor is as disarming today as it was at the time. Within weeks of becoming Second Lady upon Gerald Ford’s appointment as Richard Nixon’s vice president, Betty told the press that she took Valium every day and, when asked by Barbara Walters what she thought of Roe v. Wade, said, “I agree with the Supreme Court’s ruling. I think it’s time to bring abortion out of the backwoods and put it in the hospitals, where it belongs.” She shrugged off criticism, saying, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said it, but I couldn’t lie. That’s the way I feel.”

There’s no way to overestimate the effect Betty’s transparency had on a nation in the throes of Nixon’s downfall. Much like the rapid rise to national fame of Watergate whistleblower Martha Mitchell (played in the upcoming series Gaslit by Julia Roberts), Betty’s honesty and refreshing refusal to walk the party line was galvanizing. What led her to stay so uncompromisingly herself was a perfect confluence of events.

Dakota Fanning as Susan Ford, Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford and Aaron Eckhart as President Gerald Ford in The First Lady, airing now on Showtime.

Murray Close/SHOWTIME

Before she married Ford in 1948 at the age of 30, Betty Bloomer had already been married and divorced, with a career as a Martha Graham dancer in New York City in her past. By the time her husband became Vice President, she had 25 years of experience as a political wife. But she was delightfully unprepared for the national spotlight, in that she saw no reason to filter herself. Besides, when she and Ford discussed accepting Nixon’s offer, they agreed: Nothing about Ford’s retirement plans would change. He would serve his country, and then he would step down from public life at the end of Nixon’s second term.

Things didn’t quite work out that way. And just eight months after becoming VP, Ford was sworn in as president upon Nixon’s resignation. And Betty stepped into the national arena.

“I figured, OK, I’ll move to the White House, do the best I can and if they don’t like it, they can kick me out, but they can’t make me somebody I’m not,” Betty later wrote in her 1978 memoir, The Times of My Life. And through Ford’s presidency and re-election campaign, she stayed true to her word.

Betty Ford, at right, with Elizabeth Taylor and Halston at Studio 54 in 1979.

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What she accomplished between 1974 and 1977 is almost immeasurable, and is finally getting its due in The First Lady. She immediately caused a stir by telling reporters that she and the President would be sharing a bed, something that was shocking at the time. But the Fords were always an affectionate couple deeply in love; in a 1975 interview with McCall’s, Betty mock complained that the press had asked her everything but how often she slept with her husband. If they had, she told the reporter, her answer would be “as often as possible!” Then she added that “pillow talk” was one of her avenues for pushing the ERA to the president, a cause for which she heavily campaigned.

A First Lady who spoke about having sex with her husband was unheard of. As was Betty’s public announcement that she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer and had a radical mastectomy, not quite two months after moving into the White House. At the time, breast cancer was simply not publicly discussed. But both Fords agreed: After the secrecy of the Nixon presidency, they had to be as open about this as they planned to be about everything else.

Within days of announcing the First Lady’s diagnosis and mastectomy, so many women had gone to their doctors for breast exams that the incidence of breast cancer rose 15 percent, a phenomenon that became known as the “Betty Ford blip.” Overnight, Betty Ford brought breast cancer into the open, saving thousands of lives in the process.

Betty Ford, who served as First Lady from 1974 to 1977. 

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Michelle Pfeiffer as Ford in The First Lady.

Murray Close/SHOWTIME

She’d do the same after leaving the White House, when she was open about her struggles with substance abuse, stemming from painkillers she was prescribed for a pinched nerve in 1964. Not only did she put a face to addiction, she opened the first rehab center to dedicate an equal number of beds to women as to men. In many ways, the lasting legacy of Ford’s presidency is Betty. And her time in the spotlight still serves as a needed lesson in politics.

“She was less about partisan politics and much more about morale and being a human being,” Bier says. “Which, in the end, politics really should be but rarely is.”

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