Betty Ford breaking the rules

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33929, 23 August 1975, Page 6

Betty Ford breaking the rules

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LEWIS CLARK,

of the Obserer Foreign News Service.)

WASHINGTON. Eleanor Roosevelt, the godmother of an entire generation of American liberals, wrote the rules for the wife of a modern American President. Betty Ford, a former ballet dancer whose importance to history is altogether accidental, is| smashing them. The symbolism is satisfying to .hose (and they are a growing number) who perceive in the Presidency of Gerald Ford the end, at last, of the brave and optimistic world of which Eleanor Roosevelt was a part, and a part-creator. Betty Ford herself, though, is likely to be unconscious of any such symbolism. She is a plain lady, sensible and truthful, who has spent most of her adult life trying to be both parents to a brood of healthy, youngsters whose father was perpetually politicking. That is why she dares to> break Eleanor Roosevelt’s! rules. She does not. to put it crudely, know what she is doing.

Eleanor Roosevelt converted the position of First Lady from a social to a political role. She was a professional in a position usually held by amateurs, and she used that position as a means of power, both to sustain her husband in office and to pursue, long after his death, her many liberal causes and crusades. Embarrassing None of her successors could measure up to her standards —but none defied them. Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower both filled competently the role of managing their households while presenting to I the outer world a tidy image; of the motherliness that' Americans are reputed to I expect, even to this day, i from the wives of prominent men. And they avoided embarrassing their husbands. By Roosevelt standards, it was: the least they could do, but! it was enough. Jacqueline Kennedy had a harder time of it. She fan-1 cied herself more artist than ■ patron, a dangerous assumption because it is well nigh I

impossible to be simulta-l neously a dilettante and an < asset to the American Presi- ! dency. I But she was surrounded at , all crucial times, and ’ prodded and guided and 1 shoved, by squads of Ken- . nedys who understood the • game almost as well as . Eleanor, who invented it. Only after her husband’s ’ death did she take her re-! ’lvenge by marrying an eld- ! erly Greek millionaire, an action so precisely calcu-

lated to destroy the image which the Kennedys had fashioned for her that it invited suspicions of Freudian I motivation. After her came Lady Bird Johnson, pure corn, about whom a book might be written but who is harshly dismissed with the observation that Texans don’t count. Next came Patricia Nixon. Pat Nixon: for 30 years she sat beside her husband, knees prim, hands lightly clasped, attention unwaveringly fixed on the speech which she had heard more often than anybody else. She was exploited ml her plain Republican cloth! coat during the Checkers, speech in 1952 when Richard! Nixon used her so maw-: kishly to answer corruption, charges. And she stood erect! beside her husband after! Watergate. Strait-jacket Not once did she whimper.! not once did her attention, stray, not once did the dis-l ciplined calm give way be-; fore the outrageous mis-j fortunes to which her hus-: band subjected her. Eleanor.! who never had need of such; loyalty or courage, would l

I surely have approved of Pat ’Nixon. . Through all this ran some constant themes: whatever I her talents, the wife of the ‘ President was enjoined by ! Eleanor’s rules to recognise the political and public character of her position, and to subordinate her words and actions to her husband’s political needs. In effect, she put the First Lady into a strait-jacket, and she succeeded only because she herself wore it so loosely, her standard was not a code of manners, it was the professional’s hardbitten assumption that whatever works is right. The cardinal law was never risk her husband’s interests and within that framework the First Lady might pursue her own career, succour charities, clean up junk yards, or conduct a mawkish correspondence with poets. Unprepared The trouble with the Ford family was that its members were never groomed for the White House. Gerald Ford, a reasonably obscure Congressman even after he became the Minority Leader, pursued his own career and left his family to do the same. If anything, he neglected them. The family life rested on conservative foundations of integrity. Christianity,- tolerance, reasonableness. Both Fords had the confidence and the discipline to carry it off. The children are pleasant in a puppyish way, slow and forthright, and not above criticising the lonely career imposed on their, mother. life which their father's By Eleanor Roosevelt’s standards, it would be suicidal to place the individual members of such a family before the television cameras where interviewers can throw baited questions at them. Yet Mrs Ford’s confidence, and her certainty about the propriety of her own behaviour, carries her through. She dealt without selfconsciousness with her cancer and the mastectomy which it made necessary. She even yielded blandly to the pressure from the anticancer lobbies to use her experience to urge other women to submit to exam-j inations for breast cancer.

Her attitude was similar recently when Morley Safer, a rough television interviewer, asked her how she would deal with an illegitimate pregnancy of her daughter. Mrs Ford felt • no need to acknowledge the prurient interest in the ques-

tion — Susan Ford is a pretty and busty girl — nor to pretend to an innocence that, in this day and age, would be beyond belief. She dealt with the ques-j tion openly. She would dis-| cuss the pregnancy with her daughter. She would like to know what substance there might be to the relationship. She thought it was a bit premature f.o worry about it. But of course Susan Ford was old enough to fall pregnant. The uproar that followed was predictable. Eleanor’s rules had been breached. Betty Ford, even-tempered as ever and slightly bemused by the silliness of public life, didn’t care a great deal. And neither, fortunately, did her husband. Eleanor Roosevelt might have found it hard to believe — and the Kennedys still don’t believe it — but this family’s strength lies in the refusal to pay any price, bear any burden for anything, least of all for the painful privileges of the White House. — O.F.N.S. Copyright.

. Betty Ford, the American President’s wife, has said in a television interview that pre-marital rela- , tions “with the right partner” might lower the divorce rate. She also said she would not be surprised if her 18-year-old daughter, Susan, were to have an affair. For making these remarks, Mrs Ford , has been condemned and praised ail over the world. In this article, Lewis Clark compares Mrs Ford favourably with other ’ Presidential wives.