Read about Betty Ford’s Dance.
Do it.
Now.
And after that you can read my Betty Ford story.
I had several meetings with President Gerald Ford in the years after he left the White House. On one occasion I helped him go through his garage to find things for the Ford Museum.
One of the items we ran across — the garage was stuffed full — was a mover’s wardrobe holding six suits. These had been packed when Ford left his home in Alexandria, Virginia, to move to the White House when Nixon resigned in August 1974. The whole event was rather unprecedented, of course, and Ford had forgotten the suits packed some four-and-a-half years earlier. He asked that the wardrobe carton be taken into the house.
The next day we ran across another wardrobe with another six suits hanging in it. This time he was more circumspect. He asked that it be taken into the house but, he said, “Don’t let Mrs. Ford see it. She wouldn’t let me keep the suits in the other one.”
The former most powerful man on earth was nervous that his wife wouldn’t let him save some old suits. There was a whole lot of Mr. Ford’s character in that incident, I thought — qualified ego, self-deprecating humor, thrift.
And now that she’s gone I realize that there was a lot of Betty Ford’s character in that incident, too.