Illustration by Lusco y Fusco
There is no name more synonymous with addiction recovery than Betty Ford. During her time as first lady, and well into the 1970s, Ford struggled with alcoholism and addiction to opioids herself. She is now perhaps best known for founding the Betty Ford Center (now merged with the family of rehab centers known as Hazelden) to help addicts end their addictions.
What Betty Ford did — establishing a model for addiction recovery — was groundbreaking. In doing so, she pioneered rehab as we know it today. To date, the Betty Ford Center has treated more than 100,000 men, women, and their families, and that number will continue to rise as Hazelden is brought into the fold.
But it was addiction that found her knocking on heaven’s door.
“I liked alcohol,” she said, writing in her 1987 memoir, The Times of My Life. “It made me feel warm. And I loved pills. They took away my tension and pain.”
Initially in denial about her addiction, Ford once said, “My makeup wasn’t smeared. I wasn’t disheveled, I behaved politely, and I never finished off a bottle, so how could I be alcoholic?”
In 1964, she was diagnosed with malignant breast cancer and underwent a masectomy. She raised public awareness about cancer, openly discussing her travails with the disease.
After telling her breast cancer story in a 1964 edition of Newsweek magazine, 60,000 letters flooded the White House from fellow breast cancer sufferers, survivors, and sympathizers, often dovetailed with contributions to the American Cancer Society.
During those early 1960s, a doctor gave her prescription pain pills for a pinched nerve. The condition resulted in chronic muscle spasms, arthritis, and a numbed left neck, shoulder, and arm.
Valium snatched her immediately. She became addicted and continued to take the pills leading up to her sobriety.
In her time at the White House, Ford was beloved among her husband’s constituents. Bumper stickers and buttons said “Vote For Betty’s Husband” during Gerald Ford’s primary campaign for the Republican nomination in 1974, an election in which he lost to Jimmy Carter.
After her husband’s term, Ford’s alcohol and drug use escalated.
“I knew I was an alcoholic because I was preoccupied whether alcohol was going to be served or not,” she said in her memoir.
Despite her addiction, in the 1970s, Ford advocated to establish equality for women — including equal pay for equal work and a woman’s right to choose — and was a champion of breast cancer research. She boldly supported the Equal Rights Amendment and heftily campaigned for it to pass, lobbying politicians and state legislatures. Her efforts earned her the title of a Time magazine Woman of the Year in 1975.
Today, states continue to ratify the ERA, most recently Illinois, which passed a ratification bill in April 2018. Illinois is the 37th state to ratify the ERA. The amendment only needs one more state to hop on board to be certified.
As she continued to drink and drug throughout the 1970s, Ford’s addiction to Valium and alcohol deepened. At her peak, she was taking 20 Valium pills a day.
Her family staged an intervention in 1978, prompting her to enter treatment at Long Beach Naval Hospital for drug and alcohol rehabilitation. She achieved sobriety shortly thereafter.
In 1982, she established the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, CA, a resort city two hours east of Los Angeles near Joshua Tree National Park. The Betty Ford Center focused on treatment of addiction as well as treating children of alcoholics. The 20-acre campus was the first rehab to appear glamorous, with its own swimming pool. But rehab at Betty Ford isn’t all poolside relaxation. On the contrary, it’s marked by rigorous routine, with attendees waking up at 6:30AM every day before their morning meditation on the banks of a duck pond, while listening to meditation music on their iPods (the only electronic device allowed on campus). The Betty Ford Center’s signature is its intensive group therapy sessions, and other features of the facility include yoga classes, acupuncture, and evening group walks in the Palm Springs desert.
In 2014, the Betty Ford Center merged with the Hazelden Foundation to form the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation.
Ford was a moderate Republican who went against the grain of the conservative Republican faction that would emerge. In sobriety, she advocated for same-sex marriage and gay rights in the workplace. She also served as an early fighter in the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Her interests extended into pop culture. Always passionate about dance, she had founded her own dance school at age 14, teaching students the foxtrot and the waltz. In her later years, Ford busted out disco moves, wore a mood ring, and had a cameo on the Mary Tyler Moore show, the first first lady to appear on a sitcom.
For her advocacy on behalf of addicts as well as her role as a proponent of women’s rights, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H.W. Bush in 1991,
Betty Ford died in July of 2011, at the age of 93, and is buried at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Ann Arbor, MI. Geoffrey Mason, a former client of the center who went on to become a member of the center’s board of directors, gave one of the eulogies for Ford:
The more confidence we were able to build within ourselves, and the more we watched and listened to your regular talks of reassurance and support, the more we began to understand what this thing called recovery was all about. And you were the one who introduced us to all to this, Betty. You were the one who helped us understand.
