It's Friday, April 8, 2022, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation intended to be uplifting. Today's inspiring lines come from former first lady Betty Ford, who was born 104 years ago today.
While in the White House, Mrs. Ford, who died in 2011, faced breast cancer with courage and a level of candor rare for her time. After leaving public office, she did it again -- this time in facing up to chemical dependency.
The future Betty Ford was born on April 8, 1918, in Chicago. She was the third child, and only daughter, of Hortense and William Bloomer, a traveling salesman for the Royal Rubber Co. The family moved briefly to Denver before settling in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
A lithe and active little girl, Betty showed an early aptitude for dance, which she later described as "my happiness." She was 16 when her father died from carbon monoxide poisoning, and her hobby became a source of income for the family. As the Great Depression took hold, Betty Bloomer gave dance lessons to make ends meet and modeled at a Grand Rapids department store. She had bigger plans, however, and after graduating from high school she was accepted at the Bennington School of Dance in Vermont, where she became a protégé of the famed dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, whom she followed to New York.
Reluctantly following her mother's entreaties, Betty returned to Grand Rapids and immersed herself in the community: opening her own dance studio, working as a fashion coordinator in a local department store and dating a salesman named Bill Warren. Regarding this last endeavor, her mom's domineering personality backfired. As Betty explained in her 1978 autobiography, "My mother and stepfather were not enthusiastic about Bill Warren, which made him all the more alluring to me."
But a spirit of rebellion isn't enough to sustain a marriage, and this one dissipated after five years. Then, along came another suitor, an All-American football player from Michigan just out of the Navy -- a handsome and ambitious fellow named Gerald R. Ford.
Betty married Jerry Ford, campaigned with him, followed him to Washington after he was elected to Congress, raised four kids with him, and then followed him into the White House when he unexpectedly became president during the crucible of Watergate.
As first lady, Betty Ford openly endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment, emerging as an unlikely prototype: Republican mother and feminist. If some White House aides preferred her to be a little less outspoken, the president wouldn't hear of it.
A year after they left the White House for California -- just before Betty's 60th birthday -- the Ford family did an intervention: Her twin additions to alcohol and pain medication were killing her, her family insisted -- and it was killing them to watch it. So Betty checked into the Long Beach Naval Hospital's anti-dependency program, a stint that she credited with saving her life. In gratitude, she threw herself into the issue. She spoke about it publicly, as was her wont, and launched the Betty Ford Treatment Center in Rancho Mirage, California.
"She was a great liberator," presidential historian Richard Norton Smith said at her 2011 funeral. "She not only liberated women, she liberated us from the crippling limits of labels. Mrs. Ford was the feminist next door, a free spirit with a dress code. Above all, she was a wife and mother."
"She had so many contributions, so many lives she changed for the better and even saved by her example and her effort," added Lynne Cheney. "She not only became her own woman, but showed many others how to do the same."
Steve Ford's remembrances that day induced both tears and laughter among the mourners, especially when he described his mother's disbelief when he confided to her his own alcoholism. "You can't be in denial," the Fords' youngest son told her. "You're, like, Betty Ford. You're the poster child for this thing!"
By then, the American people knew Mrs. Ford the same way her family did. Shortly after becoming first lady, Betty discovered a lump in her right breast. By opening the discussion of her treatment, which included a mastectomy, she helped destigmatized a disease that women of her generation often hid, setting an example that has almost certainly saved and prolonged the lives of untold numbers of American women.
"It isn't vanity to worry about disfigurement," she said. "It is an honest concern. I started wearing low-cut dresses as soon as the scar healed, and my worries about my appearance are now just the normal ones of staying slim and keeping my hair kempt and the make-up in order. When I asked myself whether I would rather lose a right arm or a breast, I decided I would rather have lost a breast."
Women of Betty Ford's generation didn't discuss "breasts" in public. She did. Those remarks came in a 1975 speech to the American Cancer Society. And she had more to say.
"That is the medical side," she continued. "Cancer also produces fear -- and much of that fear comes from ignorance about the progress already made and ignorance of the need for preventive medicine for men and women alike. Cancer wherever it strikes the body, also strikes the spirit, and the best doctors in the world cannot cure the spirit. Only love and understanding can accomplish this important role.
"All of us can give love and support to our friends who have cancer. We can open our hearts and our minds to dealing with the fears that the victims have, and also the fears many of us have of the disease itself."
She ended her speech this way: "I believe we are all here to help each other and that our individual lives have patterns and purposes. My illness turned out to have a very special purpose -- helping save other lives, and I am grateful for what I was able to do."
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.