What It Takes to be Beloved

Rick Perlstein finds the key to Betty Ford at a yard sale:

Betty Ford always seemed to be vindicated in the controversial things she kept doing. Which, of course, is one of the definitions of a genuine leader. One afternoon four years ago in Beaver Creek, a Colorado resort, I saw it for myself.

A year after Gerald Ford’s death, Betty Ford closed up the family house in Vail, Colo., and was offering its contents for sale at a conference center in Beaver Creek. A smaller, outer room contained items of lesser value: cassette tapes President Ford dubbed from friends (John Philip Sousa, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir); books by John Grisham and Danielle Steel; period relics like “The Women’s Liberation Board Game” with a sticker reading “Property of Gerald and Betty Ford.” (I’ll forever regret being too cheap to shell out the $20 for that item.)

The second room held more valuable items, including books inscribed by their authors. Few were signed to the president. When Americans sent gifts to the Fords, they usually sent them to Betty.

The authors, most of them obscure, had written recovery memoirs and cancer memoirs and feminist manifestos, autobiographies bearing witness to struggles of every description. They had never met Betty Ford. But they wrote to her with an intimacy that was almost embarrassing for an outsider to read, as if they were writing to a loved one. Which, in a certain sense, they were. She had taught them how not to feel ashamed.

I’ll never forget something else. A surprising number were gay men. Take that, Mr. Satirical Columnist Whose Name No One Remembers: Betty Ford openly discussed homosexuality. I didn’t know she had made the insanity of shaming same-sex desire any sort of special cause. Only one obituary I found noted, in passing, any interest in gay rights. I didn’t find any references in an online search of historical newspapers.

But she must have said something. She probably said it long before any other “respectable” public figure dared. Because that’s what she always did. That courage made her more of a hero than most of us ever imagined.

Liberals honor personal honor and integrity over ideology.