'Have a Helluva Good Time'

Betty Ford still refers to it as "the time when the roof caved in"--the time when an unassuming Middle American political family suddenly had to move from a modest four-bedroom suburban Virginia home into the mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. "I really didn't want to come here," the First Lady told TIME Washington Correspondent Bonnie Angelo in the White House last week. "I was afraid because of the social demands, and I didn't think of it as a meaningful position for me." Adds her daughter Susan: "At first the idea of the presidency scared us, especially the kids. We were afraid we would become too public, that everyone would get wrapped up in their own things and we wouldn't be a family any more." Her stoutest encouragement came from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 91, who still remembers when she herself moved into the White House at the age of 17. Said she to Susan: "Have a helluva good time!"

Since Ford took office, the entire family has been together in the White House only once--last month, when the President insisted on a reunion. On that occasion the picture was taken that appears on TIME's cover; the First Lady presented it to her husband as a birthday gift. Yet as far-flung as the Ford children are, the family's solidarity remains its chief feature, along with a freewheeling independence of mind that all the Fords--including the President --nurture and relish.

That is one way the family surmounts crises: each member faces problems headon. Betty Ford has been the most badly hit, during the past year, by the discovery of a cancerous tumor that required removal of her right breast last September. But aside from a regimen of daily pills for one week out of every six, she has been able to ignore the disease and it has made no reappearance since her operation. She also suffers from a painful arthritic back, but even that rarely darkens her spirits. Despite her husband's mammoth work load, she finds that it has not come between them. "Evenings we usually spend together, both working while we sit in the den or maybe watch TV," she says. She also has unique occasions to lobby the President. "You might call it 'pillow talk,' " she says with a grin. "I definitely think I have influenced him on women's issues. There's a woman in the Cabinet--and I suggested that. Now if I can get a woman on the Supreme Court, I'll be batting 1.000."

She has been a forthright spokeswoman for the Equal Rights Amendment and liberalized abortion laws, and has calmly brushed aside the criticism she knew would be coming. "When somebody asks you how you stand on an issue, you're very foolish if you try to beat around the bush--you just meet yourself going around the bush the other way." On the other hand, she admits that when she occasionally disagrees with her husband, she "wouldn't want to embarrass him by opposing his position [in public]. That I'll do in the privacy of our own sitting room."

The independence of the Ford children has not been curbed by their father's new position. They go their own way--with occasionally bewildered Secret Service men in tow. In many ways the strongest family member seems to be the youngest, Susan, who turned 18 this month. With private quarters to herself on the third floor of the White House, Susan has artfully and unassumingly adjusted to the demands of a life more scrutinized--and more pampered--than any that most teen-agers ever know. "But we clean our own rooms," she says. "That's orders from Mother, and it always has been that way."

Susan is currently established, however, in a motel in Topeka, Kans., for a six-week summer internship as a staff photographer for the Topeka State Journal and Daily Capital. For $115 per week, she is learning the essentials of photographic journalism from Picture Editor Rich Clarkson, who last week took her on her biggest assignment so far: shooting the Apollo launch at Cape Canaveral. After creditably snapping such routine newspaper subjects as a local Girl Scout painting exhibition, a county land auction, and a full-page spread on marriage counseling (some scenes of which had to be reshot in a second session), Susan seemed to Clarkson to be ready for the tougher Canaveral assignment. Calling her work there "much more disciplined," Clarkson ran three of her better pictures in the paper.

Since she arrived in Topeka two weeks ago, her sole out-of-town visitor has been Brian McCartney, 26, a ski patrolman from Northbrook, Ill., whom Susan met during a Ford family ski outing at Vail, Colo., in December. After she puts in her 7 1/2-hr. day, Susan usually spends her evenings alone, cooking her own dinner, which she sometimes shares with Secret Service men. When her internship is over, Susan will join her parents at Vail for a family vacation before entering Mount Vernon College in the fall. She would like a car, but since there is no money for one in her parents' budget, she will be driven from the White House to school by the Secret Service.

As single-minded as Susan is Jack, 23, who moved into the White House last month after earning a B.S. degree in forestry from Utah State University. He has become a full-time aide in the presidential campaign (TIME, July 21), and in private conversations with his father he has not hesitated to disagree.

Outspoken as he knows his son to be, even the President may be somewhat taken aback by a recent expression of Jack's feelings on a subject that he feels very strongly about: the environment. When Columnist William V. Shannon grumbled in the Washington Star that a recent Ford speech on pollution "thickened the air with additional noxious materials," an infuriated Jack fired off a reply to the paper: "I can't help but feel that armchair conservationists like Mr. Shannon only cloud the water and do damage to an important effort."

But Jack has few reasons to fume during his current stay. He has thoroughly enjoyed being on the stump with his father. To make certain his son looks his part, the President has suggested that Jack purchase a tuxedo ("You'll be needing it now") and start teeing off, as the President frequently does, at Burning Tree golf club in Maryland. Jack has begun to taste the pleasures of such perks as flight in the presidential helicopter. Recently, in fact, Jack slung his 6-ft. 1-in. frame into the helicopter seat that is normally reserved for the Commander in Chief. A moment later his father boarded the craft, looked down at his son, and growled affectionately, "You're not the President yet." Jack sheepishly gave up his seat as a Ford aide on board quipped, "It's all yours for only 270 electoral votes."

The Ford child who most shuns life in official Washington is Steve, 19, who is currently off in Montana's Scapegoat Mountains, studying grizzly bears with John Craighead, professor of forestry and zoology at the University of Montana. So remote is the group's location that supplies--and even letters from the White House--can only be carried in by mule and packhorse every ten days. The shyest of the four children, Steve may also be the most physically daring. Taking time off after high school to work at a ranch, he has spent recent months roping, riding, broncobusting, and wrestling wild steers. A lover of the outdoors like all the Fords, he will enter Utah State this fall, where, like his brother Jack, he will pursue his interests in forestry and environment.

The deepest inner resources in the Ford family seem to belong to Mike, 25, who has a year and a half of study to complete on his master's in theology at Gordon-Conwell Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass. Mike and Wife Gayle, 24, live a few miles away in tiny Essex, Mass. (pop. 2,899). When not immersed in the intensive summer Hebrew course he takes three nights a week, Mike is usually to be found studying at home, playing tennis with Gayle or tending the small garden plot lent them by a neighbor. Gayle, whose father is a junior high school principal in Catonsville, Md., met Mike when they were students at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. They both worship in an Episcopal church, and Mike is preparing himself for the Christian youth work he one day hopes to take up.

The only irritant that he and Gayle endure as relatives of the President is the constant presence of Secret Service men; at least two follow him everywhere. But that is the extent of his contact with officialdom. He and Gayle make only rare visits to Washington, although they talk to the President or Mrs. Ford at least once a week by telephone. Mike insists that the family's times together now, though rarer, are somehow more precious for being less frequent. "I've found we've really cherished our time together," he says, "just sitting around talking and showing each other pictures. I think the joy of those times has become intensified."

That could almost serve as a motto of the Ford family's stay in the White House: when pomp threatens to overwhelm any proceeding, the Fords counter with their disarming lack of pretension. "I had never thought about being First Lady," says the President's wife. "So I decided--I'm just going to be Betty Bloomer Ford." She both has and hasn't, and that may be her chief charm and canniest success as First Lady. Not long ago, after the White House domestic staff had turned in for the night, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger came up to the family quarters to report to the President on his latest diplomatic trip. Betty Ford, wearing bathrobe and slippers, wandered in and asked hospitably what both men would like to drink. Kissinger asked for coffee; the president wanted tea. After a disconcertingly long stay in the kitchen, the First Lady emerged with two cups in hand, and apologized for taking so long--she had been unable to find the coffee and tea in a kitchen she hardly knew at all. If that scene was a bit informal for the White House, nobody minded in the least.

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