“EXCLUSIVE: MISSING BETTY FORD”

By Mary Thom
July 14, 2011

The author, editor of the WMC Exclusives, recalls a moment decades ago that encapsulates the power and purpose of the former First Lady, who died last week at the age of 93.

I saw Betty Ford in person for my first and only time in November 1977. She was seated next to Rosalyn Carter, and they shared the stage with Maya Angelou and New York’s Bella Abzug, the former congresswoman who had written the legislation governing the National Women’s Conference in Houston. The current and former first ladies were honorary co-chairs of the conference, and Lady Bird Johnson was there as well, about to introduce the keynote speaker, Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

 

As the wife of a Republican former president, Betty Ford seemed completely comfortable sitting on the dais with her Democratic counterparts. A member of her party, Representative Robert Dornan of California, called it “the greatest tragedy of all” that she and the other first ladies were sitting “properly with their hands in their lap” alongside of Bella Abzug, “approving of sexual perversion and the murder of young people in their mothers’ wombs.” His outrage referred to two of the 26 planks that the widely representative national delegates had brought to Houston from their state conferences and were about to pass overwhelmingly: one favoring gay and lesbian rights—including the right to serve openly in the military—and one demanding the continuing right to abortion and reproductive freedom.

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