Insider reveals heartbreaking phrases that saved drug addict First Lady’s life

Poor Betty Ford had no idea what was about to hit her.

Still wearing her pastel pink bathrobe, she sat, almost swallowed by the couch in her new home at Rancho Mirage, California, surrounded by 12 of her nearest and dearest.

They were about to deliver the harshest truths she would ever have to hear.

The result would not just save Betty Ford’s life, but those of tens of thousands of others who have found help and hope through her addiction foundation.

If there is a ‘celebrity rehab clinic’, the Betty Ford Foundation is it – having treated Robert Downey Jr, Keith Urban, Drew Barrymore, Liz Taylor, Lindsay Lohan, Ozzy Osbourne and countless others since it was founded in 1982.

But four years earlier, Betty herself was in the depths of a serious addiction to pills and booze.

It had started, as is so often the case, when she was prescribed opioids to deal with the pain from a pinched nerve.

That had escalated until she was hooked on a cocktail of medication – pain pills, sleeping pills, pills to counteract the side-effects of other pills – and, of course, alcohol.

‘I had watched her pour a large glass of vodka over ice at nine every morning and nurse it until four in the afternoon,’ says Bob Barrett, Ford’s chief of staff. ‘She would then pour another that lasted until dinner, when the drinks began to flow more freely.

‘Far too many nights I had seen her end the evening in an extreme state of intoxication.’

So, late on March 31, 1978, a year after the couple had left the White House, Betty Ford’s youngest daughter, Susan, had called Barrett in desperation.

‘Mom’s going to die if we don’t do something,’ she said.

‘We’re going to do this intervention thing with her. You’ve got to get him home.’

‘Him’ was her father, former US President Gerald Ford, who at that moment was sleeping in bed thousands of miles away, preparing to give a speech in Maryland.

Barrett recalls: ‘No was clearly not an option. Susan was the perfect blend of her mother and her father: tough, beautiful, and smart.’

So he made the necessary arrangements, found a replacement speaker, and got Ford on the next flight to California, ‘to ambush his wife.’

At the age of 35, Barrett was asked to serve as military aide to Richard Nixon. Less than a month later, he was assigned to his replacement, Gerald Ford.

The man responsible for carrying the ‘nuclear football’, the suitcase that contains the American nuclear codes, Barrett was not allowed to let Ford out of his sight. As such, few people were as close to the former president as he was. He went on to serve the family for nearly three decades

Writing in his new memoir, Inside the President’s Team: Family, Service, and the Gerald Ford Presidency, he describes his former boss and friend as ‘the most decent, honorable, trustworthy person I ever met.

‘He was 98 percent koala bear and 2 percent grizzly, and he and his lovely, force-of-nature wife brought me into the orbit of their family and made me feel like a son.’

His closeness to the family – both professionally and personally – meant he was one of the 12 hand-picked people to be in the room for Betty Ford’s life-changing intervention.

Everyone had flown in or driven from all over the country to confront the former First Lady.

Says Barrett: ‘Susan had traveled the shortest distance geographically, living in the desert nearby, but had come the furthest emotionally, having watched her mother deteriorate by the day.’

Also present was Navy captain and psychiatrist Dr Joseph Pursch, who ran the Alcohol Rehabilitation Service at the Navy’s Long Beach Regional Medical Center.

‘He had sobered up some of the toughest birds in the world – drunken sailors – and had sent them back out to sea. Now he’d try to do the same for Betty – the intervention was his show.’

Completing the group were Mike, Jack, and Steve – the Ford sons – Mike’s wife, Gayle; the family’s former housekeeper Clara Powell, who had at times acted as a surrogate mother to the Ford children; a nurse, Betty’s personal assistant; and Dr Joseph Cruse, Betty and Susan’s personal physician, himself a recovering alcoholic.

‘Dr Pursch gave us our marching orders,’ writes Barrett. ‘There would be resentment, anger, and crying on Betty’s part, but we had to stand firm and be brutally honest with her. Her survival might depend on it. Pain was part of the process of healing.’

He continues: ‘Betty’s initial surprise and delight at seeing her sons on her doorstep gave way to apprehension as the rest of us trooped in and she saw the somber expressions on our faces. This was not a happy occasion.

‘Her husband took her hand, led her into the sunken living room, and sat beside her on the couch. We all followed.’

Betty, writes Barrett, looked small and frail, ‘like a doll, lost in the cushions, confusion written all over her face.

‘Jerry put his arm around her. “We’re doing this because we love you,” he repeated several times. Then he said, “Mike, you start.”’

One by one, the couple’s children faced their mom and told her how her addictions had affected them. It was brutally, searingly honest.

‘Betty’s oldest son began by saying he understood the pressures she had been under as the wife of a successful Washington politician and as the mother of four children.

‘But her chemical dependency was destroying her relationship with their dad, with the children, and with her friends. She had too much to lose. “Your life is too valuable to let it go.”’

Gayle was next, and she pulled no punches, telling Betty that, while she was constantly asking the couple when they were going to give her grandchildren, there was no way she’d have a child until her mother-in-law got sober.

‘It was too much for Betty. Resentment, rage, then tears filled her eyes. She wanted to speak, stand up for herself, but Dr Pursch quieted her. “Betty, please, just listen.”’

She shrank into the sofa as Jack described being too embarrassed to bring friends home as a teenager. Now an adult, he recalled driving down to see her and not even being sure she’d known he was there.

Her husband repeated: ‘Betty, we love you.’ But his words only seemed to sharpen her pain.

‘Steve remembered all the times he had visited her, thinking she might be lonely, only to have one-sided conversations as she drifted off. He would quietly and sadly leave, driving back home.

‘Now Betty was shaking, as if being shaken awake from those lost conversations with her son.’

Susan was last. She’d been the one to make the phone calls and bring the family together. Now she was lost for words, and all she could do was sob, burying her face in Clara’s shoulder.

Finally, though, she found her voice.

‘Mom, when I was little, and even as I grew up, I always admired you for being a dancer. I wanted to be just like you. But now, these days, you’re falling and clumsy. You’re not the same person. And I’ve talked to you about things – things that were important to me, and the next day you didn’t even remember.’

Betty, reluctantly, agreed to a four-week rehab program and, a week later, sat in Dr Joe Pursch’s office with her husband and Barrett, ready to check in. 

But first, it was important she acknowledge the full extent of her demons.

‘We all knew the drugs weren’t the only addiction Betty was battling,’ writes Barrett, ‘and perhaps not even the main one, but it had been hard enough on her and the family to confront the pain meds issue.’

Dr Pursch nudged her: ‘Well, Mrs. Ford, is there anything else you would like to tell us before going into the rehab program?’ 

Betty thought for a moment then said there wasn’t.

‘Are you sure?’ Pursch asked again. ‘There’s nothing else you need to tell me?’

‘No, no. I can’t think of anything,’ she said.

If her treatment was to be successful, it was imperative she be honest with herself and her doctors, so he pressed a third time.

‘Please, Mrs. Ford. I need you to seriously consider this. Are you confident there’s nothing else we need to address when you enter this program?’

Finally, she broke down, weeping uncontrollably.

‘Well, maybe alcohol,’ she said between sobs, ‘maybe the booze.’

‘In one of the tenderest moments I witnessed between these two, and there were many during the three decades I spent with them,’ writes Barrett, ‘the president reached over and gently held her hands.

‘This man, who once held the most powerful position in the entire world, had lived with and loved an alcoholic for at least 20 years.

‘As far as I knew, and I knew a lot, he had never confronted her about it. Seeing her break down and accept the truth, he began to cry as well.

‘“Goddammit, you two,” the Boy Scout who rarely said a curse word said to the doctor and me, “she’s said she’s going in there. Now make it happen!”’

Barrett writes: ‘Sometimes, when a thing is cracked – a mirror, a bone, a person – you have to break it before you can fix it. On that day, Betty Ford was broken.

‘Her recovery would be long and hard, but most importantly it had begun. The Betty Ford we all knew and loved was pulling herself out of the bottle.’

She launched the first clinic in Rancho Mirage in 1982, and the following year welcomed one of her most famous clients: Elizabeth Taylor.

Drew Barrymore was just 13 when she entered the Clinic, and returned the following year after a suicide attempt. She has been sober since 2019.

Ozzy Osbourne believed he was going to an exclusive drink and drugs den when he was persuaded to check in for treatment in 1986 – and immediately asked where the bar was.

And in 2016, Aaron Carter reported that Robert Downey Jr had left him and fellow patients a message on a cork board at the Betty Ford Clinic after his stay, telling them: ‘I am here with you all.’

Inside the President’s Team: Family, Service, and the Gerald Ford Presidency by Bob Barrett is published by Pegasus Books, January 7