The Candid and Frank Betty Ford

In my latest CNN column, I write about Betty Ford's candid and frank speaking style:

The role of first lady is one of the most difficult in American public life. Few women have struggled with the role as passionately and poignantly as Betty Ford, who died this week at 93.

Betty Ford arrived in the White House at the same time that the new media culture arrived on TV. It suddenly became permissible for journalists to ask questions that no respectable journalist would have ever dared ask before. And it was not Betty Ford's nature to leave a question unanswered, once asked.

In 1975, Betty Ford sat down with Morley Safer of "60 Minutes."

Safer: What if Susan Ford (who was then 18 years old) came to you and said, 'Mother... I'm having an affair'?

Betty Ford: Well, I wouldn't be surprised. I would think she's a perfectly normal human being, like all young girls.

Betty Ford shared with the nation her views of her children's marijuana use. (She guessed that, yes, they had tried it.) She shared the information that she and President Gerald Ford slept in the White House in a single rather than double beds. She shared details of her life before her marriage to Ford. She shared her views on abortion (pro-choice). She shared news of her breast cancer, her face-lift and her dependency on painkillers, alcohol and cigarettes.

A journalist once asked President Ford:

"Have you ever said to your wife, 'Why do you have to be so revealing, so honest?' "

He answered: "I've told her a million times. It has no impact."

The journalist Tom Wolfe archly dubbed the 1970s the "Me Decade." He didn't mean that people had become any more selfish than previously. He meant that they had become more compulsively self-revealing. "Let's talk about me!" Betty Ford epitomized -- and to a great extent accelerated -- that trend of the times.

Click here to read the full column.