As Betty Ford was in the hospital battling cancer, the nation thought of her with warmth and sympathy. She was undergoing a physical ordeal that all Americans dread and that has become almost familiar. But for many years she has also undergone a psychological ordeal, far less serious and less familiar, but nagging and pervasive: the tribulations that befall so many wives of politicians. Though at the center of a close and apparently happy family, Betty Ford has often come near the end of her nervous resources. It is a rather special occupational disease that has become a serious factor in America's political life.
The psychological ordeal suffered by the former First Lady has been far worse. Several times last week Pat Nixon visited the bedside of her husband as he underwent treatment for a blood clot in the lung—not quite two months after his humiliating resignation. Now she shared his exile, a bitter reward for a life of self-effacing, tireless and often joyless devotion to the relentless demands of a unique political career.
Rigid Control. In a sense, both Betty Ford and Pat Nixon were veterans. Not so the younger, more fragile blonde who last week sat silently in the Heritage Room of Boston's Parker House and watched her husband bow out of the 1976 presidential contest. Joan Kennedy, demonstrating the rigid control expected of political wives in America —especially Kennedy wives—stayed calm and clear-eyed, her gaze focused on a point near her husband, her hands folded demurely in her lap. She remained all but immobile when her husband said that he would not subject his family to the rigors of a presidential campaign. Then her control began to give way at the edges, and she blinked back tears. Joan, whose life has been made miserable by a political role she neither sought nor was capable of handling, could no longer completely conceal her feelings. Said a longtime Washington friend who watched the drama on television: "You could feel her relief 500 miles away."
The ordeal of the political wife, and the somewhat lesser strains borne by the political husband (see box page 19), is more than a matter of mere gossip, more than a personal problem. It was important enough to help knock the leading Democratic contender out of the 1976 presidential race. Under the steady glare of television, the personality and character of the political wife is more crucial than ever, but the treatment she receives has not caught up with her importance. Torn between the role she feels she ought to fill and the part that is handed her, she understandably grows distraught. The problem is most conspicuous in the U.S., where traditionally politicians' wives have played a far more public role than elsewhere. But it is growing in other countries, particularly where press and television coverage is intense. Early in September, the vivacious 26-year-old wife of Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau entered Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital and said, "I'm under psychiatric care for severe emotional stress, but I think I'm on the way to recovery."