THE FIRST FAMILY: Betty Ford: Facing Cancer

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Gerald Ford was deep in preparations for the last of his series of economic summits Thursday morning when his wife Betty stopped in at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in nearby Maryland for a routine medical checkup. The examination soon developed into a searing personal and family concern. There was a nodule in her right breast. To determine if it was malignant, an operation would be necessary. The Fords wasted no time deciding: Betty would return late the next day to prepare for the exploratory surgery—and the answer that every woman fears.

The trauma must have weighed particularly heavily on Betty Ford, given the special burdens that seem to be borne by the wives of men in public life (see cover story, page 15). Yet the Fords kept their anguish to themselves. Betty Ford seemed to glow with good health on Friday morning when she and her husband joined Lady Bird Johnson at a ground-breaking ceremony for the L.B.J. Memorial Grove on the banks of the Potomac River. Later in the day, Mrs. Ford had Lady Bird to tea in the yellow Oval Room of the living quarters at the White House. No one noticed when the President's wife quietly slipped out of the White House shortly after 5 p.m. to keep her appointment at the hospital.

She arrived at 5:55 p.m., accompanied by her daughter Susan and Nancy Howe, her personal assistant, and went up to the handsome, Williamsburg blue presidential suite on the third floor. As it happened, Mrs. Peter Abbruzzese, a good friend and former Alexandria neighbor, was in the hospital, having just given birth to a girl. The Abbruzzeses had already decided to name the baby Katherine Elizabeth—the Elizabeth for Betty Ford. Susan Ford, who had been the Abbruzzeses' baby sitter for years, left her mother and delivered a present to the maternity ward—two satin baby pillows that Mrs. Ford had wrapped while awaiting her namesake's arrival.

While his wife was settling into the hospital, Ford was at the Washington Hilton Hotel calmly winding up the first day of the economic summit. After the meeting was adjourned, Ford briefly attended a White House reception for conference delegates and then departed for the hospital. When he arrived, Mrs. Ford was having a dinner of steak and French fries while chatting with Susan, the Fords' eldest son Michael, some aides and Dr. William Lukash, the White House physician. Said the President: "It looks like you're having a party here." Ford joked that his wife was faring much better in her spacious suite than he had two years before when he came to the hospital to have doctors mend an old football injury to his knee.

Fine Spirits. At 6 a.m. on Saturday, Betty Ford awoke to find three bouquets of flowers at her bedside—all from her husband. She walked across the hall to a sitting room to join Nancy Howe and the Rev. Billy Zeoli, an evangelist from Grand Rapids and a longtime friend of the family who had flown down in the middle of the night to do what he could. At 6:30 a.m., Susan and Michael arrived to cheer their mother up, but she was already in fine spirits. Mrs. Ford laughed about her toeless white operating-room socks. Said she: "This will be a new item for Women's Wear Daily."