The Nation: Jack Ford: 'My Turn to Sacrifice'

Once again Gerald Ford found himself obliged to defend his family's candor. This time the reason was the frank admission by his middle son Jack, 23, during an interview with the Portland Oregonian, that he has smoked marijuana. While careful to note that he "disapproved, " President Ford in his press conference last week insisted that he found his son's honesty a "very fine trait. "TIME Washington Correspondent Bonnie Angelo filed this report:

If the President had some private misgivings about his son's public honesty, Jack did not. He has told friends that he has felt "a lot better" since he spoke up about his pot smoking. He brought it into the open because he, along with some White House advisers, worried that his father's political opponents might try to make use of rumors about his freewheeling bachelor life, which have been swirling through Washington like smoke at a rock concert.

As the first bachelor-son to live in the White House since F.D.R.'s days, Jack Ford is a natural subject for speculation. He graduated from Utah State University in May and went back to Washington, ostensibly to find his way around before starting work as a Ford campaign aide. It was not long before Jack gained a reputation as a swinger. He jokingly asked Henry Kissinger, "Now that you're married, can I have your little black book?" When an interviewer asked him about girls, he replied laughingly, "What kind of girls do I like? Two legs, two arms..."

Jack's return to the White House left him with a case of the intellectual bends. As a friend of David Kennedy, the President's ubiquitous young photographer, Jack met Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger, and made his way onto the New York City pop-celebrity circuit. On one Manhattan jaunt, Jack, Bianca and Kennerly dropped in at Le Jardin, a discotheque frequented by gays and in-crowd types. Jack later told friends: "I was dancing with Bianca and a fellow came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'May I dance?' I thought he wanted to dance with Bianca. He wanted to dance with me!"

Jack soon began pouring out his problems to friends. Says one acquaintance: "He's miserable at the White House. He hates living surrounded by the Secret Service. He can't get a job as a park ranger for fear that there would be cries of nepotism. There are natural tensions between him and his father, who is very stern." Jack does not want him to run next year for fear of the campaign's effect on his mother.

But his feelings may have been tempered of late by some cool reconsideration. "He's done things for me for so long," he says of his father. "Now it's my turn to sacrifice a little for him." In fact, there was a party in the fashionable Washington suburb of McLean, Va., last week for Andy Warhol. Where was Jack? Off somewhere in the mountains of Utah, fishing.