Bookends: Mar. 16, 1987

BETTY: A GLAD AWAKENING

by Betty Ford with Chris Chase

Doubleday; 217 pages; $16.95

"We were up in Vail, where we'd always come for the holidays, there was a lot of good snow, we were together, and I had my pills." Betty Ford made the worst of them. In a confession marked by candor and salinity, the former First Lady traces the history of her chemical abuse. Lesser women might have slunk off to obscurity. But Ford had a saving grace: the ability to feel embarrassment. When her family intervened, she first replied, "You are all a bunch of monsters. Get out of here and never come back. " They refused to get out of her life, and she was forced to face the mirror and the facts.

Her battle with substance abuse was fought more than a decade ago, and she made sure that the cure was contagious. "Sometimes," she says, "I'm almost sorry for people who haven't been alcoholic, because I know things that a person who's never been sick doesn't know." In 1982 a clinic was established in her name, and she offers a series of case histories of the famous and the obscure who entered the place as emotional basket cases and emerged as feisty, drug-free graduates. There are no miracles here, but there is a collective refusal to succumb to the temptations of self-pity or despair. Betty and Gerald Ford have witnessed some extraordinary changes in life and in politics, and the sounds that now emanate from the Betty Ford Center may be the cheery clatter of the last laugh.

HOLD ON, MR. PRESIDENT

by Sam Donaldson

Random House; 272 pages; $17.95

Sam Donaldson is probably the nation's best-known political reporter and almost certainly the most controversial. His blunt phrasing of questions is exceeded only by his brash style of lobbing them like grenades, ambushing Presidents at every photo opportunity. Hold On, Mr. President -- a phrase that Donaldson says he has never actually used but that typifies his approach -- is in large part an attempt to justify his manner to readers who think him disrespectful. Although he offers plenty of eyewitness disclosures about Ronald Reagan fumbling over details and Jimmy Carter ruthlessly playing to win, he emphasizes the growing difficulty of breaking through White House image manipulation to get straight answers about U.S. policy, and has added timely passages about how isolation from press oversight contributed to the Iran-contra crisis. As tough on the page as on the screen, Donaldson prides himself on having written without a ghost, and the book's rambling, unpolished quality is more than offset by his anecdotal candor.

FINE THINGS

by Danielle Steel

Delacorte; 408 pages; $18.95