Representative Gerald Ford of Michigan (my home state) thought Congress would be his last political office before retirement. But a series of bribery allegations led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew, in October, 1973. Nixon chose Ford to take the nation’s number two spot.
Ford gladly stepped up, figuring this would surely be his last political office. And then came Watergate, a scandal so shocking it couldn’t be swept away. Nixon resigned from the presidency on August 9, 1974, leaving a stunned Gerald and Betty Ford in to take up residence in the White House, the last place they ever expected to be. What happened just over a year later, however, began an even more stunning chain of events.
After an anomaly had been discovered in First Lady’s right breast, she was quietly deposited at Bethesda Naval Hospital, near the National Institutes of Health. The next morning, to address the dime-sized tumor, she underwent a biopsy and a radical mastectomy. It was performed by the same Navy surgeon who had operated on the president’s knee a few years earlier. Mrs. Ford’s breast was removed, along with all of her underarm lymph nodes, and her pectoral muscles.
The public response to the news was one of shock and horror. Breast cancer killed half of the women diagnosed with it in 1975. But not only did Mrs. Ford not die, her diagnosis was the first monumental step in the wave of change coming for breast cancer.
First, it led to the “Betty Ford Blip,” so called because of the flood of women calling doctors across the country requesting breast exams.
Secondly, an article written by Rose Kushner (and previously languishing in the “maybe” box of a Washington Post editor), became front page news. She had refused the “one-step” method – being anesthetized for a biopsy and then undergoing a breast amputation without any discussion – and the radical procedure in favor of a more modified surgery that left her pectoral muscles in tact.
The article was picked up by dozens of papers across the country, causing Rose to quip, “If I had known breast cancer would finally get me into the Washington Post, I’d have arranged to get it years ago!” In reality, it made her the generalissimo of an advocacy charge she courageously led the rest of her all-too-short life.
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Read more about Rose, Shirley and Evelyn in Radical Sisters.
