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The most famous political wife in the history of addiction was Betty Ford who, after being First Lady from 1974-1977, entered treatment for addiction to medications (then called "chemical dependency") in 1978, then created the famed Betty Ford Center in 1982. Betty Ford and her namesake center became the emblem for modern addiction treatment. Ford detailed her story in her 1987 best seller, Betty: A Glad Awakening.
The wife of losing 1988 presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, Kitty Dukakis, became the emblem of the addicted person of the 1990s. Kitty Dukakis emblazoned the “disease” and “chemically dependent” labels on herself. Her 1990 autobiography, Now You Know, trumpeted as its opening line, “I’m Kitty Dukakis and I’m a drug addict and an alcoholic.” Mrs. Dukakis seemingly was either addicted or in treatment throughout her adult life. Shortly before she joined her husband in his presidential campaign, she revealed that she had been treated for a twenty-six-year reliance on diet pills. Soon after her husband’s defeat in the election, she began to drink herself unconscious and underwent a series of treatments for her alcoholism and for a variety of emotional problems.
That treatment did not succeed. Oddly, Mrs. Dukakis only began getting drunk after the election, for which she first entered the Edgehill Newport hospital. But soon after this treatment experience, she began having explosive relapses in which she drank rubbing alcohol, nail polish remover, hair spray, and other household products containing alcohol—the consumption of which may be lethal. Moreover, she discovered during the course of writing her book that she suffers from a different problem— bipolar disorder (which was then called manic-depressive disorder)—as a result of which she revealed she was receiving lithium treatment. Before that, Mrs. Dukakis had been using the antidepressant Prozac, but that hadn’t succeeded in helping her.
Every human being wished Kitty Dukakis could be happy, or at least feel better. Instead, she always appeared, in the book and on television, a forlorn human being. Kitty Dukakis didn’t inspire the feeling that treatment was a very helpful thing. Boston Globe columnist, Ellen Goodman, a neighbor of Mrs. Dukakis’s, wrote a column entitled “Do Our Drug Treatment Programs Label Patients as Losers?” Ms. Goodman wondered aloud how labeling oneself as sick and without hope is helpful. “What happens when those who wrestle with problems of self-esteem are required to wear such a label? Today, Kitty Dukakis describes herself by diagnosis. Drug addict. Alcoholic. Manic-depressive.” Ms. Goodman ended her column by wishing that Kitty Dukakis might see the brighter qualities that others have seen in her, and which seem entirely to have disappeared thanks to her various diagnoses and cures.
It is rare today to see people like Ellen Goodman who are allowed to think that our treatment doesn’t seem to produce many happy, healthy people—that, indeed, we seem to be falling further behind in this effort. For Kitty Dukakis, excessive drinking was only one of many problems, ones that medical treatment seemed unable to get to the bottom of. Labeling Kitty Dukakis an alcoholic, addict, and bipolar who needed medical treatment was a way to deal with her uncomfortable marital and personal problems, but not a solution for them. Among other issues, reviewers commented about how insensitive and unaware Michael Dukakis appeared to be while his wife endured her misery. Yet Kitty Dukakis never reflected in her book on the limitations of her marriage or how to improve it. She seemingly couldn’t come to grips with what was wrong with that part of her life.
Kitty Dukakis (who, thankfully I think for herself as well as the public, finally withdrew into her private life) seemed to resemble other political wives, including Joan Kennedy, the first wife of Ted Kennedy. Of course, Ted Kennedy had been famous for running around on his wife. After being in and out of treatment for alcoholism during and after that marriage, Mrs. Kennedy’s children finally, in 2005, when she was 68, took legal guardianship of her affairs after several late-life drunken episodes. We don’t mean to reflect on Mrs. Kennedy’s fate as proving anything about the nature of addiction. But, once again, it shows that even people with access to the very best in repeated medical treatments can’t find in them the solution of addiction and other life problems.
So, you might think, we surely have advanced beyond Kitty Dukakis and Joan Kennedy in dealing with the horrors of substance abuse and emotional problems. Simply limiting ourselves to well-known Democrats, however, we found in 2012 that not much has changed when the wife of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Mary Kennedy, killed herself. RFK Jr. is the son of President John Kennedy’s and Ted Kennedy's brother, and a prominent environmental activist. He and Mary had filed divorce papers in 2010, and Mary was seemingly in despair. She had been arrested twice after their separation for driving while intoxicated, once due to alcohol, the other time due to medication. In the unfortunate aftermath to her death, her estranged husband and her family argued over the cause of this despair, which RFK Jr. claimed was a long-term depression.
But we know that Mary Kennedy had access to the best medical treatment available (her husband's cousin, Patrick Kennedy, Ted's and Joan's son, has been in and out of the Mayo Clinic numerous times and has become an addiction expert himself). Moreover, the New York Times revealed, "Kerry Kennedy [RFK Jr.'s sister and Mary's best friend] said Mary, who participated in Alcoholics Anonymous, had been sober for five months." So, sobriety and AA did. . . . . what? We can only imagine what a scandal it would have been if Mary were attending some alternative sobriety support group, like SMART Recovery, instead of AA, and killed herself.
Those who look to the lives of these prominent, but unfortunate, women for answers will likely be fed the same self-defeating solutions. To call Kitty Dukakis’s, Joan Kennedy’s, and Mary Kennedy’s life problems diseases is to evade reality, much as these women often used medications and alcohol to do. Whether the pain they and others feel is temporary or persistent, relatively mild or relatively severe, it did not need to rule the rest of their lives. All of these women, like the rest of us, are more than our misery and problems. What troubles people like them and addicted people reading this are life problems, not diseases. And when we have reduced them to life size, we can begin to deal with them reasonably and hopefully.
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