QUESTION: What was the biggest adjustment that you had, living at the White House? There must have been so many things.

SUSAN FORD: Well, a couple of things come to mind as far as adjustment. One, living in the White House is a major adjustment. I mean, I basically had an entire floor to myself with six or seven bedrooms up there. I could have a slumber party every night. And so, I wasn't as close to my parents. You know, in our small house in Alexandria, Virginia, there wasn't a lot of room to move around in, especially with four kids.

I think another major change was after mother's 60 Minutes interview, you know, saying to the world that she wouldn't be surprised if her daughter had an affair. Well, thanks. That really helps the dating life a lot. Things like that.

Changes in friends. People that at school, that had never talked to me before or cared less who I was, you know, tried to be my new best friend. But I had the advantage of not changing schools, so I didn't have to make a whole new group of friends. This is the city I was raised in.

QUESTION: But you were living in a fishbowl all of a sudden. Did you feel a loss of privacy? Or did you kind of like the attention of it?

SUSAN FORD: I have very mixed emotions of the attention and the fishbowl. There are wonderful advantages to living in the White House in the fishbowl. There are many disadvantages, too.

QUESTION: And you were trying to navigate all of that. What kind of advice did you get from your mom?

SUSAN FORD: Be yourself. Mother just always kept saying, be yourself and come and talk to me. You know, we will work something out. In mother's mind, school was the most important thing. Get through high school, graduate from high school. You're going to go to college. But be yourself. And don't let the White House be an obstacle, that it's going to affect your grades or affect your friends, or anything like that.

QUESTION: How did you see her change from, you know, being a mom and raising kids and a Congressional wife, to suddenly being the First Lady?

SUSAN FORD: I think the biggest change I saw in mother, when she became First Lady, was more of a fact of she had a podium to stand on. The voice was always there. The opinion was always there. But she had, I guess, more of an audience. And she was very careful how she picked her audiences, and she didn't want to take advantage of being First Lady.

So it was more of a fact of what's really important to me, where do I want my voice to be, and what do I want it to stand for. And so, she was very careful in what she-- what she picked to stand for, and how she did it.

QUESTION: I mean, one of the things that she would always be known for is her champion of women's rights at a time when, you know, the gender wars were in full flower. And she had, as you said, she had opinions. Growing up, did you notice, was she interested in social issues? Did she have a lot of opinions? Or is this something that kind of came with recognizing she had the spotlight?

SUSAN FORD: That's difficult to say. I think she always had the opinions. I didn't really pay attention to them, and that sort of thing. But she never let women be beat up at our house, and you know, it was just because it's your sister and she has an opinion, she gets to voice it, too.

So we were all very free to voice our opinions in our household. I think some of it was the fact that she had the podium and the place to do it. And she felt very strongly about it. She had two brothers, and you know, she's got three boys. And I think part of it, too, was a matter of respect. Women need to be respected more. And they need to be respected by their husbands, by their sons, by their brothers, and everybody around. And you know, she was a working woman, and she was a working woman for a long time before she became a mother.

QUESTION: Tell me about what losing that election did to the family. I mean, it must have been a real blow.

SUSAN FORD: Losing the election was a very hard-- it was a hard blow on all of us, because most of us in the family did get involved in campaigning. Mother was an avid campaigner, and campaigned nonstop for him. I did some in the summertime, when I was not in school. My brother Jack was very involved in the campaign. And Mike was in-- getting his-- in his master's program, so he wasn't. Steve was involved in the campaign.

It was actually the first, if I'm not mistaken, election that my dad's ever lost. From the time that he ran in high school as class president or whatever. So that was a big blow. It was a hard blow. And he had worked hard for it. And I think the hardest part was the fact that he wanted to continue what he was doing. He didn't get to finish things that he had put into action.

And of course, in two and a half years, it's hard to get everything done. So, plus, he wanted to be an elected President, and not an appointed President. Not that he needed the confidence, but it would have given him the confidence as a President, to know that that's what the American people really wanted.

QUESTION: How did your mother adjust to leaving Washington and coming here, with the loss of the election as well?

SUSAN FORD: I was away at college. So I was not here on a day to day basis until later. So when they moved here, they rented a house, started plans to build a house. She had a book to write. Dad had a book to write. He immediately went on several boards. Began playing golf to make up for all the golf games that he lost, you know, in Washington. They were busy. They were very busy, busy people. And they were having a good time. There's no question.

They would go to New York, and they would spend a week in New York. And mother would do all of her Christmas shopping when she was in New York. And they were having a very good time. But it was also a very lonely time. Because he was gone. And she didn't travel with him all the time. But she had her own schedule. She was speaking. I mean, if you go back and you look at some of her schedules, you know, after the White House, she was still speaking a lot. And she was writing a book. And she was involved in several organizations.

I think the beginning of it was great. And then, you know, it's like the beginning of anything. Everything's fun and great in the beginning, and then it becomes mundane. And how do we keep it fun and great all the time? I mean, that's life.

QUESTION: When did you start to be concerned -- maybe without even knowing exactly what was wrong? You know, when did the family as a whole start to be concerned about her health?

SUSAN FORD: The big turn for me was when I left school, because I didn't finish my degree. And I moved here to the desert, and my whole reasoning for that was I had job offers out there as a photojournalist. And why am I sitting in a classroom? I'm very sorry for that decision now. But why am I sitting in a classroom, when I've got job offers out there? I could be working and making money.

And so, I chose to leave school. And I moved here to the desert. And so, I was here on a day by day. Saw her pretty regularly on a day by day basis. Dad was traveling, so I would have dinner with her, or we would go shopping. And that's when I saw the change.

QUESTION: What did you see?

SUSAN FORD: I saw a very sluggish person. She would call you and say, well, let's go to lunch and go shopping. And I'd say, oh, okay. I'm not working today. And I would come over, and it took her forever to get dressed. It was like watching a robot in slow motion.

And I was like, what's going on? And you would look at the medicine cabinet, and here are all, you know, these-- well, my neck hurts, so I have to take this and da-da-da. You know, I'm not a pharmacist. I didn't know. But then, I started asking questions of doctors. And that's how I found a doctor who was in recovery. And he said, I've had some concerns for your mother for a while.

QUESTION: So your siblings or your dad-- there were times when you'd all say, there's something not right? Or mom just isn't being mom. Had there been discussions in the family before you came to the point where you had that talk?

SUSAN FORD: No, there really hadn't been any discussions. Because none of us lived here. None of us were here on the day to day. You know, when you go home for five days, ten days, or whatever, at Christmas time, do you think that's really what you pay attention to? No. Because we didn't notice any difference. You know, I can get myself together for, you know, a week, and put on the show. If you know all your kids are coming home, sure, we can all put on the show. You may be miserable and depressed inside. I don't know. But you can put yourself together to put on the show for a week.

None of us lived here, so we didn't see. My dad wasn't home. His schedule was probably more like in the Congressional days. He'd have two or three speeches a week, a couple of golf games, board meetings. You know, he traveled, and he traveled a lot. And I think she was very lonely. And so, until somebody was here to watch it on a day to day basis, you really didn't know.

QUESTION: So it was pretty courageous of you to do what you did. Could you kind of just tell me a little bit about that? Because you were the one who finally said, something's not right, we've got to do something.

SUSAN FORD: Well, the first time that I confronted mother, I would not call it courageous. I would call it stupid. Because I confronted her one on one by myself. And now that I have learned and educated myself about this disease, and I know a whole lot more about it than I did 30 some years ago, you don't intervene on somebody one on one. And she called me a monster and told me I was wrong, and kicked me out of the house, and told me she never wanted to see me again. It's pretty devastating for a 19, 20 year old girl, for your mother to kick you out of the house and say I don't ever want to see you again. She doesn't want to hear what you have to say.

But to me, that really just triggered one more point of, yeah, there is a problem. And we need to move quicker on this. So once I had met with Dr. Cruz (ph) and kind of had gotten some information, and he helped begin to educate me about this whole process. And I got dad involved. It was perfect.

I mean, dad took over. He canceled a speech, which I don't think he's ever done in his entire life. I think he called Secretary Kissinger and asked him to step in for him. And on April 1st of 1978, all of us children walked into their house here in the desert, and confronted her with an intervention, and told her how much we loved her, and that there was an issue. She had fallen asleep at meals, had embarrassed us in front of friends. You would tell her something one day that was really important to you, and the next day, had no recollection of it.

She had tripped and fallen, she had chipped a tooth here and there. There were just these little patterns that so we were able to put the story together for her and confront her about it. We were very lucky. She said, okay, I'll go for treatment.

QUESTION: How did it change the family dynamic?

SUSAN FORD: Well, the biggest change for me was the fact that being 20 years old and not living at home, and my mother came back from treatment. And for someone who had not been terribly paying attention to all my quirks and lifestyle and whatever, all of a sudden, became my mother in the capital letters. And wanted to know who I was dating, where I was going, what was I wearing, who was I with.

And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, this is not-- where is this person coming from? You haven't-- you haven't paid attention in a while, and now you're paying attention to everything. So we really had to address our relationship. And listen to each other, respect each other.

Because actually, what had happened is I had become the parent in our relationship. And she wanted to be the parent again. And she wanted to be the mother again. And not to go back and make up for lost time, because you really can't go back and make up for lost time. But we needed to learn to respect each other.

As far as my mother and father, I think it was probably the neatest change in their relationship. They became much more appreciative of each other, much more respectful of each other. They didn't take each other for granted. They were true soul mates. And I think that's very hard to find in any relationship. It's certainly my goal.

I would love to have the marriage and relationship that my parents had with my husband. And we're always working at it, constantly working at it. They had a unique relationship, and it was a wonderful one.