Betty Ford, the outspoken and much-admired wife of President Gerald Ford who overcame alcoholism and an addiction to pills and helped found one of the most well-known rehabilitation centers in the nation, died Friday. She was 93.

Her death was confirmed by Chris Chase, Betty Ford’s biographer, who said she was surrounded by her children at the time. Further details were not immediately released.

Her death brought statements of condolence from President Barack Obama, former Presidents George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, and Nancy Reagan, the former first lady.

“She was Jerry Ford’s strength through some very difficult days in our country’s history,” Reagan said, “and I admired her courage in facing and sharing her personal struggles with all of us.”

Few first ladies have been as popular as Betty Ford, and it was her frankness and lack of pretense that made her so. She spoke often in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, endorsed legalized abortion, discussed premarital sex and said she intended to share a bed with her husband in the White House.

When her husband’s voice failed him the morning after he was defeated by Carter in 1976, she read the official concession statement with smiling grace. And when Gerald Ford died in December 2006, Betty Ford announced his death. The subsequent six days of national mourning returned her to a spotlight she had tried to avoid in her later years, living in Rancho Mirage, Calif., a golf community southeast of Palm Springs, and tending to her clinic there, the Betty Ford Center.

The country’s affection for Betty Ford transcended party lines. It began in earnest slightly more than two months after Gerald Ford became president in August 1974, following President Richard Nixon’s resignation over Watergate. Ford had been vice president for less than 10 months, named by Nixon to succeed Spiro Agnew, who had resigned in disgrace over accusations of bribery and tax evasion. On Sept. 28, 1974, Betty Ford had a radical mastectomy after doctors had discovered cancer in her right breast.

Within days, 10,000 letters, more than 500 telephone calls, more than 200 telegrams and scores of floral arrangements poured into the White House and into her suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital. In the months that followed, tens of thousands of women, inspired by her forthrightness and courage in facing her illness, crowded into doctors’ offices and clinics for breast-cancer examinations.

After leaving the hospital, Ford underwent chemotherapy treatment for two years. In November 1976, her physician announced that she had made a complete recovery.

Ford was once asked if she felt sorry for herself during the trauma of losing her breast.

“No! Oh, no — heavens, no,” she replied. “I’ve heard women say they’d rather lose their right arm, and I can’t imagine it. It’s so stupid. I can even wear my evening clothes.”

A life full of triumphs

Breast cancer was only one of the medical battles Ford won.

Her dependency on pills began in 1964 with a medical prescription to relieve constant pain from a neck injury and a pinched nerve. Her drinking, which became troublesome as she was faced with her husband’s frequent absences on political business, grew increasingly serious as Gerald Ford’s congressional career advanced. Her loneliness was compounded by low self-esteem and a debilitating self-consciousness about things like her lack of a college degree.

“Now I know that some of the pain I was trying to wipe out was emotional,” she recalled in “Betty: A Glad Awakening” (1987), the second volume of her autobiography written with Chase.

Going back to the days when her husband was a Michigan congressman and minority leader in the House of Representatives, she remembered that “on one hand, I loved being ‘the wife of’; on the other hand, I was convinced that the more important Jerry became, the less important I became.”

In 1978, the year after leaving the White House, her husband, children, doctors and several friends confronted her about her drinking and her abuse of pills. She refused to acknowledge that a problem existed, calling her family “a bunch of monsters,” but she eventually entered the Long Beach Naval Hospital in California for treatment.

The Betty Ford Center, dedicated on Oct. 3, 1982, was a direct result of Ford’s victory over her alcoholism and addiction. Set on 14 acres on the campus of the Eisenhower Medical Center 11 miles southeast of Palm Springs, the center was a nonprofit venture spearheaded by Ford and Leonard K. Firestone, an industrialist and former ambassador to Belgium who raised a major part of the money. Gerald Ford and Dr. Joseph Cruse, Betty Ford’s former gynecologist, were also participants.

The center’s philosophy, drawn from the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, is based on peer interaction and learning to identify and express feelings. About 2,000 people enter the program each year; some 27,000 have been treated to date. Many celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Chevy Chase, Mary Tyler Moore, Mickey Mantle and Darryl Strawberry, made no secret of their stays there.

“It’s hard to make anyone understand what it’s like to have your name on something, to be given credit for things you haven’t done,” Ford wrote. “I’ve been at meetings where someone turned and thanked me, and I hugged the person and said, ‘Don’t thank me, thank yourself, you’re the one who did it, with God’s help.’ From the beginning, we have wanted every patient at the center to feel, ‘I’m important here, I have some dignity.’”

Taking on taboo issues

Betty Ford was good at doing the things that every first lady does: accompanying her husband on tours and public ceremonies and holding dinners and parties. Her parties usually lasted past midnight as she danced from one partner to another. She also made frequent trips on her own, dedicating museums, cutting ribbons, receiving awards and encouraging good works.

But unlike many other wives of presidents, Ford rarely hesitated to make public her views on touchy subjects. She held a White House news conference announcing her support of the Equal Rights Amendment; the mail response ran 3 to 1 against her. In 1975, appearing on “60 Minutes,” she said she “wouldn’t be surprised” if her daughter, Susan, had a premarital affair; the mail was 4 to 1 against her. Her husband jokingly told her later that the comment had cost him 20 million votes in the 1976 election, she said.

A decade later, reminiscing with Margaret Truman for Truman’s book “First Ladies,” Ford voiced regret over that television appearance. Later that year, despite her advocacy for abortion rights, she reined herself in. She said nothing about the Republican platform that called for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion.

Elizabeth Anne Bloomer was born April 8, 1918, in Chicago to William Bloomer and the former Hortense Neahr. She always wanted to be called Elizabeth but ended up with Betty, Bet or Bets. She was the youngest child and the only girl in a family of three children. Her father was a traveling salesman in conveyor belts for factories.

Months after her first marriage ended in divorce in 1947, she began dating Ford, a lawyer with political ambitions who she described as “probably the most eligible bachelor in Grand Rapids.”

They were married on Oct. 15, 1948, while he was running his first race for a seat in the House. The groom was 35; the bride, 30. They spent their two-day honeymoon at Republican Party rallies.

Ford won the election.

“We came to Washington for two years and stayed for 28,” Betty Ford said.

Betty Ford is survived by her three sons, her daughter and five grandchildren.

“I am an ordinary woman who was called onstage at an extraordinary time,” she wrote in the prologue to her first autobiography. “I was no different once I became first lady than I had been before. But through an accident of history, I had become interesting to people.”