Fifty years ago on Sep. 22, 1975, a Marxist radical named Sara Jane Moore attempted to murder President Gerald Ford in San Francisco. This week she died at the age of 94.
Moore was a troubled woman who’d had a series of marriages and several children who she later abandoned. Though she had grown up in a conservative household, she was radicalized by the politics of the 1960s, in particular the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. She decided she would murder PresidentMarx Ford as a way to foment a Marxist revolution she believed was coming.
Moore had been interviewed by the police just a day earlier. The police seized her .44 pistol but didn’t arrest her. She immediately went and bought a .38 pistol which she fired at Ford the next day in San Francisco as he was leaving the St. Francis Hotel.
Ms. Moore got off a single shot at Ford from her faultily sighted .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver before being subdued in a crowd outside the St. Francis Hotel, where Ford had been speaking in downtown San Francisco on Sept. 22, 1975.
Standing 40 feet from the president with the weapon she had bought just hours earlier, she missed her target a second time as a bystander, Marine Corps veteran Oliver Sipple, deflected her raised right arm and the bullet went wide, ricocheting off the hotel, slightly injuring a taxi driver elsewhere in the crowd.
Moore would later say that if she’d had her .44 she likely would have killed Ford that day. She had practiced with it and was aiming for a head show. The .38 she bought to replace it had a misaligned site, causing her shot from about 40 feet away to miss Ford by a few inches.
Moore was sentenced to life in prison and, at the time showed no remorse. She was a revolutionary.
“No, I’m not sorry I tried,” Ms. Moore, who then claimed to be an adherent of Marxism, said at her sentencing in federal court on Jan. 16, 1976. “At the time it seemed a correct expression of my anger and, if successful, the assassination combined with the public disclosures of this government’s own activities [against the radical left] just might have triggered the kind of chaos that could have started the upheaval of change.”…
“I finally understood and joined those who have only destruction and violence for a means of making change,” she said at her 1976 sentencing, “and came to understand that violence can sometimes be constructive.”…
Throughout her many court appearances in 1975 and 1976, Ms. Moore vehemently fought efforts by her attorneys to have her plead insanity or “diminished capacity.” Over their objections, she ultimately entered a guilty plea.
“I can only assume,” her public defender, James Hewitt, told Spieler, “she would rather go down in history as a crusader … than a demented malcontent.”
In 2009, after she was eventually paroled, Moore gave an interview to the Today Show:
“It was a time that people don’t remember. You know we had a war … the Vietnam War, you became, I became immersed in it. We were saying the country needed to change,” she said on NBC’s Today show. “The only way it was going to change was a violent revolution. I genuinely thought that [shooting Ford] might trigger that new revolution in this country.”
Moore’s attempt on President Ford’s life was the second one that happened that September. Seventeen days earlier on Sep. 5, 1975, a follower of Charles Manson named Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme had also brought a gun to a public event. She got within 2 feet of Ford and raised the gun but it was wrestled away from her by the Secret Service before she got off a shot. Her stated goal was to save the Redwoods from air pollution.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Fromme said the attempt was to protest the destruction of the redwoods, which she believed the president was destroying.
“She and another Manson family member had committed to kill corporate or elected polluters of the environment,” Luecke says. “So rather than a response to Ford’s presidency or politics, it was really an outlier event.”
Reading all of this today I was struck by how similar it all sounds to what is happening now. The same deranged left-wing politics motivating attempts to murder Republicans to make a point.
Asked 10 years ago by CNN where she got the idea to kill President Ford, Moore said that at the time everyone she knew in San Francisco was talking about it.
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