Nine weeks after a gunman tried to kill Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, the FBI said Sunday there was an attempted assassination of the former president at a Palm Beach golf course.
He was not injured, but the sequence of events has historical resonance: In September 1975, President Gerald Ford escaped two assassination attempts, in Sacramento and San Francisco.
Like much of this summer’s political violence, the attempt to kill Ford shocked the nation.
The following is an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times:
September 5, 1975 | Sacramento
Charles Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromm was 26 when she pointed a gun at Ford in Sacramento. Secret Service agents caught her and Ford was unharmed.
She was convicted of attempting to assassinate the president on November 26, 1975, and was released in 2009 after serving a 34-year sentence.
Ford calmly recounted that he saw a woman in a bright red dress in Sacramento’s Capitol Park and assumed she was approaching him to shake his hand.
“My first impression was that she came up to me and reached out her hand and wanted to shake my hand or say something,” Ford says on the tape.
He then noticed a .45-caliber Colt semi-automatic pistol, adding, “The weapon was big.”
The Times’ Christopher Goffard
It also delved into Fromm’s obsession with Manson.
Journalist Jess Brabin, author of “Squeaky: The Life and Times of Lynette Alice Fromm,” told Goffard that Fromm maintained a kind of religious faith in Manson until her death. She told Brabin that she went to the park that day not knowing what she would do.
“She didn’t have any personal feelings about Ford,” Bravin said. “She was very angry about the system and the destruction of the environment. Ford had come to Sacramento to speak to businessmen. She felt that Ford was destroying the Sequoias.”
In 1987, after hearing rumors that Manson was dying of cancer, she says she escaped from a minimum-security federal prison in West Virginia in the hopes of being closer to Manson; she was caught two miles away.
she was .
September 22, 1975 | San Francisco
An accountant and divorced mother of four, she was fired from her job at Ford on Sept. 22, 1975, as she was leaving the president after a speech at the St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco.
The single shot she fired from her .38-caliber revolver missed a few feet after Oliver Sipple, a disabled Vietnam War veteran, grabbed Ford’s arm and pulled him down.
San Francisco police have dealt with Moore in the past and viewed her as a potential threat to the president.
Two days before the assassination attempt, she was arrested on the street with a .44 caliber revolver in her purse and boxes of ammunition in her car.
Police notified the Secret Service, who questioned her and released her. Less than 48 hours later, she bought a .38-caliber gun from a friend and took up position among a crowd of several thousand people outside St. Francis Church and attempted the history-making shooting.
Moore had received psychiatric treatment before shooting Ford, and her lawyers had prepared an insanity defense. She pleaded guilty over her lawyers’ objections.
After receiving his sentence, Moore expressed mixed feelings about his actions.
“Do I regret trying?” she said. “Yes and no. Yes, because it accomplished very little except ruin the rest of my life. … And no, I don’t regret trying, because at the time it seemed like the right expression of my anger.”
Sipple, a former Marine who subdued her, said the public attention the heroic act had drawn had ruined his life.
Sipple, a Marine veteran on a disability pension, was gay, a fact his family did not know until it was made public in the newspaper.
He sued seven newspapers, including The Times, for $15 million for invasion of privacy, but a judge dismissed the lawsuit. Sipple died in 1989 at age 47. He was in poor health and had been drinking heavily.
That year, he said he would be “forever grateful” for the actions of the former Marines who thwarted the assassination.
“I deeply regret the issues that have arisen for him since this incident,” Ford wrote in a letter to “Friends of Oliver Sipple” dated Feb. 14. “I was saddened to learn of the circumstances of his death.”
Evaluating a moment in history
In 2006, The Times looked back on the two assassination attempts and found them fading into a historical footnote, with historians weighing in on their meaning.
Kevin Starr, a history professor at the University of Southern California and state librarian emeritus, said the 1970s were a sign of California’s “goofiest decade of the century in terms of eerie weirdness.”
“Moore’s style was middle class, but Squeaky Fromm was a bona fide cultist. Moore represented the individual insanity of the time, Squeaky the social insanity,” Starr said. The assassination attempts on Fromm in Sacramento and Moore in San Francisco also contributed to a “lawless atmosphere” in Northern California, Starr said. This coincided with other incidents in the 1970s, such as the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the murder of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and the mass suicide of Jonestown cult members.
Others, however, argue that these acts symbolize the breakdown in American society after Watergate and the Vietnam War.
“A lot of people were wandering around aimlessly, looking for any reason to believe that there was a political or conspiracy explanation for their emotional disturbances, and they concluded that if only they would act on their impulses, they could save the world,” said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, a former Student for a Democratic Society leader, and author of such books as “The ’60s: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.”
