The Two Presidential Assassination Attempts That Targeted Gerald Ford
Public DomainGerald Ford, in the center of the frame, is hustled away after an attempt on his life on September 5, 1975.
During visits to the state of California in September 1975, President Gerald Ford was the target of not one but two presidential assassination attempts. Both, unusually, were perpetrated by women.
The first attempt on Ford’s life came on September 5th. As the president walked near the California Capitol building in Sacramento, a 26-year-old woman wearing a red robe slipped out of the crowd. Her name was Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, and she was a member of the infamous Manson Family.
Ford noticed the woman. In his testimony about the attempted assassination, he said that Fromme “appeared to want to either shake hands or speak, or at least wanted to get closer to me.”
Instead, she raised a .45 caliber pistol and pulled the trigger. But much to her dismay, the gun did not fire.
“It didn’t go off!” Fromme wailed as Secret Service agents tackled her. “It didn’t go off,” she continued. “Can you believe it? It didn’t go off.”
Fromme — who had allegedly wanted to kill Ford to make a statement about the environment — hadn’t loaded the chamber. And Ford, apparently unshaken, went to the California legislature to give a scheduled address.
Bettmann/Getty ImagesFromme was convicted of attempted murder. Years later, she left prison in 2009.
The second attempt on Ford’s life came 17 days later, on September 22nd. As the president left a conference at St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, a woman named Sarah Jane Moore raised a .38 caliber pistol and took aim.
Moore, who believed that killing the president would spark a revolution, nearly succeeded in murdering Ford. But as she fired, a Vietnam veteran named Oliver Sipple noticed the gun and lunged at her, thwarting her plans.
“I’m not a hero, I’m a live coward,” Sipple later said. “It’s probably the scariest thing that ever happened in my whole life.”
Ford later described both of his would-be assassins as “off her mind.” And though he “wore a protective vest for weeks” following the two presidential assassination attempts, he was still determined to be in public.
“[P]eople said to me, ‘Well, why don’t you stay in the White House and not go out to meet the public?'” Ford told Larry King in 2004.
“My answer to them was, a president has to be aggressive, has to meet the people, and therefore, I did. And… thank God I had no further incidents.”
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