Nine weeks after a gunman tried to assassinate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, the FBI said the former president It appears he was another assassination target The attempt was made on Sunday at a golf course in Palm Beach.
He was unhurt. But the back-to-back incidents have historical echoes. In September 1975, President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts, one in Sacramento and the other in San Francisco.
Like much of this summer’s political violence, the assassination attempt on Ford shocked the nation.
here it is A retrospective of what happened Taken from the pages of the Los Angeles Times.
September 5, 1975 | Sacramento
Charles Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was 26 when she pulled a gun on Ford in Sacramento. Secret Service agents apprehended her and Ford was unharmed.
He was convicted of attempting to assassinate the President on 26 November 1975. He was released from jail in 2009 after 34 years.
Testimony given in 1975, released decades later, Ford calmly explained that he saw a woman in a bright red dress at Sacramento’s Capitol Park and thought she was approaching him to shake hands.
“My first thought was that she wanted to come close to me and shake my hand — that’s what I thought at the time — or say something to me,” Ford says on the tape.
He said that’s when he noticed the gun, a .45-caliber Colt semiautomatic pistol. He added that “the weapon was large.”
Christopher Goffard of the Times observed The matter was reconsidered earlier this year.
He spoke to witnesses in Sacramento Also highlighted was Fromme’s obsession with Manson.
Journalist Jess Bravin, author of “Squeaky: The Life and Times of Lynette Alice Fromme,” told Goffard that Fromme maintained a kind of religious devotion to Manson until he died. She told Bravin that she went to the park that day and didn’t know what she would do.
“She had no personal feelings about Ford,” Bravin said. “She was very upset with the system and she felt the environment was being degraded. Ford was coming to Sacramento to talk to businessmen. She felt he was destroying the redwoods.”
In 1987, after hearing rumors that Manson was dying of cancer, she escaped from a minimum-security federal prison in West Virginia, hoping to be near Manson. She said she was captured two miles away.
He Released on parole in 2009,
On September 5, 1957, after Lynette Fromme attempted to shoot President Ford in Sacramento, he was moved to a secure location.
(associated Press)
September 22, 1975 | San Francisco
Sarah Jane Moore, An accountant and divorced mother of four, she shot Ford on Sept. 22, 1975, as the president was leaving a speaking engagement at the St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco.
One of his bullets, fired from a .38 caliber revolver, missed Ford several feet when Oliver Sipple, a disabled Vietnam War veteran, grabbed his arm and pulled him down.
San Francisco police had dealt with Moore before and considered him a potential threat to the president.
Two days before the assassination attempt, she was arrested in the street, with a .44 caliber revolver in her handbag and boxes of ammunition in her car.
The police notified the Secret Service, who questioned her and released her. Less than 48 hours later, she bought a .38 from a friend, stood in a crowd of several thousand outside St. Francis and tried to claim her place in history.
Moore had undergone psychiatric treatment several times before shooting Ford. His lawyers were preparing an insanity defense. He pleaded guilty over their objections.
After being sentenced, Moore expressed mixed feelings about his actions.
“Am I sorry I tried?” he said. “Yes and no. Yes, because it accomplished nothing except ruining the rest of my life. … And, no, I’m not sorry I tried, because at the time it seemed like the perfect expression of my anger.”
Sipple, the former Marine who subdued him, said the publicity that followed his heroic act ruined his life.
Sipple, who retired from the Marines on a disability pension, was gay — a fact he said was unknown to his relatives until it appeared in newspapers.
He filed a $15 million lawsuit against seven newspapers, including The Times, for invasion of privacy. A judge dismissed it. Sipple died in 1989 at age 47. His health had deteriorated and he drank heavily.
that year, Ford wrote a letter He said he would be “forever grateful” for the former Marine’s actions in averting murder.
“I am very sorry for the problems this incident has caused him,” said Ford’s letter, which was dated Feb. 14 and addressed “to the friends of Oliver Sipple.” “I am very saddened to learn of the circumstances of his death.”
Moore was released on parole in 2008.
Gerald R. Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office.
(David Hume Kennerly / Gerald R.)
Assessing those moments in history
In 2006, The Times looked at both assassination attempts and found they were becoming footnotes in history. Historians pondered what they meant.
Both plots “It epitomizes the 1970s, which was the stupidest decade of the century for California … in terms of its horrifying weirdness,” said Kevin Starr, USC history professor and state librarian emeritus.
“Moore’s style was middle class, while Squeaky Fromme was a true cultist. Moore represented the personal insanity of the period and Squeaky the social insanity,” Starr said. The assassination attempts – Fromme in Sacramento and Moore in San Francisco – also contributed to an “atmosphere of chaos” in Northern California, Starr said, exacerbated by 1970s events such as the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and the mass suicide of the Jonestown cultists.
Others say these acts symbolize the turmoil in American society following Watergate and the Vietnam War.
“Many people were confused, and were looking for reasons to believe there was some political or conspiratorial explanation for their inner turmoil, and were concluding that if they could act on their impulse, they could save the world,” said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and a former leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, whose books include “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.”
