Gerald Ford Assassination Attempts: Fromme, Moore, and Sipple

President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in California seventeen days apart in September 1975, both carried out by women acting alone and for unrelated reasons. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme pointed a loaded .45-caliber pistol at Ford in Sacramento on September 5; Sara Jane Moore fired a .38-caliber revolver at him outside a San Francisco hotel on September 22. Neither shot struck the president. Both women were convicted under the federal statute passed after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, sentenced to life in prison, and paroled decades later.

Sacramento, September 5, 1975

Ford was walking from the Senator Hotel to the California State Capitol for a meeting with Governor Jerry Brown, stopping to shake hands along the route. Lynette Fromme, 26, pushed through the crowd and raised a Colt 1911 semi-automatic pistol at the president from roughly two feet away.¹

Secret Service agent Larry Buendorf, walking directly behind Ford, spotted the weapon coming up. He yelled “Gun!”, knocked the pistol from Fromme’s hand, and wrestled her to the ground.² The magazine held four rounds, but the chamber was empty, so the gun could not have discharged without being manually racked. Fromme was heard saying, “It didn’t go off. Can you believe it? It didn’t go off.”³

Ford went on to his meeting with Brown, initially without mentioning what had just happened. “Well, I thought I’d better get on with my day’s schedule,” he told aides.³

Who Fromme Was and Why She Did It

Fromme grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Redondo Beach, California. She met Charles Manson on Venice Beach in 1967 and became one of his earliest followers, living at the Spahn Ranch commune.⁴ During Manson’s murder trial for the Tate-LaBianca killings, she camped outside the courthouse and carved an “X” into her forehead to match his.⁵

Her motives blended Manson loyalty and environmental grievance. She told her defense attorney, John Virga, that she had targeted Ford to draw attention to a new trial for Manson.⁵ At her arraignment she talked instead about logging: “The important part is the redwood trees… Do you understand this is like cutting down your own arms and legs?” She also viewed Ford as a symbol of an establishment “she and the Manson clan despised.”⁴

San Francisco, September 22, 1975

Seventeen days later, Ford emerged from the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square. Sara Jane Moore, standing in the crowd across the street, fired a .38-caliber revolver she had bought hours earlier.⁶ The first shot missed. As she pulled the trigger again, a bystander named Oliver Sipple, a former Marine who had served in Vietnam, grabbed her arm and deflected the weapon. The second bullet ricocheted and struck a taxi driver, who survived.⁷ Ford was unhurt and was rushed onto Air Force One.⁸

Who Moore Was and Why She Did It

Born Sara Jane Kahn in 1930 in Charleston, West Virginia, Moore had a turbulent personal life that included five marriages and four children she eventually abandoned.⁹ In 1974 she volunteered with “People in Need,” the food-distribution program set up by Randolph Hearst after the kidnapping of his daughter Patricia by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and was drawn into San Francisco’s radical-left circles.¹⁰

She was also an FBI informant. The Bureau ended the relationship about four months before the shooting, and Moore later said she believed she would be killed once the radicals she had been reporting on learned of her informant work. “If the government was going to kill me, I was going to make some kind of statement,” she said. She also claimed to think the act could “trigger a new revolution” and pointed to the fact that Ford “wasn’t elected to anything. He was appointed.”¹⁰

The Aftermath for Oliver Sipple

Sipple became a national figure overnight, and the attention unraveled his life. Within days, San Francisco gay-rights activist Harvey Milk, who knew Sipple, told San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen that Sipple was gay, hoping to counter stereotypes of gay men as weak. Caen published the information, and the Los Angeles Times and other national outlets ran with it.¹¹

Sipple had not disclosed his sexual orientation to his family in Michigan and had explicitly asked the Los Angeles Times reporter not to write about it. He later said his mother told him she could no longer leave her house or go to church, and stopped speaking to him.¹¹ Ford sent him a personal letter of thanks but did not invite him to the White House. Records at the Ford Presidential Library indicate Sipple himself had written to the president describing the trouble the coverage was causing him, and Ford chose not to draw further attention.⁷ Sipple sued the Chronicle and other publications for invasion of privacy and lost in 1984, with the California Court of Appeal holding that his sexual orientation was already known within the gay community and that the disclosure served a legitimate public interest.¹² He died in 1989.

The Trials and Life Sentences

Both women were prosecuted in federal court under 18 U.S.C. § 1751, the statute criminalizing assaults on the president that had been enacted after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Fromme was the first person ever sentenced under that law.¹³

Her case was heard in the Eastern District of California before Chief Judge Thomas J. MacBride.¹⁴ Fromme’s attorney argued she had never intended to kill Ford and had wanted only to publicize environmental causes and Manson’s imprisonment.¹³ Intent was central enough that Judge MacBride ordered President Ford to give a videotaped deposition, ruling that no person, including the president, was above the law and that the defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights required it.¹⁵ The deposition was taken in Washington, D.C., with Ford questioned by defense attorney John Virga about what he had seen at the moment Fromme raised the weapon, and played for the jury on November 15, 1975. It was a rare instance of a sitting president testifying in a criminal trial.¹⁶

On December 17, 1975, a federal jury convicted Fromme of attempted assassination of a president, and she was sentenced to life. She was sent to the Alderson Federal Correctional Institution in West Virginia, escaped in 1987, and after being recaptured had five additional years added to her sentence.¹⁷

Moore was also prosecuted federally, represented by federal public defender James F. Hewitt, convicted, and sentenced to life. She served time at federal facilities in Pleasanton and Dublin, California, and briefly at a women’s prison in West Virginia, from which she escaped in 1979 before being recaptured.¹⁰

Parole and Later Years

Moore was paroled first, on December 31, 2007, at 77, after 32 years in prison.¹⁸¹⁹²⁰⁹²¹

Fromme was released on August 14, 2009, from the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, at 60, after nearly 34 years. Because her sentence predated the federal abolition of parole, she remained eligible for early release through accumulated good-time credits.²² Her parole conditions included regular check-ins with a parole officer, a ban on associating with criminals, and a prohibition on possessing firearms. She avoided the press on release, and her whereabouts since have remained largely unknown.²³

What Changed for Presidential Security

The two attempts in quick succession changed how the Secret Service protected Ford. In October 1975 the agency issued him a bulletproof trench coat with a zip-in Kevlar vest weighing more than six pounds. Ford wore it and was open about disliking it. “I would not be honest to say that I took it as a matter of course,” he said in 1977. “It bothered me and I certainly would have preferred not to do it but I felt it my obligation to do it.”¹

Larry Buendorf, the agent who stopped Fromme in Sacramento, received the U.S. Treasury Meritorious Service Award and the U.S. Secret Service Valor Award for his actions. He continued on Ford’s detail, later led Ford’s post-presidency security, and died in 2025 at 87.²²⁴

1
Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library. Squeaky
2
Star Tribune. From Wells, Minn., to the White House: How Larry Buendorf’s Heroics Saved the Life of a President
3
Politico. President Ford Dodges Assassination Attempt
4
Los Angeles Times. The Manson Follower Who Tried to Kill a President and the Man Who Stopped Her
5
ABC News. Manson Disciple Squeaky Fromme
6
BBC News. Sara Jane Moore Assassination Attempt
7
Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library. A Reluctant Hero
8
Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum. Assassination Attempts – September 1975
9
Nashville Banner. Sara Jane Moore Dies
10
ABC7 News. Sara Jane Moore, Woman Who Tried to Assassinate President Gerald Ford, Dies at 95
11
WNYC Radiolab. Oliver Sipple
12
Justia. Sipple v. Chronicle Publishing Co.
13
CBS News. Manson Disciple Squeaky Fromme Set Free
14
vLex. United States v. Fromme
15
New York Times. Judge Tells Ford to Give Fromme Trial Deposition
16
Library of Congress. President Ford’s Videotaped Testimony
17
History.com. Squeaky Fromme Sentenced to Life
18
CBS News. Failed Ford Assassin Released on Parole
19
AL.com. Woman Who Tried to Assassinate President Dead at 95
20
West Virginia Encyclopedia. Sara Jane Moore
21
New York Times. Sara Jane Moore Dead
22
CNN. Fromme Released
23
NBC News. Squeaky Fromme Released From Prison
24
Washington Post. Larry Buendorf Dead