Before Trump, Ford survived 2 assassination attempts in 3 weeks: California’s month of terror
Lynette Fromme sits in a U.S. Marshal’s car in Sacramento following her attempt to assassinate President Ford.
(Walt Zeboski / Associated Press)
ByTimes staff
Nine weeks after a gunman tried to kill Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, the FBI said the former president appeared to be the target of another assassination attempt, at a golf course in Palm Beach on Sunday.
He was not hurt. But the back-to-back incidents have historic echoes. In September 1975, President Gerald Ford escaped two assassination attempts, one in Sacramento and the other in San Francisco.
Like with this summer’s political violence, the attempts to kill Ford shocked the nation.
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, was 26 when she pointed a pistol at Ford in Sacramento. Secret Service agents grabbed her, and Ford was unharmed.
She was convicted Nov. 26, 1975, of attempting to assassinate the president. She was released from prison in 2009 after 34 years.
“My first impression was that she wanted to come closer and extend — I thought at the time — a hand to shake, or to say something to me,” Ford says on the tape.
Then, he said, he noticed the gun, a .45-caliber Colt semiautomatic pistol, adding that “the weapon was large.”
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 his death. She told Bravin she had gone to the park that day uncertain about what she would do.
“She had no personal feelings about [Ford] one way or another,” Bravin said. “She was very angry at the system and what she felt was the environmental degradation. Ford was coming to speak to businessmen in Sacramento. She felt he was destroying the redwoods.”
In 1987, after hearing a rumor that Manson was dying of cancer, she slipped away from a minimum-security federal prison in West Virginia with the hope, she said, of being near him. She was captured two miles away.
President Ford is hustled to safety after Lynette Fromme attempted to shoot him on Sept. 5, 1957, in Sacramento.
(Associated Press)
Sept. 22, 1975 | San Francisco
Sara Jane Moore, an accountant and a divorced mother of four, fired at Ford on Sept. 22, 1975, as the president was leaving a speaking engagement at the St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco.
Her single shot from a .38-caliber revolver missed Ford by several feet after Oliver Sipple, a disabled Vietnam War veteran, grabbed her arm and pulled her down.
San Francisco police had dealt with Moore in the past and viewed her as a potential threat to the president.
Two days before the attempted assassination, they arrested her on the street with a .44-caliber revolver in her handbag and boxes of ammunition in her car.
Police alerted the Secret Service, who interviewed and released her. Less than 48 hours later, she purchased her .38 from a friend, stationed herself outside the St. Francis in a crowd of several thousand and tried to shoot her way into history.
Before she fired at Ford, Moore had received psychiatric treatment several times. Her attorneys were preparing an insanity defense. She pleaded guilty over their objections.
After she was sentenced, Moore expressed mixed feelings about her actions.
“Am I sorry I tried?” she said. “Yes and no. Yes, because it accomplished little except to throw away the rest of my life. ... And, no, I’m not sorry I tried, because at the time it seemed a correct expression of my anger.”
Sipple, the former Marine who subdued her, said his life was ruined by publicity about him in the wake of his heroic act.
Retired from the Marines on a disability pension, Sipple was gay — a fact that he said his relatives never knew until it came out in the newspapers.
He filed a $15-million lawsuit for invasion of privacy against seven newspapers, including The Times. A judge rejected it. Sipple died in 1989 at the age of 47. His health had deteriorated and he was drinking heavily.
That year, Ford wrote a letter saying he was “forever grateful” for the former Marine’s action in averting the assassination.
“I strongly regretted the problems that developed for him following this incident,” said Ford’s letter, which was dated Feb. 14 and addressed “To the friends of Oliver Sipple.” “It saddened me to learn the circumstances of his death.”
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 back on both assassination attempts and found they were becoming footnotes in history. Historians weighed in on what they meant.
Both plots were symptoms of the 1970s, the “goofiest decade of the century for California ... in terms of its sheer ominous weirdness,” said Kevin Starr, USC history professor and state librarian emeritus.
“Moore’s style was middle-class, whereas Squeaky Fromme was a genuine cultist. Moore represented the individual derangement of the period and Squeaky the social derangement,” said Starr. The assassination attempts — Fromme’s in Sacramento and Moore’s in San Francisco — also contributed to “an atmosphere of lawlessness” in Northern California, Starr said, compounded by such 1970s events as the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the slaying of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and the mass suicide of the Jonestown cultists.
Others say the acts symbolized an unraveling of American society in the aftermath of Watergate and the Vietnam War.
“A lot of people were rolling around unmoored, finding a reason to believe there was a political or conspiratorial explanation for their inner upheaval and concluding if they could only act on their impulse, they could save the world,” said Todd Gitlin, 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.”
Keep in mind all this happened in Northern California, types the "reporter" who is w/in walking distance of where the original Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
Shots fired near Donald Trump as he leaves his Florida golf club — The Secret Service is responding to a shooting near Donald Trump as he left his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, according to law enforcement sources. — “President Trump is safe following gunshots in his vicinity.
Random all-American shootin' that happens all the time in the low-rent areas where a Trump Golf Course might be found, or ...? Third time's the charm, this reporter says.
Officials believe an armed individual intended to target Trump, according to sources briefed on the matter. A person has been detained in connection to the incident, according to a law enforcement source.
Loomer threatens to sue Maher over Trump affair rumor — Laura Loomer hit back over Bill Maher's assertion that she was having an affair with Donald Trump — Laura Loomer is threatening to lawyer up after Bill Maher joked about a possible affair between the far-right troll and Donald Trump.
More sucker-ass chumps losing their shirts on overpriced bullshit. Warms my gawddam heart. Everything's a timeless blur, but I'll assume it was there for at least a yr. Never got around to trying the overpriced bullshit. (And what was a "Concrete" anyway?)
And what a crummy corner. There was a 7-Eleven® just up the street; it opened & went out of biznis in a couple of yrs. Fuck 'em all to hell.
When Debates Don't Go Well, Donald Trump Has a Go-To Move — It does not usually involve congratulating the moderators for their impartiality and quietly resolving to do better the next time. — As former President Donald J. Trump sought to minimize the damage done by Tuesday night's debate …
“I’m allowed to criticize Taylor Swift, and I don’t give a shit who gets upset. This is disgusting,” Kelly said on The Megyn Kelly Show. “If she wants to vote Harris-Walz, she can do it all she wants, but to say the reason she’s doing it is because of Tim Walz’s stance on LGBTQ? F[uck] you, Taylor Swift! And F[uck] all of the people who want to see these children have body parts chopped off and watched them sterilized under the age of consent, and then will ride off to their multi-gazillion dollar mansions never to think of them again!”
Yeah, fuck all those people who don't exist except in the diseased swamp of Kelly's own delusions. A truly horrid piece of Italian, German & Irish Catholic crap. When she's sent back, will we have to cut her into three parts because she doesn't know who she is?
This is very exciting for the fake news. They can barely contain their starbursts. An ignorant question asked almost 30 yrs. ago was somehow "EMBARRASSING" & "Awkward". Guess that proves something about the Vice-President. No mention of any of Trump's embarrassing & awkward "side pieces" (not when he was separated from his various wives, either) or his lust for his actual biological daughter.
Democrats picked Kamala Harris as their presidential candidate in July in a silent coup of the sitting president, Joe Biden.
And, of course, the legacy media’s obedient stenographers pushed forward with their fresh Kamala narrative, not questioning what had just taken place.
Kamala Harris is best known for being former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s much younger sidepiece.
The absurdity of that last sentence should be dwelled upon a bit. By the way, is everybody at the Gateway Pundit a woman-hating homosexual Catholic & groomer, or is it just the big ugly awkward embarrassing bald publisher who's married to a Filipino (Why do these people hate America?) gentleman 30 yrs. his junior?
Worth noting: California is one of the few states admitted to the Union w/o having been a territory. Matter of fact, we were our own damn Republic, & it could happen again!
In the good old days, gummint & bank employees & schools got the day off. That's not as common anymore. Ah, a culprit:
In 1984, however, Governor George Deukmejian signed legislation changing its observance to a “personal” option.
Send him back to Armenia if he's still alive!!
No days off for firefighters, obviously. And may I say fuck civilians who can't move their idiot 'phones 90° for a landscape shot, & fuck the AP for using a robot voiceover.
State Anthem:
O. K., the Southern Calif. anthem. Northern Cal.'s anthem is by the Dreadful Grate & has something to do w/ fog.
You bet the sun is out. Allegedly 95°F at Dodger Stadium which is just a few miles north of the bunker, 'though some sources (the telly) indicate it's 103 or 104.
And a shout out to my late father, who became late 55 yrs. ago today on the road near Yakima.
Proper reaction to shit like this is anything from smearing mud on the windows to letting the air out of the tires to breaking the fucking windows. I gotcher "free speech rights" right effing here, subhuman cretin.
Not sure what was up, but I swear it wasn't anything I did. It sat there, not attempting to move, for minutes. A crying shame some chump's food was sitting inside getting cold or warm or rotting, but that's what you get when you sell human jobs to the machines, traitors! Probably robot-made food too.
The Manchester's first deployment, when the illegal Starlink was used. Quite dull until some schadenfreude at (15:00).
How Navy chiefs conspired to get themselves illegal warship Wi-Fi
The Manchester’s secret Wi-Fi network was born in March 2023, when Marrero and a co-conspirator got to work buying and installing the Starlink system before the ship’s deployment began the following month.
[...]
It’s unclear who harnessed up and actually installed the system for Marrero due to redactions in the publicly released copy of the probe, but records show Marrero powered up the system the night before the ship got underway to the West Pacific waters of U.S. 7th Fleet.
Marrero and her cohorts paid $2,800 for a Starlink High Performance Kit with a personal credit card, and contacted Starlink to expedite shipping so the system would arrive in time for the deployment.
Worse than brewing jungle juice in a storage compartment.
And reminds us of the question: Does the Littoral Combat Ship have any purpose?
That's some fucking nerve. Wish I'd had some heroin, woulda whipped it out & sparked it right there. Or anything else. Started a fire on general anarchic principles, even.
Spent close to five hrs. outside the bunker today; the above was the most interesting/maddening thing I encountered.
Supposed to have been 105°F (40.5556°C); the Weatherbug app on the allegedly smart 'phone claimed it was a mere 94 when I got around to checking. Breezy & dry, not oppressive in the least. And my blood may be so thin that 105°F is nothing.
Again, don't give us this "mental illness" crap. The little murdering bastard was simply mad as hell, & it looks as if his father gave him a gun to express his rage. Wish I had loving parents to arm me. People haven't seen anger yet.
Do you remember growing up with the constant threat of school shootings? I don't. Most Gen X and millennials don't. So no, they aren't a "fact of life," @JDVance.
