Gerald Ford’s Would-Be Assassin Dies at 95

Sara Jane Moore has died, just two days after the 50th anniversary of her failed attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford. She was 95. On Sept. 22, 1975, Moore approached Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, firing two shots in his direction. The first shot narrowly missed the president, while the second ricocheted after a bystander, local Marine Oliver W. Sipple, grabbed Moore’s arm as she fired. Ford left the scene unharmed. Moore’s attempt came just 17 days after Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a member of the Manson family, had also tried and failed to shoot Ford in San Francisco. The two unsuccessful attempts served as partial inspiration for Stephen Sondheim’s 1990 musical Assassins, which features the women as characters. Born in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1930 as Sara Jane Kahn, Moore was an accountant with ties to California’s activist circles and a desire to stage a “violent revolution” when she shot at the president. She was also an FBI informant, recruited because she worked for People in Need, an organization created by newspaper magnate Randolph A. Hearst to appease the radical Symbionese Liberation Army after they kidnapped his daughter, Patty Hearst. Moore was sentenced to life in prison for the assassination attempt, serving 32 years at the Federal Correction Institution in Dublin, California. She was paroled in 2007 and was living at a nursing home in Franklin, Tennessee, when she died. Moore married five times and had four children: Sydney, Christopher, Janet, and Frederic. Her death was announced in The Nashville Banner by her friend, journalist Demetria Kalodimos. Moore had expressed regret for the shooting during her life and wrote an apology letter to Ford, who never responded.

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Gerald Ford’s Would-Be Assassin Dies at 95