Ford would-be assassins still in prison

They are joined in a strange sisterhood by a pair of unhinged acts: In the autumn of 1975, 17 days apart, each tried to assassinate President Ford, who died this week at age 93.

Today, Lynette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme and Sara Jane Moore are serving life sentences in federal prisons in Texas and California, respectively. The once headline-grabbing names have become historical footnotes who embody the extremism of a tumultuous era.

Three decades ago, Fromme was a slender red-haired flower child from Santa Monica, Calif., a Charles Manson handmaiden who gouged an "X" into her forehead in devotion to the murderer.

Moore was an overweight accountant, divorced numerous times and mother of four. Of her attempt at Ford's life, she said: "There comes a point where the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun."

Although the two would-be killers came from different roots, their plots were both symptoms that the 1970s were the "goofiest decade of the century for California ... in terms of its sheer ominous weirdness," noted Kevin Starr, University of Southern California history professor and California's 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," recalled Starr.

Squeaky isn't sorry

The assassination attempts - Fromme's in Sacramento, Calif., and Moore's in San Francisco - also contributed to "an atmosphere of lawlessness" in Northern California, Starr said. They were compounded by such other infamous 1970s events as the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the murder of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and the mass suicide of the Jonestown cultists.

Others say the acts symbolized an unraveling of U.S. 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, a former leader of the Students for a Democratic Society who has written such books as "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage."

Fromme, now 58, was the first woman in history to try to assassinate a U.S. president when on Sept. 5, 1975, she burst through a crowd gathered at the state Capitol, dressed in a nun's robe, with a .45-caliber pistol strapped to her left leg.

She pointed the weapon at Ford from 2 feet away. The gun was loaded, but there was no bullet in the firing chamber. A Secret Service agent disarmed her and slapped her in handcuffs.

At her sentencing, when the federal judge said he believed she would have killed Ford if she could have, Fromme shouted: "You fool! I'm trying to save your life!" She later threw an apple, hitting the federal prosecutor in the right temple.

In 1987, after hearing rumors that Manson was dying of cancer, Fromme briefly escaped from a lock-up in Alderson, W. Va., in an attempt to see the former cult leader. Eight years earlier, Moore briefly escaped the same facility.

Currently held at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, Fromme has been eligible for parole since 1985 but has yet to request her freedom.

"Her position has been consistent: She didn't kill anyone and is not sorry. She's not asking for sympathy, mercy or a second chance," said Jess Bravin, author of "Squeaky: The Life and Times of Lynette Alice Fromme."

"She says she didn't intend to kill Ford. She felt she was taking important symbolic acts, calling attention to acts she considered out of line in the world: the continued incarceration of Charles Manson and what she perceived as Ford's hostile policies toward the environment."

'He moved on'

Moore, 76, is being held at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, a low-security facility for women about 40 miles from San Francisco. Officials there would only say that she is part of the general population, is housed in a cell with two or three other people and works prison jobs for seven hours a day, five days a week.

Moore could be released on Sept. 21 if she applies for parole and the U.S. Parole Commission decides she has a good prison record and is not likely to commit another crime. "If she does apply, we can still say 'no,'" said Tom Hutchison, the commission's chief of staff.

She grew up in comfortable circumstances in Charleston, W. Va., where she was remembered as smart but aloof. She became an accountant and later an FBI informant. While living in the San Francisco Bay Area, she became involved in radical politics and volunteered for an organization which oversaw the distribution of $2 million in food, a ransom demand by the Symbionese Liberation Army after its kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.

She fired at Ford on Sept. 22, 1975, as the president was leaving a speaking engagement at the St. Francis Hotel. Her single shot from a .38 revolver missed Ford after Oliver Sipple, a disabled Vietnam War veteran, grabbed her arm and pulled her down.

Federal public defenders were preparing an insanity defense for Moore, who had received psychiatric treatment several times in the past, but she pleaded guilty over her lawyers' objections. As she was sentenced to life in prison, Moore expressed mixed feelings about her actions.

"Am I sorry I tried?" she asked. "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."

In a jail house interview, Moore said she was not inspired by Fromme, whom she called "insane," saying Fromme was "seeking all that attention."

In the end, neither assassination attempt hurt Ford nor changed his policies. In an interview with Bravin, Ford said he calculated that Fromme's actions that September day actually boosted his public standing.

"He said for better or worse, he wasn't an emotional guy and that he didn't get that excited" about the incidents, said Bravin. "It was frightening when it happened, but he moved on."