Sara Jane Moore, the former psychiatric patient who tried to assassinate President Ford during an era of astonishing violence and upheaval in California, died Wednesday at a nursing home in Franklin, Tenn.
Moore, who retreated to North Carolina after serving 32 years in federal prison but then was jailed again late in life, was 95. News of her death was confirmed by Demetria Kalodimos, executive producer at the Nashville Banner, who developed a relationship with Moore over the last two years. A cause of death was not reported, but Kalodimos said Moore had been bedridden for about 15 months after a fall.
As shocking as Moore’s attempt to kill the president was, it seemed a little less so during the frenetic 1970s.
It was 1975 in San Francisco. Charles Manson was on death row, kidnap victim-turned-accomplice Patty Hearst had just been arrested, and a very young governor named Jerry Brown was in his first year in office.
Moore chose this moment for a shocking crime in an era nearly defined by them — on Sept. 22, 1975, she tried to assassinate Ford in front of the fashionable St. Francis Hotel.
She was the second would-be assassin to confront the 38th president in the space of a month.
Her bullet missed, thanks to the quick reflexes of a former Marine standing next to her.
The attempt came just 17 days after a Manson follower in a nun’s habit, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, pointed a gun at Ford in Sacramento. It was never clear whether she tried to pull the trigger.
News accounts of the time portrayed Moore as an enigma. They emphasized her supposedly conventional past. She was described as an average housewife and mother whose conversion to radical politics seemed an unlikely twist. She herself insisted she had been a relatively normal suburbanite before joining the leftist underground.
It wasn’t true. Moore’s entire adult life had been punctuated by mental health issues, divorces and suicide attempts. Many people who knew her described her as unstable and mercurial.
Born Sara Jane Kahn on Feb. 15, 1930, in Charleston, W. Va., Moore had been an aspiring actress and nurse before finding work as a bookkeeper. She married five times, was estranged from her family, and abandoned three of her children. A fourth remained in her care at the time of the attempted assassination. Her erratic behavior had cost her jobs, and she had been treated for mental illness numerous times.
This history led some, including Ford himself, to conclude that she was “off her mind,” as the former president said in a 2004 CNN interview.
She was in her mid-40s, divorced and living in Danville, outside San Francisco, when she went to work in 1974 as a bookkeeper for People in Need. The organization had been set up to distribute food in response to ransom demands by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the extreme leftist group that had kidnapped Hearst in early 1974 and shortly after engaged in a furious gun battle with Los Angeles police, one of the longest shootouts in U.S. history.
Moore’s ties to other radical organizations were murky. She would later cast herself as a sought-after FBI informant who had come to live in fear of some unspecified threat. Its source was either from the government or her radical brethren, depending on the interview. Authorities downplayed this, saying her occasional calls to agents and local police officers were unsolicited.
Hearst had been arrested a few days before the assassination attempt. The day before, the 45-year-old Moore had been detained by San Francisco police officers who seized a gun from her. She made a vague threat and the Secret Service was alerted, but agents concluded she was not dangerous and released her.
Moore immediately bought a .38 caliber revolver.
Wearing polka-dot slacks, she went to the hotel where Ford was speaking to the World Affairs Council. She waited outside, and raised her arm to fire when the president emerged at 3:30 p.m. Oliver Sipple, a disabled former Marine standing next to her, saw the weapon and deflected her arm just as the gun went off.
The bullet went over the president’s head, ricocheted and injured a taxi driver. The president’s security detail rushed to the airport, and Ford was whisked out of California as fast as possible.
After her arrest, acquaintances said Moore was very concerned that people would assume she was mentally ill. She alluded often to her political motives for trying to kill Ford. Reporters eagerly interviewed her to learn more, but she never seemed able to clearly explain her political agenda.
Her lawyers were preparing a defense related to her mental condition when she abruptly pleaded guilty, against their advice. She was given a life sentence with a possibility of parole. Moore’s attempt prompted Senate scrutiny of presidential security.
“Am I sorry I tried?” Moore said at her sentencing. “Yes and no. Yes, because it accomplished little except to throw away the rest of my life, although I realize there are those who think that’s the one good thing resulting from this. And no, I’m not sorry I tried, because at the time it seemed a correct expression of my anger.”
Moore made headlines briefly again in 1979 when she escaped fbriefly from the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, W.Va., by climbing a 12-foot fence.
Otherwise, her prison years were uneventful. She was reported to fill her time with needlepoint and bookkeeping duties, and was paroled in 2007 at the age of 77 from a low-security federal facility for women in Dublin, east of San Francisco. Her parole was essentially grandfathered by federal rules that have since been tightened.
“It was a time that people don’t remember,” Moore told NBC’s “Today” show in 2009. “You know we had a war … the Vietnam War, you became, I became, immersed in it. We were saying the country needed to change. The only way it was going to change was a violent revolution. I genuinely thought that [shooting Ford] might trigger that new revolution.”
In 2015, Moore was interviewed remotely by CNN, her location only listed as North Carolina.
Moore was jailed again in early 2019 when she was detained at JFK Airport for traveling outside the country without telling parole officials. Friends said she had become ill in Israel, forcing her to stay longer than she intended. She was released six months later.
Moore maintained that she had not been influenced by Fromme’s assault on Ford. Fromme was paroled in 2009 and moved to upstate New York, largely disappearing. Both women were depicted in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Assassins,” which won a Tony Award in 2004.
Sipple, who deflected the shot, was lauded as a hero but later sued several newspapers for invasion of privacy. He said media reports that he was gay had ruined his family relations, but he lost the case. He died in 1989.
Subsequent attacks on public figures would eclipse Moore’s crime. Three years later, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated. John Lennon’s murder came two years after that, and John Hinckley Jr.’s shooting of President Reagan a few months later.
Ford, who died of natural causes at age 93 in 2006, was said to be nonplussed by Moore’s attempt on his life. But other members of his entourage saw it as consistent with the place and time.
Asked by the San Francisco Chronicle to sum up the event, Ford’s press secretary Ron Nessen, who was with him when he was targeted, framed it this way: “It was the ‘70s in San Francisco and California.”
Leovy and Marble are former Times staff writers.
