Bystander Saves Ford: Second Assassination Foiled

Oliver Sipple was standing in the crowd outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco when he saw Sara Jane Moore raise a .38 caliber revolver and aim it at President Gerald Ford. Sipple lunged for her arm just as she fired, deflecting the shot. The bullet missed Ford by five feet and ricocheted off a wall, slightly wounding a bystander. The date was September 22, 1975, just seventeen days after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme had tried to shoot Ford in Sacramento. Moore was a 45-year-old political activist with an erratic history. She had served as an FBI informant infiltrating radical groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, then turned against the bureau and aligned herself with leftist causes. Her motives for the assassination attempt remained murky. In later interviews, she claimed she wanted to create a political crisis that would spark revolutionary change, though she also acknowledged the plan was irrational. The Secret Service had actually interviewed Moore the day before the shooting and confiscated a .44 caliber handgun from her, but agents determined she was not a serious threat and did not place her under surveillance. She simply bought another gun and showed up at Ford's next public appearance. The security failure prompted an immediate overhaul of presidential protection protocols. Sipple's heroism made national headlines, but the attention brought consequences he never wanted. Journalists outed him as gay, a fact he had hidden from his family. His mother stopped speaking to him, and he fell into depression and alcoholism. He sued several newspapers for invasion of privacy, but the case was dismissed. Sipple died alone in 1989 at age forty-seven. Moore was sentenced to life in prison and served thirty-two years before her parole in 2007. Ford, who survived two assassination attempts in a single month, went on to lose the 1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter. The two incidents remain the closest any president has come to assassination since the attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.