Sara Jane Moore, who made headlines in the '70s for her failed attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford, died Wednesday at age 95, just two days after the 50th anniversary of the shooting. Her death at a nursing home in Franklin, Tennessee, was confirmed by a friend, though no cause was given. Moore's story reads like a tour through America's political turbulence. Once a suburban Republican mom, she drifted into San Francisco's radical leftist circles in the late 1960s and early '70s, eventually working as both an activist and an FBI informant. In a twist, she ended up spying on the same radicals she marched alongside.
On Sept. 22, 1975, Moore, then 45, fired two shots at Ford outside San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel. Her poorly sighted weapon missed the president, thanks in part to the quick actions of Marine veteran Oliver Sipple, who deflected her arm, causing one bullet to ricochet and slightly injure a bystander. Moore was tackled and disarmed by police and Secret Service. Her attempt came just weeks after another woman, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme of the Manson cult, tried and failed to shoot Ford. Neither Moore nor Fromme was on the Secret Service's threat list, a fact that led to congressional scrutiny of presidential protection.
The two cases were unconnected, notes the Nashville Banner, which first reported on Moore's death. Moore—who was sentenced to life in prison and released in 2007, after more than 32 years behind bars—spoke about the assassination attempt in a 2009 interview. "The Vietnam War ... I became immersed in it," she told Today at the time. "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 this country."
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She also spoke to the Banner about her state of mind during the Ford assassination attempt while watching coverage of a similar attempt on Donald Trump last summer. "When you psych yourself up to do something like that ... it's sort of like being in a play," she said of having no fear at the time, adding that she was "stunned" when she missed. "You know, you rehearse and rehearse, and then when the time comes, you just do it." After her prison release, Moore married clinical psychologist Philip Chase, who died in 2018. She was arrested one more time, in 2019 at the age of 89, for violating her lifetime parole by traveling to Israel without informing her parole officer, per the Los Angeles Times. She was released six months later.
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