Ford Shooter Freed
SARA JANE MOORE FREED:
Sara Jane Moore, who took a shot at President Ford in a 1975 assassination attempt, was released from prison Monday.
Moore, 77, had served about 30 years of a life sentence when she was released from the federal prison in Dublin, east of San Francisco, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said.
She was 40 feet away from Ford outside a hotel in San Francisco when she fired a shot at him on Sept. 22, 1975. As she raised her .38-caliber revolver, Oliver Sipple, a disabled former Marine standing next to her, pushed up her arm as the gun went off, and the bullet flew over Ford’s head by several feet.
Moore basically appeared to be a complete lunatic who was convinced the Conservatives had declared war on the Liberals. At least there aren’t any people like that around today.
UPDATE: I didn’t realize that Sipple, the disable Marine who was credited with saving Ford’s life, had been born in Detroit. He had been wounded in Vietnam in 1968 and suffered from a number of physical and psychological problems for the rest of his life. Shortly after the attempted assassination, Sipple was outed as a homosexual.
UPDATE 2: Much more here, including a public defender’s assessment of Moore’s reasoning:
“…Her conduct was sort of a shopping list: ‘Take my son to school, shoot the president, pick up my son from school.”
UPDATE 3: More at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Strib, including:
In recent interviews, Moore said she regretted her actions, saying she was blinded by her radical political views and convinced that the government had declared war on the left.
“I was functioning, I think, purely on adrenaline and not thinking clearly. I have often said that I had put blinders on and I was only listening to what I wanted to hear,” she said a year ago in an interview with KGO-TV.
And this in the LA Times:
At the St. Francis, where Ford had come close to dying violently, visitors sometimes gaze up at a quarter-sized gouge on an exterior wall near the north entrance.
It’s said to be the spot where Moore’s bullet ricocheted — a notion confirmed by a hotel employee who asked not to be identified.
“There hasn’t been a reason to do anything with it,” the employee said, acknowledging that tourists with a bent for American history sometimes stand on the sidewalk eyeing the spot, six feet or so above what is now a Bank of America automated teller machine.