Would-be Ford Assassin Freed

Happy New Year!

A leftwing radical who tried to murder President Ford walks free.

Woman who tried to kill Ford freed

SAN FRANCISCO - Sara Jane Moore, who took a shot at President Ford in a bizarre assassination attempt just 17 days after a disciple of Charles Manson tried to kill Ford, was paroled Monday after 32 years behind bars. Moore, 77, was released from the federal prison in Dublin, east of San Francisco, where she had been serving a life sentence, the Bureau of Prisons said.

Bureau spokeswoman Felicia Ponce said she had no details on why Moore was let out. But she said that with good behavior, inmates sentenced to life can apply for parole after 10 years.

Moore 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 and pulled the trigger, Oliver Sipple, a disabled former Marine standing next to her, pushed up her arm. The bullet flew over Ford's head by several feet.

Two weeks earlier, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a follower of Manson's, tried to kill the president in Sacramento.

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.
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In the 1970s, Moore began working for People in Need, a free food program established by millionaire Randolph Hearst in exchange for the return for his daughter Patty, who was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974.

Moore soon became involved with radical leftists, ex-convicts and other members of San Francisco's counterculture. At this time, Moore became an informant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

She has said she fired at Ford because she thought she would be killed once it was disclosed that she was an FBI informant. The bureau ended its relationship with her about four months before the assassination attempt.

"I was going to go down anyway," she said in a 1982 interview with the San Jose Mercury News. "If the government was going to kill me, I was going to make some kind of statement."

Moore was sent to a West Virginia women's prison in 1977. Two years later, she escaped but was captured several hours later.

OK, so the woman is 77 and has served a long stretch. Still, I think an attempt on the life of a president deserves life.

Via the Moore Wikipedia entry.

“I do regret I didn't succeed, and allow the winds of change to start. I wish I had killed him. I did it to create chaos.”

Check out Making of a Misfit.

Through her involvement with PIN, Sara Jane Moore soon became a kind of radical groupie. During the next 18 months, as she wandered through the small, semiclandestine parties, splinter groups and cells that make up "the Movement" in the Bay Area, Moore turned from enchanted novice into an FBI informer and then into a Marxist convert, only to be ostracized as a despised pariah after she confessed her informant role. The atmosphere of conspiracy and danger provided a sense of action and purpose that her life was lacking. "I was really nervous, but I was intrigued by the whole thing," she once said. "It was like a grade-B movie."