The Unintended Victim

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From April 4, 1841 until Nov. 22, 1963, a period of 122 years, America averaged a presidential death about every 15¼ years (we have now gone more than 50 years without an incumbent president's death). Some of those deaths were the clear outcomes of assassination attempts, and others were rumored to be — but never proven to be — assassinations.

No president had ever been the target of two assassination attempts — presumably because nearly all of the previous assassination attempts were successful — until this day in 1975.

I guess you really couldn't blame President Gerald Ford for wondering if there was a target on his chest. It was the second time in a month that he had been targeted for assassination — and both attempts were carried out by women in the state of California.

As a result of that first attempt, the Secret Service began putting more distance between Ford and the crowds who greeted him at his stops. That strategy was still evolving, but it may have prevented Ford's injury or death when, 40 years ago today, Sara Jane Moore attempted to shoot Ford from across a street in San Francisco. The gun never went off in that first attempt. It did go off in the second attempt, but the sights were off, so the shot missed.

The shot may also have been affected by the actions of a retired Marine standing next to Moore. Acting out of instinct, he reached for her just as she fired the first shot. Before Moore could fire a second shot, the ex–Marine reached for the gun and deflected the shot, which missed Ford by about six inches, ricocheted and wounded a taxi driver.

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It turned out afterward that the retired Marine was gay, and his heroic act brought a lot of unwanted attention to him and his lifestyle. His big problem was that his family found out about his sexual orientation for the very first time through those news reports.

The man was outed, so I hear, by gay politician Harvey Milk, who was a friend of the man. Supposedly, Milk thought it was too good an opportunity to show the community that gays were capable of heroic deeds and advised the San Francisco Chronicle that the man was gay. That was the tragedy of the story. The man became estranged from his family, and his mental and physical health deteriorated over the years. Eventually, he reconciled with his family, but he drank heavily, gained weight and became paranoid and suicidal.

At times later in his life, he expressed regret at having deflected the shot intended for Ford. He was found dead in his bed in February 1989. Earlier in the day, he told a friend he had been turned away by a VA hospital where he had gone about difficulty he had been having breathing due to pneumonia.

I don't know if that was his cause of death or not, but his treatment after the incident speaks volumes about the America of the mid–'70s and the America of today. The man asked that his sexual orientation and other aspects of his life be withheld from publication, but the media ignored his request. President Ford was criticized at the time for not inviting the man to the White House to thank him and was accused of being homophobic. Ford insisted that he did not know until later about the man's sexual orientation; my memory is that the topic was never mentioned the next year when Ford ran for a full four–year term as president.

Ford lost that election, but the ex–Marine, Billy Sipple, lost a lot more than that. He was the unintended victim.

Taking Aim at Jerry Ford

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"In the job of selling himself to the voters, Ford embarked, shortly after Labor Day, on a routine two–day trip to the West Coast. Before it was over, the nation was treated to yet another bizarre illustration of the unpredictability of American presidential politics."

Jules Witcover, Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency 1972–1976

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For just a moment or two, put yourself in Gerald Ford's position 40 years ago. The summer of 1975 was Ford's first full summer as president, having succeeded Richard Nixon in August 1974. To say that his first year in office had been challenging would be an understatement.

Most people who are old enough to remember Ford's presidency would tell you that he seemed like a nice guy, a decent guy, whether they agreed with him on most things or not. When Ford became president, the contrast between his easygoing disposition and the sullen Nixon was so stark that he enjoyed astonishing popularity from the start. He irretrievably lost a lot of the public's good will when he pardoned Nixon about a month after becoming president, but he didn't deserve to be targeted for assassination for it. I think even Ford's detractors would agree with that.

Yet it was 40 years ago today that Squeaky Fromme, one of the original members of the Manson Family, tried to assassinate Ford in Sacramento, Calif.

Now, to be fair, Squeaky's motive for shooting Ford apparently had nothing to do with the pardon of Nixon. It was just that, even then, the timing of the shooting seemed spooky to me — just a few days shy of the one–year anniversary of the pardon.

I suppose most people don't remember Squeaky's real name (Lynette). Doesn't really matter, I guess. "Squeaky" suited her.

Most of the first half of 1975 had not been particularly kind to Ford. He came under frequent criticism from hard–liners in his party over his choice of Nelson Rockefeller to be vice president. The economy had been a drain on his presidency; only a few months after taking office, he went on national television to encourage anti–inflation sentiment — since inflation was regarded as a greater threat to economic stability than rising unemployment (which, while high by the standards of the times, seems modest when compared to today's 5.1% rate). And the United States had suffered its greatest foreign policy humiliation — up to that time — when the North Vietnamese drove the Americans from South Vietnam. That led to rumblings of concern that Ford's national security team wasn't up to the job.

But in May 1975 Ford's luck began to change, thanks to an event half a world away, in the Gulf of Siam. Inexplicably, the Khmer Rouge seized the merchant ship Mayaguez and held its crew captive. The Ford administration freed the crew with a plan that was both daring and overkill, subjecting the Cambodian mainland to heavy air strikes. It was a shot in the arm for those who had worried about a loss of U.S. influence in the region, and it was leverage that Ford supporters used — unsuccessfully — in an effort to persuade Ronald Reagan and his supporters not to challenge Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976.

The Mayaguez incident was a real turning point for Ford. Economic news was getting better, too. The recession that had plagued the economy was bottoming out. Unemployment was still higher than most would like, but there were signs of a recovery, which was seen as good news for the administration, and Ford announced his candidacy for a full term in July.

Also that July, California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, would not commit to speak to the annual "Host Breakfast" in Sacramento — a gathering of the state's politically influential business leaders. They saw Brown's response as a snub and, in apparent retaliation, invited Ford, a Republican, to speak. Ford believed California was crucial to his hopes of winning a full term in 1976 and accepted the invitation.

Meanwhile, Fromme apparently had become active in environmental causes and believed (due, in part, to a study that had been released by the Environmental Protection Agency) that California's redwoods were endangered by smog. An article in the New York Times about the study observed that Ford had asked Congress to ease provisions of the 1963 Clean Air Act.

Fromme wanted to bring attention to this matter, and she wanted those in government to be fearful so she decided to kill the symbolic head of the government. On the morning of Sept. 5, she walked approximately half a mile from her apartment to the state capitol grounds — a short distance from the Senator Hotel, where Ford was staying — a Colt .45 concealed beneath her distinctive red robe.

Ford returned from the breakfast around 9:30 a.m., then left the hotel on foot at 10, his destination the governor's office — and an apparent photo opp with Jerry Brown. Along the way, he encountered Fromme, who drew the gun from beneath her robe and pulled the trigger. The weapon had ammunition — but no bullet in the chamber — so the gun didn't fire.

"It wouldn't go off!" Fromme shouted as Secret Service agents took the gun from her hands and wrestled her to the ground. "Can you believe it? It didn't go off."

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Ford went on to the capitol and met with Brown for half an hour, only mentioning the assassination attempt in passing as he prepared to leave.

"I thought I'd better get on with my day's schedule," Ford later said.

Two months later, Fromme was convicted of attempting to assassinate the president and received a life sentence. She was paroled in August 2009, nearly three years after Ford's death.

Forty Years Since the Fall of Saigon

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The picture at the top of this post is the image that comes to my mind when I think of the end of the war in Vietnam 40 years ago today.

As far back as I can remember, the war in Vietnam was a fact of life. To a young boy, it seemed that there had never been a time when U.S. forces were not in Vietnam. Anyway, it seemed that way to me. It was probably different for people who were even a year older than I; I was born at the right time to have no real memory of the pre–Vietnam era, but I know that older brothers and sisters of my contemporaries did know of that time, had memories of it.

I knew nothing of it, and I guess I've always assumed that the others who were my age had no memories of it, either, but I could be wrong about that. I can think of a few people I knew who were probably more aware of the outside world than the rest of us, but they were definitely the exceptions. Anyway, Vietnam influenced everything. It was on the news every night with updated casualty counts. Late in the '60s, if there was a demonstration somewhere or someone important was giving a speech, it was a pretty good bet that it was about the war. It was everywhere.

My father was a religion professor at a small college in my hometown. For a small college, it had some impressive things, though, like an Olympic–sized swimming pool. In the summer, one hour was set aside each weekday for faculty members and their families to have exclusive use of that pool, and my brother and I were regulars there. Anyway, on one of those occasions, I have a vivid memory of swimming in the pool and, for whatever reason, I started to muse about whether the war would still be going on when I got old enough to be drafted. I didn't think about it that much; after all, the prospect still seemed far away, and I was still just a boy, cooling off on a hot summer day in Arkansas. But that moment made enough of an impression on me that I can still remember it all these years later.

I don't remember how I imagined the war would end. I guess I pictured a Hollywoodesque finish with bombs and rockets bursting, and the Americans finding some way to win the thing in the end. I guess I imagined a John Wayne movie. It wasn't like that, of course. The fall of Saigon was far from glamorous. The Viet Cong swept the city, capturing all the important places, and South Vietnamese refugees evacuated.

In fact, the fall of the city actually came after many of the civilians and the Americans there had fled. In that picture, you can see some of the South Vietnamese trying to climb aboard a single helicopter on April 29, 1975. It looks reasonably orderly in the picture, but my memory is of chaos. I guess it was controlled chaos. In 24 hours, American helicopters evacuated about 7,000 people — roughly a dozen at a time — and it was not orderly.

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But there were times when I watched the news coverage of helicopters like the one in the picture struggling to get off the ground, so heavy were they with passengers.

Strange as it might have seemed to people at the time — which explains why I never mentioned it to anyone — I found myself sympathizing with Gerald Ford. I liked him when he first became president. He was such a likable guy, a breath of fresh air after the Nixon years, and then he pardoned Nixon and threw away all the good will the American people had given him. In hindsight, I have to grudgingly admit that he was probably right when he said that pardoning Nixon was the only way to close the chapter on Watergate and move on. At the time, I thought it was a flimsy excuse. So, too, apparently, did a lot of people.

The Nixon/Watergate matter wasn't the only challenge Ford faced. The loss of Saigon was another. Ford's approval rating, which had been in the low 70s right after he took office but tumbled after the pardon, had been hovering around 40% since before Christmas in 1974, which was when the North Vietnamese broke the 1973 accords and invaded a South Vietnamese province along the Cambodian border. In Gallup's last survey before the fall of Saigon, Ford's approval stood at 39%.

Ford had a reputation for not being too bright, but I have come to believe that was mostly a facade for him. He used that image to his advantage. It made his adversaries underestimate him, some more than others.

I don't think anything illustrated that quite as well as the Mayaguez incident a couple of weeks after the fall of Saigon. The Mayaguez, a merchant ship, was seized by the Cambodians on May 12. Three days later, a rescue mission was launched, making Ford appear decisive and assertive — qualities he would need in the campaign for the Republican nomination against former Gov. Ronald Reagan; if that was what he was seeking, I'd be inclined to say he got it. In Gallup's next survey, Ford's approval was over 50%.

Ford and his people were products of the Cold War — he had three chiefs of staff while he was president (Alexander Haig, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney), and they almost certainly influenced his actions in Southeast Asia. They were worried about the other Southeast Asian countries, whether they would be more likely to fall prey to communism after the fall of Saigon, and they were determined to make a stand.

At the time, the expectation had been that the South Vietnamese could resist the North Vietnamese until 1976. Obviously, that prediction fell a bit short of the mark.

It is a tricky proposition to see into the future.