[Marxism] Unsuccessful Ford assassin was FBI informant

[Louis Proyect]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-ford1jan01,1,5255865.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california

 From the Los Angeles Times
Would-be Ford assassin released from prison
Sara Jane Moore, who shot at the president in 1975 and was sentenced to 
a life term, is paroled at age 77.
By Steve Chawkins, Larry Gordon and Richard Winton
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

January 1, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — After more than three decades in prison for a foiled 
attempt to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford, Sara Jane Moore was 
released on parole Monday.

Although Moore had been given a life sentence in the 1975 attempt on 
Ford's life outside a hotel in downtown San Francisco, she had been 
eligible for parole for some time. Federal officials offered no comment 
as to why she was released Monday, but Moore had suggested in past 
interviews that she would probably not gain release until after Ford's 
death. Ford died almost exactly one year ago at his home in Rancho Mirage.

Moore, 77, was released from the Federal Correctional Institution in 
Dublin, a low-security facility for women 30 miles east of San 
Francisco, according to Mike Truman, a spokesman with the Federal Bureau 
of Prisons.

Michael G. Ford, one of President Ford's four children, said the family 
would have no comment on Moore's release. "We're keeping a private, low 
profile on that," said Ford, who is an administrator at Wake Forest 
University in North Carolina.

Moore, an accountant and a divorced mother of four, fired at Ford on 
Sept. 22, 1975, as the president was leaving a speaking engagement at 
the St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco. Her single shot from a 
.38-caliber revolver missed Ford by several feet after Oliver Sipple, a 
disabled Vietnam War veteran, grabbed her arm and pulled her down.

It came a little more than two weeks after Lynnette Alice "Squeaky" 
Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, pointed a loaded gun at Ford as he 
visited the state Capitol in Sacramento. Moore later said that Fromme's 
effort did not inspire her own.

Before she fired at Ford, Moore had received psychiatric treatment 
several times and her attorneys were preparing an insanity defense. She 
pleaded guilty over their objections.

After she was sentenced, Moore expressed mixed feelings about her actions.

"Am I sorry I tried?" she said. "Yes and no. Yes, because it 
accomplished little except to throw away the rest of my life . . . . 
And, no, I'm not sorry I tried, because at the time it seemed a correct 
expression of my anger."

James Hewitt, the now-retired federal public defender who handled 
Moore's case, said the public should not be alarmed by her release from 
prison.

"She is pretty close to becoming an old lady," Hewitt, who lives in 
Marin County, said Monday in a telephone interview. "She is probably too 
old to cause any damage."

Besides, he said, the motivation she expressed in a jumbled and 
fragmentary fashion had to do with politics, not a broader hostility to 
society at large. Describing Moore as "a very confused person," Hewitt 
said he never got a clear sense of what drove her. "I'm not sure anybody 
knows why she did it," he said.

"This is a strange woman. Let's hope she has gotten over her 
strangeness," said Hewitt, 78. "I think she has had a lot of time to 
think about it."

Although he said he has had no contact with Moore for more than 30 
years, he said he also knows she blamed him for her sentence. 
"Hopefully, she won't be contacting me now," he said.

A native of Charleston, W. Va., Moore was an on-again, off-again FBI 
informant who became enmeshed in radical politics after moving to the 
Bay Area. A peripheral player rather than a leader, she volunteered for 
a group that distributed $2 million in food -- a ransom demand made by 
the Symbionese Liberation Army, the extreme leftist band that kidnapped 
newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst.

In a 1975 interview with The Times, Moore painted a picture of herself 
as desperate for the approval of a radical counterculture that dismissed 
her as a possible security risk. In frustration, she said, she would 
call the FBI from time to time and feed agents insider tidbits that she 
considered harmless.

Three days after her arrest, she said from behind a bulletproof window 
at the San Francisco County Jail that shooting Ford would have been "the 
ultimate protest against the system."

Although she said she was glad the president was unhurt, she derided the 
security detail that was supposed to protect him, comparing her attempt 
to "target practice."

In fact, San Francisco police had dealt with Moore in the past, and 
viewed her as a potential threat to the president.

Two days before the attempted assassination, they arrested her on the 
street with a .44-caliber revolver in her handbag and boxes of 
ammunition in her car.

Police alerted the Secret Service, who interviewed her and released her. 
Less than 48 hours later, she purchased her .38 from a friend, stationed 
herself outside the St. Francis in a crowd of several thousand and tried 
to shoot her way into history.

Her attempt damaged more lives than her own. Sipple, the ex-Marine who 
subdued her, said his life was ruined by publicity about him in the wake 
of his heroic act.

Retired from the Marines on a disability pension, Sipple was gay -- a 
fact that he said his relatives never knew until it came out in the 
newspapers.

He filed a $15-million lawsuit for invasion of privacy against seven 
newspapers, including The Times. A judge rejected it. Sipple died in 
1989 at the age of 47.

Few of the employees at the posh St. Francis on Monday were working 
there when the assassination attempt took place. However, Jaime 
Gonzalez, 58, was at his post in the hotel garage, just as he had been 
when pandemonium broke out that September afternoon 32 years ago.

"I didn't think a lady would do something like that," he said. "Maybe 
someone else -- but not a lady."

Gonzalez shook his head in disbelief at the news that Moore had been 
released.

"I really don't know if this is justice," he said. "I mean -- that was 
the president of the United States."

Moore's attempt on Ford's life came 17 days after Fromme tried to kill 
Ford on Sept. 5, 1975, when she burst through a crowd at the state 
Capitol, dressed in a nun's robe with a .45-caliber pistol strapped to 
her leg.

Fromme pointed the weapon at Ford from two feet away. Though the gun was 
loaded, there was no bullet in the chamber. A Secret Service agent 
disarmed her and slapped her in handcuffs.

Ford died on Dec. 26, 2006, of natural causes. Fromme remains in prison.

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.