A middle-aged accountant and FBI informant fired a gun at President Gerald Ford in 1975, missed by inches due to faulty sights, and then spent the next 32 years in prison wondering if she’d made the biggest mistake of her life.
BREAKING: A SECOND ATTEMPTED ASSASSIN HAS HIT THE PRESIDENT!
Sara Jane Moore, a Patty Hearst follower with ties to left wing radical groups, attempts to shoot President Ford as he leaves the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.
She fires two shots with a .38 Special revolver.… pic.twitter.com/rMJcjVI7zE
— 1975 Live (@50YearsAgoLive) September 22, 2025
The Unlikely Revolutionary
Sara Jane Moore defied every stereotype of a presidential assassin. This five-time divorcée and accountant from California had spent months feeding information to the FBI about radical leftist groups in the San Francisco Bay Area. The irony was unmistakable: the woman who tried to kill a president had been working for the very government she sought to overthrow. Her transformation from suburban informant to would-be assassin captured the bizarre political turbulence of 1975 America.
Moore’s path to that fateful September day began with her involvement in the chaotic aftermath of the Patty Hearst kidnapping. While infiltrating groups connected to the Symbionese Liberation Army for the FBI, she became increasingly radicalized by the very causes she was supposed to monitor. The Vietnam War’s bitter end and the Watergate scandal had left many Americans disillusioned, but Moore channeled that anger into something far more dangerous.
Seventeen Days and Two Triggers
What made Moore’s attempt particularly unsettling was its timing. Just seventeen days earlier, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a Charles Manson devotee, had pointed a gun at Ford in Sacramento. Two women, operating independently in California’s radical subculture, had targeted the same president within weeks of each other. This wasn’t coincidence but rather a reflection of the volatile political climate that had gripped the nation’s most liberal state.
The Secret Service had actually evaluated Moore earlier in 1975 and deemed her no threat. They had even arrested her for illegal handgun possession but released her. This spectacular failure of threat assessment would haunt security protocols for years to come. Moore herself seemed surprised by her own actions, later describing being in a “fugue state” during the shooting, as if following some predetermined plan she didn’t fully understand.
The Shot That Changed Everything
Moore’s hasty purchase of a .38 caliber revolver on the morning of September 22 came after police had confiscated her preferred .44-caliber weapon. Standing 40 feet from Ford outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel, she fired once. The bullet missed the president but ricocheted, striking taxi driver John Ludwig. Judge Samuel Conti later noted that only the gun’s faulty sights had saved Ford’s life.
Moore’s stated motive was to spark a violent revolution against the U.S. government, particularly over its handling of the Vietnam War. She believed that assassinating Ford would somehow galvanize the radical left into overthrowing the system. Instead, her failed attempt simply landed her in federal prison with a life sentence, while the revolution she envisioned never materialized.
Decades of Second Thoughts
After serving 32 years, Moore was paroled on December 31, 2007. Her post-release interviews revealed a woman grappling with the magnitude of her actions. In 2009, she told KGO-TV that she regretted the attempt, citing the “blinders” of radicalism that had clouded her judgment. Yet her feelings remained complicated—when asked directly if she regretted trying to kill Ford, she answered “yes and no.”
Moore’s case stands as one of only two female presidential assassination attempts in U.S. history. Her death on September 24, 2025, at age 95 in a Tennessee nursing home closed a chapter on one of the strangest episodes of 1970s political violence. The woman who once believed killing a president would change the world spent her final years living anonymously, a reminder that revolutionary fervor often leads not to transformation but to profound personal reckoning.
Sources:
These Two Female Assassins Independently Tried to Kill Gerald Ford
A Woman Who Tried to Kill the President Tells Her Story
The Housewife Who Tried to Kill a President