On September 5, 1975, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of the Manson Family cult, stood a few feet away from President Gerald Ford in Sacramento, California, pointed a pistol at him, and unsuccessfully tried to shoot him. Less than three weeks later in San Francisco, a different woman, an accountant named Sara Jane Moore, managed to actually fire her weapon but missed Ford before being tackled by a bystander.
Was there any deep meaning to such violent and potentially world-changing actions? According to her biographer, Fromme "had no personal feelings about [Ford] one way or another….She felt he was destroying the redwoods." The motivations of Moore, who died last year at age 95, were similarly vague and impersonal, if a bit more political. The Washington Post noted in its obituary that she at various points was a "suburban Republican matron," an FBI informant, and "enthralled" by San Francisco's "radical activists and their Marxist rhetoric." As the Post summarized her comments at her sentencing hearing, "I finally understood and joined those who have only destruction and violence for a means of making change…and came to understand that violence can sometimes be constructive."
