Nine weeks after a gunman tried to kill Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, the FBI said the former president appeared to be the target of another assassination attempt, at a golf course in Palm Beach on Sunday.
He was not injured, but the successive incidents have historic echoes. In September 1975, President Gerald Ford escaped two assassination attempts, one in Sacramento and the other in San Francisco.
Like the political violence this summer, the attempts to kill Ford shocked the nation.
Here's a look back at what happened, taken from the pages of the Los Angeles Times.
September 5, 1975 | Sacramento
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a Charles Manson follower, was 26 when she pulled a gun on Ford in Sacramento. Secret Service agents caught her and Ford was unharmed.
She was convicted on 26 November 1975 of attempting to assassinate the president. She was released in 2009 after 34 years in prison.
In a 1975 testimony that was published decades later, Ford calmly described seeing a woman in a bright red dress in Capitol Park in Sacramento and thinking she was reaching out to shake his hand.
“My first impression was that she wanted to come up to me and extend her hand — I thought at the time — to shake my hand or say something to me,” Ford says in the film.
Then, he said, he noticed the gun, a .45-caliber Colt semi-automatic pistol, adding that “the gun was big.”
The Times' Christopher Goffard reviewed the case earlier this year.
She spoke to witnesses in Sacramento and delved into Fromme's obsession with Manson.
Journalist Jess Bravin, author of “Squeaky: The Life and Times of Lynette Alice Fromme,” told Goffard that Fromme maintained a kind of religious devotion to Manson until her death. She told Bravin that she had gone to the park that day, not knowing what to do.
“She had no personal feelings about [Ford] “One way or another,” Bravin said. “She was very angry at the system and what she felt was environmental degradation. Ford was coming to talk to businessmen in Sacramento. She felt like it was destroying the redwoods.”
In 1987, after hearing a rumor that Manson was dying of cancer, she escaped from a minimum-security federal prison in West Virginia, hoping, she said, to be close to him. She was captured two miles away.
She was released on parole in 2009.
President Ford is rushed to safety after Lynette Fromme attempts to shoot him on September 5, 1957, in Sacramento.
(Associated Press)
September 22, 1975 | San Francisco
Sara Jane Moore, an accountant and divorced mother of four, fired from her job at Ford on September 22, 1975, as the president was leaving a speech 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 to the ground.
San Francisco police had dealt with Moore in the past and considered her a potential threat to the president.
Two days before the attempted murder, she was stopped on the street with a .44-caliber revolver in her purse and boxes of ammunition in her car.
Police alerted the Secret Service, who interviewed her and released her. Less than 48 hours later, she bought her .38-caliber revolver from a friend, stood in front of St. Francis in a crowd of several thousand people and tried to make history by shooting herself.
Before shooting Ford, Moore had received psychiatric treatment several times. His lawyers were preparing an insanity defense. He pleaded guilty despite her objections.
After being sentenced, Moore expressed mixed feelings about her actions.
“Do I regret trying it?” he said. “Yes and no. Yes, because I didn’t accomplish much except throwing away the rest of my life… And no, I don’t regret trying it, because at the time it seemed like an appropriate expression of my anger.”
Sipple, the former Marine who subdued her, said his life was ruined by the publicity that followed his heroic act.
Sipple, a retired Marine on a disability pension, was gay, a fact he said his family never knew until it appeared in the newspapers.
She filed a $15 million invasion-of-privacy suit against seven newspapers, including The Times. A judge dismissed the suit. Sipple died in 1989 at the age of 47. Her health had deteriorated and she was drinking heavily.
That year, Ford wrote a letter saying he was “eternally grateful” for the former Marine’s action in preventing the killing.
“I deeply regret the trouble you have experienced as a result of this incident,” said Ford’s letter, dated February 14 and addressed “to the friends of Oliver Sipple.” “I was saddened to learn of the circumstances of his death.”
Moore was released on parole in 2008.
Gerald R. Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office.
(David Hume Kennerly / Gerald R.)
Evaluating those moments in history
In 2006, The Times looked at both assassination attempts and found that they were becoming footnotes in history. Historians weighed in on what they meant.
Both plots were symptoms of the 1970s, the “silliest decade of the century for California … in terms of its sheer, sinister weirdness,” said Kevin Starr, a USC history professor and state librarian emeritus.
“Moore’s style was middle-class, while Squeaky Fromme was a real cultist. Moore represented the individual disorder of the time and Squeaky represented the social disorder,” Starr said. The assassination attempts — on Fromme in Sacramento and on Moore in San Francisco — also helped create “an atmosphere of lawlessness” in Northern California, Starr said, compounded by events in the 1970s such as the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and the mass suicide of the Jonestown cultists.
Others say the acts symbolized the collapse of American society following Watergate and the Vietnam War.
“A lot of people were just wandering around aimlessly, looking for a reason to believe there was a political or conspiratorial explanation for their inner turmoil and concluding that if they could just act on their impulse, they could save the world,” said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and a former leader of Students for a Democratic Society whose books include “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Anger.”
