In the fall of 1975, President Gerald Ford was finding trouble wherever he turned. He’d been in office just over a year, but he remained “acutely aware” that he was the only person in U.S. history to become the chief executive without being elected. His pardon of Richard Nixon, whose resignation after the Watergate scandal had put Ford in the White House, was still controversial. Democratic voters had turned out in droves in the congressional midterm elections, taking 49 seats from the Republicans and significantly increasing their party’s majority in the House. Now the presidential election was just a year away, and popular California Governor Ronald Reagan was poised to challenge Ford for the GOP nomination.
But his political troubles were only the beginning. On September 5, 1975, Ford spoke at the California state capitol in Sacramento. He was walking toward a crowd in a park across the street when a woman in a red robe stepped forward and pointed a Colt semi-automatic pistol at him. Secret Service Agent Larry Buendorf spotted the gun, leaped in front of Ford and wrestled Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a member of the Charles Manson family, to the ground before she could fire.
On September 22, Ford was at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco when a five-time divorcee named Sara Jane Moore fired a .38 caliber revolver at him from across the street. Her shot missed the president’s head by several feet before Oliver Sipple, a former Marine standing in the crowd, tackled her.
And on the evening of October 14, Ford’s motorcade was in Hartford, Connecticut, when a 19-year-old named James Salamites accidentally smashed his lime-green 1968 Buick into the president’s armored limousine. Ford was uninjured but shaken. The car wreck was emblematic of the chaos he was facing.
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