Review: The Radicals Who Tried To Kill Gerald Ford

The Rip Current podcast is a good reminder that political division and even violence are not new in America.

In September 1975, two California women each tried unsuccessfully to assassinate President Gerald Ford. The podcast Rip Current examines both women's stories, plus the radical politics of a counterculture whose desperate last gasps informed their worldviews.

Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a 26-year-old Charles Manson disciple, tried to shoot Ford in Sacramento, but her gun misfired. Sara Jane Moore, a 45-year-old housewife who had gotten in too deep with radicals, fired at Ford in San Francisco 17 days later, but a bystander deflected the shot. The podcast recounts each woman's history and the confluence of events that led them each to attempt to murder a sitting president.

Rip Current premiered on the anniversary of Fromme's attempt, September 5. Coincidentally, this happened to fall just weeks after an attempted assassination of then-former President Donald Trump and just 10 days before officials foiled another attempt. While this moment in history feels tense—like the radical 1960s and '70s—it's worth remembering that, in fact, American political violence has been with us, and often more intensely, for a long time.

Comments

[Rick James]

Media interview with Sarah Jane Moore, now 94 after watching Trump assassination attempt:

"I mean, I've got to ask you Sara, this has got to bring back some sort of PTSD for you!"

followup:

"You know, it occurs to me... that the day that your incident happened... you could have been "neutralized"."

You can't make this stuff up.

[Rick James]

"and I had an escape plan, that would have worked, because I met somebody that used that escape plan, but I didn't have a chance."

This interview is bizarre beyond reckoning.

Reporter: What if you had succeeded what if someone died that day?

Moore: I would have thought that I was successful and I'd have gone about my business. I don't think anyone I think I'd have used my escape plan... you know, people don't pay any attention to women... I'm a woman-- I'd have gone up a street car gone up to the top of the hill, gone into the hotel up there and had a coke or somethin', and no one would have even thought about it."

This bitch is a hoot!

She goes on about how Ford wasn't elected and was appointed. Um, yes, that's how the vice president situation works babydoll. When the president resigns, the vice president takes over.

[Rick James]

Moore’s demeanor, in the archival clips we see from around the time of the assassination attempt, and in the interviews she did for the film (where she’s eerily well-preserved, with vibrant skin and graying curls), remains haughty and unapologetic. The very premise of “Suburban Fury,” with Moore interviewed in ironic period settings like the back seat of a ’70s station wagon, makes her seem a classic performative personality — a woman who descended into the darkness out of a need for attention. What’s odd about “Suburban Fury,” even as it holds you with a kind of rapt tension, is that the film’s point-of-view is so limited to Sara Jane Moore’s rationalization of her own life that the movie, by the end, almost flirts with endorsing Moore’s defense of her actions: that she tried to kill the president as a trigger for social justice. Then again, believing that to be true might just be what insanity looks like from the inside.

Interesting writeup of her documentary in Variety.

[A Thinking Mind]

It is worth pointing out that Ford is unique in history, in that he was never on the ballot to be Vice President because Spiro Agnew resigned. So Ford became President without ever winning a national election to the office or subordinate office, something that may never again happen in the United States.