Sara Jane Moore, would-be assassin of President Ford, dies at 95
Moore died in Tennessee nursing facility; her 1975 attempt on Gerald Ford came weeks after another assassination bid and decades later she was revealed to have FBI ties.
Sara Jane Moore, the would-be assassin who fired at President Gerald Ford in 1975, has died at age 95. Moore died Wednesday at a nursing facility in Franklin, Tennessee, according to reports, after moving to the area in 2022 following her release from prison in 2007.
On Sept. 22, 1975, outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, Moore fired two rounds toward Ford from a small-caliber revolver. The first shot missed by about six inches; during the second shot, Marine Oliver Sipple tackled her, and a ricochet from the gun struck a cab driver. Ford was not injured. The incident occurred just weeks after another attempted assassination attempt on Ford by Lynette Fromme in Sacramento, who fired a shot but did not strike the president.
Two weeks after her arrest, Moore told The New York Times that she had previously worked as an FBI informant who reported on the activities of leftist groups where she volunteered, including People-In-Need, a food-distribution organization that sought the release of kidnapped heiress Patricia Hearst. The FBI confirmed to The Times that Moore had served as an informant.
Ford remains the only modern president who was not elected to the office, a distinction underscored by the era’s political violence surrounding his presidency. Moore’s attack, part of a broader wave of high-profile episodes in the mid-1970s, set off a national conversation about mental health, extremism and the role of security for American leaders.
In the years after her arrest, Moore offered a mix of depictions of her motives and reflections on her actions. In a 2015 interview with CNN, she said she believed there would be a revolution and that killing Ford would trigger it; she also asserted that she had "always been a good citizen" despite spending 34 years in prison. Her comments drew renewed attention amid interviews from survivors and other participants in the era’s security debates.
Moore remained in prison until her release in 2007. Her move to Tennessee in 2022 brought renewed public attention to a case that has long been a touchstone in discussions of political violence and presidential security. Authorities say she died on Wednesday in Franklin; her death closes a chapter on a violent episode that nonetheless left Ford unharmed and altered the national conversation about the limits of protest and the risks faced by public figures.
