SAN FRANCISCO — Sara Jane Moore, who tried to assassinate President Ford in 1975, was released from federal prison early Monday after serving more than three decades behind bars, officials said.
Moore, 77, who in 1976 was sentenced to life in prison, was released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, a low-security women’s facility in the Bay Area, said Mike Truman, a spokesman with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Moore remains on parole.
Moore, an accountant and a divorced mother of four, fired at Ford on Sept. 22, 1975, as the president was leaving a speaking engagement 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 down.
Federal public defenders were preparing an insanity defense for Moore, who had received psychiatric treatment several times, but she pleaded guilty over her lawyers’ objections. After she was sentenced to life in prison, Moore expressed mixed feelings about her actions.
“Am I sorry I tried?” she said. “Yes and no. Yes, because it accomplished little except to throw away the rest of my life. … And, no, I’m not sorry I tried, because at the time it seemed a correct expression of my anger.”
No comment from Ford family
Michael G. Ford, one of Gerald Ford’s four children, said the family would have no comment on Moore’s release.
“We’re keeping a private, low profile on that,” said Ford, an administrator at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
James Hewitt, the now-retired federal public defender who handled Moore’s case, said the public should not be alarmed by her release from prison.
“She is pretty close to becoming an old lady,” Hewitt said Monday. “She is probably too old to cause any damage.”
Besides, he said, her cause in trying to shoot Ford was political, even if it was a jumbled political goal, and he said she does not pose a general threat to society. Describing Moore as “a very confused person,” Hewitt said he never got a clear sense of her motives. “I’m not sure anybody knows why she did it.”
“This is a strange woman. Let’s hope she has gotten over her strangeness,” he said. “I think she has had a lot of time to think about it.”
The former public defender, now 78, said he has had no contact with Moore for more than 30 years.
A player in radical politics
A native of Charleston, W.Va., Moore was an FBI informant who was enmeshed in radical politics after moving to the Bay Area. But she was a peripheral player rather than a leader. In 1975 interviews with the Los Angeles Times, Moore painted a picture of herself as desperate for the approval of a radical counterculture that dismissed her as a possible security risk. In frustration, she said, she would call the FBI from time to time and feed agents insider tidbits that she considered harmless.
Three days after her arrest, she said that shooting Ford would have been “the ultimate protest against the system.”
While she said she was glad the president was unhurt, she derided the security detail that was supposed to protect him, comparing her attempt to “target practice.”
Moore’s attempt on Ford’s life came 17 days after Lynette Alice “Squeaky” Fromme tried to kill Ford on Sept. 5, 1975.
Ford died on Dec. 26, 2006, of natural causes.
