Sara Jane Moore,Ford Assassin,Dies at 95

Sara Jane Moore,the former psychiatric patient who tried to assassinate President Ford during an era of astonishing violence and upheaval in California,died Wednesday at a nursing home in Franklin,Tenn.

moore, who retreated to North Carolina after serving 32 years in federal prison but then was jailed again late in life, was 95. News of her death was confirmed by Demetria Kalodimos, executive producer at the Nashville Banner, who developed a relationship with Moore over the last two years. A cause of death was not reported, but Kalodimos said Moore had been bedridden for about 15 months after a fall.

As shocking as Moore’s attempt to kill the president was,it seemed a little less so during the frenetic 1970s.

It was 1975 in San Francisco. Charles Manson was on death row,kidnap victim-turned-accomplice Patty Hearst had just been arrested,and a very young governor named Jerry Brown was in his first year in office.

Moore chose this moment for a shocking crime in an era nearly defined by them – on Sept. 22, 1975, she tried to assassinate Ford in front of the fashionable St. Francis Hotel.

She was the second would-be assassin to confront the 38th president in the space of a month.

Her bullet missed, thanks to the quick reflexes of a former Marine standing next to her.

The attempt came just 17 days after a Manson follower in a nun’s habit, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, pointed a gun at Ford in Sacramento. It was never clear whether she tried to pull the trigger.

News accounts of the time portrayed Moore as an enigma. They emphasized her supposedly conventional past. She was described as an average housewife and mother whose conversion to radical politics seemed an unlikely twist. She herself insisted she had been a relatively normal suburbanite before joining the leftist underground.

It wasn’t true.Moore’s entire adult life had been punctuated by mental health issues,divorces and suicide attempts. Many people who knew her described her as unstable and mercurial.

Born Sara Jane Kahn on Feb.15, 1930, in Charleston, W. Va., Moore had been an aspiring actress and nurse before finding work as a bookkeeper. She married five times, was estranged from her family, and abandoned three of her children. A fourth remained in her care at the time of the attempted assassination. Her erratic behavior had cost her jobs, and she had been treated for mental illness numerous times.

This history led some, including Ford himself, to conclude that she was “off her mind,” as the former president said in a 2004 CNN interview.

She was in her mid-40s, divorced and living in Danville, outside San Francisco, when she went to work in 1974 as a bookkeeper for People in Need. The institution had been set up to distribute food in response to ransom demands by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the extreme leftist group that had kidnapped Hearst in early 1974 and shortly after engaged in a furious gun battle with Los angeles police, one of the longest shootouts in U.S. history.

Moore’s ties to other radical organizations were murky. She would later cast herself as a sought-after FBI informant who had come to live in fear of some unspecified threat. Its source was either from the government or her radical brethren, depending on the interview. Authori