Attempted assassination of Gerald Ford in San Francisco

You are standing near the Post Street entrance of the Saint Francis Hotel, the site of one of the most jarring moments in American presidential history. On the afternoon of September 22, 1975, President Gerald Ford stepped out of these doors after an address to the World Affairs Council. As he prepared to board his limousine, a woman named Sara Jane Moore stood in the crowd just forty feet away and fired a .38 caliber revolver at him. The bullet missed the President by only a few inches, embedding itself in the stone wall above the doorway you see here. This attempt on his life occurred just seventeen days after another woman, Lynette Fromme, had pointed a gun at him in Sacramento. These two events remain the only instances in United States history where a woman has attempted to assassinate a sitting president. Sara Jane Moore was a complex and erratic figure who had been working as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She had actually been detained by police on a firearms charge just one day before the shooting, only to be released because authorities deemed her a low risk. The gun she used on the President was purchased in haste that very morning, and its sights were significantly misaligned, a mechanical failure that likely saved the President's life. As Moore moved to fire a second time, a bystander named Oliver Sipple instinctively lunged at her and forced her arm downward. Sipple, a former Marine who had been wounded in Vietnam, found himself thrust into the national spotlight as an immediate hero. His involvement triggered a separate, painful chapter in local history, as his private life was exposed to the public against his wishes by activists who viewed him as a symbol to be leveraged for political visibility.