The Day Squeaky Fromme Pointed a Gun at President Ford
Updated: Sep 5
On the morning of 5 September 1975, a young woman dressed head to toe in red walked through Capitol Park in Sacramento, California. Her name was Lynette Squeaky Fromme, and she was carrying a Colt M1911 pistol. As President Gerald Ford shook hands with well wishers on his way into the California State Capitol, Fromme pushed through the crowd, drew the pistol from a holster on her thigh, aimed it at the president from about two feet away, and pulled the trigger.
The weapon clicked. It didn't fire.
Ford, who was less than two feet away, later recalled the surreal moment:
“As I stopped, I saw a hand come through the crowd in the first row, and that was the first active gesture that I saw, but in the hand there was a gun.”
Quick Answers
Why did Squeaky Fromme try to shoot President Ford? Fromme, a devoted Manson follower, said she wanted to draw attention to environmental damage to California's redwood forests, believing a dramatic act against the government would force the country to pay attention.
Why didn't the gun fire? Fromme had loaded the magazine but never chambered a round. She later claimed she'd deliberately ejected the top cartridge before leaving home that morning and had no real intention of killing Ford.
Who Was Squeaky Fromme?
Lynette Alice Fromme was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1948, the daughter of a well off aerospace engineer, and was by most accounts an intelligent and artistic but troubled child. She was nicknamed Squeaky by George Spahn, the blind owner of the Spahn Movie Ranch where Charles Manson and his followers lived in the late 1960s, after the sound she made whenever he touched her. By her late teens she'd fallen completely under Manson's influence and became one of his earliest and most devoted followers, staying loyal even after the Tate LaBianca murders of 1969 sent Manson and several others to prison.
She wasn't directly involved in the killings, but she worked constantly to keep the Family connected from the outside, visiting imprisoned members and speaking publicly on Manson's behalf. In 1971 she served 90 days in jail for trying to feed LSD laced food to a witness in the Tate murder trial. After Manson's conviction she shaved her head and carved an X into her forehead in solidarity with him, a gesture several other Family members repeated.
By the mid 1970s Fromme was living in a modest Sacramento attic flat with fellow devotee Sandra Good. The two had become fixated on ATWA, air, trees, water, animals, an environmental philosophy Manson had preached, and Fromme in particular had convinced herself that California's redwood forests were facing imminent destruction. That March she'd even tried to warn Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page about bad energy she believed was closing in on him, passing a note to him through the band's manager after he declined to meet her in person.
Why Target Gerald Ford?
Ford was an unlikely target by most measures. He'd taken office in 1974 after Nixon resigned over Watergate and was widely seen as steady and unremarkable rather than polarising. But to Fromme, Ford represented a government actively neglecting the environment, and she was especially angry about worsening smog in California, which she believed threatened both people and the ancient redwoods she revered. She later said her goal was to get life, not just her own life but clean air, healthy water, and respect for creatures and creation. When she learned Ford would be in Sacramento in September 1975 for the state's annual Host Breakfast, she decided that frightening the government by targeting its leader might finally force people to listen.
A Gun That Was Never Actually Loaded to Fire
The pistol itself had a small history of its own. It belonged to Harold Zeke Boro, a retired government draftsman in his sixties who'd befriended several Manson Family members in Sacramento and, by some accounts reluctantly, loaned Fromme the weapon along with a box of ammunition after showing her how it worked.
What actually happened next has never been fully settled. A semi automatic pistol like the M1911 needs a round chambered before it can fire, and Fromme had loaded the magazine but not racked the slide. In a 1980 interview she claimed she'd deliberately ejected the top round before leaving her apartment that morning, and investigators did find a stray cartridge on her bathroom floor, evidence that lends some support to her claim that she never actually intended to kill Ford. Others have simply put it down to inexperience with the weapon. Either way, the gun clicked uselessly, Secret Service agent Larry Buendorf wrestled it from her hand, and Fromme shouted in frustration that it wouldn't go off as she was pulled to the ground. Ford, walked briskly into the Capitol by his agents, went ahead with a scheduled meeting with Governor Jerry Brown as though nothing had happened, reportedly telling his own agents to put him down when they tried to hurry him away.
It was the first of two attempts on Ford's life within the same month. Just seventeen days later, another woman, Sara Jane Moore, fired an actual shot at him in San Francisco that missed. Both women survived their sentences to see Ford outlive the controversy entirely, dying of natural causes in 2006.
A Trial She Refused to Take Seriously
Fromme's actions in the lead up to trial worried the court before the trial had even properly started. She rejected an insanity defence, tried to represent herself, and was only allowed to do so after a court appointed psychiatrist ran a 90 minute competency evaluation and certified her fit to stand trial, a recording later released decades later showing her calmly predicting she had a 70 percent chance of acquittal. She was wrong. She was eventually represented by court appointed attorney John Virga instead, after the court denied her request to call Manson himself as a witness.
Fromme spent much of the actual trial nowhere near the courtroom. When she used her time on the stand to lecture the court about redwoods, whales and pollution rather than the case itself, the judge, Thomas MacBride, had her removed entirely, and she watched most of the remaining proceedings from her jail cell on closed circuit television. The jury convicted her of attempting to assassinate the president on 19 November 1975, making her the first person sentenced under a federal statute covering assaults on presidents that had been enacted after John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963.
At her sentencing hearing on 17 December, prosecutor Dwayne Keys told the court Fromme was full of hate and violence and asked for the maximum penalty. Fromme responded by throwing an apple at his head hard enough to knock his glasses off. She was sentenced to life in prison anyway.
Life Behind Bars
Fromme's devotion to Manson never wavered in prison. She wrote him letters and defended his philosophy to anyone who'd listen. In March 1979, while held at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, she attacked fellow inmate Julienne Bušić, a Croatian nationalist serving time over a 1976 plane hijacking, hitting her in the head with the claw end of a hammer. The attack added 15 months to her sentence and got her transferred to Alderson Federal Correctional Institution in West Virginia.
In December 1987, after hearing a rumour that Manson had testicular cancer, Fromme slipped out of Alderson and spent two days hiding in the surrounding hills before being caught roughly two miles from the prison on Christmas Day. The escape added another 15 months onto her sentence, to be served consecutively. In total she spent 34 years behind bars.
On 14 August 2009, at the age of 60, Lynette Fromme was released on parole. Gerald Ford had died nearly three years earlier. She moved to Marcy, New York, where she has lived with a partner, Robert Valdner, himself a former convict, and has largely avoided public attention since.
Today, the pistol itself, the one that clicked instead of firing, is on display at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a strange artefact of just how differently that morning could have gone.
A Teenage Friendship With Phil Hartman
One detail about Fromme's earlier life gets repeated a lot, often with the facts stretched. In junior high in the early 1960s, she was genuinely close friends with a classmate named Phil Hartman, years before he became a Saturday Night Live star. The two performed Shakespeare and Molière scenes together in drama class, and their school yearbook jointly listed Fromme as Personality Plus in a superlatives poll. It wasn't a romance, whatever some later retellings claim. Hartman himself described her as very sweet and very shy, but said plainly she wasn't the kind of girl he'd have asked out. They drifted apart by graduation and never reconnected. Decades later, journalist Paul LaRosa, who corresponded with Fromme in prison, found she still brought Hartman up in her letters, recalling a cartoon surfer he'd once drawn in her yearbook, not long before Hartman himself was killed by his own wife in 1998.
Ford's Response and a Strange Cultural Footnote
Ford rarely showed any bitterness about the attempt in public. Recalling the moment years later, he described seeing a hand come through the crowd with a gun in it as the first sign anything was wrong. His wife, Betty Ford, admitted in 2004 that she'd prayed for his safety every time he left the White House afterwards, though Ford himself maintained his composure throughout.
In a strange footnote, George Lucas is widely reported to have renamed his Star Wars hero from Luke Starkiller to Luke Skywalker in 1976, reportedly wary of any accidental echo of Manson and the climate of violence his name had come to represent.
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Fromme's attempt on Ford sits alongside several other strange, and sometimes far more determined, attacks on public figures. Read about King Zog of Albania, who survived more than 50 attempts on his life, or the 1981 attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II, one of the very few attempts from this era that actually succeeded in wounding its target.
