Sara Jane Moore, the middle-aged radical and mother of four who fired two errant shots at President Gerald R. Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on Sept. 22, 1975, with a vague notion of igniting a leftist revolution in America, died on Wednesday at a nursing home in Franklin, Tenn. She was 95.
Demetria Kalodimos, a reporter for The Nashville Banner who had developed a friendship with Ms. Moore, confirmed the death, which was first reported by The Banner.
Ms. Moore’s attempt to kill Mr. Ford occurred only 17 days after another would-be assassin, Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, a follower of the cult leader Charles Manson, pointed a gun at the president in a crowd at Sacramento but was seized before she could fire.
In San Francisco, about 3,000 people were gathered near Union Square for a glimpse of the president as he left the St. Francis Hotel. Ms. Moore, 45, who had been questioned by Secret Service agents the day before but then released, was standing across the street, 40 to 50 feet away from the commander in chief. She drew a chrome-plated .38-caliber revolver and fired at the president. The shot missed, and she raised the gun for a second shot.
Oliver W. Sipple, a former Marine, deflected the gun just as she fired. The bullet narrowly missed the president, ricocheted off a wall and grazed a bystander. Pandemonium erupted as Mr. Ford, unhurt, was hustled into a limousine by Secret Service agents and sped away. Mr. Sipple and two police officers seized Ms. Moore.
Investigators found no evidence of a conspiracy and said her ties to radical groups were tenuous. She was found legally sane by doctors who had examined her tangled life of marriages, divorces, possible mental illnesses, radical associations and work as an F.B.I. informant. She pleaded guilty to the attempted assassination that December, was sentenced to life in prison and spent 32 years behind bars before being paroled. At one point she wrote an apology to Mr. Ford but received no reply.
In a 2003 interview with Geri Spieler, who later wrote a well-received biography of Ms. Moore, Mr. Ford, talking about an unsuccessful parole application by the would-be assassin, was unforgiving. “Just because the president is left standing may be a matter of luck,” he said, “but the malice was the same and the attempt was to kill.”
In February 1979, Ms. Moore and another female inmate escaped from a minimal-security federal prison camp in West Virginia by scaling a 12-foot fence, but they were recaptured hours later. During her imprisonment, she converted from Christianity to Judaism in 1986, explaining to Ms. Spieler that she wanted kosher food for better-quality prison meals. She was paroled from a federal prison in Dublin, Calif., on Dec. 31, 2007, a year after Mr. Ford died at 93.
Ms. Moore moved under an assumed name to an unidentified town on the East Coast and only rarely gave interviews. But she did speak to Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show in 2009.
“It was a time people don’t remember,” Ms. Moore told Mr. Lauer, citing the Vietnam War, a politically divided nation, her own radical beliefs and her attempt to kill the president. “We were saying the country needed to change. The only way it was going to change was a violent revolution. I genuinely thought that this might trigger that new revolution in this country.”
Joining John Wilkes Booth and other notorious figures from history, Ms. Moore was a character in Stephen Sondheim and John Wideman’s dark musical “Assassins,” which debuted Off Broadway in 1990. In the show, she was portrayed as a hapless revolutionary — “a true flibbertigibbet,” as the critic David Richards wrote in The New York Times, “as likely to pull a banana from her capacious handbag as she is a pistol.”
Sara Jane Kahn was born on Feb. 15, 1930, in Charleston, W.Va., to Olaf and Ruth (Moore) Kahn. She graduated from Stonewall Jackson High School, studied nursing, joined the Women’s Army Corps and became an accountant at RKO Studios in Hollywood. Friends called her intelligent and, by the late 1960s, she was living in the Bay Area and was politically engaged. She joined civil rights and antiwar protests.
Accounts of her life are fragmentary and contradictory, partly because she deliberately obscured her identity and background. She told people falsely that she was the daughter of a rich coal and timber family, had graduate degrees in business administration and was an aspiring actress. Officials said she had been hospitalized repeatedly for aberrant behavior. At some point she took her mother’s maiden name as her surname.
She had three children, Sydney Jr., Christopher and Janet, by her first marriage, to Sydney L. Manning, an Air Force officer, but gave them up to her parents. Another husband, John Aalberg, the father of a fourth child, Frederic, worked in Hollywood as a sound technician. She was married to Dr. Willard J. Carmel Jr., an internist with Kaiser Permanente in Danville, Calif., from 1969 to 1973.
She was married and divorced at least four times, including her first husband twice. and she though some reports cite five marriages and suggest that she wed one man twice.
After her release from prison in 2007, Ms. Moore married Philip Chase, a clinical psychologist, and lived in a retirement community in North Carolina. He died in 2018, and Ms. Moore moved a few years later to Tennessee. Her son Christopher died; a complete list of survivors could not be immediately confirmed.
By 1974, she was in San Francisco with Frederic, 9 at the time, working for People in Need, a food giveaway program begun by the media-empire heir Randolph A. Hearst at the demand of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the radical leftist group that had kidnapped his daughter Patty Hearst.
Over the next year, Ms. Moore attached herself to the fringes of extremist groups but was also recruited as an F.B.I. informant. The word got out.
Ostracized by radicals and desperate to persuade them of her sincerity and remorse, she called reporters and went on radio programs to expound Marxist and Maoist theories. She also confessed her informer’s role and said it had ended. Still, she felt endangered and bought a .44-caliber pistol.
On Sept. 21, 1975, she was spotted with the gun by Secret Service agents in Palo Alto, Calif., as President Ford made an appearance at Stanford University. Agents seized the weapon but, after a brief evaluation of Ms. Moore, did not deem her a serious threat and released her. Hours later, she bought the .38-caliber gun from a dealer in Danville and fired it at the president the next day in San Francisco.
Ms. Spieler’s biography of Mr. Moore, “Taking Aim at the President”, was published in 2009. The author was an investigative reporter and writer who had corresponded with Ms. Moore for years.
In an interview on Thursday, Ms. Spieler said Ms. Moore could be “charming” and give the appearance of a kindly neighbor, “which was why the Secret Service wasn’t looking at her in the crowd that day.”
Based on the general profile of an assassin, she added, “They were looking for a man, foreign-born, a loner with delusions of grandeur, not a white, middle-aged lady with curly hair.”
Ash Wu and Adam Bernstein contributed reporting.
Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.
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