I'm Sorry I Missed, Mr. President
The assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford


Prologue

            Sara Jane Moore reached into her purse and pulled her gun halfway out.  She’d already loaded five bullets into the chamber on her drive to the St. Francis Hotel --- efficiently making the most of her time
during the agonizingly slow drive through San Francisco’s afternoon
Traffic. She’d been waiting for two hours, first uncomfortably sticky
in the afternoon sun and then chilled as the shadows lengthened. But
now, suddenly, she was aware of nothing but her target, fifty-three feet
in front of her, just across the street.

          He was tall, six foot one, with graying blond hair. She could see
slight beads of sweat forming on his forehead as she waited for a
clear shot­. She wanted the bullet to enter just above his eyebrows.

          He stood still for a moment, deciding whether to cross the street so that he could shake hands with the people lined up on the north side.
As he hesitated.  Sally had her clear shot.

          She raised the .38 shoulder-high in her right hand, bracing it with
the left, cup-and-saucer style.  She peered through the sight. She
wished she’d had a chance to test fire the weapon beforehand, but to
her practiced eye the gun seemed “bead-on.” Her finger tightened on
the trigger and she squeezed off a shot, determined to blow off the
head of Gerald R. Ford, the President of the United States.

          Soon, all of America would be asking the same question: How did
a middle-aged suburban mom, a doctor's wife, become the only woman in history to fire a shot at the President of the United States? The
answer would turn out to be more convoluted than anyone imagined at
the time, leading investigators from the perfect Middle American
childhood through the twists and turns of 1960s and 70s radical
politics, and leaving them with an even more puzzling question: Who
was Sara Jane Moore?

*

          My curiosity about Sara Jane drove me to accept an invitation to meet with her in January 1976 after she was settled in to her first federal prison home at Terminal Island in San Pedro, California.  She had read an article I had written in a small local publication about a class action suit against Sybil Brand Institute, Los Angeles county’s women’s jail. I couldn’t wait to see what this woman who attempted to assassinate a U.S. president was really like.

          As I waited in the visitors’ room, I reviewed what I had read about her in the papers: sharp tongued, scattered brained, uncommunicative and uncooperative. But the woman who approached me was not the woman described in the news. This woman was gentle, middle-aged, medium height, with short curly brown hair. A plump suburban housewife and anybody’s neighbor. Her blue eyes twinkled as she smiled broadly and walked right up to me, looked me the eyes, stretched out her hand and said in a most gracious tone of voice, “I’m so glad you came.” 

          The disconnect between her shocking act of violence and this well-spoken and charming woman was stunning. She acted as though she just stepped off an elevator at a five star hotel and we were sitting across from each other at lunch in the hotel’s upscale restaurant, not sitting in the middle of a dingy federal prison visitors’ lounge. She said she was so anxious to meet me and that I must call her Sally, the name all her friends use. By the way, she asked, how old did I say my son was in my letter? 

          This was the quintessential Sally, but it was not the only Sally I came to know over the next 30 years. She might have been sitting in prison, but prison would only be a backdrop for the gracious hostess, the valiant fighter for justice, or whomever she decided she would display to the world that day.  That day, she was the gracious hostess. It was her reality, and it took me many years to discover that her reality wasn’t always the same as the reality the rest of us live in.  

          Sally, I would discover, was her lovely self only as long as she was in control and getting what she wanted. She got what she wanted from me for a long time, but then I was never relying on her for anything, and I provided some conveniences—reading material, craft kits, and a small monthly allowance for a while.

          When I visited her, it was always the same chatty, charming visit where Sally would “perform” and talk as if she were still living in a Victorian house in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood, or decorating her suburban country club home in Danville, thirty miles from the city by the Bay. 

          Her letters to me were similar: perfectly printed, grammatically correct, and excruciatingly detailed.  They usually began with a “Thank you for…” and she always remembered to ask about my son and relay a similar story of her own to highlight the similarities in our lives.

          No challenges, no questions, just polite and newsy visits, letters and phone calls from her to me. I never had a reason to doubt what she told me and I never questioned her or checked on anything she said. It didn’t matter, and I figured what she said was true.  After all, why would she lie to me?

          I’m the first to admit it: I was very naïve. But I was not alone in being deceived by Sally. As I would later discover, this is a woman who conned Randolph Hearst, the San Francisco Police, the FBI, and the U.S. Treasury; she even convinced the U.S. Secret Service to release her the day before she attempted to assassinate the president. And she lied to me for 30 years.

          Our long acquaintanceship ended abruptly, as she instantly cut off our conversation when, for once, I would not give in to her demands. I subsequently learned her behavior toward me was not unique. Sara Jane Moore had been re-inventing herself over and over again, never really embracing any of the roles and responsibilities she took on in life: not as a nursing student, in the Women’s Army Corps, as wife or mother. Only as it suited her would Sara Jane be present for the people in her life. In an instant she would change her mind, dump what she saw as baggage and move on, never once looking back at the trail of broken lives and pain she inflicted on others.

          Her intelligence, talent and charm opened doors and allowed her to move through life with ease. Her ability to talk her way into schools, jobs and multiple marriages to professionally successful men eventually took her from the hills of West Virginia, to an Arizona Air Force base, and to several California cities, where she eventually ended up living in the shadowy underground communities of the 1970s’ disaffected political left and coldly aiming a loaded pistol at the head of the President of the United States.

          How did it happen? What could have driven her to this end? Who is Sara Jane Moore?
          My curiosity about Sally’s story wouldn’t let go. For 30 years my association with Sally remained fascinating as I watched her evolution behind bars. During my research I crisscrossed the country tracked down her former classmates, family and neighbors anywhere she lived as well as her birthplace.
          My search would begin in an idyllic hilltop house in Charleston, West Virginia, where Sally grew up surrounded by love.