By Hiya Swanhuyser,
Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009, SF Weekly

Did you know? Because we didn't: In 1975, 45-year-old Sara Jane Moore became the only woman ever to fire a bullet at a U.S. president. What's more, she did it in San Francisco, right in front of the St. Francis Hotel. (Epilogue: She was paroled early last year.) In Taking Aim at the President: The Remarkable Story of the Woman Who Shot at Gerald Ford, author and onetime Moore confidante Geri Spieler draws a fairly straightforward map of the facts. Moore was intensely crazy in a million ways, but the story is written in the voice of a trained and responsible journalist, not a tabloid screech. Spieler's understanding of radical left-wing politics is distractingly lame — Moore was deeply involved in a number of Bay Area groups — but otherwise, the book is pretty hard to put down.

SFGate.com
Steve Weinberg, Special to The Chronicle
Friday, January 30, 2009
Taking Aim at the President:The Remarkable Story of the Woman Who Shot at Gerald Ford
By Geri Spieler
Palgrave Macmillan; 246 pages; $24.95

On Sept. 22, 1975, a seemingly unremarkable 45-year-old named Sara Jane Moore shot at President Gerald Ford in San Francisco. She missed, but only by about 6 inches. Wrestled to the ground and disarmed, Moore insisted she was not insane, refused a trial and pleaded guilty.

Sentenced to life in prison, she never fully repented and never fully explained her assassination attempt. In 2007, at age 77, Moore walked out of prison a free woman, assuming she met the conditions of her supervised parole.

The month after her arrest, Moore sent a handwritten note to Geri Spieler, then a Los Angeles newspaper journalist. Three months later, Spieler visited her. They stayed in touch after that.

Spieler relies heavily on their acquaintanceship in "Taking Aim at the President," an unusual book about an unusual criminal.

Because I am 60 years old, I remember the assassination attempt well and figured decades ago that I knew enough vital information about the shooting and about Moore herself to move on to other topics. Spieler's book shows the error of my thinking.
Although the book contains no breaking news, it provides two fascinating, disturbing threads that I'd either long forgotten or never knew.

Thread one: The day before Moore's assassination attempt, she told a law enforcement officer about her plan to carry a gun to a public appearance by Ford. The police officer made sure the authorities confiscated Moore's weapon, and notified all agencies entrusted with protecting the U.S. president. But nobody placed Moore in custody. She purchased another gun, and the next day shot at Ford's head.

Thread two: Despite a privileged upbringing in Charleston, W.Va., with professional parents and four caring siblings, success as a student, good looks and a modicum of charm, Moore (born Sara Jane Kahn), starting as a teenager, demonstrated unusual personality traits and bizarre behaviors. Perhaps the strangest episode of all: At age 26, already divorced from two husbands and the mother of three children younger than 5, Moore called her parents from Los Angeles. Still in West Virginia, her parents knew almost nothing about their daughter's life. They told Moore that she and the children would be welcome to visit.

One of Moore's brothers waited at the Columbus, Ohio, airport. Passenger after passenger emerged from the plane, without a sign of Moore. Finally, the brother saw his 4-year-old nephew and his 3-year-old niece walking toward him. A flight attendant followed the children, holding Moore's 9-month-old son.

Spieler reports that the Kahns "were shocked beyond belief. They were sure that something terrible had happened to Sara Jane. They called the airline, the hospitals, and the police. They called her home phone, but it had been disconnected. As the days went by with no call from Sara Jane, they even called [the children's father]. ... He had no idea of his ex-wife's whereabouts."

Finally, the Kahns "realized that she was not hurt or sick. Sara Jane had carefully planned this maneuver, effectively abandoning her children to her mother's care."
Moore called her parents from a pay telephone 10 weeks later. She said she would show up in West Virginia soon. She never did, and three months later she stopped calling.
Moore moved on with her life, marrying and divorcing, marrying and divorcing. She gained experience as a bookkeeper-accountant and held regular jobs. But behind her facade of competence, she let the work slide at each job, until she felt it was time to move on.

Drawn to San Francisco, she became radicalized politically during the early 1970s. Moore seemed to sincerely believe in the critiques of numerous groups at odds with authority. Yet, simultaneously, she became an undercover informant for the San Francisco Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Talk about truth being stranger than fiction!

The book is frequently captivating. Spieler is not a gifted stylist, but the strength of the material carries the chapters forward well. Spieler also fails to explain how she knows much of what she writes, but the source notes are sometimes helpful.
Despite its flaws, the book is quite likely to interest readers who remember that assassination attempt in downtown San Francisco.

Steve Weinberg is a biographer in Columbia, Mo. His most recent book is "Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller." E-mail him at books@sfchronicle.com. This article appeared on page E - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Good Books

"Journalist Geri Spieler met would-be assassin Sara Jane Moore while she was in prison; Taking Aim at the President is based on over two decades of interviews as well as independent research. Spieler follows Moore's actions from her childhood in a small West Virginia town to her release from prison in December 2007. Moore's life was never conventional, and along the way she entered and dropped out of the military, was married five times, and was both a political radical and an FBI informant. Focusing on the complex psychology and motivations of a quintessentially desperate housewife and the only woman to ever fire a bullet at an American president, Spieler delivers a nuanced portrait of an elusive person and a fascinating glimpse back at a turbulent period in American history."

From Alan Weisman
author of Extraordinary Life and Times of Dan Rather

"It is the obligation of the thoughtful journalist to tell us something meaningful that we don't already know. In Taking Aim at the President, Geri Spieler is more than up to the task. The byzantine tale of Sara Jane Moore's double, triple and quadruple lives, with so many bizarre groups -- including the federal government -- exploiting her vulnerabilities, is the stuff of Hollywood fiction. The fact that it's all true, and told with precision by Spieler, raises Sara Jane's story to something significantly more than a footnote to history."

From Publishers Weekly

"On September 22, 1975, Sara Jane Moore attempted to kill President Gerald Ford. Investigative journalist Spieler traces the "unlikely assassin's" convoluted path as the suburban housewife who abandoned her children meandered through relationships, marriages and careers ranging from bookkeeping to political activist turned FBI informant.

"Moore assumed varied personas, a skill she first displayed as an actress in high school. Despite three decades of contact with Moore, Spieler admits she still cannot explain what led Moore to attempt to kill Ford. But Spieler offers a portrait of an erratic, unstable woman with a protean capacity to shift identities, with the 1960s and '70s as a dramatic backdrop.

"Fans of true crime accounts or contemporary history will savor this portrait of the first woman to make an assassination attempt on an American president."

(Jan. 12) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From James Dalessandro
Screenwriter and Author of 1906: a novel

"Geri Spieler has done a marvelous job of unraveling the events surrounding one of the most bizarre events in American history, Sara Jane Moore's attack on Gerald Ford."

From Frank Baldwin
Author of Jack & Mimi: A Novel and Balling the Jack

"Sara Jane Moore is a compelling figure. Willful, stubborn, frustrating. For the first time, we realize what this woman was capable of. She managed to charm an Academy-Award winning Hollywood player into marriage; and gain the confidence of Randolph Hearst. She's truly an enigma, and the story of her transformation into a violent revolutionary is riveting. Just an amazing era. Geri Spieler has been a fine tour guide through it."

From Carl Stern, JD
Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University, and former NBC News correspondent

"A well-written, fascinating story about an inexplicable moment in American History."

Brothers Judd Book Review

In 1969, Man reached the Moon and the New York Miracle Mets won the World Series. In 1980, the United States Men's Hockey team beat the USSR and proceeded to win the Olympic gold medal. If it is an exaggeration, it is only a slight one to say that nothing good happened in the intervening years. Most of us have, therefore, tried to forget that the 1970's ever happened. That's generally not too difficult since the cinema, literature, television, etc. of the era is so dire and so few have any pleasant memories of the period that they'd want to share with us. So perhaps I'll be forgiven the admission that until I read this book I thought that both of the women who tried to shoot the accidental president, Gerald Ford, were Manson girls. Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme was, indeed, a member of the Manson Family, but Geri Spieler's fine short biography of Sara Jane Moore presents us with an, if possible, even odder second assassin--a middle class mother of five who was also an FBI operative, informing on her comrades in the California radical movement. It's a story that's so fascinating one actually regrets ignoring it for all these years.

In many ways, Ms Spieler has set herself an impossible task here because Sara Jane Moore is essentially unknowable. While her parents were strict and her mother in particular deeply religious, Ms Moore's West Virginia up-bringing does not appear to have been so difficult as to explain her aberrant personality. Yet as early as age 16 she disappeared for three days and never offered any explanation of where she'd been. She was a bright student but notoriously odd and had no friends. She insisted on being the center of attention even at the cost of alienating all those around her and naturally gravitated towards the Thespians, her high school's drama club. This last seems especially revealing as her life might be said to consist of nothing but role-playing. If we engage in a bit of pop psychology, she appears to have the sort of hollowness that characterizes psychopaths. And as Ms Spieler charts the course of Moore's next three decades--five marriages, children abandoned, debts unpaid, etc., etc., etc.--one consistent theme is the monstrous selfishness that characterizes narcissistic personalities. The portrait that emerges certainly makes sense, of a self-centered and impulsive woman leaving a trail of destruction in her wake, but it may be impossible to make sense of how she became such a person and what triggered her impulses. Her ultimate decision to try and kill the president may not be surprising, given what has come before, but it remains literally senseless.

Ms Spieler's story benefits greatly from the deeply dysfunctional social milieu in which Sara Jane Moore found herself in the Bay Area of the 70s. Things were so chaotic that she could not only wangle her way into a bookkeeping job for the food distribution organization that the Symbionese Liberation Army demanded William Randolph Hearst set-up, but could join up with radical organizations that interested her and then, when she'd become an informant for the FBI, infiltrate the ones they wanted information about. People recognized that she was unreliable but still she was able to navigate this world. More troubling, her handlers in law enforcement realized how unstable she was but continued to use her and failed to prevent her assassination attempt even though SFPD Inspector Jack O'Shea specifically warned that she might be planning such an attempt.

Here her already peculiar tale becomes downright surreal as the actual events just about start to parallel the The Parallax View. While law enforcement was able to exploit Moore's estrangement from radical groups to get her to spy on them, in doing so they were submerging her further into a subculture that already genuinely attracted her. Thus she was getting greater exposure to ideas like the notion that social change, even revolution, would follow from political violence. In particular, she aligned herself with a Maoist group called Tribal Thumb, that wanted to overthrow the government. (Apparently she thought that should Nelson Rockefeller become president people would be so upset that he was an unelected leader that they would rebel.) Unbelievably, she was also recruited by the ATF (Burueau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) for a sting on Mark Fernwood, a gun dealer who was also the head of the John Birch Society in Danville, CA. As events conspired, she would buy the gun she used to shoot at President Ford from Fernwood. You couldn't make it up.

If Ms Spieler can never quite wrap her arms around what Sara Jane Moore's motivations were, it's frustrating, but understandable. In the meantime, however, she provides what will likely be the authoritative account of the assassination and Moore's life. And if this window on the '70s reminds us of why we loathe them so, it also fills in some gaping holes in our historical knowledge. It's an altogether worthwhile read.

(Reviewed:21-Mar-09)

Grade: (B+)