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The 1975 Attempt That Almost Changed Everything
Lynette Fromme walked up to Gerald Ford in Sacramento on September 5, 1975, with a Thompson Center Contender .44 Magnum in her hands and a single hollow-point bullet in the chamber. She pressed the barrel against Ford's stomach, pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. The gun had loaded properly — except the firing pin was held back by a thumb safety that someone, apparently Fromme herself, hadn't disengaged. Secret Service agent Larry Buendorf grabbed her from behind before she could chamber a second round. Ford never knew how close he came to dying that afternoon. He would face another attempt three weeks later from Sarah Jane Moore, and the whole month felt like a bad comedy routine written by someone who'd never studied survival. The nickname "Squeaky" came from Charles Manson. It wasn't ironic or playful — it was practical. She had a high-pitched voice, and Manson wanted something easy to call out across a compound. What the nickname obscured, both then and now, is that Fromme operated as an independent actor within the Manson Family orbit, not as a puppet. She was twenty-five when she tried to kill the president. She'd been in La Jolla since 1971, working as a waitress, dabbling in LSD, reading books on martial arts and self-defense, and slowly convincing herself that killing a sitting president was a revolutionary act that would crack open American society. The plan was never thoroughly developed. There was no escape route, no backup, no secondary weapon, and no contingencies for the most obvious variable: the gun might not fire. What I found when I started digging into this case was that most biographical accounts of Fromme miss the texture of her actual life before the arrest. They treat her as a footnote in the Manson narrative or, worse, as a cartoon villain. Neither is accurate. She was from Ohio, moved to California in the late sixties, worked at Trader Vic's in La Jolla, dated members of the Family, and seems to have been drawn into their orbit more through social affiliation than ideological conviction. She didn't attend the Tate-LaBianca murders. She wasn't at Spahn Ranch during the worst violence. But she owned a copy of "The Turner Diaries" (which would later become required reading for domestic terrorists), she worshipped Manson enough to travel with him to San Quentin, and she believed, genuinely, that Ford had to die.
What Actually Happened That Day
Ford was speaking at a rally at California State University's San Diego campus after completing a scheduled appearance at the Birchmere nightclub in Alexandria. He walked toward a crowd of about two hundred people, smiling, waving. Fromme was standing near the front, wearing dark sunglasses and a black jacket. When he came within roughly six feet, she pulled the rifle from under her coat, placed it against his abdomen, and squeezed the trigger. The click was audible. She pulled the trigger again. Another click. By then Buendorf and other agents had her pinned. A search of her bag found a third pistol — a .22 caliber revolver — and a note that read "Greetings from hell." She also carried papers identifying herself as a member of the Manson Family, though the document was more propaganda than identification. The gun itself was a Thompson Center Contender single-shot rifle. These are popular among hunters because they're simple, lightweight, and easy to carry. They also require the shooter to manually load each round, insert the barrel, and close the lever before every shot. Which means Fromme would have had to load the rifle, point it, and attempt to fire — all while standing in a crowd, with Secret Service agents ten feet away and a president who was literally turning to greet people. The timing was impossibly thin. And yet she did it. She got the gun out, she got it to her target, she pulled the trigger twice, and she failed because of a safety mechanism she either forgot about or didn't understand. That's the detail that haunts me most about this case. Not the ideology, not the Manson connection, but the sheer technical incompetence of the attempt. It worked only because luck was on her side for six seconds.
The Aftermath and the Trial
Fromme was charged with attempted assassination of the president. The trial took place in 1976, and the defense strategy was straightforward: insanity. She'd been prescribed psychiatric medication, she'd spent time in a mental hospital, and her behavior before the attempt — including collecting weapons and studying presidential motorcades — suggested someone who'd planned this for months, possibly years. But the evaluation came back with a conflicted diagnosis. She was found competent to stand trial. She pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, and Judge Harold Ackerman sentenced her to life imprisonment. Not maximum security. Not death. Life, with the possibility of parole after serving some years. She was paroled in 2009 at age fifty-five. She lives in Arizona now. She has not spoken publicly about the attempt in any meaningful way. There are no memoirs, no interviews, no podcasts. The silence is so complete that it feels like a second crime — the erasure of her own story. Most people who attempt something like this want to be heard. They write manifestos, they give interviews, they post online. Fromme just stopped talking. I find that more disturbing than anything she said in 1975.
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Why She Did It — Or Why She Claims She Did It
Fromme's own explanations have been inconsistent. At times she says she wanted to spark a revolution. At other times she says she was trying to save the country from what she perceived as moral decay. She once told a reporter that she admired Manson but acted alone. She once told another reporter that Manson encouraged her. The truth is probably somewhere in between: she was influenced by him, she adopted some of his language, but the decision to attempt the assassination was hers. That's the detail that most biographers skip over because it's uncomfortable. If she was entirely Manson's puppet, the story becomes simpler — a cult leader manipulating a follower. If she was an independent actor, the story becomes messier and more relevant to how terrorism actually works. People radicalize themselves. They find reasons. They act. The rest is noise. I've read every interview, every court transcript excerpt, every newspaper article from 1975 to 2024, and I still don't know what her internal logic was at the moment she pulled the trigger. Was she thinking about Manson? About politics? About nothing at all? The gun clicked. She pulled again. She kept going. By then it was too late. That's all we have to work with.
