Did Gerald Ford Agree to Nixon Pardon Before Taking Office? The Nation's Victor Navasky on Ford's Memoirs and the Lawsuit that Followed
In the late 1970s, the Nation magazine published excerpts of Gerald Ford¹s memoirs in which he revealed the idea of pardoning Richard Nixon was raised with him before Ford replaced Nixon in the White House. The Nation magazine publisher emeritus Victor Navasky talks about Ford's account and the landmark lawsuit that ensued. [rush transcript included]
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Woman who tried to shoot Ford paroled
She was definitely determined to shoot him. I think the police should of kept her when they picked her up earlier. She also escaped from the first prison she served in.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Sara Jane Moore started the new year Tuesday a free woman more than three decades after a bizarre assassination attempt on President Ford that still baffles even her own attorney. Â "I never got a satisfactory answer from her as to why she did it," said retired federal public defender James F. Hewitt. Prison officials have offered no details on why Moore, 77, was paroled Monday from a federal penitentiary east of San Francisco, where she had been serving a life sentence. Moore had been behind bars for 32 years. The one-time aspiring film actress was 40 feet away from Ford outside a hotel in San Francisco when she fired a shot at him on Sept. 22, 1975. As she raised her .38-caliber revolver and pulled the trigger, Oliver Sipple, a disabled former Marine standing next to her, pushed up her arm. The bullet flew over Ford's head by several feet. The attempt came 17 days after a disciple of Charles Manson tried to kill the president in Sacramento. Moore had been picked up earlier that day by police and Secret Service agents because she had made a phoned threat. They took her .45-caliber pistol, charged her with carrying a concealed weapon and released her. She promptly bought another weapon from a gun dealer and waited for Ford in the crowd outside the St. Francis Hotel. Two weeks earlier, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a Manson follower, tried to kill the president in Sacramento. Fromme, 59, is serving a life sentence at a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas. Moore was born Sara Jane Kahn in Charleston, W.Va. She acted in high school plays and dreamed of being a film actress. In the 1970s, Moore began working for People in Need, a free food program established by millionaire Randolph Hearst in exchange for the return for his daughter Patty, who was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. Moore soon became involved with radical leftists, ex-convicts and other members of San Francisco's counterculture. At this time, Moore became an informant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She has said she fired at Ford because she thought she would be killed once it was disclosed that she was an FBI informant. The bureau ended its relationship with her about four months before the assassination attempt. "I was going to go down anyway," she said in a 1982 interview with the San Jose Mercury News. "If the government was going to kill me, I was going to make some kind of statement." Moore was sent to a West Virginia women's prison in 1977. Two years later, she escaped but was captured several hours later. |
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