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   LYNETTE "SQUEAKY" FROMME
































































































































































































































































































From Newsweek, September 15, 1975:

Ford's Brush With Death

TOM MATTHEWS with THOMAS M. DeFRANK traveling with the President, GERALD C. LUBENOW and WILLIAM J. COOK in Sacramento and HAL BRUNO in Washington

A sunny morning outside the Statehouse, friendly faces, cheers, glad hands stretching out on every side. It 1ooked like a perfect spot for gathering a few California votes. Instead, President Gerald Ford escaped a helter-skelter touch of California evil in Sacramento last week - a narrow brush with death that summoned up all the worst vibrations of the murderous '60s. This time there were no shots, no blood, no screaming ambulance siren. But once again a gun had popped up out of nowhere in the crowd, once again a terrifying scuffle surged around the President of the United States, and once again a prisoner with jangled wits was dragged away in handcuffs - a reminder to the country that its Chief Executive is still the Republic's most vulnerable target.

The abortive assassination attempt put an abrupt end to a lull in political violence that has lasted since Arthur Bremer gunned down George Wallace three years ago. The hiatus had led most Americans to hope that the madness that killed John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and left Wallace crippled for life had finally run its course. The instant replay of the near miss in the shadow of the capitol in Sacramento, however, stood out as clear evidence that handgun politics is still very much part of the American scene. Ford gamely dismissed the affair as an "incident" last week and vowed that it would not stop him from "contacting the American people" face to face in the months ahead. But the assault sent a familiar shudder among the political supporters and next of kin of Sen. Edward Kennedy and Governor Wallace, and it forced all the candidates in the Presidential election campaign to confront again the unnerving question: has the road to the White House also become an inside track to martyrdom?

A RED-HEADED LOSER
As if to compound the sense that the '60s were catching up with America once more, the gunman this time was a member of Charles Manson's first family of freaky crime. The 45 that poked out among the friendly hands reaching for Ford was held by a red-headed loser named Lynette Alice (Squeaky) Fromme, 26, who had moved to Sacramento to be close to Manson, now serving a life term in San Quentin prison for the murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others in 1969.

The FBI launched an investigation to determine whether Fromme had been working on her own or as part of a spidery Manson conspiracy to gun down Ford. The early signs suggested she had been acting alone, but the fact that anyone with so lurid a history could get within arm's length of the President with a loaded pistol aroused fresh concern about how well the Chief Executive is - or can be - protected. Even though the Secret Service had handled the immediate crisis with great skill, critics suggested that they should have been alert to a possible threat from the Manson clan after a hostile manifesto two of the girls delivered to a Sacramento newspaper.

The close call also cast a pall over the opening rounds of this year's Presidential election campaign. In Washington, gun-control advocates hoped that the near-tragedy in Sacramento might finally give some new and needed momentum to their cause. Cautious campaign managers asked themselves whether they should recast time-tested techniques of political stumping to protect their clients from free-floating madmen. The problem was that security has never mixed well with such hallowed American political rituals as the laying on of hands in a crowd. "If you get to the point where you have to wear a bulletproof vest and live in a bubble," observed Michael Griffin, Wallace's political director, "then why be in politics at all?"

Ford's own relish for pressing the flesh was what almost undid him. He had already spent exhausting hours working the crowds and the rubber chickens on the banquet circuit in Seattle and Portland before he arrived in Sacramento for some early-in-the-season campaigning and a speech to the California legislature - on the subject of violent crime.

Sacramento was the home of Squeaky Fromme, a rather plain young woman with freckles on her nose and Charles Manson's peculiar obsessions on her mind. Her eyes were a bit glazy, and at 5 foot 4 and 120 pounds she looked a good deal more like Orphan Annie than any assassin. But the outward appearances were deceptive. Over the years, Squeaky had discovered within herself a clear vocation for Manson's theater of the macabre.

A HOLSTER ON THE THIGH
The night before Ford arrived, Squeaky watched the TV news with her roommate Sandra Good, 30, another Manson disciple. Sandra noticed that she seemed a bit depressed. She didn't say anything about shooting the President. But the next morning, she rose early and put on a loose-fitting red cotton dress with a fetching V-neck - and tied a red bandana around her head. She also strapped a holster to her thigh underneath the robe and got out a .45-caliber Army Colt pistol she had borrowed from a friend a couple of months earlier. Then she set off for the state capitol.

Ford awoke at 6 that morning in his sixth-floor suite at the Senator Hotel. With his usual verve, he conferred with aides and then sat through the Annual Host Breakfast of California businessmen whose 1,000 or so members gave him a rousing reception.

Outside the hotel, the Secret Service and Sacramento police had taken what they believed were adequate security precautions. Ford was scheduled to walk up a broad, curving pathway that led to the rear steps of the capitol building, and police lines had been set up to keep the crowds in check at the left of the walk. An encouraging throng of state employees, newsmen and rubberneckers had turned out to wait for the President, and no one really noticed anything unusual when the girl in red strolled up and took a place in the crowd under a stately magnolia near the President's line of march.

Shortly after 10 a.m., and slightly behind schedule, Ford swept through the lobby of the Senator Hotel and trotted out to the street. He blinked in the bright morning sunlight and headed for the capitol. Instantly spotting the friendly crowd, he cheerfully moved forward, double-pumping hands and smiling every step of the way. Then suddenly, recalled Karen Skelton, a 14-year-old who was standing next to the girl in red, "the color went out of his face."

A SHOUT OF 'GUN!'
"He was smiling and as soon as he touched my hand, he turned pale and pulled away," said Irene Morrison, 28, a secretary who had turned out to see the President. The girl in red had stepped forward, reached under her dress and then straightened up. "I extended my left hand to her - that's when I saw the gun," Ford told NEWSWEEK'S Thomas M. DeFrank later. "Then Ernie [Secret Service agent Ernie Luzania] grabbed me and I was gone."

The weapon also caught the eye of Larry M. Buendorf, 37, a crack Secret Service agent, former Navy pilot and expert skier who has served as the President's body man all over the world. "Gun!" he bellowed to his colleagues and he leapt forward to grab Squeaky's pistol and twist her gun hand behind her back. His shout set off an immediate action drill the Secret Service uses for emergencies. "Let's go," yelled Luzania, the acting chief of Ford's security detail. With that he lunged into the President, buckling Ford's knees - to reduce his target profile.

Within seconds other agents formed a protective human cocoon around their charge. "Everyone get out of the way, get out of here," roared one agent. The flying wedge carried the President by the scruff of his blue suit to safety. "Are you all right, sir?" a reporter asked when the President reached the capitol steps. "Sure," he replied - in a shaken voice that barely rose above a whisper.

Meanwhile, Buendorf had forced Squeaky to drop the gun. By one account, she shouted "Don't get excited. It didn't go off. It didn't go off. Can you believe it?" Buendorf muscled her up against a tree, borrowed a pair of handcuffs from a Sacramento cop and manacled his charge. Some eye-witnesses reported later that Squeaky bleated a final verbal assault on Ford: "He is not a public servant."

For the time being, no one could tell whether she had pulled the trigger. When investigators examined the gun they found that it had four bullets in its seven-slug clip - but the firing chamber itself was empty. During the scuffle a few witnesses heard an ominous click, but no one heard a shot. One educated guess was that Squeaky had cocked the gun's hammer with her thumb (hence the click) but had forgotten the essential step of pulling back the slide that shoves a bullet into the firing chamber (diagram, page 17).

BETTY GETS THE NEWS
Ford appeared to bounce back quickly from his narrow escape. He spent 45 minutes chatting with California Gov. Jerry Brown without even mentioning the assassination attempt. Brown got the news only after Presidential aide Donald Rumsfeld brought it up. And then Ford proceeded to deliver an old-fashioned stem-winder in the capitol. The time had come to stop coddling gunmen who engage in serious crimes, he told the legislators - but he chose not to mention the gunwoman he had just confronted.

The Secret Service flashed the news quickly, however, from Sacramento to Washington (its code word for the President is "passkey;" for the First Lady "pincushion"). About the time Squeaky pulled out her gun, Betty Ford was working quietly at a desk in her study at the White House. She was talking on the telephone when the White House operator suddenly cut in and informed her that she had an urgent call from Richard Keiser, chief of the President's Secret Service detail. Keiser, who was not on the California trip because he had come down with a severe attack of hiccups, told the First Lady about the incident, assured her that her husband was safe and then rang off. Mrs. Ford turned to an aide and said quietly: "It's something you have to live with."

Vice President Nelson Rockefeller had just finished speaking at a savingsbond lunch at the Chamber of Commerce in Rochester, N.Y., when the scuffle in Sacramento erupted. He took an urgent call from the White House in a private room next to the dining hall and got the startling message. "What went through my mind," he said later, was, "Thank God he's alive."

Ford returned to Washington in fine fettle for a man who had put in such a harrowing day. On the return flight aboard Air Force One he took a brief nap, joshed with the Secret Service agents, puffed on his pipe and chatted for a while with White House counselor Robert Hartmann. Betty Ford was waiting for him on the South Lawn of the White house and greeted him with a open arms embrace. During the next day, however, Ford clearly had the incident very much on his mind: he talked about it with almost everyone he met. "We're not going to schedule any more trips like that, " he joked to one friend.

The atmosphere was far grimmer in the Sacramento courtroom for U.S. Magistrate Esther Mix. The gray-haired Federal judge sat behind the bench, Squeaky sat alone at a table in the tiny hearing room, and the clerk of the court read a formal complaint charging that "Lynette Fromme did knowingly and willfully attempt to kill the President of the United States of America." With that, Squeaky became the first person every charged under the 1965 law that makes the assassination - successful or attempted - of the President of the United States and those next in line a Federal crime. Bail was set at $1 million, and if convicted, Squeaky could face a life prison term. Mindful of the fate of Lee Harvey Oswald, police locked Squeaky up "in complete isolation" in the Sacramento County jail.

Squeaky first set up housekeeping in Sacramento three years ago. Accompanied by Sandra Good, she hoped to offer a little moral support to Manson, who was then serving his time in Folsom prison nearby. The two women found a little apartment (at $100 a month) in an old Victorian house seven blocks from the capitol. They planted a 17-by-11-foot plot in a community garden called "Terra Firma" where they raised squash, beans, carrots, strawberries, lettuce, onions and tomatoes. They accepted food stamps and picked up pin money from a trust fund that trickled in to Good. They wore monklike long red robes: "We're nuns," explained Good, "and the red is the blood of sacrifice." And they spent much of their time firing off letters of protest to corporate polluters.

Sandra Good professed to be as mystified as anyone else over the motives that had finally driven Squeaky into her adventure. Good called Ford a "dummy . . . empty head . . . and robot" last week, but she also denied that her roommate had any personal quarrel with the President. Instead, in an impromptu press conference, she handed up an acid indictment that suggested Squeaky's freaked-out state of mind. "I guess she got tired of talking about people not having water in Trenton, N.J.," Good shrugged. "The air in Los Angeles is so bad. Hollywood has done nothing but teach violence and distorted sex. We were looking at what's happening to the ocean, to the whales. There was no wind yesterday, and on the bus people's eyes were running."

That bizarre explanation, credible as it may have been in Mansonian terms, did not satisfy many lawmen. Taking note of the Mansion family's celebrated reputation for togetherness, the FBI quickly rounded up, but in the end did not arrest, a number of Squeaky's friends, including Good. The question the agents wanted answered was whether Squeaky had been following her own scrambled circuits - or whether Manson himself might somehow have directed the caper from his solitary cell. "There was an assumption of conspiracy because of the close nature of the group," explained U.S. attorney Dwayne Keyes last week. But Keyes added quickly that the Feds had no evidence "that Manson was connected in any way" with Squeaky's abortive errand.

A WARNING TO 'NIXSON'
That the question came up at all was due in part to a rather bloodthirsty manifesto that turned up at The Sacramento Bee and KNBC-TV in Los Angeles over the summer. A Xeroxed letter bearing a misspelled headline - MANSON IS MAD AT NIXSON - and signed with a backward swastika reported that the father of the family was still chafing over the way the ex-President had convicted him in the public press while the Tate-LaBianca trial was under way. More ominously, the document seemed to suggest that Manson and his people were transferring their grievance from Nixon to Ford. "If Nixon's reality wearing a Ford Face continues to run this country," the broadside warned, "your homes will be bloodier than the Tate-LaBianca houses and My Lai put together."

It seemed possible that Squeaky was acting out Manson's fanatical philosophy of "helter-skelter" revolution. Borrowing the term from a Beatles song, Manson repeatedly drummed into his followers the theory that they could murder well-known whites, make it appear that blacks were the killers and touch off a racial war that the blacks would win. After 40 or 50 years, in Manson's view, the blacks would realize they were unfit to govern and would summon the Manson family to rule the world.

Normally anyone espousing so bloody an ideology - especially given the Manson family's murderous record - would receive a quick going-over by the Secret Service. In Washington the agency maintains a computerized list of people who have threatened the life of the President. The roster includes as many as 47,000 names (including those of many harmless political dissidents as well as more dangerous types). It turned out last week, however, that Squeaky had never made the list. President Ford took care, nonetheless, to congratulate his agents for the "superb" skill and courage they had shown in Sacramento. But the fact remained that luck and quick reflexes, not thorough homework, had averted an ugly situation that might have turned into a national tragedy. "Law-enforcement agencies know a lot of people who may be potentially dangerous," said Keyes, in defending the security system. "But you can't put everyone under surveillance."

A TIP TO THE COPS
To make matters more unsettling, it turned out that the Sacramento police had been given ample warning that Squeaky bore watching. Her landlord, Jesse Fain, 55, tipped police in Sacramento when he discovered that his tenants were part of the Manson family. "They knew all about them," he said last week. The local cops did place Squeaky, Sandra Good and a third friend named Susan Murphy under intermittent surveillance. Yet on the day the President came to town, no one seems to have tailed Squeaky. "I felt like the landlady for Lee Harvey Oswald," said Fain gloomily last week. "I didn't think the girl had it in her."

To most politicians, the threat of assassination has become an unpleasant, but unavoidable, part of their high-visibility, high-risk jobs. In Washington last week, Rep. James P. Johnson, a Colorado Republican, probably set a new record for black humor - and bad taste - in stating his reaction to Ford's scrape with Squeaky. When reports of the assault filtered into a meeting of the House Agriculture Committee, Congressman Johnson said cheerily, "Mr. Chairman, I think the record should show that for the first time since McKinley, we have a Republican President worth shooting."

'ALL PART OF THE RISK'
Not everyone was so amused. The candidates running against Ford expressed shock at the incident and relie that the President had escaped harm. Most of them, however, rejected the notion of retreating from the stumps and street corners to the relative safety of the TV studios. "The great majority of the American people want to see their President and talk with him," observed Sen. Edward Kennedy, a man who knows the risks better than any other member of Congress. "I'll plunge into a crowd tonight and just hope that we as a country can get our heads together," said Arizona Rep. Morris K. Udall. "It's all part of the risk," allowed Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas. And Sargent Shriver summed up the candidates' quandary with a degree of feeling that can only come from losing two brothers-in-law to gunmen. "There is no defense," he said last week. "If unbalanced or malicious people want to get close to a prominent figure, they can do so - there is nothing anyone can do to stop it."

It seemed likely that President Ford would feel understandably crowd-shy for a while: he rode his limousine back from the Sacramento capitol and later passed up a bunch of well-wishers eager to shake hands. Even that rambling populist Fred Harris was tinkering last week with the notion of getting a few Secret Service agents to ride shotgun on his campaign. "I'd like to keep them down to a bare minimum," he said. "You have to be able to talk to people up close." The axiom was as old as American politics itself. For the plain fact is that American politicians, from the President down to the homeliest ward heeler, feel most alive, most real and most needed when they are out in public working the crowd. The shots at Ford's Theater in 1865 did not change the nature of the tradition. And neither will last week's black day in Sacramento.