In September 1975, two California women each tried unsuccessfully to assassinate President Gerald Ford. The podcast Rip Current examines both women’s stories, plus the radical politics of a counterculture whose desperate last gasps informed their worldviews.
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a 26-year-old Charles Manson disciple, tried to shoot Ford in Sacramento, but her gun misfired. Sara Jane Moore, a 45-year-old housewife who had gotten in too deep with radicals, fired at Ford in San Francisco 17 days later, but a bystander deflected the shot. The podcast recounts each woman’s history and the confluence of events that led them each to attempt to murder a sitting president.
Rip Current premiered on the anniversary of Fromme’s attempt, September 5. Coincidentally, this happened to fall just weeks after an attempted assassination of then-former President Donald Trump and just 10 days before officials foiled another attempt. While this moment in history feels tense—like the radical 1960s and ’70s—it’s worth remembering that, in fact, American political violence has been with us, and often more intensely, for a long time.
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