Ford was in Sacramento because of a snub. In July 1975, Governor Jerry Brown, California's relatively new Democratic governor, had refused to commit to speaking at the 49th annual Sacramento "Host Breakfast," a gathering of the state's most influential business leaders scheduled for the morning of September 5 at the Sacramento Convention Center. The organizers, offended by what one would later describe as Brown's "dilatory response," decided to teach the governor a political lesson. They invited President Ford, a Republican, to deliver the keynote instead. Ford accepted. It was this chain of bruised egos and political maneuvering -- a breakfast speech born from a governor's indifference -- that placed the president on a public pathway through Capitol Park on that particular morning, at that particular time.

Fromme's path to Capitol Park traced its own strange logic. Nicknamed "Squeaky" by George Spahn, the rancher on whose property the Manson Family lived, she had been among Charles Manson's earliest and most devoted followers. After most of the Family was imprisoned for the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders — seven people killed across two nights in Los Angeles, Fromme took on a leadership role, keeping scattered members in contact. In 1971, she had served 90 days in jail for lacing a hamburger with LSD and feeding it to Barbara Hoyt, a witness in the Tate murder trial, to prevent her testimony. By 1975, Fromme had latched onto environmental causes, particularly Manson's concept of ATWA -- air, trees, water, animals. When she read that automobile smog might be threatening California's coastal redwoods, the tallest trees on Earth, she became convinced she bore personal responsibility for saving them. Her solution was to put fear into the government by killing its most visible symbol.

At 10:02 a.m., Ford crossed L Street into Capitol Park. The crowd gathered along the pathway was friendly, eager. Fromme had positioned herself in the front row, wearing red. She raised her right arm and pointed a Colt M1911 pistol -- manufactured in 1911, the same year the model became the standard sidearm of the U.S. armed forces -- at a height between Ford's knees and waist. She pulled the trigger. The gun did not fire. The pistol's magazine held four rounds, but Fromme had not chambered one. A Secret Service agent grabbed the weapon. Years later, from Federal Prison Camp Alderson, Fromme claimed she had deliberately ejected the top round onto her apartment floor before leaving, because she "was not determined to kill the guy." Whether calculated or accidental, the unchambered round was the margin between an assassination attempt and an assassination.

What Ford did next was remarkable in its ordinariness. He continued walking to the state capitol, entered the building, and sat down with Governor Brown at 10:06 a.m. for a 30-minute meeting. He did not mention that someone had just pointed a gun at him until their business was concluded. The normalcy was deliberate -- a president demonstrating that a Manson follower with a pistol could not derail the machinery of government. Three days before Fromme's trial, Ford provided videotaped testimony from the White House as a witness, the first time a sitting president had testified at a criminal trial. Fromme, characteristically, refused to cooperate with the proceedings. At one point she hurled an apple at the prosecuting attorney after he described her as "full of hate and violence." She was convicted on November 19, 1975.

The ripples of that September morning reached unexpected places. Seventeen days later, on September 22, Sara Jane Moore fired at Ford in San Francisco -- making him the target of two assassination attempts in the same state within three weeks. Betty Ford later revealed that after the Sacramento attempt, she prayed on a White House balcony each time her husband left the building. In Hollywood, George Lucas was filming Star Wars when advisors warned him that his protagonist's surname, Luke Starkiller, could be read as "celebrity killer" in the shadow of the Manson Family. Lucas renamed the character Skywalker. Fromme served 34 years in federal prison, released in August 2009 -- two years and seven months after Ford's death on December 26, 2006. The M1911 pistol that failed to fire now sits in a display case at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a relic of a morning when Sacramento's Capitol Park became the most dangerous patch of ground in America.