Sara Jane Moore was a complex figure: an FBI informant who had infiltrated radical leftist groups in the Bay Area, a woman whose tangled loyalties and unstable psychology led her to attempt the assassination of the president she had previously reported on for the bureau. Her single shot from across the street missed Ford's head by several feet, largely because Sipple grabbed her arm as she fired. Secret Service agents immediately tackled Moore and rushed Ford into his limousine. The president was unharmed. Moore was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. She was paroled in 2007.

Oliver Sipple was a decorated Vietnam veteran living in San Francisco. When Harvey Milk and other gay community leaders publicly praised Sipple's heroism, they also revealed his sexual orientation -- something Sipple had not disclosed to his family. The resulting media coverage outed him nationally. Sipple sued the San Francisco Chronicle for invasion of privacy. The case was dismissed. His family in Detroit disowned him. His mother refused to speak to him. Sipple, who suffered from PTSD and struggled with alcoholism, died alone in 1989 at the age of 47. The irony was bitter: he saved a president's life and was punished for it by a culture that was not yet ready to accept who he was.

The attempt on Ford's life in San Francisco came just seventeen days after Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, had pointed a loaded pistol at the president in Sacramento. Two assassination attempts on the same president in the same state within three weeks was unprecedented. Ford's presidency -- unelected, inheriting the wreckage of Watergate and the fall of Saigon -- was already one of the most turbulent in American history. The San Francisco attempt added another layer of chaos to a period that seemed to generate it endlessly.