SAN FRANCISCO — After more than three decades in prison for a foiled attempt to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford, Sara Jane Moore was released on parole Monday.
Although Moore had been given a life sentence in the 1975 attempt on Ford's life outside a hotel in downtown San Francisco, she had been eligible for parole for some time. Federal officials offered no comment as to why she was released Monday, but Moore had suggested in past interviews that she would probably not gain release until after Ford's death. Ford died almost exactly one year ago at his home in Rancho Mirage.
Moore, 77, was released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, a low-security facility for women 30 miles east of San Francisco, according to Mike Truman, a spokesman with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Michael G. Ford, one of President Ford's four children, said the family would have no comment on Moore's release. "We're keeping a private, low profile on that," said Ford, who is an administrator at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
Moore, an accountant and a divorced mother of four, fired at Ford on Sept. 22, 1975, as the president was leaving a speaking engagement at the St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco. Her single shot from a .38-caliber revolver missed Ford by several feet after Oliver Sipple, a disabled Vietnam War veteran, grabbed her arm and pulled her down.
It came a little more than two weeks after Lynnette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, pointed a loaded gun at Ford as he visited the state Capitol in Sacramento. Moore later said that Fromme's effort did not inspire her own.
Before she fired at Ford, Moore had received psychiatric treatment several times and her attorneys were preparing an insanity defense. She pleaded guilty over their objections.
After she was sentenced, Moore expressed mixed feelings about her actions.
"Am I sorry I tried?" she said. "Yes and no. Yes, because it accomplished little except to throw away the rest of my life . . . . And, no, I'm not sorry I tried, because at the time it seemed a correct expression of my anger."
James Hewitt, the now-retired federal public defender who handled Moore's case, said the public should not be alarmed by her release from prison.
"She is pretty close to becoming an old lady," Hewitt, who lives in Marin County, said Monday in a telephone interview. "She is probably too old to cause any damage."
