On Sept. 5, 1975, one of cult murderer Charles Manson's female disciples
aimed a .45 caliber pistol at President Ford outside the Statehouse in
Sacramento, California, and pulled the trigger. Fortunately for the President, although there
were four bullets in the clip, the firing chamber was empty. Secret Service
men pounced on Lynette Fromme, called Squeaky.
It was a time of great social upheaval. With the end of the Vietnam War and the resignation of President Nixon, the hippie movement was directionless. Various communes, where life centered around drugs, free sex, and a merging of self with environment that was based in eastern religion, had begun to fall apart, self destructing through drug and alcohol abuse and being aided by the police harrassment and drug busts. An increasing emphasis on violent overthrow of the government often brought repressive measures from authorities. Charles Manson's "family" had moved from location to location to escape harassment. Manson, a charismatic, sensual drifter who had been in and out of correctional institutions from his childhood, appeared as a Christ-like figure to his children, who had no trouble identifying him with the Savior. Raised in the Bible belt of West Virginia-Southern Ohio, Manson encouraged the comparison. His flashing eyes and mystical utterances aligned his followers with good against the rampant evil of the world. Forged from a combination of eastern religon, the occult, hypnotism, and scientology, all picked up in prison, his teachings were above all earth-centered. Fromme writes: "I have no respect for people who don't have respect for what gives them life. And that's earth. You know, earth first. That's Manson's first woman."
Fromme's association with Manson came at a vulnerable time in her life, when she had run away from home. She had a happy childhood, the oldest of 3 in a suburban family where life for many years had centered around her appearances as part of a touring dance group, the Lariats, who had once been seen on the Ed Sullivan Show. In her recent biography by Jess Bravin, she is quoted as saying: " We all came from houses with doors. Doors that were to be closed when there were things going on that we weren't supposed to see and when our pants were down." But her teen years, against the backdrop of such tumultous times, were difficult, marked by a growing bitterness between Lyn and her father, "a no-nonsence aeronautical engineer who did not adjust easily to change," like so many fathers in that era. The story of her meeting with Manson is a familiar one, the weeping urchin seated on the bench at the Venice Beach boardwalk with all her possessions--make up, dictionary, books--in her lap. The magnetic rough-hewn elf-uncle who told her everything about herself--where she'd been and where she wanted to go--won over her initial resistance. "Up at the Haight," he told her, "I'm called the Gardener. I tend to all the flower children." She went with him. Never looked back.
When Manson and his disciples were arrested for the "helter-skelter"
Tate-Bianca murders, Fromme was among those followers who shaved their
heads and sat in front of the courthouse. She appeared, brandishing weaponry,
in the documentary film Manson. (The picture top right is from this
documentary on Manson, in which his followers tried to give the press what
they wanted.)After Manson's conviction and incarceration,
she moved into an apartment with two other Manson disciples in Sacramento,
where they lived a quiet life without drugs, alcohol or sex, an ascetic
vegetarian life of mediation, gardening and writing letters to those whom
they targeted as major polluters, threatening them with destruction. "Your
product . . . is killing, poisoning the world. There is now excuse for
it. . . . If you do not stop killing us, Manson will send for your heart.
. . . 
Remember
Sharon Tate." But no one listened. She wrote the judge who presided over
the Manson trial (and not for the first time) telling him that she was
going to do something desperate. A campaign Fromme waged throughout the
summer to put Manson and the family into a courtroom or on CBS, with Nixon,
the Pope, the author of Helter Skelter (the book about the Manson
murders), and sundry other members of the establishment did not bear fruit.
It was then that she learned of Ford's visit to Sacramento.
Wearing a flowing red robe over a scoopnecked flowered dress and sandals, with the .45 pistol stapped to her leg, Fromme joined the onlookers waving at the President in front of the capitol grounds. As the President noticed her red dress and turned to wave, he became aware of the weapon aimed directly at his midsection, approximately two feet away from him. In the instant that followed, the President heard the click, then pandimonium broke out as he was wrestled through the crowd to safety and she was wrestled to the ground. She maintained she never intended to fire--the bullet missing from the firing chamber was used as support--but she later confessed to attorney Phil Shelton the incident that had caused her to realize she couldn't do it. She stated:
Fromme Links
ATWA (ACCESS MANSON. The Web Site Dedicated To Charles Manson: A Real Source for Manson Thought)
After Manson's
trial, his followers were left to their own devices. Fromme grew wierder, dressing in earth-nun costumes, posing in cemetaries, and writing letters to earth's enemies. As for her motive to assassinate the President,
she writes: "If Manson had anything to do with it, it is this - He
asked the women around him to put the Earth before him to work for air,
trees, water, animals (he calls it ATWA). He told me long ago that life
on Earth does not begin with humans, but with all that keeps us alive.
He said the Earth and its animals can survive without people. People cannot
survive without it. Such a simple thing. You may say that everyone knows
it; but humans behave now as if they can eat money and drink gasoline and
oil. I had that and other pollutions on my mind when Ford flew
into Sacramento for a big Business and Industry breakfast the following
morning. "
Sources: Bravin, Jess. The Life and
Times of Lynette Alice Fromme. New York: St. Martin’s Press,1997;
"Quotes from Red and Blue." ATWA. 27 Dec. 1999.