[On April 26th,
1865, John
Wilkes Booth was killed after a nearly two-week manhunt following his assassination of Abraham
Lincoln. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of different assassinations
and their contexts!]
On the silliest
and yet the most serious would-be political assassin in American history.
Lynette
“Squeaky” Fromme’s famous nickname is only one of many silly details about
President Gerald
Ford’s unsuccessful 1975 assassin. Fromme wore a
flowing red robe and elfin red hat to Sacramento’s Capitol Park, where Ford
was holding a televised event; she carried a pistol with no round in the
chamber, and when she was immediately restrained by the Secret Service after
pointing the gun at Ford, she
emphasized to the cameras that the gun “didn’t go off.” Later she would
tell the court during her trial that she “was so relieved not to have to shoot
it, but, in truth, I came to get life. Not just my life but clean air, healthy
water, and respect for creatures and creation.” When the prosecuting attorney
recommended a harsh sentence, Fromme threw an
apple at him (drawn from the folds of another flowing robe) and knocked off
his glasses (“Sandy Koufax couldn’t have thrown a better pitch,” her defense
attorney noted when asked about the incident). Much of Fromme’s assassination
story reads more like a minor Wes Anderson film than an act of attempted
political violence.
Yet there’s a
problem with that image, and it has to do with how Fromme spent the eight years
prior to her pseudo-assassination attempt. In 1967, when she was only 19 years
old and a homeless Junior College dropout, she met Charles
Manson on Venice Beach, and quickly fell under the
psychotic cult leader’s spell. Although she was not charged with taking
part in the Manson
Family’s brutal 1969 murder spree, she and other followers camped outside the trial, carving X’s
in their foreheads when Manson did so and working to prevent other Family
members from testifying against Manson. When Manson was sentenced to life in
prison, Fromme and others continued the Family’s legacy of violence as well as
its relationship
with the Aryan Brotherhood, and she (along with other Family and Aryan
Brotherhood members) played some role in the brutal murder of a young married
couple (James
and Lauren Willett) in Stockton (CA) in the fall of 1972. Although she was
not connected to any crimes between 1972 and 1975, she was living with another
Family member throughout this time, and the red robe she was wearing at the
time of her assassination attempt was in honor of Manson’s nickname of “Red”
for her.
None of those
histories necessarily mean that Fromme was really trying to assassinate Ford in
1975, but they do significantly change any image of her as a silly
environmental activist or performance artist or the like. Indeed, the question
I raised about Leon Csolgosz in Wednesday’s post—where was he or she
radicalized?—has a crystal clear answer for Lynette Fromme, and that answer is “In
the midst of one of the most brutal and horrific cults in American history.”
Given that, I can’t help but wonder if some of the sense of silliness (which to
be clear I’ve given into myself) is a form of white privilege, an inability to
see a petite white woman as part of a group of bigoted, violent killers and
criminals. Yet that’s precisely what Fromme was, and what she
apparently remained throughout her three-plus decades in prison: a disciple
and devotee of one of the most despicable figures in American history.
Fortunately she was not able to commit an act of political violence in service
of those beliefs, but she quite possibly took part in—and at least overtly condoned
and supported—multiple, far more violent acts against innocent, private people.
This is not a would-be assassin to laugh at.
April Recap this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other assassination contexts or connections you’d highlight?
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