Recently on the WNYC radio show and podcast Radiolab, producers delved into the moral minefield of a local scandal of sorts that erupted in the wake of an attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel in Union Square in 1975. Radical leftist politics, a misguided and perhaps mentally unstable housewife, and the burgeoning gay rights movement collided with mainstream journalism and the president of the United States in a tricky, sad tale that left one man's life in ruins, all because he may have saved the president's life.
The story begins with a first-person account from the attempted assassin herself, Sara Jane Moore, who was freed on parole a decade ago and is now 87 years old. On September 22, 1975, she was 45 years old and had been married and divorced five times, with four children. As she tells Radiolab, she had just dropped off her nine-year-old at school and went down to Union Square with a diabolical goal in mind. She parked in the underground garage beneath the park, and joined a crowd of people on the Powell Street sidewalk across from the hotel who were waiting to get a glimpse of Ford. She says she waited an hour or two, and was jostled in the crowd, including being pushed by a tall blond man who she thought was being fresh, who would turn out to be Oliver Sipple.
Sipple had heard in passing that the president was in town and decided to go have a look. He had served in the Marines in Vietnam and was discharged in 1968 after being injured in combat, and likely had what we would now call PTSD. He moved to San Francisco after becoming acquainted with Harvey Milk in New York the two actually shared a boyfriend, the same character who inspired "Sugar Plum Fairy" in the lyrics to Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" and he quickly became active in the gay rights movement, thanks to Milk. And that day in 1975, when he saw Sara Jane Moore raise a gun out of her purse and aim it at the president, he either bumped her and caused her to miss (as some accounts have it), or as Moore remembers, she missed, had no plans to take a second shot, and Sipple grabbed her arm and pushed it down to her side until police could make their way to her. (An image of the moment can be seen here.)
As Radiolab goes on to explain, Sipple took to heart Milk's calls for gay people to come out, because it was only through visibility that gay people would find acceptance, and for all intents and purposes Sipple was out to many friends in SF, frequented gay bars, and was active in the Imperial Court with Jose Sarria. But what followed in the days after Moore's assassination attempt and national coverage declaring Sipple a hero is where one begins to get uncomfortable both with Milk's hard-charging ideology at the expense of a person's privacy, and with journalists who took that and ran with it as newsworthy.
Milk took the opportunity of Sipple's sudden fame to call Herb Caen at the Chronicle and make sure he knew that Sipple was gay. Caen wasn't able to reach Sipple to confirm this, but he heard from a second source that Sipple was, indeed, an out homosexual, and decided to drop the detail of Sipple being celebrated among friends in a gay bar in one of his daily columns, a couple days after the attempted assassination.
From Caen's column, the story of Sipple's sexuality got to an LA Times bureau reporter in San Francisco, and from there went quickly "viral" as such things were not called back then, being picked up by several newspapers and subsequently several national news broadcasts. The angle at the time was that President Ford was being somewhat slow in publicly thanking Sipple for his heroism, and that the reason was because he was gay.
A week or so later, Ford would thank Sipple in a letter, however by then, Sipple's parents and siblings in Michigan had disowned him, and his own mother had hung up on him.
Following months of anguish over this, Sipple filed a $15 million lawsuit in San Francisco court against the Chronicle, the LA Times, and multiple other newspapers alleging a violation of his privacy.
The case would drag on for years after that, finally being decided in favor of the newspapers in May 1984. The verdict: Sipple had not been entirely private about his sexuality, he had become a public figure by saving the president's life, and because of the gay rights movement his sexuality had necessarily become a part of a newsworthy story.
It is a fascinating case to look back on now, and one that is apparently taught in some law schools. Radiolab examines it via the moral ambiguity of occasions like this when one man's happiness and keeping a secret from his family is sacrificed for a greater good in this case showing that a gay person could be an ex-Marine and a hero. That was Milk's goal, and as the story goes, Sipple must have forgiven him for that, because he remained friends with Milk until Milk's own assassination in 1978.
The sad epilogue to the story came via an interview with one of the pillars of the local LGBTQ community, Wayne Friday, who passed away in 2016. Radiolab got a transcription of the interview and had an actor do a dramatic reading of it, which you should listen to if you're interested. In short, Sipple spent his later years as a broken man, seriously alcoholic, living in a small apartment on Van Ness and blowing his disability checks at Queen Mary's Bar (now Aunt Charlie's) in the Tenderloin, often buying drinks for the bar the day he cashed his check. To the end, Friday said, Sipple would cry on his shoulder about the fact that no one remembered him as a hero. They just remembered him as "a faggot."
Friday remarked how, when Sipple died in 1989 at the age of 47, hardly anyone came to his funeral, despite all those drinks he bought.
Previously: The SF Assassination Attempt on Gerald Ford
Sara Jane Moore in 2009, giving an interview on the Today show two years after being paroled. (Getty Images)
