In September 1975, the nation was stunned whenPresident Gerald Fordsurvived two assassination attempts within just 17 days, both occurring in California and both carried out by women.
While unsuccessful, the shootings highlighted the social and political tensions in a country still reeling from theVietnam Warand theWatergate scandal. The year before, Ford hadunexpectedly become presidentwhen Richard Nixon resigned. Before that he had been appointed to the vice presidency when Spiro Agnew had resigned.
“Ford had come into office under a great wave of popularity, which he enjoyed for the first month—until September 8, 1974, whenhe pardoned Richard Nixon," says Mirelle Luecke, supervisory curator for theGerald R. Ford Presidential Museumin Grand Rapids, Michigan. "Ford "[He] struggled with his popularity ratings after that. The country was also facing the end of the Vietnam War and massive inflation, so it was a time of a lot of change and a lot of difficulty.”
At first, the two assassination attempts against Ford seemed as if they might turn the clock back to the dark days of the 1960s, when the assassinations ofJohn F. Kennedy,Martin Luther King Jr., andRobert F. Kennedyconvulsed American politics, according to Ken Hughes, a historian with theUniversity of Virginia’s Miller Center.
“But Ford survived both attempts on his life without so much a scratch, so the assassination attempts did no lasting damage,” he says. “The buzzword was ‘decompression.’ After years of tumult and controversy, the pressure was finally off.”
Source: Drudge Report
