In September 1975, the nation was stunned when President Gerald Ford survived 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 the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The year before, Ford had unexpectedly become president when 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, when he pardoned Richard Nixon,” says Mirelle Luecke, supervisor curator for the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in 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 of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy convulsed American politics, according to Ken Hughes, a historian with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
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