Customer Reviews

Taking Aim at the President: The Remarkable Story of the Woman Who Shot at Gerald Ford

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Geri Spieler has taken her unique relationship with Sara Jane Moore and cashed-in with the only book out now about this complex and troubled woman. Spieler, with her "inside" access creates the illusion we are getting the full story about the bizarre life of Sara Jane Moore. What's bizarre here is the way she manipulates what we are allowed to know.

After having to research deeper into this book I found some very strange errors and omissions.

A completely inaccurate story about an amnesia episode then WAC PFC Sara Jane Kahn had in Washington, DC in May 1950. According to Spieler, Sara was touring the White House alone and without identification on a lovely cherry blossom time afternoon. A richly detailed account follows of her then collapsing on the White House lawn complete with Secret Service Agents rushing to her and taking her to Walter Reed Hospital for treatment. Nurses finding hidden photos of Sara in her dress then used in papers all over trying to identify the mystery woman with amnensia. Her mother in West Virginia and her estranged husband in Pennsylvania supposedly seeing the photos and rushing to her bedside to ID her. "Suspicious" FBI wondering about her. Suspicious indeed! Especially since you couldn't go near the White House in May 1950, as it was completely shelled to the bare walls inside having a massive modernization renovation.

Funny thing is when you read the actual SINGLE newspaper account that Spieler loosely cited on this yarn, the story doesn't match except it was Sara and she did have some sort of weird loss of memory episode. It's a lot more involved in items left untold in this fable, but there's only so much space available here to report the many holes in this story.

Sara was identified by the FBI though fingerprints and her military status at the time. The authorities contacted her mother with a telephone. Sara, after being treated at two city hospitals, wasn't taken to Walter Reed, she was RETURNED to Walter Reed where she had been a patient for many weeks under observation for "fainting spells"...code back then perhaps for something a bit more worrisome?
Sara was on a Walter Reed Hospital pass when she was found alone collapsed near the Washington Monument by Park Police at midnight. None of that told in this story.

At any rate, Spieler's version of this episode is at serious odds with actual newspaper accounts from May 1950. She's also very casual with her cite on this part of the story. In an online version of this tale she cited a newspaper from 1948 - 2 years BEFORE this happened complete with 1950 headlines screaming! A typo?

It leads one to wonder what other flights of fabrication are in this book?

Then the things she doesn't tell you...

After countless pages making it clear it was the Patty Hearst kidnapping that put Sara Jane on a road to shoot Ford - she leaves out the incredible irony that the two women met in prison! After Patty's capture and Sara's arrest for the assassination attempt.

They shared a wing and were across the hall from each other for a few days. They met and talked according to the Warden of the prison to The New York Times and other papers.

Spieler makes it clear that Sara is a roller coaster of emotions. She's self absorbed, select in her memories, a control freak and Spieler selects the comments made by a couple psychiatrists regarding Moore after her examinations to see if she was competent to stand trial in 1975. Six doctors examined her.

It's curious that she neglects to mention or share what the renowned Dr. William Menninger, yes THAT Menninger, had to say to the Judge, newspapers and TV concerning the hearing on her sanity. She was sane enough to stand trial but had a past that's not to be found in this book. Dr. Menninger had some critical history to tell. That Sara Jane Moore from 1950 - 1975 had 7 times received mental illness treatments, including a stay at Bellevue in 1954 for being psychotic and out of touch with reality. Starting in 1950...the same year she was at Walter Reed for weeks under observation for "fainting spells".

Why leave Menninger's revelation out? Not even a footnote? Could it be if the reader was completely told all the findings they'd think maybe Sara's bouts of bizarre behavior had an explanation beyond being really odd? There might not be a story here that is as interesting? Oh, there's a story here but you won't get it all in this book of select and even contrived information.

Sara held an important job not mentioned that ties into things she said about herself after her arrest. Sara had step children not mentioned and a home life not completely described. Sara had a female roommate of 3 years who was very close to Sara apparently. When were they roommates? During Sara's so called missing 8 years? Did Sara separate from her last husband for 3 years and live in Pasadena? Who knows? Geri Spieler doesn't seem to want us to, if she even bothered to look.

One thing you will know after reading this is too much about the author and that's always a red flag. When an author has a website about a "history" book she's written that includes a movie script synopsis with her as the star...seek your history elsewhere and do what I did, go to the Library. Join a newspaper archive service or two and read it first hand when it happened. You know, like the author should have.

Spieler, in this book, controls the horizontal and the vertical - the resulting picture is full of snow.

Taking Aim at the President: The Remarkable Story of the Woman Who Shot at Gerald Ford

It's interesting that there are more books and movies about the late sixties and seventies these days. Fortunately these materials are no longer about the hippies and drugs. How refreshing.

And now we have yet another "look back" at the seventies. Except this "look back" is written from a personal relationship with the subject.

For that reason alone, Taking Aim is in a league all it's own. This is a view of seventies San Francisco that is personal and all too real. Without the Spieler/Moore relationship, I'm not sure I would have cared about Moore's antics. Yet, because of it, I cared a lot.

Seen through the eyes of this young mother accidentally linked up by chance to this odd-ball would-be assassin made the book a fascinating read. The crazy twists and turns of political San Francisco as the backdrop of Sara Jane Moore's distorted reality were well placed.

The details about people and specific events are powerful. This is original work and information about San Francisco I never knew. If Spieler did her homework as well as it seems, I learned some surprising things about an era I thought I knew so well?

I recommend this book. It covers brand new ground and reads well.

Maybe there is no "core" to Sara Jane Moore, but, psychologically speaking, Geri Spieler gets about as close as you can. Moore clearly has some sort of mental health issues -- histrionic, narcissistic, and a neurotic version of borderline personality disorder, perhaps. But why? Her family of origin seems all relatively normal, not just her parents but her siblings.

But, you can see instability, as well as a narcissistic self-focus, histrionically played out, through multiple husbands, multiple life changes, abandonment of children, unrealistic self-views and more.

Eventually, Moore winds up working in radical movements in San Francisco and as an FBI informant at the same time, then, crazier yet (pun intended) telling both sides she was actually working for the other side.

That eventually led up to the fateful 1975 day, in which (which I did not know before) due to a gun with a bad sight, Moore missed Ford by only six inches.

Spieler wonders if the final group with which she associated, Tribal Thumb, didn't put her up to the shooting, if only indirectly. But, because Moore pled guilty without going to trial, nobody could be subpoenaed. And, given the screw-ups of lack of communication between Secret Service, FBI and San Francisco PD, Spieler speculates they were all likely glad there was no trial either.

That said, we may never know too much about Sara Jane Moore. She eventually became uncooperative with Spieler, and nobody else will likely even get that close. So, this is your best shot.

A real page-turner. This is a fascinating account of the strange life and mind of Sara Jane Moore. It is an equally fascinating account of the social and political protest movements of the 1970s. Any student of that era of American history should consider it required reading.

When Sara Moore took aim at President Ford, I was yet to be born 5 years later in Europe. Even after living in the San Francisco Bay Area for a few years, I knew very little about the assassination attempt, until I came across this book that shed light onto the events from the many perspectives of the police, FBI, media, Sara Moore, her acquaintances and even the author. Equally fascinating to me was the unexpected content of the book. Geri Spieler introduces the reader to the many radical left movements in the Bay Area of the 70s that played a big part in Sara Moore's life. I don't know where else I would have been able to experience this historical time in such an authentic way. The second unexpected gain reading this book provided was the chance to see inside the heavily convoluted mind of Sara Moore, who when interacted with for only short periods of time, must have appeared completely normal. It made me aware of the many other 'Sara Moore's' that must be out there, that we interact with daily, and just maybe will, maybe will not cause harm one day. For the way this book brought my attention to topics that I would have otherwise missed, it gets my definite recommendation and 5 stars.

Full blow by blow description of the event and the planning involved. Remarkable journalistic project taking years of research. Should get a PhD for scholarly research as well a medal for putting up with Sarah. Ten stars!

In "Taking Aim at the President," author Geri Spieler has skillfully woven together the twin strands of the personal (a disaffected suburban housewife) and the political (the radical groups in 1970s San Francisco with which she becomes involved). Spieler met Sara Jane Moore shortly after her arrest and incarceration for shooting at President Gerald Ford outside a San Francisco hotel in 1975. There began a relationship of nearly 30 years, conducted through correspondence and occasional meetings in prison. Spieler did extensive research to uncover what brought Moore to that fateful day. What she delivers is the finely-told story of a woman who becomes unmoored from past and her family (Moore divorces her husband and abandons her children), and moves to San Francisco where she finds some sense of belonging in the radical Left. Moore vacillates in her allegiances, from the FBI for which she serves as an informant, to the political groups she had been assigned to infiltrate. Moore seems insecure, unstable, struggling to belong -- and through her story we get a vision of the era as equally unsettled, and unsettling. Forming the background are SDS, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the SLA and the Patricia Hearst kidnapping, and the FBI's COINTELPRO efforts to undermine these and other organizations. Spieler's book is a remarkable portrait of a woman and her times. It is sure to interest students of modern U.S. history and the radical Left.

Reading this book felt like I was reading a novel. The story line is fast paced and the characterization of Ms. Moore is quite in depth. The mystery surrounding her remarkable behavior is quite amazing. The fact that she came so close to actually assassinating President Ford, and that she was off by only 6 inches due to a faulty sighting mechanism is a detail that few knew at the time of her attempt. I also find it quite interesting that she was an informant for the FBI as well as Randolph Hearst. The story of her involvement in, and conversion to the radical underground of the time presents perhaps the most provocative and bizarre aspects of this fascinating story.

For anyone who lived through the 1970s or is curious about those radical years, Taking Aim at the President by Geri Spieler is both a stroll down memory lane and a credible account of the times. Through Speiler's meticulous recreation of the events leading up to Sara Jane Moore's attempt on President Ford's life (she barely missed!) we see portraits of the radical left in the Bay Area as well as the local FBI, police department, and other government agencies who tracked and hassled both students and radicals. Patricia Hearst kidnappers Emily and Bill Harris, Cinque and Willy Wolfe, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Zebra killings, the nascent Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, and the Hearst family's desperate food give-away are all woven into this true tale. Conservative Sara Jane Moore, housewife and mother who over the years abandoned four children, married five times, and became a paid FBI informant and well-dressed gun toting killer, is not only a psychological study of a home-grown terrorist, but a warning for the present. A riveting tale of true crime and political adventure, Taking Aim at the President is a book I couldn't put down.

There are actually two stories revealed in this book; both fascinating. First, we finally learn the details of Sara Jane Moore's life, and they are quite different from either of the two vastly divergent portraits that were painted for us so many years ago (one by the FBI, and one by Sara Jane Moore, herself).

Second, as we read this intriguing biography, we are also treated to a well-documented look inside the highly organized effort that was underway at the time to undermine, disrupt and discredit the progressive movement in the United States. Troubling then, and troubling now.....