Presidential (Attempted) Assassinations and Classic Rockers in Crime of the Century: Kennedy, Ford, and Reagan

Boomers remember where they were when JFK was assassinated. Millennials remember where they were when they found out about 9/11. Gen Z remember where they were when Donald Trump was nearly shot and killed at a rally.

I’m a cusp millennial, as I was born in 1994. I remember being in primary school when 9/11 happened and watching the Twin Towers collapse on TV and my parents talking about plane hijackings and then being afraid that terrorists would break into my house and so I’d sleep with a lot of stuffed animals. My favourite subject in school growing up was history, both US and world history. Living in England, I found out about the assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump just chilling at home about to vape my weed after a long day of painting the spare bedroom and then I got a text from my friend that Donald Trump has been shot. At first I thought it was a joke, but I looked it up and it was true, the bullet was only inches away from hitting his brain and his ear was all bloody. As the news spread, I saw the pictures you saw: the image that captured the moment the bullet flew right by his head and the video of the Secret Service surrounding Donald Trump and getting him out of there but Donald Trump shouted “Wait! Wait! Wait” and raised his fist in the air with blood trickling down his face and his ear covered in blood. Love or hate Trump, it was an iconic image. Eventually, we found out the shooter’s name, a 20-year-old named Thomas Crooks. Since he was killed, there is a lot that we’ll never know. Maybe I’ve been eurocucked from my years of living overseas, but I’m not a fan of police officers killing criminals unless it’s a matter of life and death, like “someone’s going to die, it’s either them or me”. We have courts and prisons for a reason. Lock up criminals, don’t kill them because that’s barbaric and killing people doesn’t bring back the dead. That’s my take on January 6. I think it was wrong that the officers killed Ashli Babbitt. I believe the real test of your principles is when something bad happens to people you don’t like and I pride myself on being principled. I’m very much against violence and I don’t think it’s right to kill people, full stop.

This news story made me think about the stories in my book. One thread I’ve noticed is the storytelling of the cultural beginning, middle, and end of the 60s: Pre-JFK assassination (also known as the Long Fifties), The Kinks’ touring the US in 1965 – part of the British Invasion, Beatlemania and its effects on Charles Manson, the Tate-LaBianca murders, Altamont, and Kent State (although that took place in 1970, but you catch my drift because the anti-war protesters were hippies).

The other thread I’ve noticed is all of the presidential assassinations, or attempted assassinations. Yes, it’s the classic rock era, but I can’t get over how rock bands are only a few degrees of separation from these crimes. It’s interesting how popular culture and history collide in these stories and that’s how I love to approach history, make it relatable by connecting popular culture to it. Small world, I guess! In this blog post, I’ll talk about the connections and a bit about the assassination (attempts).

JFK Assassination: The Band played at Jack Ruby’s nightclub months before and a story about The Beatles was supposed to be aired that night on CBS News.

Chapter one of Crime of the Century begins with the cultural beginning of the 60s: the JFK assassination. While The Band (then known as The Hawks) were not connected to JFK, they did play at Jack Ruby’s nightclub The Skyline Lounge sometime in 1963. The place was a dump and it was called the Skyline Lounge because there was no roof so you could see the Fort Worth skyline. Hardly anyone showed up and it was a very non-glamorous time for the band because they were too broke to afford multiple hotel rooms so they took turns sleeping in the venue, guarding their instruments. That’s the reality of being a touring band. Only the upper echelon of rock stars get to live the high life and stay at posh hotels and fly around in a private jet.

The Band definitely thought Jack Ruby was a strange guy, but they didn’t really think too much about him until 24 November 1963. Two days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was going to be escorted from the Dallas Police Headquarters to the city jail, but then Jack Ruby shot Oswald on national television. Robert H. Jackson’s photo of that moment won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in 1964.

The Beatles were a band on the rise at the time and were growing in popularity in their native UK and were about to break out overseas. Within months they’d arrive in the US. A story about them was supposed to be aired on the night of 22 November 1963, but the President being assassinated meant that other news stories weren’t important (especially if it’s about a rock band) and they’d be shelved for the time being. That story would eventually air later.

When we think about the assassination, there’s a lot of questions. How does a man shoot someone in the head from six storeys high? It couldn’t be that Oswald acted alone! You’re not crazy for questioning it. The ER doctors at Parkland Hospital who tried to save JFK’s life said as much, there had to have been multiple shooters because one of the shots seemed to have been from the front and the other from behind. The trauma doctors believed that the wound on his throat was an entrance wound, not an exit wound, but the Secret Service told them not to say that it was an entrance wound. Even LBJ told Walter Cronkite that he believed it’s possible that a foreign power had something to do with it, but he requested the comment be excluded from the interview. Doesn’t that give credence to the idea that it was an inside job or something? Why would you hide the truth if you’ve done nothing wrong? The CIA is no stranger to thwarting left wing movements abroad (Latin Americans know all about this), who’s to say they wouldn’t do it at home? Look at what happened to MLK, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton. Heck, the FBI had files on celebrities and entertainers. You speak out against capitalism and the establishment too much and they’ll kill you. JFK supported Medicare For All. And now Democrats won’t even support M4A, I wonder why? Because they’re all bought and paid for by corporations. Follow the money.

The other thing I thought about was how lucky Trump was that he’d turned his head at the right time and the bullet grazed his ear instead of going through his head. Pardon my French, but Trump has to be the jammiest bastard alive. Unfortunately for JFK, he had his health problems working against him. Don’t be fooled by his appearance. The US is no stranger to having a president with a lot of health problems. Biden doesn’t have all of his mental faculties. He’s mumbling and always looks lost and mixes up his words all the time, like in an interview he called himself the first black woman (huh?) and in the debate with Trump he said there were 1,000 trillionaires in America (haha Dr Evil moment) and that “we beat Medicare” and Trump responded wittily with “Well, he’s right. He did beat Medicaid, he beat it to death and he’s destroying Medicare.”

Anyway, there’s a lot of rabbit holes when it comes to the Kennedys and I could probably talk all day about all those tragic and crazy stories. But anyway, despite JFK looking “healthy” and being the youngest president ever elected, his health was rubbish and he did everything to hide it. He had a laundry list of medical conditions, the best known ones being Addison’s Disease (which is what made him look tan) and back pain. No wonder he supported Medicare For All. There’s a theory that his back pain (indirectly) led to his death. Where did it all begin? The origins of his back problems was likely in university while playing football. Even then, he didn’t let it stop him from joining the military and becoming a war hero (it helped that his father was well-connected though), saving his crew mates after the Japanese destroyer Amagiri hit the patrol torpedo boat PT-109, sinking it. This heroic act exacerbated his back problems and led to him being hospitalised for a time. On top of that, his treatments for Addison’s disease weakened his bones and made his back problems even worse. He had multiple back surgeries and almost died multiple times because of it and wore a back brace for the last 20ish years of his life and was quite dependent on it. He was also reliant on crutches to go up and down stairs. Now you see where I’m going with this. Back braces are rigid even if they’re made of fabric and to keep the fabric from rolling upwards or downwards, you need metal rods (stays). Because of the metal rods, it’s hard (or impossible) to bend over and duck and it’s even harder if it covers more of your body. Months before the assassination, his back pain relapsed and against his doctor’s orders, he went back to wearing a back brace and wrapping his torso in Ace bandages, promising his doctors he’d stop wearing it once he came back from Dallas. Unfortunately he did not make it back from Dallas alive. Multiple doctors have a theory that because of the back brace, President Kennedy could not duck and because he was stuck sitting upright, another bullet went right through his head. However, some doctors say it didn’t play much of a role in his death.

Ford Assassination Attempt: Manson Family member Squeaky Fromme tried to send a message to Jimmy Page.

What’s really interesting about President Ford is that there were two assassination attempts a little over two weeks apart in September 1975 in California. He was a one-term president and wasn’t even President for three years since he took over after Nixon resigned, making him the only President of the United States to have not been elected as President or Vice President. Before Ford was VP, he was minority leader of the House of Representatives and became VP after Spiro Agnew resigned because he was accused of extortion, bribery, and income tax violations from he was the governor of Maryland. Interestingly, both attempted assassins were women: Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore. Fromme was almost 27 at the time of the assassination attempt and Moore was 45. They are the only women who’ve attempted to kill a US President. Both of them were sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. Both were paroled decades later after Ford died in 2006. Squeaky Fromme was paroled in 2009 after serving 34 years in prison and Sara Jane Moore was paroled in 2007 after serving 32 years in prison.

Months before Squeaky tried to kill President Ford, she tried to contact Jimmy Page by giving him a note saying to watch out because something dangerous is going to happen to him at the concert in Long Beach. She went to the hotel where the band were supposedly staying and knocked on the door of Swan Song’s (Led Zeppelin’s label) VP Danny Goldberg. She was nervous and asked him if she could meet Jimmy Page. He denied her request and took the note for him and burnt it. Goldberg later recognised her when her face was on national television after trying to kill President Ford.

Why did she try to kill President Ford? After the Manson Girls: Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten were jailed, the Manson Family still kept going and Squeaky was one of Manson’s most loyal girls. In 1971, she was sentenced to 90 days in jail for trying to give Barbara Hoyt a burger laced with LSD to keep her from testifying at the Tate-LaBianca murder trial. Squeaky kept in touch with Charles Manson long after the Tate-LaBianca murders and to impress him and stand for his ATWA (air, trees, water, animals) movement, she was going to try to kill President Ford when he was visiting the state capital of Sacramento. Fromme and Sandra Good were big proponents of ATWA.

Of course with Ford being a Republican, he was not good to the planet and climate change would only get worse from there. A report came out in August 1975 that showed that smog was widespread in rural areas in California. President Ford wanted to relax parts of the Clean Air Act. Redwood trees, the tallest trees in the world, are in some of these rural areas in California and Squeaky cared a lot about the redwood trees and she reached out to someone in the San Francisco government to see if something could be done about it. At the time, Squeaky and Sandra Good were living in Sacramento in a flat on 1725 P Street. While watching the news, Squeaky found out that President Ford was coming to Sacramento to meet with California governor Jerry Brown. Turns out that the hotel he was staying at, the Senator Hotel, was not even a mile away from her flat. She was not the first person arrested for threatening President Ford’s life. On 18 August, an ex-con named Thomas Elbert was arrested for calling the Secret Service threatening to kill the President when he visited Sacramento.

Squeaky’s goal was to scare the government by killing the President. What that would accomplish, I don’t know. She bought a Colt M1911 pistol, originally used in the US Army before being sold as government surplus in 1913. Fromme took the pistol from a retired federal government engineering draftsman named Harold E. Boro who was a friend of the Manson Family and helped them out a lot financially. Boro did not want her to take the pistol and ammunition with her, but she did it anyway even though she didn’t know a lot about how to use the pistol. She walked to Capitol Park right by the California State Capitol wearing a long red dress to symbolise the animals and the Earth and kept her pistol in a leg harness. As President Ford was shaking hands with the crowd, he passed by Squeaky Fromme and she stood out with her ginger hair and red dress. He assumed he wanted to speak to her, but she pulled out her gun and pointed it at him, but President Ford was saved by her incompetence and the swift action taken by the Secret Service. There was a click and Squeaky famously shouted “it wouldn’t go off!”. No bullet was in the chamber after all.

What about Sara Jane Moore? She was a radical and a convert to Judaism who was fascinated with newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, who was famously kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Her father had set up an organisation after the kidnapping called People In Need to feed the poor. Moore was a volunteer bookkeeper for them and was an FBI informant until she tried to kill President Ford two and a half weeks after Squeaky’s failed attempt. The Secret Service had known about her and had investigated her, but didn’t find that she was a threat to the President and so they let her go. On 22 September 1975, President Ford went to San Francisco to speak to the World Affairs Council and as he left the St Francis Hotel for his limousine, Moore fired two shots with her .38 Special revolver. The first shot missed President Ford’s head by a mere five inches. After the first shot was fired, a bystander named Oliver Sipple dove towards Moore, potentially saving the President’s life. However, the second shot ended up hitting a taxi driver named John Ludwig in the groin. Ludwig survived. The Secret Service surrounded President Ford and pushed him into the limo and got him out of there to the airport and then on Air Force One back to Washington DC. From that point onwards, President Ford wore a bulletproof trenchcoat in public. He lost the 1976 US Presidential election to Jimmy Carter. This was really a close call!

Oliver Sipple was a decorated US Marine and disabled Vietnam War veteran. Not long after the assassination attempt Sipple was outed as gay and even in a relatively progressive city like San Francisco, it was difficult and he rightfully felt that it was an invasion of privacy. As a result of him being outed, his mother disowned him and he tried to sue the San Francisco Chronicle. Oliver Sipple was friends with politician and gay activist Harvey Milk.

Reagan Assassination Attempt: DEVO wrote a song based on a poem by John Hinckley.

Another one of the biggest what if’s in American history is what if Hinckley was successful and actually killed President Reagan? This was a really close call! This presidential assassination attempt had a few things in common with Squeaky Fromme’s assassination attempt on President Ford because both of them were doing this to get the attention of someone they admired. In Squeaky’s case, she actually knew Charles Manson, but in John Hinckley’s case it was the actress Jodie Foster, whom he obviously did not know, but he was obsessed with her and he stalked her and his goal was to kill President Reagan to get her attention.

As well, both Fromme and Hinckley are creatives. When Fromme was young she was a dancer, wrote poems, and she was a seamstress, making the outfits the Manson Girls wore for their murder trial. Even while behind bars, Fromme still loved Charles Manson and she escaped from prison in 1987 to try to see him, but she was caught after two days on the run.

Meanwhile, John Hinckley was famously obsessed with the Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver, starring Robert DeNiro and Jodie Foster. Robert DeNiro played the anti-hero Travis Bickle who is a veteran who gets a job as a taxi driver, struggles with his mental health, and has a crush on a woman who is working for Senator Charles Palantine’s campaign. Travis’s crush rejects him after he took her to an adult movie theatre on a date. His mental health deteriorates further and he buys guns. Jodie Foster plays a child prostitute named Iris Steensma and Travis sees her while he’s driving. He talks to Iris and tries to get her out of prostitution, but she refuses. He kills her pimp, a Mafioso client, and a bouncer. Iris is saved and her family thank Travis for saving her. The movie is famous for the “you talkin’ to me?” monologue. It was based on the real life story of Arthur Bremer, who tried to kill racist right wing presidential candidate George Wallace.

John Hinckley has a YouTube channel where he posts videos of himself singing songs he’s written as well as covers of songs he likes. He has written poetry for decades and that’s where the classic rock connection comes in. One poem that he wrote for Jodie Foster ended up being turned into a DEVO song, “I Desire”, not unlike Dennis Wilson performing a Charles Manson composition “Cease to Exist” as “Never Learn Not To Love” on the Beach Boys 1969 album 20/20.

John Hinckley came from a well-off family and they financially supported him moving around the country following Jodie Foster, even going as far as to enrol in a writing course at Yale when he found out she was attending that university. The Yale police department were aware of Hinckley’s existence but couldn’t track him down. His original plan was to try to assassinate President Jimmy Carter. He was once really close to him, but in October 1980 he was arrested at Nashville International Airport on a firearms charge, but the authorities didn’t know of his plans to kill the President, so the Secret Service were not made aware. Hinckley’s parents sent him to therapy, but it clearly didn’t work, given what happened months later.

A little over a week before the assassination attempt President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan visited Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC for a fundraising event. In case you’re not aware, that’s where President Lincoln was assassinated. President Reagan said that seeing the presidential box seat was eerie and even with the Secret Service, it’s still possible for someone to get that close to the President and kill them.

Two days before the assassination attempt on 28 March 1981, John Hinckley arrived to Washington DC by bus and checked into the Park Central Hotel. He was en route to New Haven, where Yale is, but he decided that with Reagan being in DC at that time the timing was right to do the thing and get the attention of Jodie Foster. Before he shot Reagan, he wrote a letter to her, but didn’t post it.

On 30 March 1981, President Reagan went to the Washington Hilton to deliver a luncheon address to AFL-CIO (a trade union) representatives. The Secret Service know this hotel like the back of their hands since there have been many presidential visits to the hotel since the early 70s. The security at this hotel was really tight especially with multiple presidential assassination attempts. The hotel was built in 1965, two years after the Kennedy assassination, and for safety, they built a special secure passageway called the President’s Walk. President Reagan would wear a bulletproof vest for some public appearances for safety reasons, but since this hotel was really safe, he decided to forgo it since the walk from the hotel to the presidential limousine was only 30 feet and not even Secret Service agents had to wear bulletproof vests.

The Secret Service had their eyes peeled, but Hinckley was still able to fire shots because the Secret Service did not screen people standing by the limousine. Hinckley fired six shots at President Reagan using a Röhm RG-14 .22 LR blue steel revolver, purchased at a pawn shop in Dallas, within less than two seconds. White House Press Secretary James Brady was hit in the head right above his eye and succumbed to his injuries on 4 August 2014. Officer Thomas Delahanty was shot as well as he turned his head to the left. The bullet struck the back of his neck and ricocheted off his spine. Delahanty survived. A Cleveland labour official named Alfred Antenucci saw Hinckley firing shots, hit him, and wrestled him to the ground. Meanwhile, Special Agent in Charge Jerry Parr grabbed President Reagan by the shoulders and the two dived into the limousine. Secret Service Agent Tim McCarthy took a bullet for President Reagan and was hit in the lower abdomen. He survived and for his heroic act the University of Illinois alumnus won the NCAA Award of Valor. He wasn’t supposed to work that day, but was only there by chance, losing a coin toss to a colleague who took the day off. The fifth and sixth bullets hit the limousine.

Turns out that President Reagan’s rib was hit by a bullet, was cracked, and he was coughing up blood. The Secret Service acted quickly and drove straight to George Washington University Hospital instead of the White House. They got there in just four minutes. Hinckley was tackled, arrested, and booked into jail. First Lady Nancy Reagan went straight to hospital to see her husband. There was no stretcher and so the President walked in and was witty and humorous, joking about the cost of the custom suit the doctors had to cut through to save his life and telling his wife “Honey, I forgot to duck”, and he famously joked with the medical team “I hope you’re all Republicans”. He was operated on and thanks to that quick decision making under intense pressure, he lived another 23 years, dying in 2004.

Hinckley was released from psychiatric hospital in 2016 and was given restrictions on what he could do and where he could live. Slowly but surely, these restrictions were lifted and he was approved for unconditional release in 2022, 41 years after the assassination attempt. Quoting John Lennon, Hinckley’s response to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was “Violence is not the way to go. Give peace a chance.”

In Conclusion

Here are three stories from my book, plus some other interesting information. If you’ve enjoyed reading these stories, pick up a copy of my book Crime of the Century: Classic Rock & True Crime. I’m also currently offering a Pay What You Can deal for the ebook edition where if you donate £1/€1/$1 or more to my blog (links to my PayPal and Patreon can be found below), I’ll send you a copy of the ebook. This is my way of giving back to the people who have read and supported my work whether you’ve been here since 2015 or you’re a new reader. My birthday is also coming up as well. There are so many more stories in the book and they’re all really interesting, especially if you’re into true crime and rock and roll. Even if you’re not, it’s storytelling and who doesn’t like storytelling? Anyway, hope you have a great summer!

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