Fourth Reich Archaeology - #085 - She Harvey Oswald, Part 5

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

This week marks our penultimate episode about the first of the two would-be assassins who, in September 1975, pointed a gun at President Gerald R. Ford and pulled the trigger.  That’s right, folks, we are nearing the end of the line for Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. In this episode, we focus on the lead-up to the day that changed Squeaky’s life forever. We start off by returning to our dig site in the early 1970s, with Squeaky and her Manson sister, Sandra Good, living in Sacramento, California.  Shacked up in a Victorian era mansion-turned tenement, Squeaky and Sandy find themselves in the closest they've had to a routine in a long time. They take classes at the local community college, dumpster dive for food, and sew clothes with their landlord.  The two were also working on their next big scheme for Charlie, for Air Trees, Water, and Animals.  Squeaky also continued to work full-time on her book and to secure visitation rights for Charlie. At the time, the city of Sacramento was experiencing conditions similar to those of many cities in the 1970s.  Between the national spike in crime and the great suburban migration, Sacramento was turning into a bit of a ghost town. The perfect environment for the fringes of society to prosper, including the likes of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, who were very much in Squeaky’s orbit during this time.  We then turn to President Gerald Ford and his trip to Sacramento in September 1975. Ford’s trip to Sac Town was part of his tour of the West Coast’s more provincial cities, including Portland and Seattle. The intended purpose of the trip was little more than a charm offensive to bring the country together and get everyone amped for the bicentennial.  What was meant to be a series of layups turned into a series of disasters, culminating in a near-catastrophic trip to Sacramento. We end this episode on the day that changed Squeaky’s life forever: September 5, 1975. Next week we will take on the trial and aftermath as we chart our path towards the next would-be assassin in this tale, Sara Jane Moore.

September 5th, 1975, 1246 p.m. Pacific, the Senator Hotel, Sacramento, California. Just a few short hours after a attempt was made on his life, President Gerald R. Ford addresses members of the press. The cameras are flashing, the crowd is buzzing. Mr. Ford walks up to the podium. Hello. First, let me say very emphatically that I think the Secret Service, and the other law enforcement agencies that were on the job were doing a superb job. I also wish to express to the people of California my gratitude for the warm, very warm welcome

that they have given me in the state of California. I would not, under any circumstances, feel that one individual in any way represented the attitude on the part of the people of California. I just thank the Californians for being so friendly and so hospitable. Let me end with great emphasis. This incident, under no circumstances, will prevent me or preclude me, from contacting the American people as I travel from one state to another and from one community to another.

In my judgment, it is vitally important for a president to see the American people, and I am going to continue to have that personal contact and relationship with the American people. I think it is vital, and I intend to carry it out. Mr. President, Mr. President, Mr. President, can you tell us what you saw or felt personally at the time? I am not sure that I ought to describe what I saw beyond the fact that I saw a hand coming up behind several others in the front row, and obviously there was a gun in that hand. I then saw almost instantaneously, very quick and very effective action by the Secret Service taking care of that matter. What was your own thought, sir? I was very thankful to the Secret Service for doing a superb job,

but once I saw that they had done it, I thought I better get on with the rest of the day's schedule. Thank you very much. Or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. It's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.

And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic. domestic, the Warren Commission, the science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life.

The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. This is a mile. He knows so long as it's a die. Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pro Harbor.

A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is a animal. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Hello and welcome back to

our show. We're so glad to have you here with us today. This week we are returning after a much, much too long hiatus. We are returning to our series within a series. Shee Harvey Oswald. That tale about the two would-be assassins that tried to allegedly kill President Gerald R. Ford in September 1975. Before we get into it, I would just like to do our preliminary thank yous and moment of gratitude. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to everyone who is tuning in week after week. Thank you to everyone for showing your continued support. Before we get really deep into the thank yous, let me just, let's take a moment, everybody. I know you're all listening right now. And I just want to say everyone who's listening, please open up your phones, open up your laptops, open up your computers, whatever you

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in our free time. Believe it or not, we both have full-time jobs where we are not doing this. We are not podcasters by trade. We are doing this out of love. And so I want you all to just imagine what could be possible if we were to do this full time. If we were to give this project our full attention. Thank you very much, Dick. And welcome back from your prolonged absence from the pod. I know that some of our listeners out there were getting a little bit concerned.

You know, you were in many different plays. places around the globe. And we are very, very happy to have you back, welcome back. It's very exciting to have you back. And we are very much looking forward to digging into all of this stuff, all of this material that we have left here in. Not only she Harvey Oswald, but the larger Jerry World series. and, you know, it's always timely.

It is always timely because not only is political violence very much back in the news, and I think this is one of the real high watermarks of political violence that we're covering here, the mid-70s and the political terrorism and false flags and all the rest of it that occurred during that time period. And if we don't review and learn from the lessons of the past, of course, there is a very, very high probability that the very same bad shit that happened long ago will happen once again. And, you know, it happened first as tragedy. It happened second as farce, it happened third as something even worse than that. And, you know, we're... Outright mockery. Yeah, I mean, we are now to the point of who knows what round on this

calliope of shit that keeps spinning around and around. And, you know, maybe, just maybe, if we can get a grip on how the hell we got here, we could also root ourselves into some means of thinking about how to dig ourselves out. That has always been the goal here on Fourth Reich Archaeology and continues to be the goal. And, you know, I think that right now we're getting into some juicy, juicy stuff. And I don't mean juicy like the refuse that's bubbling up out of the toilets on the USS Gerald R. Ford as we speak.

but I think I would be remiss if I didn't give just a shout out to Jerry once again saving the country from beyond the grave by clogging up the toilets on his namesake aircraft carrier, the biggest one in the world. Maybe war with Iran is prevented or precluded as a result. Much like the man in our cold open, the ship, the namesake of the ship, the man in the course, hold open, both filled brimming with shit. Just utter shit. Hell yeah. That's right. That's right. So, you know, I think that we can largely dispense with the lengthy recap that we had prepared because I read most of that into the record inside B of the last installment that we put

on the free feed last week. and so now, you know, by way of recap, just to situate the reader before we dive into the substance, we are back in Jerry World, we are back in California in the mid-70s, alongside the first female protagonist of this series within a series, Lynette, Alice, Squeaky, Fromey, and we left her off living, In Northern California, she was living with Sandy Good, the other Manson girl, who also, like Squeaky, had escaped imprisonment, and the two of them eventually wind up in Sacramento. And you'll recall that we covered Squeaky's entire biography up till this point. I do suggest, if you've not already, please catch up on the series. But she is, to put a long story very short, a product of the post-war boomer phenomenon,

the first generation ever to be raised within the spectacle, the Society of the Spectacle, that Guy Debord so presciently laid out and described in his theoretical works, the Society of the Spectacle and the comments on the Society of the Spectacle. And Squeaky is an exponent of the spectacle largely because, you know, she's coming up in this cookie cutter, a house, tract house, suburbia of the post-war era, deeply embedded into the military industrial complex that employed her father, Bill Frommi, in Southern California,

for the Northrop Aircraft Corporation, building weapons of war for the U.S. imperialist war machine to launch death from the skies in Southeast Asia. And, of course, she rebelled against his overbearingness, against his sort of Germanic way of disciplining his children and even his wife, and the escape that she found came in the form of Charlie Manson, who, you know, I think at this point in time, my personal point of view and others may disagree.

I wonder, Dick, if you have any disagreement with this, but I mean, the guy essentially was able to brainwash his followers, I think with a lot of help and instruction along the way, from all of these CIA adjacent mind control specialists, everyone from the sort of OG popularizer of ordinary interpersonal mind control techniques, Dale Carnegie with his How to Make Friends and influence people, all the way to Scientologists that he met in prison, all the way to his spooky parole officer, Roger Smith, whose office in the hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco in the Summer of Love was adjacent to the laboratory from which Jolly West recruited

unwitting subjects of his own mind control experiments. And so, you know, it's obviously impossible to know to a certainty, given the destruction of records, given the destruction of lives and of memories of the people directly involved. But, you know, even without that certainty, I think it's safe to say that the Manson phenomenon exists under the umbrella of this mind control gambit that the U.S. deep state, that the covert forces of the CIA, and of the individuals working alongside both wittingly and unwittingly on its behalf, was seeking not only to channel that rebellious streak that the likes of Squeaky Fromey had against her parents into something compatible with American consumerism,

that being a very big goal of all of this. God forbid that the... anti-war movement, that the rejection of the stifling social norms of 1950s, Betty Crocker America should somehow lead to sympathy with or support for global liberation in the form of either alignment with the communist cause or alignment with all of those powers, accused of aligning with communism in the form of the national liberation movements in the former colonies in Southeast Asia, in Vietnam against the U.S. military aggression there and on and on and on. 100%. Well, I think it's just important to clarify. I agree wholeheartedly that he was this

expert at mind control, but I think it's important to clarify when we say mind control, we don't mean like your hypnosis, right? It's not like the guy is going out and taking a timepiece and waving it in front of someone and brainwashing him that way. It's someone who is more akin to a con man or a pickup artist, someone who is able to target, who pick his targets based on their perceived vulnerabilities to be able to exploit those vulnerabilities and then to use things like LSD, sleep deprivation, things like negging, you know, like things that would be very much what you would consider like a con man or a pickup artist, someone who is able to manipulate his targets.

That's what we're talking about here. And in that respect, I agree 100% that that is the guy he was. He was not this hippie guru guy that he has been made out to be through the myth of Charlie Manson. not only that, but he was also really what we might look at as kind of a con man or a mafia guy, a node in a larger organized criminal milieu that is involved in drug trafficking, is involved in the production and distribution of pornography, and all other kinds of illegal business up to and including murder, you know, there's a lot of really sketchy details around the Tate La Bianca murders,

around that whole Hollywood Polansky milieu that, you know, we didn't make the focus of this series, but you can certainly find that in places like Tom O'Neill's Chaos, in places like our friend of the pod, Dana Duda's podcast. What is the process and many other locations that do zero in on that? And suffice it to say for our purposes, squeaky by the time that she is on her own, you know, Charlie is imprisoned in 1970 and she becomes kind of the face and the leader of the family in his absence. during his incarceration. And even at that time, you know, through this deep interrelationship with the Aryan Brotherhood

prison gang, both inside the prison system and outside, as they work to free some of their comrades, as they work to make money to support their cause by selling drugs and, you know, selling women, etc. She is no stranger to the dark criminal underbelly of all of the countercultural movements. And somehow, somehow, in spite of it all, squeaky maintains her squeaky clean attitude, her squeaky clean appearance, notwithstanding that X, some have described as a swastika carved into her forehead. But she is nevertheless charismatic, you know.

She's never a person who's dismissed out of hand as a kook because she always maintains an ability to not only speak more or less articulately to people, but to have a charismatic and a charming impression on people. And that becomes very important as she stands trial. for this attempted assassination as we will see. So, Dick, I think, you know, if you want to set us up of where we're going from here, or if you have anything else to add on the road that's taken us. Absolutely.

So in this episode and in the next, we're hoping to round out our story, our saga, about Lynn, about Squeaky, and move on to Sarah Jane Moore. but in this episode, we're going to catch up with Lynn and Sandy as the two are living in Sacramento and getting into a new routine. You know, Sandy's going to school and Lynn is working on her book. Remember that Lynn has been working or was working on this massive book for many years at this point. And, you know, they're making friends with locals and they're working almost full time, at least Lynn is working almost full time trying to get visitation rights for Charlie Manson, who some of you may know, some of you may not. At this point, Charlie Manson was not allowed to

have any visitors while he was in prison. And they're also working on there the next big scheme for Charlie, the next big thing, which is this air, trees, water, and animals, or what would you say, Atwa or ATWA movement. And that's not going so hot. So in this episode, we're going to sort of cover the The early years leading up to the day of the deed in September 1975, where Lynn and Sandy are sort of getting into a routine in Sacramento. And then we're also going to do a little bit of scene setting of the political climate, the social climate in 1975, where things were really going down in terms of assassinations, in terms of political movements, in terms of what the California Attorney General would call terrorism in California. and then we're going to cover a little bit of our favorite anti-hero, Gerald R. Ford. You heard him in the cold open, and I thought it would, we thought it would be high time. We got back and caught up with Jerry just a little bit, because after all, this is a series within a series,

and that will bring us all the way to that fateful morning of September 5, 1975. And I think that's about as far as we're going to get in this episode. And in the next episode is when we're going to cover the trial of Squeaky FroMe and wrap things up, hopefully. And before too long, we will be on our way to the story of Sarah Jane Moore. That's all I got. You want to say the magic words? No, Dick. I think that it's been such a long time since our listeners have heard the magic words from you,

my dear dear homie. So I give that honor to you. I pass you the mic. Let's get digging. The attempt on the life of President Ford by a camp follower of Charles Manson has revived the nightmare of the century's most depraved mini-hoo who rivals the most grotesque monsters in history or fiction. Squeaky has said publicly that she would die for Manson, She would kill for him, and she will do whatever is necessary. His followers were fanatical, religious followers.

They thought he was a second coming of Christ and the devil all wrapped up in one person. Much easier to talk to someone like Manson than to talk to Squeaky, because when you talk to Squeaky, you're talking to that part of Manson that he transplanted into her mind. She doesn't have her own mind anymore. Charlie's a universal man. He is a universal soul. He is life itself.

He lives inside of all of this. And when he moves and when he sings, that connection is apparent to anyone who has eyes. Those weren't crimes. That was war. That was a holy war. And that had nothing to do with Manson. Manson was not raised in our world.

This was society's children giving their, They're taking lives and at the same time giving their lives to make change in this country. Because anybody with any brain can see that if we don't have change, I'm talking about revolutionary change, we're having, we'll have nothing. The year is 1973, and Lynn Frommi and Sandy Good had moved to Sacramento. Remember, this is after all the dust had settled on the murder of the Willits, James and Renny Willett, that we covered in the last installment, which did have Squeaky incarcerated and held on suspicion of murder for a period of time, but she was ultimately released for that crime without

charge and the Aryan brothers responsible ultimately were convicted therefore and squeaky once again as we've described it as sort of a catch and release is back out on her own and in 1973 lynn and sandy were living on the third floor of a rather charming i mean you look at the picture we should maybe i'll tweet a photo of it uh this Victorian house in down downtown Sacramento on P Street, and the mansion was built in the style of these fancy old money East Coast houses that would look familiar to somebody from Philadelphia, say, or Beacon Hill in Boston, you know, these old tawny style single-family houses. And the West Coast, of course, it was an imitation of that old world luxury.

You've got your wood paneling. You've got your ornamental trim. And this particular house was built in the late 19th century for a wealthy family who had made their fortune manufacturing wooden crates in which the fruit of California was packaged and shipped around the country. That agricultural boom. And one thinking about California should never, ever forget the same. central role of the agricultural industry of that land-owning agricultural class, not only in California politics, but it's played a massively outsized role in the political life of the nation as a whole. I mean, you can look at any, for example, immigration policy or law that

the country has ever pursued, and chances are it originated with the California planter class, from, you know, the Bracero program for Mexican guest workers way back in the day, all the way to the anti-immigrant legislation that we've covered in our Down by Law series. All of that shit came from these wealthy Californians who wanted people to pick their fruits and didn't want those people to have the full rights of citizenship. So it's symbolic of the country that these are the people that built this house, which then passed on to a bourgeois, a doctor who had made the second floor of the house his practice. And then, of course, by the time that Lynn and Sandy get there, I think about 20 years before they get there in the 50s sometime is when in the housing boom the post-war era, it's split up, subdivided into a multi-unit residence and the

third floor where Lynn and Sandy resided became an apartment. Yeah, and I think this transformation, this metamorphosis from this, you know, intergenerational mansion that is built to meet the needs of this moneyed family to this, uh, to this, uh, to this place where this doctor is going to not only live but also work and then eventually to this what you know effectively is like tenement housing because I think there's like three it becomes a triflex or maybe even there's four apartments in this one mansion I think it's like a beautiful metaphor for what was becoming of America by the time we get to the 1970s because it's really just this empty vessel this Victorian home becomes just this vessel for basically a place that is just inhabited by dropouts and the elderly and effectively the fringes of society.

And that house, I think, is itself not only a metaphor for the time, but also a metaphor for the place of Sacramento, which was itself suffering in a way that many of the, of course, the larger cities in America in them 70s were. suffering. You know, think about New York City, think about Chicago in the 1970s, but it was also suffering in ways that, you know, towns like Sacramento, towns like Seattle, towns like Portland, these provincial towns, these smaller towns, they too were suffering in a way that, you know, the population was dropping precipitously. Entire historic neighborhoods were being torn down to make way for large government buildings, buildings, for super highways, for things that would allow for mass transportation, for mass movement. And during this time, like I say, the population was just deteriorating and people would

basically come into town to work and there was this migration towards suburban life, suburban homes. And so during the day, Sacramento would be filled with the working class, professional class people and come send down, everything would change. And the city would turn into this virtual ghost town. And it had absolutely no commercial vibrancy, no commercial prospects other than this idea of, you know, just being this vessel. And I think that should give folks a sense of the scale. Because when you do have someone like President Jerry Ford, which we'll talk about in a bit in this episode, but when you have someone like Jerry Ford visiting, it's a big deal, you know, it's a pretty big deal that the president's coming to town. Oh, yeah. But what that means for

a town like Sacramento is that it's a prime ground for the fringes of society to move in, for the artist types, for the folks that don't necessarily have the ways and means to live and cut it out in a big city. And for the folks that want to sort of lay low, it's the perfect place for that, right? And so you had people like Lynn and Sandy moving to Sacramento, of course, but you also had members of the SLA and people including Patty Hurst herself moving into Sacramento and living and making their way in Sacramento. And so Sacramento turns into this breeding ground for the student movements, for the revolutionary movements of the time. Yeah, exactly. Like you said, so Sandy and Lynn, while they're living in Sacramento, not gainfully employed. A big surprise there. They were enrolled at City College of Sacramento for a period of time. I don't think either of them ever ended up getting a degree from the City College. They were kind of perennially taking unemployment benefits. Sandy Good as a reminder. had started out her life in a very wealthy family in L.A. And I think was getting money from her parents as well,

like through most of her life or had a trust fund or something. She came from a wealthy family. And if not from her parents, I think either Sandy or Lynn or both of them were getting that government cheese, for sure, getting some government support. Definitely. Yeah. And of course, they were also very well practiced in the art of living frugally, dumpster diving,

getting free clothing, getting all kinds of free shit. And in that respect, you know, I think that there's still a tendency to reject or dismiss or scoff at some of these techniques because they were associated with these all. ultimately violent and dirty seeming hippie types. But, you know, I got to say, respect for the dumpster divers out there, respect for the thrifters, respect for all who seek to live a life that is less strenuous on the earth through moderating consumption and recycling, reusing, all that stuff, critical support for all of our re-users and recyclers and composters out there, you know,

we reject the negative association that shit-coding that stuff as quote-unquote Manson shit has wrought upon these otherwise good habits. But back to Sandy and Lynn. So they're going to City College. Their classmate is none other than Patty Hurst, as you mentioned. and other members of the SLA. Remember, up in Sacramento, the reason why they're there in the first place,

I don't think we've recollected it now, but it's because Charlie had been moved to Folsom Prison, that famous Northern California prison located very nearby to Sacramento, the prison where Johnny Cash famously recorded his live album, live from Folsom Prison, a classic, if ever there, was one. And so that's what brought them there in the first place. And of course, the SLA is also very much

in outgrowth of the prison radical system and prison radical movement. And we're going to cover that in depth when we get to Sarah Jane Moore. But suffice it to say for now that like you were saying, you know, this is a hotbed of radical activism. Again, you know, recollecting that Monty Python scene. I think we brought it up when we were talking about all the hippie gurus in San Francisco back in 67. Well, eight years later, you know, 75 Sacramento, you've got the same thing. But this time it's kill the pigs, you know. Right.

It's the SLA. It's the weather underground. It's the, all the other revolutionary counter-revolutionary movements that were happening. Exactly. Exactly. And among that atmosphere, Sandy and Lynn were attempting to the best of their abilities to put a flag in the ground for Atwa, the new brand of Charles Manson thought. And in that regard, they were trying to recruit students from City College.

They were trying to bring girls into the fold, trying to bring boys into the fold. They were proclaiming this quasi-religious worldview based on largely environmental protectionism with some sort of occultic and weird quasi, I don't want to say like super Nazi because, you know, they weren't talking about openly racial purification, but they were still adjacent to this. Aryan Brotherhood. So it wasn't like totally outside of what they were up to, but they were relying on the spectacle. They were relying on appearance. They were wearing these costumes. They started to don these robes of red and walk around everywhere in these very eye-catching habits. And they even described themselves as nuns. And in one event, they were in

interviewed by a local reporter and insisted on doing the interview in a cemetery. And there's some pictures of them where they're taking photos in the cemetery. They would apparently have their recruits sleep in an open grave. They were really trying to build this ideology that was rooted in some sort of environmental cause, but had so many bizarre accoutrement that it was not at all successful to the pool of would-be recruits. I don't think that they recruited anyone except this other girl that was kind of already in the fold anyways that live with them for a period of time on P Street, right? Yeah, so they're like M.O. of free love. and, you know, sexual promiscuity of the late 60s was replaced by effectively like abstinence,

right? And that didn't play too popular with the folks in Sacramento, I guess. And they weren't, they weren't successful. And but they were nonetheless making every effort to bring about some change, right? So at this time, I think one of the major campaigns that Lynn had was, she was asking the the crew there was you know there's there's this small recruitment that they did they were able to obtain she was asking for like the names and addresses of every executive in the in the country and they were setting up like a letter campaign of threats and and threats on their lives and there was this like real sort of movement on their part to continue this mission of trying to affect some change. And I think it might be a good time to sort of orient the listener

about what was going on in the 70s, right? Because up until now, we sort of been talking about it, but it's like, remember, this is just a few years after Nixon was reelected, despite everyone knowing that Nixon was a crook. And, you know, at this point, we're leading up to the point where Nixon resigns because he is a crook. And things are happening. with the environment, right? The Cuyahoga River catches fire, right? And so the country is suffering from this increase in crime, this crime spike that's happening in the 70s. All of this stuff is informing Lynn and Sandy's decision to really push towards this movement, actual movement of protecting the kids and protecting the environment and being the voice for

these vulnerable people in places and things that don't otherwise have a voice of their own. Yeah. And I think it's important to keep in mind, too, that they, in their heart of hearts, and this is something that based on my own personal review of the record and watching ungodly amounts of interviews and videotaped statements from Lynn and Sandy, like they believed to their core that the salvation of the world and that the advancement of these causes they were advocating was inextricably tied to the freedom of Charlie Manson. They thought he was the Savior, he was the Messiah, and without him, with him behind bars,

none of the efforts that they were undertaking could bear the fruits that they needed to, and indeed that their work on the outside would ultimately lead the society at large to realize the necessity of Charlie Manson to its salvation. They were talking about Charlie becoming president of the United States and leading the country into a new era. And so that's like very intrinsically tied up with what they're up to. You know, they are communicating with him in prison, but it's also important to keep in mind that his appeals were going poorly, that the rest of the Manson family was starting to taper off their contact with Lin and Sandy. They were beginning to have these jailhouse conversion stories develop where they were denouncing and renounce.

the work that they had done for Charlie, including murder, prior to their incarceration, in hopes of living more normal lives behind bars. So all of that is part of the stew. These are all the ingredients that undergird Squeaky's turn towards her fateful acts on September 5th of 1975. And that's a really important point that you were sort of alluding to is that, you know, the Charlie Manson star is very much, it's not on the rise anymore. It's very much dimming. And he is no longer as relevant as he once was, right? And this is something that I think was definitely on their mind in the early 70s to the mid-70s, that Charlie Manson was no longer this relevant cultural force that he was in the late 60s, in the early 70s, in the early 70s. least 70s and that was a problem right the publics didn't really care about charlie mansen so much anymore and one of the things they were constantly doing and one of the things lynn was constantly doing while in sacramento was trying to get visitation rights for charlie and she was trying to get

anybody who could help to help and i think actually one of the things in our in our research we found was she even tried to get none other than Melvin Beli, the San Francisco super lawyer, who once represented none other than Jack Ruby. Of course, Beli turned down the representation, but this just goes to illustrate the links that Lynn was going to, for Charlie to get Charlie back in the limelight. Yeah, and she was growing increasingly frustrated with the failures of the legal system to provide the relief and the path that she wanted to pave towards this new world that she thought that Charlie could usher in. And so at the same time that she is undertaking all these efforts, you know, remember, she's

also very busy working on her memoir. She's getting it up to like 600 pages. And like giving it to friends. I remember it's got that SS Totencope on the cover. Yeah, got that Nazi decor. She's like giving it to friends who are like sometimes reading it, sometimes not.

And like the feedback is always like there's way too many words here, Lynn. Yeah. And you know, besides that, she is thinking about violence. So you had mentioned a little bit. You'd alluded to it or previewed it. But, you know,

she is practicing shooting, for example. In December of 1973, she goes and does target practice at the San Francisco Municipal Rifle Range and shoots hundreds of rounds, including with a semi-automatic pistol that it's not the weapon that she had when she went to visit Jerry, which we will get into the genesis of that weapon in a little bit. But she is shooting, she is preparing the same that she was back on Spawn Ranch, right? Like there's even a documentary that would eventually hit the theaters right around the time of her trial, ironically enough, that was filmed back in the 60s when she was still at the

Spawn Ranch. And in that documentary, there's all these clips of Squeaky with knives, with guns, with guns talking about, you know, how cool it is and how groovy and how important it is to be able to use weapons. Whether she intended to or not, there's definitely enough in the record to show that she was on the fringes and dancing around violence. She was certainly messing around with guns. There are photographs of her messing around with guns. There's firsthand account of her messing around with weapons. And then there's also those things like those threatening letters she was preparing the letter campaigns and the threats of violence that she was willing to do. I don't know if we'll get into it in this episode, but even after the day of the deed, she continued on about the violence that was inevitable in America.

And even Sandy would talk about the violence that was inevitable, the assassinations that were inevitable in America. And again, this is in a time where it's not like the country was very stable, right? talking about a time where there were assassinations, political assassinations happening every year, maybe multiple times a year in some years. So it was very close to the public psyche, this idea of political assassinations being done to effectuate change. And so whether she meant it or not, basically she was playing the part. She was doing everything but actually committing acts of violence. Yeah, that's a great point. And to put an even finer point on it, the activism of threats of death and violence that she and Sandy were doing,

they conducted that under the moniker of the International People's Court of Retribution. That's right. What a name. Yeah, it's a crazy name. It's a very interesting name that they chose, and they would often talk about how, it consisted of like thousands of adherents all over the world would be sleeper-sell assassins ready to take vengeance on the destroyers of the economy. However, there were no members except Lynn and Sandy.

It's funny because, you know, the title of the series is Shee Harvey Oswald. And I do want to just make the parallel that Lee, Harvey Oswald, of course, was the lone member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a chapter in New Orleans. Remember, he founded the chapter and himself was the president, and I think he listed his alias, Alec Heidel, as the treasurer of the New Orleans chapter. And so, again, we see this phenomenon of social outcasts pretending to represent a much larger movement, but who are actually lone delusional operators in some respect. So I wanted to read in this passage about the International People's Court of Retribution

from this article that was published in this. 1990 about kind of what they were getting up to. So just a little bit from that is an article by Steve Rosenfeld. And he writes, I was researching all the corporations and industries in the U.S. that were polluting, the oil, chemical, lumber, paper, drug companies, the media, processed food industry, Sandy said, you find out they are all so connected. I was researching companies that were in any way responsible for the destruction of the air, trees, water, and animals. Then Rosenfeld writes, Good had files for polluting companies from each state

and lists of corporate officers taken from Standard & Poor's corporate directory. She categorized each company according to its specific sin, then composed letters for each. By mid-1975, she had 3,000 ready to mail. Quote, they weren't personal threats, but the consequences of putting money over life, she said. Some said, you murdered our world. You know what you've coming.

Those letters went to Exxon, the company that had the Bhopal plant, Union Carbide. Some of these people were so, so criminal. You couldn't just say, dear so-and-so, will you stop murdering villagers and the ecosystem? Like Hydro-Cubek, International Paper. For the magnitude of their destruction of life, there will be retribution. They are living in hell right now, and they are bringing us into that hell, end quote. So you can see, I mean, three thousand different targets that they had compiled a pretty Herkulean effort, right? And this was this was exactly what I was talking,

you right? These letters to these execs, these letters to these companies. And it was really just Lynn and Sandy doing the work, right? Maybe they had one or two other recruits to help them, but three thousand, like highly specific letters. And then all of them are. archived or at least sort of filed away in an organized manner, that is a huge task. Huge task for sure. And again, like, keep in mind where they're coming from is not wrong. You know, there's something actually useful about doing that type of collecting and tracking of corporate crime.

I mean, today, of course, that work is largely done by. NGOs and instead of writing threatening letters they publish white papers on their websites that nobody reads except their donors and it's all siloed off very safe very non-discruptive to the continued functioning of this corporate death machine that continues to destroy the planet right so it's like their diagnosis again was not totally wrong like corporations and corporate greed were indeed then as now, destroying the planet, needlessly killing people, killing animals, destroying ecosystems, polluting, et cetera, et cetera.

But the solution that they proposed is something well outside of the realm of, like, sanity, much less productivity. We here on Fourth Reich archaeology, of course, are adherence to the immortal science of historical materialism and believe that the expropriation of the owners of capital and the redistribution of wealth and the seizure of the means of production by the working class is the only solution to this capitalist disease. but Lynn and Sandy, or they believed it was Charlie and Charlie only that could solve their problems. That's right.

And like you say, they're not wrong. They're not wrong in sort of their diagnosis. And it's absolutely true. It's like these corporations are ruining the environment. Television is ruining our youth. Nowadays, instead of television, I would say it's these apps that are ruining our youth. and they're 100% have their finger on the pulse there, right? They're saying things like food is not affordable for some reason.

A tomato is costing 50 cents where tomato grows free in the ground. Their point is not wrong. The method they go about sort of proving their point and the way that they try and addressing their point is twisted. But it's not all doom and gloom. I think what this story is missing is a little bit of a love connection. Oh, yeah, one quick thing before we get to that love connection, just one more thing on the sort of twisted methods that they're pursuing.

I think we'd be remiss to leave out a reference to this fella that Squeaky gets in touch with. guy by the name of Lanier. Right. The guy, none other than the guy who introduces Charlie Manson to Scientology. But what does Lynn want from Lanier? Yeah, she hits him up and is asking him to put her into contact with the rest of these radical groups. You know, she's trying to ask him for a contact in the weather underground or in, I don't know if she was asking him about the SLA. I think she was more focused on whites.

although the SLA, to be fair, was predominantly white. Yes. Ideology was very much racially infused. Right. But she was trying to get Lanier Raymer to put her into contact with other white radicals, get her some guns, get her maybe some other sorts of destructive devices. And the reason why we mentioned this, not only because this guy is, and helped to put Charlie on the path that he ultimately rode to the end of his life

by introducing him to Scientology, but also because, again, like, not saying that Lynn or Raymer were somehow taking orders from the deep state, but if they were, the outcome would have been very similar to what actually happened, because clearly there is a shit-coding interest in bringing this little cell of these two Manson girls and having them infect the larger radical movement in the same way that people criticize the weather underground as a totally adventurous and counterproductive cell in its own right through its acts of terror and its ideologically loose commitment to the methodology espoused by the likes of Fred Hampton, right?

There's that famous Fred Hampton interview where he's throwing all of these bomb-throwing white privileged kids, really giving them their proppers and, calling them for the counterproductive, immature folks that they were and the harm that they were causing to the liberationist agenda of the Black Panther Party. But all of that is also happening with Lynn and Sandy. You know, they are an effective shitcoat, whether it's a deliberate one or not. All right. I think it's now it's time for our love story or what the closest

thing we're going to get to a love story before Lynn does the deed. Lynn has been described as someone who, I'm sorry to say it, has daddy issues. And I think it's not just me saying this, ladies and gentlemen, it's, I think Time Magazine has said this, that Lynn is someone who has a complex of sorts. Yeah. That complex maybe dates back to her abusive father. Maybe it dates back to Charlie Manson. Either way, while she is in Sacramento,

Lynn does come across a man with whom she begins a relationship, a relationship of a romantic sort. And there's nothing wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong with the fact that the man is 64 years old at the time. You know, love is love. Age is nothing but a number. But what I'm getting at is that this characterization as Lynn, as someone with daddy issues,

well, we'll see in a minute maybe if the shoe fits. If the shoe fits. So the man is a fella by the name of Mani Borough. And Lynn comes across him. I think the story goes that she just finds him sitting alone on a park bench. sound familiar and he is on his own at the time he's just sitting alone on a park bench and she you know he's she approaches him right that's I think that's how it starts

and I can't I haven't been able to tell for the life of me if this was sort of like a targeted approach if Lynn saw this guy and thought hey he looks like a mark maybe I can take advantage of him maybe I can get close to him much like I got close to George Spahn or what. It's got to be some of that, right? But because he did look sort of disheveled, right? He's alone. He's got sort of raggedy clothes.

Not raggedy clothes, but like worn out, right? He's wearing like a golf hat, but it's a worn out golf hat. So it's someone who looks like maybe he's got some money, but is alone. He's got no one to take care of him. And, yeah. And he, by all accounts, lacks the charm that George Spahn seems to have had. All the stories about George Spahn are like funny guy, hilarious guy,

amazing stories about like celebrities and stuff. Right in Hollywood, yeah. And Manny is like a fucking dud. Yeah, I kind of like, well, I mean, we'll get into it. But as I was reading about him, kind of reminded me of Lynn's dad. But let's talk about the Boro's and Manny Borrow and the Boro family. Yeah. So the boroughs came from gold country, California.

Manny's grandfather came out to California to make it rich in the mines. And that never happened. They did not, you know, the borough family did not become one of these lucky few that strikes it rich, but they did end up doing okay and well enough to buy property, which of course is itself key to building that generational wealth that we hear so much about. And by the time that Manny comes onto the scene, you know, he comes from some money, but it's kind of in a backwater, right? Like, this is not in a major city. He's not sophisticated. He's not cultured. He's a weird, sort of a lonely guy who hardly ever left.

the vicinity of his family ranch, their lands where he was born. He had been married at some point in the past before, well before he meets Lynn, and had three adult children by the time that he does meet Lynn. And his profession was, interestingly, on McClellan Air Force Base, right outside of Sacramento, where he was not in the service, I don't think, right? But he worked as a draftsman, like a civilian job for 30 years before getting that government retirement. That's right. He kept the same job for 30 years. To me, there's a little bit of a red flag there.

Maybe that's more of my modern take of employee mobility. But if a guy sticks at the same job at the Air Force Base for 30 years, that is kind of weird. But so he does, so he does keep to himself. He limits his outings. He limits his outings to his family. I couldn't tell, you know, what his relationships was with his other children. But at the time that Lynn comes into the picture, he is pretty much just visiting his son, his son Charles. And actually, I think his closest relationship was with his daughter-in-law, Nelda. And of course, they at that time had a family. And they were living on that family property. And so when Mani had. his free time, he would go out and visit them. And again, he was a very weird dude. He would spend most of his time when he was visiting the property. He would be puttering around the house. He would be puttering around the property, grumbling and complaining about life, about things that only he cared about. And he was antisocial to say the least, right? He would, one of these these vignettes, these factual vignettes of his life would be that, you know, people would be sitting in a room watching TV

and he would walk in without asking anybody to change the station. He would just walk in and he would change the station and he would plop down and he would just watch whatever he wanted to watch. Or he would get in these explosive fits of rage against his grandchildren. Or you would be having a conversation with someone and he would just interrupt with sort of this complaint about his health and his life. life in very anti-social behavior. And again, to me, this sounds a lot like Lynn's dad.

Yeah. And it's weird. I mean, it all makes it all the stranger that Lynn would be drawn to him and that they would hit it off because it's like, this is a very grumpy old man. And, you know, you got to wonder, did she have an ulterior motive? when she spotted him there on that park bench? Maybe so. Maybe not.

Who knows exactly how that relationship really kicked off? It's something that she really didn't talk about. And in any of her post-release interviews, she's not been asked about it nor talk about it. And everybody, you know, her lawyers, et cetera, in and around the trial, really try to keep him out of it. They don't really relish talking about Manny, which is interesting because he ends up having a pretty major role in her alleged crime because the relationship as it develops becomes

one of, wouldn't exactly call it a sugar daddy relationship, but maybe a little bit of a sugar daddy relationship, actually, to come to think of it. And it doesn't last long. I think this all happens within the year before, you know, September 1975. I don't think there's a very long relationship that's going on. But pretty quickly, things like, you know, he's getting Lynn a car, a VW, within months of getting to know Lynch. buys her a car and even though he buys her a car she doesn't like that car so then she takes his car which is this Cadillac and takes that car in a road trip in California uh I think with Sandy and when they take the car they total it and then he has to like cover that expense right um and so there does

seem to be this air of Lynn very much like taking advantage of this old man but at the same time he's not getting nothing out of it, right? One of these other weird sort of encounters that Manny has. It's a very strange encounter with his daughter-in-law, Nelda, is that he starts bragging about his sexual relationship with Lynn and even shows Nelda nudie photos of Squeaky, which is, like, to me, very inappropriate, very weird thing to do. and so obviously Manny feels like he's getting something out of that relationship as well.

But to the point of this story, to the point of this relationship, the big sort of thing that Manny assists, you could call him maybe even an accessory before the fact, is that one night Lynn comes over and asks Manny, just much like she was asking Lanier Ramer, if he's got a gun. And of course, Manny does have a gun because this is the gun that Lynn carries with her on September 5th. And she basically, like, bullies him into giving the gun to her, which is a really funny scene to think about.

But Lynn is asking Manny for a gun. Mani goes and pulls out, or I think tells her to go to the closet and pull the shoebox that has the Colt 45 gun. And she pulls it down and Manny asks if she knows how to use it. and she says she doesn't know. And then Manny says, go put the gun back. But Lynn doesn't do that. Instead, she takes the gun and she puts it in her purse. And she puts the bullets in her purse and she walks out of the room.

And that's the story with the handgun. And that's how it comes to be that Lynn has a Colt 45 handgun to use against the president. Yeah. And this is like an antique gun, right? Like, I think it dated back to, like, it's like almost a collector's item. Not only antique, but unused for many years. I think one of the things the cops noticed when they were doing their sort of examination of the weapon was that the bore, the gun itself actually had collected dust. So it was like unused, right?

There was dust collected in the actual mechanism of the gun. Yeah. So this is sort of the setup. And I think it's worth mentioning, you know, besides. her seduction, if you will, of Manny Borough, the girls, Lynn and Sandy, are also attracting the attentions of some younger men, you know, one of whom was their downstairs neighbor, I believe, and the other who was a friend of his or maybe a co-worker of his. These were kind of well-intentioned young guys who were interested in doing activism and were also attracted to Lynn and Sandy.

Remember, I mean, they're pretty good looking girls and they have a certain air and reputation. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly some mysterious aura about them. And so these two young guys are also bar. up those trees trying to kick off a little spark with Lynn and Sandy. And it seems to me like Lynn and Sandy were kind of stringing them along, getting them to do

odd tasks to help out with the people's international tribunal of retribution, writing letters. Exactly. These are some of the people that I was calling maybe recruits. But these folks were helping them, if not writing the letters, but certainly doing research on who these execs were and where they were located and all of that stuff. And they're at the same time drawing some attention to themselves in a negative way, because the more their rhetoric scales up towards violence, the more suspicious these guys get, but not suspicious enough to turn them in. And the same goes for their landlady whom Squeaky and Sandy had really charmed into becoming one of their fiercest defenders

reputationally during the trial and after. So, you know, they're speaking this violent rhetoric, but they are doing so in a defensible enough register around activism, around environmentalism, that there's just... low enough of a profile that the Secret Service does not see fit to put a tag, you know, a shadow on either Squeaky or Sandy when it comes time for Gerald Ford's trip to the state capital of Sacramento. So before we get into Jerry's trip to Sacktown, let's just do a little bit of scene setting

on political assassinations in the 60s and early 70s. So there was quite a hotbed of activity in this space during that decade after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Political assassinations had become somewhat commonplace. Every year there was at least one or two happening. Every year there was a couple in the news, a couple attempts in the news, right? We could start with, I don't know, it depends on who you want to start with, but we could start with Malcolm X, but at least by the time we get to the late 60s, you have RFK, you have MLK, you have George Wallace, you have, even President Richard Nixon had an attempted assassination by Samuel Bick.

Assassinations sort of became in vogue at the time, right? And this is, the climate that we find ourselves in, and it was actually a time also that news was coming out. There were these reports for the first time that the U.S. government, the CIA, was involved in political assassinations, the attempts on Fidel Castro's life and the CIA attempts on Salvador Aende. And it's like very much become a cultural phenomenon, this idea of political assassinations taking off.

and you know in this show in this program we often talk about how we are now living in a time that is much like the 1970s I think we get a lot of guff about that and you know a lot of times we are I think just trying to be for illustrative purposes trying to you know draw an analogy but in this respect I do think that what we're seeing today there is a little bit of actual concrete connections, right? When you think about the assassinations of Charlie Kirk or the United Healthcare CEO or the attempts that have been on, you know, Donald Trump's life. Attempts in big scare quotes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right. And it's that thing you were saying, right? History repeating itself when it comes back, it's as oftentimes as farce. It is funny to think. Yeah, we've kind of talked about it in the way that like the assassinations of the 60s, you know, I think if you probe them on their facts, most of them lead back. The roads lead back to some form of deep state culpability pretty directly, right?

Like Malcolm, Martin Luther King, RFK, JFK, which we've covered at length. And what we've talked about now is how kind of in the intervening period since then, the machinery of the deep state has set these types of political violence in motion in such a way that it's no longer even necessary to go to the lengths to pull off a hit like the CIA did with JFK, for example, or, you know, like, like, you know, like the FBI and its allies, it went to those lengths with the NYPD, infiltrating the nation of Islam to knock off Malcolm, all of that work that went into those assassinations. And now you just basically drive everybody insane through this overstimulated internet environment.

And, you know, the chips will fall where they may and somebody's going to get fucking shot. Right, right, exactly, exactly. But back to the 70s, back to our point and the culmination of this point about political assassinations, by 1975, the U.S. Secret Service was getting something like 200,000 assassination tips a year

and was investigating something like 15,000 of those every year. Of course, not all of these were that had any credibility, right? They were often crackpots, often repeat offenders, right? There was one guy, David Albert, who called in and just said, I'm going to kill your boss, President Ford. That guy had just been released out of prison for making the exact same threat against President Nixon.

So it's like this, the Secret Service was just fielding these. And, you know, they were, they were. they were sort of bragging about the fact that there hadn't been a political assassination during Nixon and L.B.J.'s tenure, which is really funny to me, right? They're like, well, you know, it's been two presidents without an accident. And that may be, in part, because of their budget, right? Ever since the Kennedy assassination, the U.S. Secret Service budget had skyrocketed when Kennedy was president, it was at $5.8 million to $98 million by the time Ford is president. And this is the dollars in the 1960s, 1970s time, right? This is not today's

dollars. So $5.8 million to $98 million within the decade. That's massive. And at the same and at the same time, the agency's forces had more than tripled from 450 agents to something like 1800 agents. And another important thing that was happening at this time is this data bank. The U.S. Secret Service was developing what it called the data bank of more than 500,000 people that it considered, quote, potential assassins. That's a lot. It's a lot of potential assassins in the country.

And included in the list were people like Charlie Manson. And here's the funny thing is they also included members of the Quaker anti-war organization. If you know anything about Quakers, you know that they are non-violent. And so the data bank got a lot of criticism because it was viewed as not very accurate. Someone that is near and dear to my heart, Arthur Miller, the Siv Pro God. Not the playwright, Arthur Miller. Not the playwright. Arthur R. Miller, and if you're a lawyer, that name should sound familiar to you.

And if it's not, shame on you because his audio tapes are some of the best if you're trying to learn federal civil procedure. I don't know anything about his personal life or his personal pursuits. But when it comes to civil procedure, you'll be hard pressed to find a better source of information. The guy is, I don't know if he's around anymore. but at the time that I was taking SivPro, I could not, I don't think I could have gotten through it without him. Well, anyway, Arthur Miller lambasted the data bank as just another enemies list. And I mean, you could say that it was that, right? Because it wasn't very accurate, right?

You know, I mentioned the Quaker anti-war organization forks and Charlie Manson. They were in the data bank. But you know who wasn't in the data bank? Arthur Brammer, squeaky Frommi, Sarah Jane Moore, Shiran Siran, literally anyone else who actually shot or attempted to shoot a president or presidential candidate? Yeah, yeah, and it does. I mean, it's all part of the bigger picture that takes shape, you know, as this integrated spectacle that we have so exhaustively traced throughout this series

and throughout the entire podcast, really, the, if not instrumentalization, at least the, let's say, opportunistic taking advantage of these assassination attempts in order to promote policies that amount to a crackdown, that amount to an expansion of the national security state, an expansion of surveillance, an expansion of the infrastructure for repression, right? And by the time that Reagan gets into office, things start really cooking. You get your Rex 84, you get your lists of people to be rounded up in case of some kind of a revolutionary outburst. And this is all steps along the way towards that.

goal and of course today with the likes of Palantir and their goal of total informational awareness you know you can't even look at a billboard or a sign in a shopping mall or on the street anymore without having your retinas scanned and having that cross listed against a database now run by ICE. You know, if you look in the news about the drag net surveillance that ICE is conducting under the guise of this mass deportation, it's just the latest chapter in this saga that has been going on once again, really since 1963, because that's when these laws get on the book. That's when the Warren Commission comes up with its recommendations for enhanced presidential security. that's when this machinery gets into gear and, you know, that 98 million that you mentioned of the

Secret Service budget back in the 70s, you know, think about where that budget is now, not only in the Secret Service, but for government surveillance writ large, it is really unimaginably huge. and the justification has always been these events, these deep political, violent events that have so often had the fingerprints of intelligence all over them. And so, you know, it just works a little bit too well not to notice. Yeah, the data bank has been privatized. And so whatever sort of accountability or transparency

that they might have had in the 60s and 70s, that is all gone to the wayside. Just coming right back to it. So, you know, Arthur Miller, he called the data bank just another enemy's list. And he's, of course, referring to President Nixon, just another enemy's list for President Nixon. By the time we get to the 1970s, however, we get a new president, President Ford. And by then, the data bank had been reduced in size. it had gone down from, remember, 500,000 people, down to 38,000 individuals, 300 of whom were considered, quote, extremely dangerous. And before we get on to the President's West Coast tour

and the Secret Service that accompanied him, I just want to talk about the shift of the Secret Service from Nixon to President Ford, because I don't think many people know this, and I certainly didn't know this, but we, you know, along with that Victorian house that we're going to take a, you know, send a photo out on Twitter, we got to show a photo of what the Secret Service looked like during the Nixon era because these weren't the guys in the black suits, in the sunglasses, and the plain clothes. These were the guys that looked like, you know, the palace guard. They had this dazzling monarchical wardrobe. They looked, they literally look like they were. They literally look like they were palatial guards and you know the the the the wardrobe was insane and they were also notably

very rough with the public pushing people around unafraid to beat up anyone who got close to nixon they were they were thugs and they did have jackboots and when ford came into office he wanted to change all of that and he is the guy who opted for a more plain clothed servicemen and Don, if you will oblige me. He even said to the

staff, he said that it would be okay for them to loosen up and don't push people around and it's all right if you smile every once in a while. And that is the secret

service that accompanied Ford to Sack. And I think with that, let's head on over to Sacktown in September 1975. But we saw that our planet Earth was in trouble. And these, my friends who did the killings, I stand by them. I stand by them because I didn't see anybody else willing to go to war. In war, there's death. There's killing and there's sacrifice.

They were willing to go to the gas chamber. I hand it to them. I don't see anybody else with the heart. All these phony jive environmental groups. It's a disgrace. I pointed a gun at people's leader. That's your leader. It's like landing on the planet.

That's true. There was not a bullet in the chamber of this gun, and I knew it. It happened fast, but I made the decision quickly. And I hadn't determined to do it. I hadn't decided either way. So really, what did I do? In wanting to believe that people were willing to change, we lost our lives. So Ford arrives to Sacramento on a larger tour of the West Coast.

And that tour was hitting up these more provincial cities. You know, not so much your L.A.'s in San Francisco's. but rather your Portland, Oregon, your Seattle, Washington, these were cities that would view the prospect of a presidential visit with great fanfare, with really, you know, becomes a whole to-do to have the president there. And even though now, you know, I think we know Portland and Seattle as much bigger cities, they were still growing at that time. And I think we're rather smaller population-wise than they are today. And so when Ford would land and touch down in these cities, he would be covered by all the local media and really would suck up all the oxygen for the period of time that he was there. And part of that is your classic rah-rah hail to the chief big band reception. But this is 1975, so it was not without its disruptions from.

protesters as well. And Ford wasn't alone on this trip. Was he Dick? No, so he had some congressmen, so ever the campaigner, right? So this visit was, of course, this broader, you know, picture was that Ford was deciding to run for re-election or for election the first time around, I guess. But accompanying him were also some other politicians. You had Oregon Congressman Joel Pritchard and Senator Bob Packward as well as Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska. So these are some Pacific Northwest names that would have been familiar to the people of Portland, to the people of Seattle. And they would have given Jerry Ford that local cred that he otherwise might not have had. And as you say, the message was going to be ostensibly, it was a soft one, right? It was a media

campaign to bring the country together. This was of course obviously coded. It was for sure there was a angle here for campaigning for the election in 76, but it was a media campaign to bring the country together. Like we said earlier, the country was suffering from a spike in crime, a spike in violence, a spike in political assassinations. And the other thing that was happening is, you know, 1976 was the bicentennial. And so there was this push towards unifying the country after this terrible thing that had happened called Watergate, bringing the country together to celebrate the impending bicentennial. Yeah, and not just Watergate, too. I mean, remember that a few months before this in the end of April, 1975, was the disaster.

evacuation and fall of Saigon, right? The humiliating U.S. retreat from Indochina and Southeast Asia that kind of gave rise to the so-called Vietnam syndrome, right? This lack of belief in the righteousness and victory of the U.S. cause. Absolutely. And all of that sort of comes out in this sort of duality that was playing out. So, you know, Ford would attend these pressers. He would go to these fundraisers. And inside the building, everything was curated and genteel. They were getting softball questions.

And when he was heading towards the event, everywhere he went, there were protests. And so let's just cover a few of those, right? So he lands in Seattle first. And he goes to the, Seattle Center to give a talk and as he's talking inside outside there are protests a contingent of American Indians protesting among other things they're protesting the recent FBI storm of the Oglala Sioux reservation near Pine Ridge South Dakota and you know this is

something that carries with Ford throughout his travel in the Northwest same thing happens when he gets to Portland, right? After a long day of doing these functions throughout the city, he goes and does a talk to the 4-H club, the Boy Scouts of America, the Girl Scouts of America. And it's actually quite ironic, right? The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, they give President Ford a blanket made by Oregon Indians. Meanwhile, there is like outside the building. There are protesters, including, I, I got to say, Bill Walton of the Portland Trailblazers. And they're chanting, like, down with the FBI, FBI out of Pine Ridge, right?

They're protesting this horrific stuff that's happening in South Dakota in Pine Ridge. And this is another one of, so this is a great example of, like, the softball questions that he's getting, these, like, press opportunities that he's getting. And so I'm going to ask you to put on your Jerry Ford voice once more. and I'm going to put on my best 10-year-old girl voices I can do. So he's at this 4-H club talk, and he gets a question from a 10-year-old girl, and it goes, Mr. President, what can I, as a 10-year-old girl, do to help the country? Ronda, assuming your name is Rhonda, simply by asking that question and showing an interest in helping your country,

you have made a great contribution. And the crowd goes wild of this like bullshit response. And I think that's like a great metaphor of like what was going on in the country, right? It's the what you're seeing in the press, what you're seeing in the news and what's actually happening in the streets, right? Another part of this is that everywhere he went, he was kicking up a lot more attention, a lot more negative attention, that was expected. And so the local police were completely overburdened. And the Portland police were so miffed at the time.

And given all the tensions that were happening that overburdened the police, they quipped by the time the president left. The Portland police, their line was that they needed to charge the White House for their security services. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah, as again, like none of this stuff is apart from the fundamental shifts in the economy that are taking place at this time, right? You have deindustrialization. You have municipal debt crises popping off all over the country. You have like the hardest neoliberal turn that is still, the consequences are with us today, 50 years later. And I feel like the spectacular smoothing over with all of this sort of frivolity, all of this real superficial bullshit that is neatly

packaged up and put onto the television sets that are becoming ubiquitous in American homes at this time, even like the music, right? You're, going in the mid-70s, you know, what's at top in the billboard charts by this time is no longer like your psychedelic rockers and stuff like that. It's like Jim Croce and, you know, Gordon Lightfoot and stuff like that, much more soft-spoken and introspective cultural production to signal, you know, you just, you got to focus on your. yourself, you know, the so-called me decade of the 70s, works hand and glove with a shunning of any sort of collective action, you know, shunning culturally and then practically cracking down as the FBI did

on the Pine Ridge Zoo. And not just the music, but the movies, I think we talked about in the first episode, right? The movie of the year was Jaws. And movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest were in 1975. I think 1975 was like a huge year for these really hard, you know, movies that were real social commentaries at the time. And there is this dissonance between what you're getting through the mainstream and what is actually happening. Cities like Sacramento, of course, are being gutted. We talked about the population drop. We talked about the increase in crime. And what was supposed to be really a softball sort of press tour turns into just a complete disaster with one one thing after the next with these visits. And that brings us to, and heroin. Don't forget

heroin, right? Oh, right. Heroin. How could you forget heroin? Massive loads coming in from Math, crystal meth? Yeah. All that stuff. Cocaine? Yeah. And especially at this time, though, it's heroin that's coming in from Vietnam, from Indochina, thanks to U.S. imperialism. That these covert forces are trafficking massive amounts of heroin from Indo-China.

You know, it's extremely well documented that the CIA was the kingpin of. the heroin traffic into the United States, and that heroin was offered as the literal opiate of the masses to cope with the economic pain that the neoliberal turn was inflicting on everybody. It seems almost old hat to say it, but it really bears recollecting and never forget as the so-called war on drugs remains a part of our political landscape, notwithstanding, Decades upon decades of proof that the real drug dealers are the secret government agents that are trafficking it from the locuses of imperial conquest. It's always, always rooted in the need to control the masses and to prevent them from doing what masses got to do. Okay, this brings us to the last leg of the president's trip, Sacramento.

And I think, if you'll humor me for a second, Don, I think it's important to point out just to really drive home the point as just how many threats the president was getting at the time on his life, to the point where like, if I was the secret surface, I would be numb to these threats. The first threat he gets is just when he arrives. So the president is preparing to the plane and the Secret Service gets a phone call reporting that Channel 3 News, the local news, had received a call from a man saying that 10 snipers are waiting for the president when he gets off the plane. So that's threat number one.

And in fact, threat number one isn't even the first threat because a few days he even gets before he even gets to Sacramento. Channel 40 in Sacramento had received another threatening threatening phone call. And on the other end of the line was a voice that said, Get your paper and get this. This is the SLA. President Ford is going to die in Sacramento on Thursday. This was, again, this was reported to the Secret Service, but the official line was because there was no leads to pursue,

there was no action taken. And even this wasn't the very first threat that the president got. Because even a month before the trip, the Secret Service had received a tip about another plot to kill the president while he was in Sacramento. And this one came in August. In August 23rd, the Santa Barbara police arrested two guys by the name of Gary Stephen Dishore and Preston Michael Mayo. And these guys were a couple knucklides. They were arrested for stealing a TV from a local motel.

And while they were in police custody, they recounted this cross-country tale, the saga that they were going across country that would culminate with the assassination of President Ford. And D'Shoor even bragged, believe it or not, he even bragged that he once shared a jail cell with none other than Charlie Manson in an LA County jail.

And again, these two, these two were real knuckleheads because the reason they got caught, the reason their plot to kill the president was foiled is they had listed out in writing. Like the weapons that they would use, the blueprints for the Capitol building the president was going to visit.

They had all of this, like, this huge paper trail that they had, their plans. And they left them. those plans in a rental car in the Burbank airport rental lot. So it's like, kill the president, use this gun, hit him at the capital, and then just forgot that in their car and they left the car. Yeah. And shit like that, I mean, it is important to bear in mind, right, that not every single

plot, and we can reflect on this later once we're looking at the squeaky, quote unquote, attempt in the rear view mirror, but not every single plot is like a serious plot, and not every single plot has the fingerprints of intelligence. In fact, here you could say the opposite is true. It is an utter lack of intelligence that really marked the DeSure and Mayo plot. At the very least to me, it's like just another example of just how in vogue political assassinations or attempts were at the time. Okay, but back to September, I think it's September 4th, back to Sacramento, President Ford is getting off the plane and he is greeted by none other than Governor Jerry Brown. And from the get-go, there is an obvious rivalry between them. Do you want to maybe, before we get into this rivalry, go over Jerry Brown a little bit?

Or should we just get right into it? Yeah, I mean, I think we don't need to do like a super deep dive on Jerry Brown, but I think it's important to just note, right, this is a Democratic governor who had been elected after, the prolonged Ronald Reagan governorship of California. And Jerry Brown promised to make a real break with the Reagan era that was marked by this crony capitalism and real iron fist with respect to the protest movements of the 60s and early 70s.

you know, Reagan really used California as a petri dish to nurture and practice and really a dry run of the elements of fascism that would coalesce in his presidential administration in 1980 through 88. And at this time, Brown comes in. He wants to make a clean break from that. and he also, just like Ronald Reagan, you know, as we kind of hinted before with the political importance of the state of California more generally, Jerry Brown also has his eye on higher office. I don't know that he was necessarily looking to throw his hat into the 1976 election,

but he was certainly seen at the time as a figure who had a potential, to make a splash on the national political stage. And I think he does end up eventually running in a presidential primary, although never getting the nomination. So he's kind of a big guy there in California. He's also, I think, kind of a big guy literally, so he can square up to Jerry the big effort. And he's a Democrat, and you're right,

he is a big deal in the political realm, and he's like definitely a sort of a legendary politician for California and he's a Democrat and of course Jerry's a Republican so there is sort of this obvious rivalry between them when Jerry shows up just from the get-go there is this rivalry and it seemed like at the time when Jerry when Jerry Ford lands and gets off the plane the crowd seemed more excited that Jerry Brown was there and so like you know Ford is coming he's the president. He's coming off of Air Force One and it's Jerry Brown who starts shaking hands with the crowd and greeting the crowd and Schwartz and Ford sort of follows him, right? And Jerry

Brown goes over to the people and then Ford follows him. Jerry Brown goes over to the military personnel and then Ford follows him, right? And it's like Jerry Brown is the hero and Jerry Ford is sort of this guy in the shadow of the governor. It culminates in this one scene where it's like there's a guy who wants to take a photo of Brown and the camera gets jammed and then Brown like grabs the camera and fixes the mechanics of it on the spot and he goes like there you go

and what does Ford say you are one of them mechanical types huh so there's like this whole pissing match between the Democratic governor and the Republican president the Democratic governor who's like this favorite of the people, the Republican president, who wasn't even elected as president, right?

And before they even get to Sacramento, the staff, the White House staff is trying to figure out like, okay, what common ground do these two Jerrys have? And they're racking their brains and they can come up with nothing other than the fact that Jerry Brown, along with the actor Steve McQueen, had recently protested a regulation that would require motorcyclists to wear helmets, right? Of course, in several states, I should say at this point, you're not required to wear a helmet when you're riding motorcycle. I know Florida is one of them.

I don't think California is one anymore, but this was the only issue that the White House thought that Jerry Ford would agree with Brown on, that motorcyclists should not have to wear helmets when they're riding their motorcycle. Yeah, Jerry Ford, after a long football career of wearing just a piece of leather over his head rather than a helmet was certainly pro-C-T-E. He was... Right. Well, it was because he's anti-regulation, right? He doesn't want there to be any regulation.

Except when it comes to regulating human behavior of the working class, right? And to throw one more piece. piece into this mix, I want to remind the listener of another guy who's involved in this trip, who's involved in California politics, who we introduced in the last episode talking about Evel Younger, who was Attorney General of the state of California. Remember, that's a separately elected position. Younger, of course, a Republican, was the chair for the state of California of Ford's campaign and was therefore very intimately involved in the planning and coordination of all of Ford's campaign trips to California.

And to very briefly recap what we discussed about Younger, he was an OSS veteran, he was a spooked up guy to his eyeballs, an old China hand, you know, a friend of all these CIA fellas. ultimately would become another Ronald Reagan apparatchik both in California and later on in the White House. And wasn't he the DA for the Tate La Bianca murders? Wasn't he in L.A. as an attorney for that? Yes. I think he was. Yeah, he oversaw all those prosecutions.

And also he had prepped a memo for President Ford for his visit to Sackdown, of some like 500 page, 600 page memorandum about California. So, so yeah, very much a major player. Okay, but so let's talk about the purpose of the visit. Why is Jerry Ford in Sacktown? Yeah, well, it stems right out of this very Jerry-on-Jerry rivalry in the first place. The city of Sacramento every year hosted, and I believe still does host, something called the host breakfast.

And I apologize for saying the word host that many times. The host breakfast, you can think of it as not a smoke-filled room, but the room is filled instead with the smell, the stench, perhaps, of like bad catering. This is a luncheon for the business elite of California, the business and political elite where every businessman in the state has the opportunity to pay, in this case, I think it was a thousand bucks a plate to get into the room and rub elbows with the political elite. And it's really funny,

like it's so cheesy the way this pay-to-play politicking worked because even at the beginning of the event. Like they spend an hour plus reading off the names of every single attendee so that it like gets on the radar of whoever the keynote big dick politician speaker is. And the attendee would stand up, right? They would say the person's name and they would stand up in the crowd. Yeah. And I think it's just a point like these are sort of the big shots in Sacramento.

they're not the billionaire class, right? These are like the middling millionaire class, right? These are the agribusiness executives. These are the people that are a big deal in Sacramento, but they're not necessarily a national name, right? They're trying to get to that next level. Yeah, it's not for the old Silk Topper families of the California Gold Rush, right, that have like their names on the university buildings.

stuff like that. Maybe those would go every once in a while, but this was much, much more of a down home thing. And for that reason, you know, Ford's presence there was actually unusual because ordinarily it was the governor who would keynote the host breakfast. And in the spirit of breaking ranks with the Reagan era, Jerry Brown turned down the invitation to deliver the keynote address because he wanted to eschew the appearance of corruption that comes from rubbing elbows with all of these donors. And so in that vacuum, in steps Jerry Ford and his handlers think, you know, this is an opportunity for you to show face in California, to make some connections, to get some ins with the powers that be over there. And that's important because in 1976, one of the names of Republicans who might

run against Jerry in a primary was Ronald Reagan, the former California governor. So Ford saw this not only as a way to kind of throw a little sand in the eyes of Jerry Brown, his Democrat rival, but also to get one over on Ronnie Reagan and put in a good word with the people of California really introduce himself to the people of California who thither too had little knowledge or interest in that son of Grand Rapids who holds such a dear place in our hearts. Yeah, so Ford agrees to sign on to do it, even though at first when they asked him to do it, I think in June of 1975, the host committee goes to the White House after Brown says, no. They go to the White House and they say, hey, do you want to do this?

And the White House responds extremely doubtful that President Ford will attend. But over that summer, between June 1975 and September 1975, Ronald Reagan's star really rose. And yes, Ford was very eager to have that opportunity to sort of get some FaceTime. with Northern California's business elite. And so he does just that. He shows up at the host breakfast, as you mentioned. I think the president enters the host breakfast at like 7.30 in the morning. Of course, to the trumpet playing hail to the chief.

And of course, outside, there are protests with people with signs like hands off Angola. Ford is a puppet of ITT. So, you know, there's that happening outside. Inside, there is Hail to the Chief playing. There's the stench of catered breakfast and middle-aged white men. And everyone from it, this is like really the remarkable thing, right? All of these characters that we'll get into in our next episode, people like Tom McBride, the judge that presided over the squeaky trial, people like Don Hell.

the federal prosecutor that handled the government's case. And Dwayne Keyes, the U.S. attorney whose office handled the case, who was very much a part of the trial, they were all in attendance at this breakfast. And after, you know, so Ford gets in at 7.30 in the morning, it's not until 9 a.m. that he's able to give his keynote. And I think there were some firsthand accounts talking about how Ford was dozing off when it got closer to 9 a.m.

Because they were just literally going through all 600 guests names. Yeah, you could imagine. The sound of polyester leisure suits, sashaying against vinyl upholstery of the seats and pleather. Just one name after the next. But then the smells of sausage starting to combine with the smells of body odor that, Maybe the occasional fart from all that black coffee being consumed in there.

And then Ford, I mean, Ford gets up and he does his keynote. And his keynote is this sort of classic speech. It's this classic talk about how government needs to get out of the way of business, how it's that the people in that room that day and not the big wig board members, that billionaire class I was talking about, not them, nor would it be the regulators that would give the much-needed jobs that Americans needed for, to get through the next decade, to get through the next part of the 20th century, it was those nitty-gritty millionaires, right?

They were the ones, those businessmen, they were the ones that were going to save America. And this is an address, I think, that has been recycled and has been presented in so many different permutations ever since, right? It's that it is the businessmen in America, not like the superhead honchos, not like the, billionaires smoking their cigars, the fat cats, but it's those entrepreneurs that are going to save America. And it's largely like a canned keynote address, right? It's like very unremarkable. He finishes the address and he heads back to the hotel. Yeah, it was apparently he spent 20 minutes taking a break in the hotel and just in light of recent events in the Mediterranean on the the USS Gerald R. Ford, I want to predict or venture a guess that that 20-minute break was

so that Jerry could drop a heaping deuce in his hotel and leave Ausencheis, as the Germans say, to go and carry on the rest of his daily schedule. Get that powdered, scrambled egg mix bullshit out of his system, you know, let that mass... The freeze-dried coffee. Yeah, exactly. Get that instant coffee. Let it cleanse the pipes and go out fresh. And he does go out fresh. And here's another sort of wrinkle in the story. It's... So the layout, you know, the Senator Hotel is very close to the Capitol building to the Capitol Park. I think it's like across the street. And it's not a very long walk.

But the plan was originally for Ford to go down to the basement and get in a motorcade and go down to the basement of the Capitol to avoid the protests and the crowds. But Ford wasn't about that. He wanted to meet the people. And so he decided, and he had the Secret Service, to decide to make the walk through Capitol Park to get through to the Capitol Park. to get through to the Capitol building. Of course, this is a fateful decision. Not so much for Jerry, who comes out on Skate, but for Squeaky, who gets the opportunity to do the deed.

And so once Ford comes out of the hotel and he makes his walk, there is, of course, a larger crowd of supporter. It's actually, there is a sizable crowd of folks that actually wanted to go and see the president and meet the president. And he, you know, he makes his walk. He walks, they reach the Capitol Park area. And that is when, out of the crowd, a small woman with a red hood appears and points a 45 caliber colpistol at the president. And no sooner is she able to do that that she is subdued not by the Secret Service, but by a bystander named Jerry Fox.

And that listener is where we'll pick up next time with the aftermath of Squeaky's alleged attempt on Jerry Ford's life and the trial. This one, I don't think it had the pretense of trial of the century, as the Jack Ruby trial did. Probably not even the trial of the month. Yeah, just a trial. but an interesting trial nevertheless and one that I think will segue us nicely to tie off the saga of Squeaky Fromey

and to transition to that other much, much more skilled would be assassin, Sarah Jane, Sally Moore. For now, I'm done. I'm Dick. Saying farewell. And keep on digging. All right, ladies and germs, guys and gals, you know what time it is.

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