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Watching Ford fall, the crowd had no way of knowing that he had not been hit. Spectators screamed. Agents and police rushed toward the wisp of smoke drifting up from Moore's gun. "Lynch the bastard!" someone shouted. "Kill him now!" yelled someone else, unaware that the assailant was a woman. San Francisco Policemen Timothy Hettrich and Gary Lemos dove at Moore, knocking her to the ground. Hettrich grabbed the cylinder of the revolver so that it could not turn and bring up another bullet. Patrolman William S. Taylor grabbed her hair. "Goddamit! Goddamit!" one officer shouted as he pounded on her back.
John Ludwig, an off-duty cab driver, felt a pain in his groin. "The wind was knocked out of me," he said. "I saw something fall from my pants. I picked it up and asked a policeman what it was. He said, 'Hey, that's the bullet!' " It had ricocheted off the wall, passing behind Ford within a few feet and hitting Ludwig, who was not seriously hurt.
Ford's limousine roared away toward the airport at up to 70 m.p.h. Not until the car reached a freeway was Ford permitted to sit up. As the hotel was left far behind, the car slowed to let motorcycle escorts catch up. At 3:47 p.m. Ford pulled up to the ramp of Air Force One and warmly thanked local and state police for "all your help."
Betty Ford, unaware of the close call, arrived from Monterey. "Have you had a good time?" she asked. Ford turned to Rumsfeld. "You tell her, Rummy," he said. Mrs. Ford winced as she heard the news. Then she sighed, "Thank God she was a poor shot."
Shoved like a battering ram into the St. Francis Hotel by officers, a bleeding, handcuffed and barefoot Moore was thrown into a mezzanine reception room. She had lost her cowboy boots when overpowered, and her tan slacks had been split open. She was helped into a chair, and her handcuffs were removed. After she was assured that her son would be picked up at school, she waived her right to an immediate lawyer. Displaying remarkable casualness about her assassin's role, she declared that if Ford had not left the hotel when he did, she would have abandoned her shooting vigil to go pick up her son.
She told agents that no one else was involved in the plan. She related how she had bought the two guns, even producing the check stubs from her purse. But she could not, or would not, say why she had tried to kill Ford.
Later, in her San Francisco County jail cell, she tried to explain. As always, her thoughts were disjointed. "It was kind of an ultimate protest against the system," Moore told Los Angeles Times Reporter Ellen Hume. "I did not want to kill somebody, but there comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun." She rationalized, "I was driven to act."
Somewhat more specifically, she said she had been rejected by the FBI, also by the radicals she had come to admire, and she had hoped to break out of this "isolation" and regain her radical friends. On the shooting itself, "I had set a course for myself that I hoped I would not be permitted to do. But the security was so stupid. It was like an invitation." Yet Moore added, "I'm glad he didn't die."