2009. A New Year. Yippee?

I arrived back at work from a long holiday vacation, which employees at our company had to take to save costs, though, fortunately for us, it was paid, unlike at other companies. Of the many e-mails that greeted me was this from my company’s president. He was urging his employees to start 2009 with “renewed energy” and a “positive attitude to overcome the ongoing economic hurdles and finish 2009 together as winners.”

I wish—I really wish—I could must some “renewed energy” and “positive attitude.” But, frankly, it’s a struggle. I can’t say I have any big excuse to be feeling blue this week: I have my job, I have my job, I have my family, I have my home. I did have a very pleasant break.

Part of what’s going on is my annual post-holiday blues. I’m like a kid when it comes to Christmas and the months-long run-up to it, which for me starts in September. I love the change of seasons from summer to fall, the leaves changing color and raining down into the streets and yards. I love the way the light of the sun takes on a different, softer slant, the new chill in the air, and even the fact that it starts to get dark at 5. Halloween comes, then Thanksgiving, and the start of the rains. The store shelves become stocked with Christmas kitsch and Frosty the Snowman plays on the loudspeakers.

The run-up to this holiday season, though, was much different than any I’d ever experienced. We had the contentious presidential election and the crash of our global economy. People started losing their homes and jobs and retirement and kids’ college savings. My workplace—like many others—was trying to regroup, cut costs, and figure out a new strategy for moving forward, even just to survive.

The world started to feel like it was spinning out of control, and I couldn’t get a fix on where I belonged in this tumultuous universe.

For the first time this year, I was feeling down in the weeks before Christmas.

But then, my forced vacation actually turned out to be a good thing. I went to see all those end-of-the-year, Oscar-bait movies. Even the serious ones, like The Reader with Kate Winslet starring as a startingly sympathetic former SS guard at a Nazi concentration, left me feeling moved and uplifted by its profound exploration of the complexities of the human condition.

Bad news, though, came this past Saturday. Our neighbor across the street died. He was in his early 60s and had been courageously battling kidney disease and other ailments for two decades. He has a lovely, devoted wife, two great kids who are in their early 20s, and a daughter-in-law who just received her US citizenship and is a whiz student in something like mathematics at UC Berkeley. Our neighbor hadn’t been working for some time, but you could always see him, gaunt and weak sometimes, still out in his front yard, proudly tending his garden.

Just a few weeks before his death, he walked most of the length of the 2.7-mile route around the Lafayette reservoir. He also walked into downtown Walnut Creek to pick up some groceries at Safeway. His health seemed to be on an upswing, his wife says, so, as chronically ill as he was, his death still came as a shock to his wife and kids. But, having dealt with the ups and downs of his kidney transplant and dialysis and times in and out of the hospital, his wife had learned to become philosophical about it all, and realized that he probably knew the end of his life was near. He died on New Year’s Day, after knowing his family was all gathered at home to celebrate the holidays.

My one project for grappling with my blues is to swear off alcohol for a while. I have long been one of those two-glasses-of-red-wine-a-night gals—my reward, I would tell myself, for a long, “stressful” day at the office, or to celebrate whatever I happened to feel like celebrating on a particular day. In November and December, I think, in part because of my increased anxiety about the economy (or that was my excuse), I noticed my consumption go up. I let myself continue to indulge through the holidays, but came to realize that this is not how I want to live the rest of my life. Maybe eliminating the alcohol, over time, will help lift my mood (Alcohol is supposed to be a depressant) and give me more energy—just like my boss would likeI arrived back at work from a long holiday vacation, which employees at our company had to take to save costs, though, fortunately for us, it was paid, unlike at other companies. Of the many e-mails that greeted me was this from my company’s president. He was urging his employees to start 2009 with “renewed energy” and a “positive attitude to overcome the ongoing economic hurdles and finish 2009 together as winners.”


Ugh.

Okay, enough griping. I need to take inspiration from certain people. There’s my neighbor who just lost her husband, and is able to talk so openly and even laugh and joke about the things her husband said and did in his final days. And then, I should also mention my friend, the Mayor of Claycord—blogging from his hospital bed, with some kind of problem with a disk in his back. It’s possible he’s in some nasty pain, but he continues to keep blogging, and with an upbeat, optimistic attitude. I could be cynical and say his attitude is due to the meds he's on, but, then, that's the tone he always maintains on his blog.

Is Chevron living up to its stated support for human rights by hiring a former Pentagon lawyer allegedly linked to abusive treatment of US detainees?

First, I apologize for this long post, but there was so much material on its subject, William James Haynes II. He is the new chief corporate counsel at San Ramon-based oil giant, Chevron Corporation, which is also a major East Bay employer and contributor to local arts, education, and social service organizations, including Walnut Creek's Lesher Center for the Arts.

Over the past few years, Chevron has been making a concerted effort to present itself as a socially responsible multinational corporation. On its website it talks about wanting to help the environment—as in developing alternative energy sources—and, most notably, about supporting human rights in the countries where it does business. In fact, in 2006 Chevron adopted a Human Rights Statement, grounded in the “Chevron Way” that is modeled after the United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

While espousing its support for human rights, Chevron hired William Haynes in February 2008 to serve as chief corporate counsel. His hiring is deeply troubling to some because right before taking the Chevron job, Haynes worked as general counsel for Defense Department. There, according to a Washington Post op-ed piece written by U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, Haynes “developed and defended three of the administration's most controversial [war on terror] policies: the refusal to treat any of the hundreds of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions of 1949; the department's military tribunal plan for trying suspected war criminals; and even the incarceration of U.S. citizens without counsel or judicial review.”

Most notably, Haynes also advised Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on interrogation techniques used on U.S.-held detainees in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Haynes’ advice even drew the ire of key Senate Republican Lindsay Graham during one of President Bush’s attempts to secure Haynes’ a federal court appointment. Graham, of South Carolina, told the Washington Post, after Haynes’ testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006, that the tactics Haynes pushed led to the “legal confusion” over interrogation practices that contributed to the scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib.

In the past few weeks, the Senate Armed Services Committee reignited the detainee interrogation debate. It issued a damning report (signed by both Democrats and Republicans, including former Republican presidential candidate John McCain) of top Bush administration officials. The New York Times, in an editorial, says these officials were involved in “the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.

Bush administration officials mentioned in the report include Rumsfeld and former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. Also receiving prominent notice is Chevron’s new hire, Haynes, who is reportedly a friend of Chevron’s vice president and general counsel Charles James, from the time both worked for the Bush Administration.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Andrew Ross says the report shows that: “Haynes' opinions on the legality of various interrogation techniques were a key contributor to their being given the go-ahead. For example, then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld authorized the techniques only after Haynes recommended their approval. … Haynes' office sought information on harsh interrogation techniques even before a list of such techniques was drawn up by military officials for possible use at Guantanamo Bay. In the report's conclusions, the senators said they found some of Haynes' actions ‘deeply troubling.' "

According to the report, on November 27, 2002 “notwithstanding the serious legal concerns raised by the military services, Mr. Haynes sent a one-page memo to [Secretary Rumsfeld], recommending that he approve … techniques such as stress positions, removal of clothing, use of phobias (such as fear of dogs), and deprivation of light and auditory stimuli. … Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora raised concerns to Haynes several times from mid-December 2002 to mid-January 2003 that these techniques ‘could rise to the level of torture.’ ”

The New York Times editorial suggests that the Senate committee report “has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges” against Rumsfeld and Haynes, as well as Gonzales, and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The Times goes on to say:

"These top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy. The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions. ...”

"These top officials ignored warnings from lawyers in every branch of the armed forces that they were breaking the law, subjecting uniformed soldiers to possible criminal charges and authorizing abuses that were not only considered by experts to be ineffective, but were actually counterproductive ..."

Moreover, the editorial says, these practices deeply “harmed America’s image as a nation of laws and may make it impossible to bring dangerous men to real justice” and increased the danger to our troops Iraq and Afghanistan. ... Alberto Mora, the former Navy general counsel who protested the abuses, told the Senate committee that ‘there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq—as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat—are, respectively, the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.’”

Not everyone on the committee agreed with these conclusions. Six GOP members dissented, saying the “inquiry breaks little new ground (and) the implication that this abuse was the direct, necessary or foreseeable of policy decisions made by senior administration officials is false and without merit."

The Wall Street Journal editorial page wasn't happy either, calling the report "politically predetermined” and that the “real purpose" of the committee chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., "is to lay the groundwork for war crimes prosecutions of Bush officials like ... Jim Haynes who acted in good faith to keep the country safe within the confines of the law."

“Nearly every element of the narrative is dishonest,” the Journal editorial continued. “As officials testified during Mr. Levin’s committee meetings and according to documents in his possession, senior officials were responding to requests from the CIA and other commanders in the field. The flow was bottom up, not top down. … We know that the most aggressive tactic ever authorized was aterboarding, which was used in three cases against hardened, high-ranking al Qaeda operatives. … U.S. officials say the information [obtained by one operative] foiled multiple terror plots and led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11.”

Haynes did not respond to request for a comment from Crazy in Suburbia, but in his testimony before the committee, he denied, despite Alberto Mora’s warnings, that he ever advocated torture. About the abuses the public now associates with Abu Ghraib, Haynes says it has “been consistently determined that the photographs that were so widely broadcast in 2003, and even to this day, reflect nothing that was approved interrogation. It was just flat-out abuse by people who were not being supervised."

It’s important to consider the context of what he and other White House lawyers were dealing with in the years right after 9/11, Haynes testified: a new landscape of global terrorism where previously understood rules of warfare no longer applied. “There was a paucity of law that was applicable at the time.”

Finally, Haynes said, "As the lawyer, I was not the decisionmaker. I was an adviser."

The Senate committee report strongly disagrees with Haynes’ assertion that the abuse at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was “the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.”

The report concludes by showing that military leaders, namely General David Petraeus, have since repudiated those practices:

"While some argue that the brutality and disregard for human life shown by al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists justifies us treating them harshly, General Petraeus explained why that view is misguided. In a May 2007 letter to his troops, General Petraeus said ‘Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right. Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy. This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we—not our enemies—occupy the moral high ground.’ ”

Despite the report’s findings and the New York Times view that Haynes and others should possibly be prosecuted for war crimes, Haynes, it appears, has found a home at Chevron, at least for the time being.

Kent Robertson, Chevron's Media Relations Advisor for Policy, Government and Public Affairs, told me: “Mr. Haynes is a respected and proven lawyer who has always operated with the highest degree of ethics and integrity at Chevron, consistent with the company's values.”

Those values include following the United Nations Universal Declaration for Human Rights. It is interesting to note that Article 5 of this 1948 document says: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” This is just the sort of treatment that Haynes signed off on, as he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on his federal court nomination. The Washington Post reported:

"Haynes addressed the development of a memo that suggested it would be legal to subject some al-Qaeda prisoners to 'cruel, inhumane or degrading" treatment.
Responding to charges that he essentially collaborated with Justice Department lawyers on the memo, then ran roughshod over military lawyers who objected, Haynes acknowledged that there had been "spirited discussions" at the Pentagon
but that everyone received a fair hearing.

Senator Graham retorted that the military lawyers "went ballistic" when they saw the "torture memo.”

I don’t know enough about Chevron’s operations in other parts of the world to judge criticisms of the company by human rights and environmental organizations, such as the Washington D.C.-based Multinational Monitor magazine. This publication named Chevron one of the top 10 worst corporations in the world “for its refusal to take responsibility for dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon and its close relationship to the brutal Burmese military regime, among other human rights and corporate governance problems."

For its part, Chevron responded to the devastating May 2008 cyclone in Burma by donating $2 million to the relief efforts. Chevron can also make other claims of social responsibility on the international front by launching a three-year, $30 million commitment to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

In our East Bay suburbs, Chevron is a big supporter of arts programs at Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts, including the one-day annual Chevron Family Theatre Festival in July. Chevron also donates thousands of dollars to science education programs in the San Ramon Valley Unified School District, while Joan O’Reilly, wife of Chevron CEO David O’Reilly, sits on the board of advisors for Wardrobe for Opportunity. This East Bay-based nonprofit, which started in Walnut Creek, supplies a professional wardrobe and dressed-for-success advice to poor men and women looking for work. Wardrobe for Opportunity gave Chevron a 2008 Leadership Award.

So, Chevron tries to do good things, either because its leaders truly believe that these are the right things to do—or because it makes good for PR. I hope Chevron’s motives are the former. I also hope that Chevron isn’t doing the wrong thing by keeping William J. Haynes II on staff. Maybe the Harvard-trained attorney and former Navy captain has done great work and acted with honor and integrity throughout much of his 25-year legal career.

At the same time, he could be a war criminal, as some critics assert. At the very least, I think it is fair to ask Haynes' new employer, Chevron, whether he was the only lawyer in America who could do this job for the company. And given its "Chevron Way" campaign, I think it is also important to question the company's leaders on whether they are being consistent in their stated support for human rights by hiring Haynes, with his controversial human rights record, to be one of their top legal advisors.

Great New Blog for a Hard-to-Discuss Condition “That Just About Everyone” Suffers From

The condition I’m talking about is stress and anxiety, and the blog, the Stress and Anxiety Club, was started by one of our best-known local bloggers, Mister Writer.

He says, “one of my goals this year is to get a new blog started that serves to help people who suffer from anxiety related disorders, or stressed out and facing other symptoms.” Mister Writer started it in honor of a good friend and “the hope that others will find solace and comfort, as well as practical solutions.”

He adds that “Anxiety is not a sign of failure. Neither is it a sign of a defective human being. It is a product of our society and does come with solutions.” In fact, as it says on the Stress and Anxiety Club, 18 percent of Americans, or more than 40 million people suffer from anxiety disorders.

At the Stress and Anxiety Club, you can share your own story and find information. Mr. Writer says you can use a post name, rather than your own, and even recommends you do so to protect your privacy. He says you can also email him directly at andre@misterwriter.com, and he will be happy to add his input or direct you to where help may be found.

Thanks Mister Writer for this important public service.

Do I Have Any Reason to Post This Photo of a Topless Young Catherine Deneuve?

Kind of.

This is a gift for my husband, who, like many men and women over the past four decades, have considered the French actress Catherine Deneuve to be one of the most beautiful woman on the planet--ever in the existence of civilization.

I am definitely not going to argue that point of view, since I admit to my own woman-crush on Catherine. And, I have fond memories of when my husband was courting me, that sweet, silly young man, asserting that I bore some resemblance to Catherine. How could I resist such a comparison, as misguided as it was? No woman could resist that kind of flattery. It helped convince me to marry him.

Here is Catherine, in one of her signature roles, as the patrician housewife in the 1967 Luis Buñuel-directed film Belle du Jour. Catherine's Séverine moonlights as a prostitute in a high-end Parisian brothel, where she fulfills her masochistic fantasies. In this role, Catherine was so very, very bad--and so very tragically beautiful.

Sorry, to any of those readers who were hoping I would post an image of Jennifer Anniston on the cover of GQ, wearing just a man's tie. I still can. But come on, Catherine Deneuve versus Jennifer Anniston. Even Catherine Deneuve now, at age 65: There is absolutely no comparison.

The Art and Sad Beauty of the Crosses, and My New Year's Wish for 2009: An End to the Madness that Necessitated Lafayette's Famous Memorial

Rainy Friday.


Taking a drive around our lovely suburbs, including through Lafayette, the home of the now world-famous Lafayette crosses war memorial. Starting in November 2006, on a privately owned hillside, volunteers began erecting a cross for every US service man or woman killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As of today, the memorial shows 4,850 dead.


I've passed the memorial from time to time, but what struck me this morning was really noticing the way friends or family members of some of the deceased has decorated their crosses, often in incredibly beautiful, poignant ways--like the cross to the right, one of several of which is covered in a colorful mosaic of brightly colored tiles and mirrors.


There is also the cross dedicated to the memory of James Coon (below right). He was a 22-year-old graduate of Las Lomas High in Walnut Creek who was killed in April 2007 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle in Balad, Iraq.


James Coon's father, Jim Coon, described his 6-f00t, 6-inch son as a "good-natured" guy. After graduating from Las Lomas in 2003, where he had been a punter on the school's championship football team, he went to Diablo Valley College, according to an interview his family gave to the San Francisco Chronicle. He joined the Army, hoping to make enough money to buy a house when he returned. He had been in Iraq eight months before he was killed.



At the time of his son's death, his father told the Chronicle: "I'm very proud of my son. ... I would like everybody to support our troops." But Jim Coon added, "I don't support the government and what they're doing with this war. I don't believe the war is right."

Sara Jane Moore: the Link between this Danville Mom on the Verge and Wanna-be Presidential Assassin to the Patty Hearst Kidnapping

A while back the Mayor of Claycord uncovered an interesting story about the notorious radical terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army—how, in their early days, the group was headquartered in Concord. Between 1973 and 1975, the SLA—“a self-styled urban guerilla warfare group,” as described by Wikipedia—committed bank robberies, two murders, and, most famously, the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in February 1974.

As they often say, it’s a small world, especially in the East Bay suburbs and especially when we’re dealing with famous local criminals and their acts. A new book uncovers another intriguing SLA/Patty Hearst kidnapping link to the East Bay suburbs—specifically in the form of Sara Jane Moore, the middle-aged Danville housewife and mom who, in September 1975, tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford.

The new book is a biography of Moore, who a year ago was paroled from the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, where she had been serving a life sentencing for taking a shot at the president outside a San Francisco hotel. The new book is called Taking Aim at the President: The Remarkable Story of the Woman Who Shot at Gerald Ford. The author is Bay Area investigative journalist Geri Spieler, and it hits the book stores January 12.

Before I tell you about what Spieler learned about Moore’s connection to the Hearst kidnapping case, I’ll mention that Diablo magazine in September 2005 published an article by Spieler, “Don’t Blame it On Danville,” that chronicled Moore’s time in Danville, where she lived between 1967 and 1974. In that article, as in the book, Spieler explains that Moore’s decision to kill the president didn’t come from some experience in her suburban life that pushed her over the edge.

Rather, Spieler wrote, “Information that until recently had never been released—from reams of investigative reports generated in her case, as well as interviews with her former Danville neighbors—tells a somewhat different story. It becomes clear that Moore’s attempt to kill the president was just the latest outburst in a stormy life, one driven by a constant need to be the center of attention.”

Still, if you want to read about Moore’s time in Danville, you can read the Diablo magazine article or pick up Spieler’s book and read the chapter called “The Doctor’s Wife.”

Yes, Moore was married to a doctor who worked at Kaiser hospital in Walnut Creek. The couple and Moore’s young son settled into a new upscale housing development in Danville. Spieler tells how Moore had been married twice before and earlier given birth to four other children, whom she abandoned to her parents in West Virginia to raise. Now settled in Danville, Moore dressed well and attempted to fit in with the other Danville wives by using her Southern-bred charm and good manners. Ultimately, her personality and poor social skills, that haunted her throughout her life, turned off her neighbors and the other Danville moms in her son’s play group. In time, Moore’s marriage to the doctor also deteriorated and the break-up became contentious.

Meanwhile, Moore had become bored with her suburban routine and was looking for her next big project that would allow her brilliance to shine. Like a few other bored, middle-class suburbanites, Moore had become intrigued by the politics of the counter-culture movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The counter-culture movement emerged from campaigns for Civil Rights, women’s rights and gay rights, and against the Vietnam War. The Bay Area, with its Summer of Love and groups like the Oakland-based Black Panthers, was a hotbed of counter-culture agitation. In her book’s most compelling chapters, Spieler documents how all sorts of groups, some more legitimate than others, formed around the more established progressive organizations.

Some groups on the outer fringes embraced Mao-ist, Communist doctrines, hated the prevailing white-dominated establishment, and even embraced the idea that violence was necessary to shake up the status quo and usher in the revolution that would remake American society. The SLA was one such fringe group.

No, Moore didn’t join the SLA, but she jumped into the middle of the action after Patty Hearst was kidnapped. One of the SLA’s demands for Patty Hearst’s release was that her father, San Francisco Examiner publisher, William Randolph Hearst, set up a program to distribute food to the Bay Area’s poor. The program was called People In Need (PIN). Hearst set its operations up at a warehouse in San Francisco’s China basin and hired some staff. But PIN was mostly run by a motley assortment of volunteers, including militant blacks, teenagers, pensioners, hippies, graduate students professionals, society matrons, ex-cons, and even some former prison gang members.

Spieler says that Moore eagerly volunteered to become PIN’s accountant, but also pushed her way into the forefront of the organization by becoming its self-designated public information officer. She sent out press releases and "commandeered all of the press questions about the food distribution program; by doing so, she made the name of Sara Jane Moore known to most of the newspapaper reporters in the Bay Area."

She eventually caught the eye of William Randolph Hearst himself, who noticed her at work in the warehouse and summoned her for a private chat. The father, desperate to secure his daughter’s release, thought Moore might be able to get close to some of the less than savory volunteers whom, he suspected, might have contacts with the SLA.

Unbeknownst to Hearst, Moore had already attracted the attention of the FBI, who recruited her to become an informant in a similar way. As Spieler notes, the FBI had a long tradition, thanks to J. Edgar Hoover, of trying to infiltrate and destabilize organizations it deemed a threat to U.S. domestic security. The FBI’s targets included Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., anti-Vietnam War groups, and the Black Panthers.

Spieler contends that Moore, in her usual craving to be the center of attention, was flattered both by the notice of the FBI and William Randolph Hearst. She happily agreed to become a protégé of Wilbert “Popeye” Jackson, “a muscular and charismatic” ex-con and black revolutionary who had known Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze while both were serving time in San Quentin. Cinque started the SLA in 1973 after escaping from Soledad prison, where he had been serving time for armed robbery.

From Danville doctor’s wife to radical study groups held in storefronts, apartments, and church basements of then-seedy San Francisco neighborhoods. That was the path Moore was careening down. And then to wanna-be presidential assassination. Spieler explains the “duality” that emerged in Moore’s ideology and actions and that ultimately contributed to her decision to try to kill President Ford in September 1975.

“In the beginning, she idealized her FBI work and saw informing on the radical left as work for the greater good,” Spieler writes. “But the deeper she went, the more she found herself agreeing with the movement’s agendas.”

One idea that intrigued her was that violent action might be necessary for the revolution that would lead to real social change. And, most likely, with her need to be the center of attention, Moore hit on one way to become truly famous and respected by her radical compatriots: kill the president.

And, as Spieler describes in her Diablo piece, “On September 22, 1975, the 45-year-old Moore stood in a powder-blue trench coat outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel and aimed a .38 at President Gerald Ford as he walked out. When she opened fire and sent a bullet whizzing past Ford’s forehead, Moore became the ninth person in history to attempt to kill a U.S. president, and proved unquestionably that she was not your typical housewife after all.”

If you want more information about Spieler, her book, or her appearances in the Bay Area visit her website at www.gerispieler.com.