Code Name: Aquarius

I did a performance last night for the Encyclopedia Show, an all-ages mostly poetry themed reading series that is really fun. Our topic for the evening was the Zodiac, my assigned subject was Aquarius, and this is it. It is a pack of lies, except for the parts that are true.

Born February 15, 1930, my aunt Sarah Jane Moore is a brilliant and talented woman, despite that she attempted to murder a high-ranking public official because her horoscope told her to.

She was a renegade. The mission of FBI agents, after all, is to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats. Not to, as my auntie did, use intelligence to attempt to assassinate the President. But, as she later told Matt Lauer, he was a Cancer. Aquarians and Cancers never get along.

On September 22, 1975, my middle-aged aunt shot off two rounds at Gerald Ford in San Francisco. The sun was in Virgo, moving into Libra—not a good time for Aquarius. She was arrested humming that song. It was the second attempt on President Ford’s life in two and a half weeks. By a woman.

Ford had been appointed to office in August of 1974, after Nixon’s resignation. Within months, his wife Betty Ford was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was one of the reasons he had decreed 1975, by Executive Order, International Women’s Year.

Even so, Ford’s record on women’s issues drastically improved after the assassination attempts. He immediately reached out to over 300 national women’s organizations, and began supporting the Equal Rights Amendment in a bitter struggle. He even named August 26, 1976 Women’s Equality Day. No previous president had given women a full day of equality. Ford personally appointed more women than ever before to public office: 14% of his new appointments were female, the highest such percentage to date.

Early in the 1970s, Aunt Sarah was conscripted to join the FBI. Her “frumpiness”—later reviled by Time, the Washington Post, and USA Today, and rarely if ever connected to her status as an often-single mother of five, married to a succession of five cheatin’ no-good skirt-chasin’ husbands at a time when the courts viewed women as property—this “frumpiness” was why the FBI sought her out. Well, that and her 180 IQ.

The discrepancy between her physical appearance, of stressed-out housewife, and her brilliant mind made her the perfect undercover agent. Aquarians are natural liars; their symbol is water, yet it is an air sign. If you are sitting next to an Aquarius, check now for your wallet.

For two years, Sarah trained as an agent, running off to the shooting range every day after dropping the kids at school, back by three to pick them up, spending the evenings studying Russian and various codes in thick books hidden within Good Housekeeping or TV Guide. When one of her philandering husbands was home, she’d cook him dinner.

For in the 1970s, husbands worked. Wives stayed home. If they weren’t lucky enough to develop a secret life—a lesbian affair with a neighbor, membership in a feminist consciousness-raising group, getting a job as a spy—they drank and took drugs during the day. Like Betty Ford.

But Aunt Sarah was asked to infiltrate the radical Marxist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. They kidnapped Patty Hearst, 19-year-old granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and had demanded as ransom that the elder Hearst establish a food giveaway program for the poor. Frumpy Sarah volunteered at the program alongside radicals half her age, for the FBI. There, Aunt Sarah realized that middle-aged women with few rights apart from their husbands have a lot in common with the American underclass. Sarah Jane Moore, FBI Code name: Aquarius.

Then one day Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a Libra, and devotee of Charles Manson, walked out into a beautiful Sacramento day to aim, for whatever reason, an unloaded pistol at the President of the United States. Exactly 17 days later, Sarah Jane Moore checked her horoscope.

September 22, 1975. AQUARIUS. Today is the day. Where others have failed, your special Aquarian skills will allow you to succeed. Only one man stands in the way of your success, and it is time for you to eliminate him. You will only have one shot, so make sure to take it. Your lucky number is: 17.

Aunt Sarah was an excellent shot—top marksperson in her agent-training program. She aimed carefully that morning, and squeezed the trigger. President Ford did not fall. A shadow crossed her brow. Her son Ben needed to be picked up from school in a few hours. She aimed—more carefully this time—and squeezed the trigger again. Still Ford stood. Never elected. Pardoned Nixon. “Ass hat,” Sarah called him. And still he stood.

But in a moment, she no longer did. Jumped, gun wrestled from her well-trained grip, my cousin Ben waited at school that day for four hours before it occurred to anyone that his mom might not be coming. “We, ah, never thought to check the evening news,” the principal told Ben apologetically.

Sarah was released from prison last spring. She now knows that the sight on her weapon was off, a fact that she never caught because she had trained with another. The agent in charge of assigning the gun later admitted that he gave her the faulty pistol because he was pretty sure the frumpy housewife would never have the guts to use it.

Today, workplace discrimination based on gender is illegal—under laws originally proposed by President Gerald Ford, who, after two assassination attempts by women, saw the dawning of a new age of harmony and understanding.

Tags: FBI, Gerald Ford, Patty Hearst, presidential assassins, Sarah Jane Moore, SLA, William Randolph Hearst, zodiac