The accidental hero lived in torment.
He didn't ask for fame, didn't even want it. Oliver "Billy" Sipple
just happened to be standing in the path of history, right next to Sara Jane
Moore, the would-be assassin, as she raised a .38 and aimed it at
President Gerald R. Ford outside San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel.
Sipple, a former Marine and
Vietnam vet, saw the gun. He grabbed Moore's arm as she fired and saved a
president's life. Afterward, he told people anybody would have done the
same.
Only later, after he was outed
in the media as a gay man, after his parents back in Detroit were hounded and
teased about their gay son -- only then would he realize the personal price to
be paid.
"There were a lot of times he
wished he had never saved the president's life, for all the anguish it caused
him," says his older brother, George Franklin Sipple, 66, of New Boston,
Mich. "He only said it when he was drinking. He said life would have been
so much simpler if he hadn't have done it."
But history had grabbed and pummeled
Sipple, then 33, just as it did to a lesser extent another man, John Ludwig, a
42-year-old taxi driver who stood at the other end of that bullet's wild
trajectory.
The two men had nothing in common,
didn't even know each other, but are forever connected in the historic tableau
into which they stumbled on Sept. 22, 1975.
They shared something else, too --
a sense of bitterness and disappointment over how they were treated during
their walk-on roles in a presidential drama. (As for Moore, she is serving a
life sentence for the assassination attempt.)
* * *
Sipple was feted as a hero,
a man who'd saved the day. But even as he tried to fend off the notoriety,
someone passed San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen a tip that Sipple,
the presidential hero, was gay and a close associate of Harvey Milk, then a
candidate for San Francisco city supervisor and one of the first openly gay
candidates for public office.
The gay rights movement was in its infancy. Author Randy Shilts wrote in "The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk," that Milk wanted Sipple's homosexuality made public. Shilts quotes Milk as saying, "For once we can show that gays do heroic things."
Caen wrote about Sipple, several
newspapers picked up the item, and the news got back to Detroit, back to
Sipple's family. If his parents knew he was gay, they did not admit it, says
George Sipple. So when the news appeared in the newspaper, it was received as
an embarrassing blow.
George Sipple says that he, his father and another brother, who all worked for General Motors, endured taunting and laughter on the factory floor.
And Ethel Sipple, Oliver's mother,
was harassed by neighbors.
"It was partly the neighbors,
partly the reporters, partly the papers," George Sipple says. "For
two days they hassled her, wanting to know about her gay son and all this
stuff. . . . And they didn't believe her when she said he was in the
Marines."
"It never really hurt me. I
lost some friends, so I figured they weren't really worth being friends
anyway," George Sipple says.
He says he remained proud of what
his brother had done, saving the president's life.
Oliver Sipple flew to Detroit to
try to put his parents at ease, to explain "that he wasn't embarrassing my
father in any way, because he wasn't in the same state with him and he was an
adult and should be able to live the way he wanted to."
The family became estranged.
"For a period of time, she
didn't want to have nothing to do with him," George Sipple says of his mother.
Oliver was not disowned, as some reports of that time said. But the family
needed to absorb what had happened.
Back in San Francisco, Oliver
fought a battle on another front, against the media. He filed a $15 million
lawsuit against seven newspapers, accusing them of invading his privacy.
"He told me he wasn't
interested in suing the papers for saying that he was gay," his brother
says. "He was interested in suing for the right that he could be gay, that
it was his lifestyle, he chose that, and it was nothing wrong."
Oliver was convinced, according to
his brother, that the press was motivated by anti-gay sentiment. The lawsuit
was ultimately dismissed in 1984 after five years, but the ethical issues it
raised are highlighted in legal and journalistic textbooks to this day.
While the lawsuit dragged on,
Sipple's health deteriorated. From his service in Vietnam, Sipple suffered from
what he called shell shock, his brother says. The war had made Oliver very
emotional, George says, and he received treatment at a Veterans Affairs
hospital.
In Vietnam, he had been wounded and hospitalized; then his hospital was bombed. In San Francisco, he spent the Fourth of July holidays at the VA hospital, away from the sounds of firecrackers and explosions.
And he drank more and more
heavily. His bar friends rallied round the local hero, giving him rides home
when he couldn't drive. And he returned the generosity by buying rounds of
drinks, especially when he received his disability checks, says Wayne Friday,
an old friend.
"I think about him a lot
because he was well liked," says Friday, a former San Francisco police
commissioner. "People really liked the guy and not only because he spent a
lot of money on drinks. But after the incident, and after his family disowned
him, there were people . . . who would always make sure he had a place to go on
a holiday."
Eventually, the family tensions
eased and Oliver Sipple was welcomed back into the fold, says his brother.
"They accepted it,"
George says of his late parents. "That was all. They didn't like it, but
they still accepted. He was welcomed. Only thing was: Don't bring a lot of your
friends."
Oliver died in 1989 of pneumonia.
His family collected his effects from San Francisco, including a framed letter
from President Ford that he had hung on the wall of his apartment.
"I want you to know how much
I appreciated your selfless actions last Monday," it read. It was signed,
"Jerry Ford."
Presidential letters are the stuff
of history, often treasured by those who receive them. But the letters sent to
Sipple and to Ludwig, the man who was hit by Moore's bullet, were reminders of
bitterness and disappointment.
"My brother always felt he
[Ford] could have at least shook his hand or at least stood up someplace and
had him appear with him and congratulate him," George Sipple says.
Talking about the letter, Sipple
says, "It's not really a big deal anymore."
After talking about the letter, he
went into his basement to retrieve it and discovered it was missing.
* * *
Questions
Essay: How should Oliver have been
treated?
-300
words
-details