Larry Buendorf, Secret Service agent who saved Gerald Ford, dies at 87

Boston Globe

15-03-2025

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As Ford crossed the street and made his way through Capitol Park, shaking hands with well-wishers, Buendorf followed at his shoulder, watching to make sure no one reached for the president's watch or held his hand too long. He happened to be looking in the right direction when a red-robed, red-haired woman began to pull a .45-caliber pistol out of an ankle holster while standing about two feet from the president.
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'I see it coming and I step in front of him, not sure what it was other than that it was coming up pretty fast, and yelled out 'Gun!'' Buendorf recalled in a 2010 oral history for the Ford Presidential Foundation. 'When I yelled out 'Gun!' I popped that .45 out of her hand. Agents hear this, they covered the president and they're gone. So now you've got this guy in a suit with this big .45 wrestling with this little girl.'
The assailant, Fromme, was a diminutive 26-year-old member of the Manson Family, the cult led by convicted murderer Charles Manson. Buendorf was not wearing a bulletproof vest at the time and feared he might be shot by a potential conspirator. He and Fromme continued to struggle over the Colt semiautomatic pistol, which contained bullets in the magazine but not in the chamber.
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'She was pulling back on the slide, and I hit the slide before she could chamber a round,' he said. 'If she'd had a round chambered, I couldn't have been there in time. It would've gone through me and the president.'
As Buendorf brought Fromme to the ground, witnesses heard her shout: 'Don't get excited! It didn't go off! It didn't go off!' After Buendorf handcuffed her and other agents forced her against a tree, she continued to repeat: 'He's not a public servant. He's not a public servant.'
The president went on to meet with Brown, as planned, and delivered his crime address to lawmakers without mentioning the assassination attempt. Ford later told Buendorf that even first lady Betty Ford passed the morning without realizing what had happened. When he spoke to her afterward on Air Force One, she asked him, 'So, how was your day?'
Buendorf also carried on after the assassination attempt, turning Fromme's gun over to a colleague before going 'back to work,' he said, 'because we were one down on the shift.'
Seventeen days later, Ford survived another attempt on his life. He had just spoken to the World Affairs Council in San Francisco when a woman named Sara Jane Moore fired two shots with a revolver, before being subdued by police and a Marine Corps veteran, Oliver Sipple. (The president, unscathed, was issued a new piece of protective gear: a beige trench coat with a bulletproof liner.)
Buendorf was in Sacramento at the time of the second attack, testifying about the previous assassination attempt. He said that Fromme had not been on the Secret Service's 'radar screen' as a threat, but that the scenario of her attack was incorporated into the agency's training programs. Fromme was sentenced to life in prison later that year, after a chaotic trial in which she tried to call Manson as a witness and threw an apple at a prosecutor. She was paroled in 2009.
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For his actions in Sacramento, Buendorf was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award and the Secret Service's Valor Award. The episode left him transformed, he told the New York Times: 'I started taking life one day at a time; I started appreciating people more.'
It also left him recommitted to the job at hand. When Ford continued to interact with members of the public after the attack, Buendorf recalled in the oral history, 'that's when you go to your agents, and you go, 'Tune it up, boys, because we've got a job to do and we cannot fail.''
The third of four children, Larry Merle Buendorf was born in Wells, Minnesota, on Nov. 18, 1937. His father ran a local business, Merle's Fix-It Shop, and died of a heart attack days before Buendorf turned 17.
His mother, who remarried in 1960 and worked as a grocery store checkout clerk, later told The Washington Post that Buendorf 'sort of took over for the family.' She added that 'he put himself through college' at Mankato State, now Minnesota State University at Mankato, where he studied business education, played basketball and was a hurdler on the track team.
After graduating in 1959, he joined the Navy and served as a pilot on the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. He had a stint in Naval Intelligence before joining the Secret Service's Chicago field office in 1970. Two years later, he began working on the presidential detail, protecting Richard M. Nixon and later Ford and Jimmy Carter.
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Buendorf continued to work with Gerald and Betty Ford after they left the White House, directing their postpresidential detail for 10 years. He retired to join the U.S. Olympic Committee, as the USOPC was then known, and spent the next quarter-century safeguarding Olympic athletes and training sites.
'You feel like you had a cocoon whenever you traveled with him,' Rulon Gardner, a gold-medal-winning wrestler, told the Colorado Springs Gazette in 2018. 'You put him in a 450-degree oven and he's as cool as ice. The man will not sweat.'
Buendorf married Linda Allen in 2013. In addition to his wife, survivors include a daughter, Kimberly, from an earlier marriage; a stepdaughter, Stephanie; a brother; a sister; and three grandchildren.
Even after he retired from the Secret Service, Buendorf remained in touch with Ford, speaking by phone almost every Sept. 5, the date of the assassination attempt. 'The anniversary date was like a birthday,' he told the Mankato Free Press in 2007. The duo never discussed the attack itself, he said, but talked instead about skiing or their families.