Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Lynette Fromme C-SPAN program to air shortly

C-SPAN recently filmed panelists discussing the 1975 attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford by Lynette Fromme.

According to their website the run-time is 1 hour and 28 minutes.

It has not yet been aired.

The event took place on September 24 this year at the United States Courthouse in Sacramento, California, and was presented by the Eastern District of California Historical Society.

Panelists included the original prosecutors Dwayne Keyes and Donald Heller; original defense counsel John Virgo; Doug Duncan the Secret Service in charge of the Sacremento office in 1975; and Jess Bravin the author of Squeaky, the Life and Times of Lynette Alice Fromme.

The Event "An Oral History of United States v. Lynette Alice Fromme" is publicised here on the Court History.org website:
http://courthistory.tripod.com/

The page contains a link to the Sacramento Bee newspaper that has an article about it which has photographs of trial evidence exhibits (Fromme's holster and what looks like a page of a handwritten Fromme letter, her handbag and mugshot).

22 comments:

LynyrdSkynyrdBand said...

Thanks Chris.
You ROCK!

Jess Bravin the author of "Squeaky, the Life and Times of Lynette Alice Fromme" is part of the program.
That's pretty cool.

MrPoirot said...

Bravin never focused on it but there were four seizures described by others during her Family days. Manson and Paul Watkins stated that Squeaky had seizures during sex. If Squeaky was epileptic this would help explain her quick expultion from society during a time when she was doing rather well. She was a well liked, very talented high school student and then poof! She became an outcast. This happened at the age when she started dating.

katie8753 said...

Thanks Chris!

Mr. P, that's interesting. I never thought of it like that. You could be right.

sunset77 said...

Thanx for the post, the Gerald Ford library released Ford's filmed testimony about this incident a few months ago, if anyone hasn't seen it and is interested, the YouTube vid is HERE.

Also, I received an e-mail in my blog mailbox from someone wanting me to post a video on the blog. The video is apparently an audio recording of a male voice I don't recognize, and "Star", a woman that meets with Charles Manson in prison. The video is HERE.

sunset77 said...

Off topic comment:

I received another blog related e-mail, someone wants me to post a link to the website "Manson Direct". That site was apparently updated Nov. 1, with some "faqs".

If anyone wants a link, Manson Direct.

louis365 said...

I have thought for a long time that Red may very well been sexually abused by her father.

MrPoirot said...

Louis that is one of the many duplicitous stories of the Manson saga that have believers both ways. Squeaky herself started the rumor back in the 70s that her father abused her. then she disavowed it years later. Take your pick; which way was it? Flip a coin.

As far as her seizures; Paul Watkins said when he saw Squeaky later that night after she had a seizure that she acted as if nothing happened at all. Maybe that is how she learned to live with it. That is a tough row to hoe for anyone.

Maybe the seizures were what guided her involuntarily into drugs which then sunk her.

beauders said...

I was just going through CSPN3 and it is scheduled for this Saturday at 7:30AM Pacific Time and 3:00PM Sunday.
A friend of mine lost someone this week technically to lung cancer but she would have died from renal failure due to alcoholism if the lung cancer didn't take her first. By the end she was begging my friend to mercy kill her which of course my friend could not do. MaryAnne was a week younger then me, 49. Those of you who smoke and/or drink to excess think about this, this was a strong woman, and she had such a miserable death, she was begging people to end it for her. I am very sad.

MrPoirot said...

I'm terribly sorry to hear that Beauders. lost my dad and younger sister to cancer. My sister was 39 and a very beautiful lady. I just don't see why we can not make any strides towards a cancer cure. My mother believes they make so much money from cancer; they don't want to cure it. I don't know if she is wrong but I know the loss I feel from cancer.
Stay near puppies and children. It helps the grieving process.

LynyrdSkynyrdBand said...

Beauders,

I'm sorry for your loss.

My sincere sympathies,
LS

Patty is Dead said...

Why we can't cure cancer: molecular biology and chemical signalling, tumor suppressors and promoters, genetic introns and exons, cells merging with macrophages and metastasizing, programmed apoptosis and depletion of poly-A tails. They're working on it but its very, very complex. Some believe that cancer is a genetic inevitability that would happen by chance even if we lived forever, which thank god we don't.

Patty is sorry for your loss, Beauders. Cancer is a big part of the Patty Family's history. Poirot is right about puppies and kids.

PS: Sunset, you have not heard the last from Stuart. Patty has invited him to contribute rather than plaster that URL everywhere...maybe you could encourage him to do the same.

PEACE

katie8753 said...

Beauders, I'm sorry for your loss too. It must mean a lot for you to put it on the blog.

I watched a friend die of colon cancer. It was one of the saddest things I've done yet.

Thinking of you....

MrPoirot said...

http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN3/

If you don't get Cspan3 it streams

sunset77 said...

I found a bit of info about the program listed in this post. Apparently, it apparently airs "November 9, 2013 at 10:30am & November 10, 2013 at 5:30pm ET" on C-Span 3. I have that stream open in another tab right now, thanx Poirot.

A "preview" vid of that program is on YouTube HERE.

MrPoirot said...

It was a good talk on Cspan except they wasted the 1st 30 mins. Jess Bravin decided to synopsize his entire book. However at the end he redeemed himself. He spoke about fanatics in the courtroom. Whether at Guantanamo or Sacramento the fanatic refuses to acknowledge the authority of the court and won't let anyone speak for them; preferring to self represent.
Also he spoke on how Squeaky refused any mental plea because that would delegitimize her fanatical message or cause.

This harps back to what Paul Watkins spoke about: the obsessive compulsive personality. OCD. Watkins identified a main issue behind the Family as being their singlemindedness; their radcal ability to compulsively fixate.

Whenever the Family would sit around and focus their paranoia and hate onto one individual it became a matter of time until they would attack this person or entity and kill.

One guy from the DA read a letter found in Squeaky's Sacramento apartment detailing how Squeaky wanted the CEO of Kaiser Aluminum murdered in a gruesome, tortuous way. It showe how Squeaky's became obsessed in her hatred of so-called polluters. She could become frenzied after a prolonged focus.
Sandra is mentioned in Bravin's book as knowing she could get Squeaky riled up to a frenzied, murderous rage against some individual, or some thing.

Squeaky is one thought of as being nonviolent yet the letter read on the show revealed how she was heading towards violence and only through luck did not kill anyone.

It was also covered how if told not to discuss Manson that you could not pick out Squeaky from a crowd but if she spoke on Manson she became fanatical and quickly set herself apart from the crowd.

Most of the imprisoned Family members took AA and NA courses. This helped them control obsessive desires for drugs and alcohol.

Spahn Ranch must have been like a big home full of obsessive compulsives heading for a common trainwreck.

beauders said...

Being obsessive and having OCD are two different thing. A person who suffers from OCD has an obsessive thought which causes anxiety, in order to lessen the anxiety they do a behavior that may or may not be related to the obsessive thought to lessen the anxiety. An example would be a person is scared to drive over a bridge because of earthquakes so to lessen the anxiety they roll down their window in their car as they drive over the bridge telling themselves they would survive the fall into the river by climbing out the window when they sink in the river. The Manson Family members did not have OCD they were just normal obsessives. There is a big difference, I know this because I have suffered from OCD my whole life. The only reason I'm not a shut in is because of medication and exposure therapy.

MrPoirot said...

Dr Poirot's understanding of ocd is that it covers many things such as germaphobe like on Seinfeld.
Alcoholics and druggies are ocd. Even if they quit drinking they still have the urge.
Control freaks are ocd.
Workaholics are ocd.
Various others are neat freaks sexaholics. I reaf of a lady who cleaned furniture to the extreme: she cleaned the finish off new furniture and tried to use the warranty to get new furniture claiming it was defective but the store said she cleaned the stain off the wood from obsessively cleaning. OCD is many things and can be part of more encompassing disorders. It is not always bad; your excellent surgeon may be obsessive about his work. Howard Hughes was an obsessive; he employed 750 PHDs and revolutionized the airplane industry and medicine.
But let's don't get too far from Squeaky and the Manson Family.
I got my pshiactric diploma from a big school that went out of business.

MrPoirot said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzpLyB8IE0M

At 14:00 mins you hear Paul mention ocd and the Manson Family. This is not his only sound bite on ocd. He would talk with groups like AA in S Cal about ocd. You can hear his daughter Claire talk about growing up with people all around her who were compulsives and used alcohol and drugs compulsively. He mother/Paul's wife died of O.D.
Paul felt that this was a key component to the Manson Family catastrophe.

beauders said...

Alcoholics and drug addicts do not have OCD. They have genetics that once triggered cause them to crave the substance and getting that substance becomes obsessive because they are in physical pain when they don't have it.
I have never watched Seinfield so I don't know about the germaphobe but I do know that for it to be true OCD not only do you have the obsession, then the compulsive behavior, then eventually these behaviors take over your life and cause the person pain and it negatively effects the person's life. So if the germaphobe is happy with their behavior and it causes them no distress it is not OCD it is obsessiveness.
I don't know if your joking about the degree but I would say just through life experience I know a little about OCD myself.

beauders said...

Paul Watkins was incorrect about OCD. I thought his wife committed suicide through the use of a substance and yes she was an alcoholic/depressive.

beauders said...

Poirot if you have time go look up OCD on Wikipedia. They have a correct description of what OCD is and what it is not.

katie8753 said...

Beauders, if you never watched Seinfeld, I suggest you try. Funniest show ever!