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Caught in Fate's Trajectory, Along With Gerald Ford
Oliver Sipple, left, lunges for Sara Jane Moore, who was trying to assassinate President Ford.
(By Gordon Stone -- San Francisco Examiner Via The Associated Press)
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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.
