By grabbing a loaded handgun from Squeaky Fromme in 1975, Mr. Buendorf, as part of a Secret Service detail, thwarted a would-be assassin in California’s capital.
Larry Buendorf, the Secret Service agent who, by wresting a handgun away from Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, was credited with saving the life of President Gerald R. Ford in an assassination attempt in 1975 in California, died on Sunday at his home in Colorado Springs. He was 87.
His death was announced by his wife, Linda.
After leaving the government in 1993, Mr. Buendorf (pronounced BOON-dorf) was the chief security officer for the United States Olympic Committee until he retired in 2018.
On Sept. 5, 1975, President Ford spurned his limousine, which was idling outside the Senator Hotel in Sacramento, and, flanked by Secret Service agents, strode across the street to greet a throng of well-wishers on his way to the State Capitol to meet with Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.
“My position was right at his shoulder,” Mr. Buendorf recalled in 2010 in an interview for the President Gerald R. Ford Oral History Project.
“Squeaky was back in the crowd, maybe one person back, and she had an ankle holster on with a .45,” he said, referring to a .45-caliber semiautomatic revolver. “That’s a big gun to have on your ankle. So, when it came up, it came up low, and I happened to be looking in that direction, 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!’ When I yelled out ‘Gun!’ I popped that .45 out of her hand.”
He added: “I got a hold of her fingers, and she’s screaming — the crowd is screaming — and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t have a vest on, I don’t know where the next shot is coming from,’ and that I don’t think she’s alone. All of this is going on while I’m trying to control her.”