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.”
“She turns around, and I pulled her arm back and dropped her to the ground, and agents and police come from the back of the crowd” as Ms. Fromme shrieked in disbelief, he said.
“She’s screaming, ‘It didn’t go off!’” he continued. “I had it in my hand. I knew what she was doing, she was pulling back on the slide, and I hit the slide before she could chamber a round. If she’d had a round chambered, I couldn’t have been there in time. It would’ve gone through me and the president.”
Ms. Fromme, who was nicknamed Squeaky because of her high-pitched voice, was a 26-year-old disciple of the cult leader Charles Manson, whose gang’s brutal killing spree in 1969 claimed the lives of the actress Sharon Tate and eight others.
Cloaked in a full-length red robe and matching turban, Ms. Fromme had cocked the hammer, but none of the four bullets that the gun was armed with had entered the chamber yet.
Testifying for the prosecution at Ms. Fromme’s trial, Mr. Buendorf said she jerked the gun when he grabbed it “as though she was trying to pull it away or fire it.” Other agents hustled Mr. Ford to safety.
“I was in the right place at the right time,” Mr. Buendorf, who was 37 at the time and had been an agent for five years, said. “If I had been looking someplace else, who knows how history would have changed.”
Ms. Fromme was convicted of attempted assassination and sentenced to life in prison. She was paroled in 2009.
Harvey Schiller, the former chief executive of the Olympic Committee who hired Mr. Buendorf, described him in an interview as “a real hero who was universally loved and trusted.”
Lawrence Merle Buendorf was born on Nov. 18, 1937, in Wells, a city of about 2,000 in southern Minnesota. His father, Merle, managed a furniture store. His mother was Ruby (Meyer) Buendorf.
In high school, Larry himself was a president — of his junior class. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business from Mankato State College (now Minnesota State University, Mankato) in 1959, then joined the U.S. Navy and became a pilot during the Vietnam War.
“I think he wanted to serve the country in the military — that was his first choice — and wanted to be a defender of freedom,” Mr. Schiller, the Olympic Committee official, said.
After he was discharged in 1970, Mr. Buendorf applied to the Secret Service and the F.B.I. and was accepted by both. Choosing the Secret Service, he was assigned to its Chicago field office before being deployed in 1972 to the Presidential Protective Division in Washington, where he helped safeguard Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Ford and Jimmy Carter.
He served in the Denver field office from 1977 to 1982 and ran the Omaha office from 1982 to 1983 before returning to the Protective Division, where he became special agent in charge of a California-based team that was assigned to Mr. Ford. Mr. Buendorf retired from the Secret Service in 1993. Mr. Ford died in 2006, at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
When Mr. Ford skied, Mr. Buendorf’s job was “to make sure that he didn’t trip over his own skis or let the chair hit him,” he said, referring to mountain ski-chair lifts — although he added that the president was actually a good athlete. When Mr. Ford went swimming in the ocean, Mr. Buendorf said, “I was one of the assigned swimmers that would go out as shark bait — go further out than the president — and swim along.”
He was awarded the U.S. Treasury Meritorious Service Award (the service was an arm of the Treasury Department until 2003, when it was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security) and the United States Secret Service Valor Award.
In addition to his wife, Linda (Allen) Buendorf, whom he married in 2013, Mr. Buendorf is survived by a daughter, Kimberly, from a previous marriage; a stepdaughter, Stephanie; and three grandchildren.
Even after Mr. Buendorf left government service, he and Mr. Ford maintained their relationship; they touched base by phone almost every Sept. 5, the anniversary of the assassination attempt.
At the Olympic Committee, he supervised security at its headquarters in Colorado Springs and at training sites in Lake Placid, N.Y., and Chula Vista, Calif.
During the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, he oversaw the safety of the athletes after a call to 911 warned of a terrorist’s pipe bomb in the Centennial Olympic Park. The explosion killed one person and injured more than a hundred.
“Him smiling gives you a lot of confidence,” Rulon Gardner, who won a gold medal in Greco-Roman wrestling at the 2000 Sydney Olympics in Australia, told The Gazette of Colorado Springs. “You feel like you had a cocoon whenever you traveled with him. You put him in a 450-degree oven and he’s as cool as ice. The man will not sweat.”
After the attack in 1975, Mr. Ford resumed his prearranged schedule, meeting with Governor Brown and then returning to Air Force One, where he was met by his wife, Betty Ford, who, Mr. Buendorf said, “had been off doing her thing.”
Mr. Buendorf was being debriefed at the time, but he vividly remembered the president’s account of her greeting.
“He said he approached the plane and Mrs. Ford goes, ‘So, how was your day?’” Mr. Buendorf recalled in the oral history interview, with the biographer Richard Norton Smith.
“‘How was your day?’” Mr. Smith repeated quizzically. “I assume he wanted to tell her very gently. I mean, how do you answer that?”
