May 6, 2025 • 29 mins
The guy who took a shot at Trump last summer wasn't the first person to shoot a presidential candidate without a clear political motive. In 1972, Arthur Bremer failed to assassinate Richard Nixon and settled on one of Nixon's opponents instead.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello everyone, Molly Konger here. You've probably
noticed this episode showed up on your feed on an
unusual day. If you're a diehard listener of another show
on the network, it could happen here. You may have
(00:21):
also noticed that this isn't exactly a brand new episode.
But I'm not here this week. I'm not thinking about
were Little Guys at all right now. I'm on my honeymoon.
The show feed will run old episodes this week and
next week, so there will be something on your feed
on the usual day, but I wanted to drop in
a little something extra this week too. This episode is
(00:44):
one that originally aired last summer on It could Happen here,
so some of you may have heard it already, and
there are a few references to the fact that it's
August of twenty twenty four. I didn't change those lines,
but I have slightly edited and re recorded the episode
so my talented audio engineer Rory could give this the
full weird little guy's audio feel. So if you missed
(01:06):
it last summer, I hope you'll enjoy this story about
the very weird little guy who shot a segregationist Because
it turned out shooting Richard Nixon was too hard. Remember
that time Donald Trump got shot? I kind of don't.
(01:31):
It feels like it was one hundred years ago or
in a dream. I barely remember who I was during
those tense few days where it seemed possible Trump would
ride that momentum to victory, imagining posters of that photo
of Trump with blood dripping down his face, fist raised.
And then it kind of didn't matter at all anymore.
(01:52):
We all forgot. The shooter wasn't a Biden sleeper agent
sent to take down the opposition. He was just some
kid with a rifle and the kind of uniquely American
desire to cause chaos with it. And that was really
hard for a lot of people to swallow. What do
you mean it doesn't seem like he was politically motivated.
(02:13):
He shot the former president. He shot him while he
was on stage at a rally for his campaign to
retake the presidency. Everything about the situation was political. How
could the shooter have had any other motivation? But he
wouldn't be the first guy to take a shot at
a president or a presidential candidate for what seems like
(02:35):
no reason at all. Far from it, As it turns out,
while I was doing the research for the first episode
of Wee Little Guys, I got lost on some side quests.
That's always happening to me. But as I breathed past
a quick mention of George Wallace, the four term governor
of Alabama who is perhaps best remembered for his rallying
(02:58):
cry of segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. You know,
the one I remembered that he had gotten shot while
he was running for president too. During the primary in
nineteen seventy two, George Wallace was paralyzed after surviving an
attempted assassination on the campaign trail. Surely, whoever shot a
(03:19):
man like George Wallace did it out of a deep
ideological commitment to something right. Maybe it was a civil
rights activist who opposed Wallace's views on race, or a
McGovern voter concerned about Wallace's attempt to gain the Democratic
Party nomination after he'd won five states as a third
party candidate in nineteen sixty eight. Or maybe it was
(03:42):
a diehard Nixon supporter who saw Wallace as a spoiler,
siphoning conservative votes away from Nixon. But that's not what happened.
When Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace four times in the
chest and stomach on May fifteenth, nineteen seventy two. It
had nothing at all to do with Wallace's policy positions,
or honestly, even really anything to do with George Wallace.
(04:07):
Rehmer had been planning for months to assassinate Richard Nixon,
but it turned out that was too hard. He just
wanted to shoot somebody important. I hesitate to draw too
many comparisons to the Trump shooter because there's a lot
we still don't know and may never know. But it
has come out that Thomas Crooks was equally interested in
(04:29):
shooting Joe Biden. Trump just happened to have had a
campaign rally close to his home in Pennsylvania with weak
perimeter security. Crooks had also looked into how to get
close to FBI Director Christopher Ray, Attorney General Merrick Garland,
and inexplicably Kate Middleton. Yes, that Kate Middleton, the Princess
of Wales. If Biden had been campaigning in western Pennsylvania,
(04:53):
or if Richard Nixon's security had been less vigilant, Crooks
may have shot Biden and Remer may have killed Nixon.
It doesn't seem like it really mattered to either of
them who they shot, as long as they shot a
guy running for president. One of the funny things about
history is realizing we've always been what we are now.
(05:17):
There's truly nothing new under the sun. Within hours of
the attempt on George Wallace's life, before there was any
clear information at all, Nixon was demanding that the White
House Deputy Director of Communications, Kenneth Clawson, put out a
statement that the shooter was a supporter of George McGovern,
the front runner and the Democratic primary Nixon would go
(05:39):
on to defeat McGovern later that year. Just say we've
got unmistakable evidence, Dixon said, Of course, they didn't have
any evidence of any kind, and when they did get
that evidence, it certainly didn't show the shooter working on
the McGovern campaign. But that was the rumor Nixon hoped
to spread in those early hours. Rumors ball and put
(06:02):
it on the right and right away you can get there.
You put it to must get out before they fit
them on the right way. It's a bit fuzzy, but
you can hear Nixon saying that they need to act
quickly to pin this on the left. Rumors are going
(06:26):
to spread, and they want theirs to spread first and fastest.
It doesn't matter what's true, It matters what people believe. Unfortunately,
we don't have thousands of hours of secret tape recordings
inside the offices of today's Republicans, but we did see
something similar in the immediate aftermath of the Trump shooting.
(06:47):
He's a Biden voter, he's a Democrat, he's a radical leftist,
he's Antifa. We can already tell. We just know it's obvious.
We have proof. The fact that there was no proof
of anything on day one, it doesn't matter. It matters
even less that no proof ever materialized. You just have
to get the room or out first. You have to
(07:08):
make an impression while the cement is wet and sometime
little stick. One thing that is not on the Nixon tapes, though,
is a conversation that allegedly occurred that afternoon in May
of nineteen seventy two that was reported by Seymour Hirsch
twenty years later in nineteen ninety two. Despite a Supreme
Court ruling in the seventies the tapes belonged to the
(07:30):
National Archives, the full volume of the Nixon tapes were
not made available to the public until two thousand and seven. Now,
whatever you think of his later career, Seymour Hirsh wasn't
a making stuff up kind of guy back then, So
I don't think he's fabricating any part of this story.
He's still alive and has a sub stack at eighty
(07:50):
seven years old, so I don't want any beef with Seymour.
He said a decade's long career as an investigative journalist
and a Pulitzer for exposing the cover up of the
Malai massacre. So I don't think he's patting the truth here.
But in his nineteen ninety two New Yorker piece Nixon's
last cover up, the Tapes he wants the Archives to suppress,
(08:11):
Hirsch wrote that the unreleased tapes from the afternoon of
the Wallace shooting contained recordings of Nixon directing I Howard Hunt,
the retired CIA officer who head at Nixon's White House,
plumbers to break into Arthur Bremer's apartment before the FBI
could search it and plant McGovern campaign literature. Hunt's own
(08:45):
autobiography admits only that at Nixon's direction, Nixon advisor Charles
Coulson did ask Hunt to quote take a look around
Bremer's apartment. Given that this is all taking place just
a month before Hunt did in fact play a key
role in the Watergate break in, this isn't exactly unbelievable.
(09:06):
I can absolutely believe that Richard Nixon asked E. Howard
Hunt to break into a building for some nefarious purpose,
because we know that happened at least once. And one
thing the varying accounts do seem to agree on is
that Hunt was unable to complete the assignment because the
FBI had already sealed off Bremmer's apartment in Milwaukee before
he got there. Hirsh's article in nineteen ninety two claims
(09:31):
that the tapes contain recordings of Coulson breaking the news
to Nixon that Hunt had arrived too late and the
apartment was already under police guard, and that the recording
captures Nixon berating Coulson for not doing more to slow
down the FBI. Again, this is all very believable if
you have even a passing knowledge of Richard Nixon, and
(09:51):
Colson himself was the one who related this account to
Seymour Hirsh in nineteen ninety two. The problem is we
have something now that Seymour Hirsch didn't have in nineteen
ninety two, and that's those tapes. Fifteen years after Hirsch's
article was published, researchers scoured the newly released recordings for
proof of this version of events, and it isn't there.
(10:16):
It's entirely possible that Coulson was recalling conversations that did
occur but outside the presence of the tape machine, or
maybe he's misremembering how much of this was actually spoken
aloud and what was simply understood. It's not out of
the realm of possibility that Coulson is recalling something Nixon
definitely wanted. It's just not on the tapes. Absence of
(10:40):
proof isn't proof of absence. But we do have a
pretty complete record of Nixon's conversations on the afternoon of
May fifteenth, nineteen seventy two. There are famously eighteen missing
minutes in those tapes, but those are from a different
afternoon in nineteen seventy two. On May fifteenth, though, Nixon
had just gotten out of a budget meeting around four pm,
(11:02):
shortly after the shooting, and that's when he first got
the news. His first phone call was to his own wife,
Pat and then he called George Wallace's wife, Cornelia. He
then asked Secretary of the Treasury John Connolly to call
Ted Kennedy to offer him full Secret Service protection. And
presumably this is because he believed Ted Kennedy would be
(11:23):
McGovern's vice presidential pick. But I guess if people are
getting assassinated, you need to account for all your Kennedy's.
It's actually kind of wild to dig into those tapes
and see where Everwend's heads were on that afternoon in
the Oval office. A recording from around seven pm, so
three hours after the shooting, captures speculation that the shooting
(11:44):
may have been a false flag by Wallace's own people,
but the idea was quickly dismissed. He wouldn't have had
his own people shoot him in the stomach. They would
have gone for something less likely to end up killing him,
like shooting him in the foot, which is a conversation
we all heard immediately after the Trump shooting. Isn't it right?
Maybe this is a stunt, but why would he have
(12:06):
them shoot at his head? That's so risky. And this
recording to captures top Nix and aids hoping that whoever
did this was a left wing nut and not a
right wing nut. It could be one of his own
people too. They wouldn't shoot that man, and they would
have shot him in the foot or something. I haven't
(12:30):
it wouldn't be It is not one of those other
people shoot him in the stot did to kill him? Oh,
I think the guy. The guy has to be a
nut of some kind. I just don't be the left
wing nut, not a right wing So Nixon tried to
put a thumb on the scale after the fact, but
the exact nature of his meddling will forever be up
(12:51):
for debate, and the Nixon tapes aren't the only unique
primary source for what went down that day. In the
early months of nineteen seventy two, as Arthur Bremmer prepared
to shoot Nixon, gave up on shooting Nixon and ultimately
shot George Wallace, he kept a diary, and in nineteen
seventy three, Harper's Magazine Press published that diary. I couldn't
(13:16):
find a physical copy of that original bound book for
less than a small fortune, but I did find an
original scan of Bremer's diary that was produced in court
as evidence. The diary is a strange and fascinating document.
Only the latter half was published. He'd thrown away the
first hundred and forty eight pages, a fact he notes
(13:37):
on the first page of the version that we do have.
In nineteen eighty a construction worker named Sherman Griffin found
the first one hundred and forty eight pages wrapped in
plastic inside of a backpack under the twenty seventh Street
Viaduct in Milwaukee from prison. Arthur Bremmer actually tried to
sue Griffin for ownership of the document, saying it would
only be used to embarrass him, but in nineteen eighty
(13:59):
one a court ruled that Griffin could keep it. Find
your skeepers. But the portion that we do have, that
latter half of the diary is a lot of things.
It's full of spelling errors and disorganized thinking, and sexual
fantasy and mundane rambling stream of consciousness of a guy
(14:20):
going about his day to day life as he tries
to figure out how to assassinate the president. A few
months after it was published, The New York Review published
an essay by A. Gourvadal speculating that Brehmer hadn't written
the diary at all. As a literary critic, it was
Vidal's professional opinion that Brehmer could not have written such
a document, though it was riddled with spelling errors. Vidal
(14:42):
writes that they come and go, almost as though the
writer is remembering, as he writes that he's supposed to
be a twenty one year old bus boy of mediocre intelligence.
He also doubts Brehmer was well read enough to make
references to Soljhanitson's Day in the Life of von Denisovitch
or quip A he crossed the Great Lakes, call me Ishmael.
(15:04):
Both Denisovich and Ishmael are misspelled, but that could be intentional, right, No,
Gore Vidal believes, or perhaps would like you to think
he believes. You know, it's hard to say that the
diary was falsified in its entirety by E. Howard Hunt
Nixon Spook. Hunt was a prolific writer, giving Thedal a
(15:26):
large volume of material for comparison, and he claims there
are similarities in the writing styles. Again, just as Hirsch's
claims about the Secret Tapes in nineteen ninety two were
called into question when we got the tapes in two
thousand and seven, Vidal's essay was published in nineteen seventy three,
seven years before the first half of the diary was found.
(15:48):
So even if you're inclined to believe Hunt was crafty
enough to construct this elaborate plot with a fake diary
and a patsy shooter, it's a real stretch to think
that he would write one hundred and forty eight pages,
wrap them in plastic, hide them in a backpack, and
tuck that backpack into a nook in a bridge in
Milwaukee to be discovered by a construction worker years later.
But it's also possible that Gorvittal was just doing a
(16:10):
bit that were not clever enough to understand. But the
legacy of that diary lives on in some surprising ways.
In those early confusing days after the Trump shooting, before
we all forgot what ever happened, I did see a
lot of people point out that the last time at
president took a bullet, it wasn't over politics at all.
(16:33):
John Hinckley Junior shot Reagan to impress Jody Foster. Remember,
And Okay, here's where I have to admit something kind
of embarrassing. I've always just accepted that statement at face value.
It makes no sense at all. But he wasn't acting rationally,
so it's not something that seemed like I needed to
(16:53):
make sense of. He shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jody Foster.
I guess he just thought she'd find that impressive. No
need to interrogate that further. A lot of women might
find it impressive if he shot Ronald Reagan, so there's
not a lot of follow up to do on that.
The thing is, i'd never seen the movie Taxi Driver.
I truly never pieced together that he thought shooting the
(17:16):
president would impress Jody Foster because she had starred as
a child sex worker in the movie Taxi Driver, in
which the protagonist Travis Bickle plans to shoot a presidential
candidate named Charles Palatine. Hinkley shot Reagan to impress Jody
Foster makes a lot more sense with that added cultural context,
And I fear I may have been the last person
(17:37):
in America to realize that. So maybe everybody else already
knows this part too. Taxi Driver owes a lot to
Arthur Bremer, the guy who shot George Wallace. Screenwriter Paul
(18:05):
Schrader has always denied basing any part of the movie
on Bremer's diary. In a nineteen seventy six interview, Schrader
says he was inspired by the shooting itself, but that
the script was actually finished before the diaries were published,
telling Richard Thompson for a film comment, I want to
emphasize that the script was written before any of the
(18:27):
diary was published. After I read the diary, I was
very tempted to take some of the good stuff from
it and add it to taxi Driver, but I decided
not to because of legal ramifications. Bremmer is sitting there
in jail with nothing better to do than sue us,
which is why I made certain the script was registered
before the diary came out, and that nothing was changed
(18:47):
after the diary's publication. And it's actually kind of prescient
of him, come to think of it. He's saying in
nineteen seventy six that Brehmer could file some kind of
nuisance lawsuit from prison, and this is years before he
tried to get half a million dollars and his diary
back from that construction worker. And look, I'm obviously not
(19:07):
a film buff. Like I said, I only recently saw
a taxi driver for the first time, so I won't
say Paul Schrader isn't telling the truth. And I don't know.
Maybe if you're a film buff, you'd say there's a
difference between changing the script and changing the screenplay. Those
are kind of different things, right, I guess that's true.
I don't know, because there are some scenes in Taxi
(19:30):
Driver that, unless Scarcese and Trader had some kind of
deep psychic connection to whatever forces in the universe motivated
Arthur Bremmer, they absolutely came from the Diary. You can't
tell me if they don't come from the diary, because
when I sat down to watch the movie, I had
just finished reading the Diary. So when I saw the
(19:50):
scene where Travis Bickle, the titular taxi driver, pulls up
outside of a building with his fair Bartin Scorsese himself
in the back seat, I did that, Leonardo DiCaprio pointing
me at my TV when the camera panned to the
woman in the window and she's smoking a cigarette, partially
obscured by the gauzy curtains, And that's a rather specific
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visual image. And just a few pages into Bremer's diary,
he describes a very similar scene before he flew back
to Milwaukee to try across the border into Canada to
shoot Richard Nixon at an event in Ottawa. He wrote
this in his diary, My last night at the Howard
Johnson's in the Jamaica Area, New York City. I didn't
(20:32):
sleep much. A beautiful naked lady across the parking lot
of the next motel out by her window Florida ceiling,
smoking cigarettes, and I had to watch her. Her table
room light was on, and a thin veil of curtain
allowed me to watch as she passionately kissed a man
who wore clothes. I never saw them in each other's
arms more than a minute at a time. They must
(20:53):
have been fighting through binoculars. I saw them gesture like
Italians and open their mouths very wide, very often. So
maybe Schrader did finish the script before he read the diary,
but the diary absolutely influenced the way the film was shot.
According to Andrew Rausch's book on the Films of Martin Scorsese,
(21:13):
Robert de Niro prepared for the role by getting a
New York taxi license and driving around the city listening
to a cassette tape of Bremer's diary. The diary is
genuinely odd. Normally, I'm firmly in the camp of please
do not read or recommend that others read the manifesto
left behind by a shooter. But I really don't think
(21:36):
anyone will read Arthur Bremer's diary about leaving a nude
massage parlor frustrated that he's still a virgin, and feel
inspired by it. But I do think it's a fascinating document.
I think I learned more about what's inside the mind
of a nihilist aspiring shooter from Bremer's diary than I've
learned from any self indulgent little manifesto left by a
(21:58):
mass shooter. After failing to get his shot at Nixon
at the appearance in Ottawa in April, he wrote, I
just need a little opening in a second of time.
Nothing has happened for so long three months. The last
person I held a conversation with in three months was
a near naked girl rubbing my erect penis, and she
wouldn't let me put it through her failures. A few
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pages later, he writes that he thought about getting really drunk,
but quote decided against it. Just wanted to pick a
fight with a bartender somewhere someone and get arrested, and
then where am I? I got something to do something
big before I ever get arrested again. He writes that
he's tired of waiting. He wants to be a madman
(22:41):
who kills, and then abruptly transitions to saying he quote
goes crazy when he hears Johnny Cash's new single, quoting
the lyrics I shot you with my thirty eight and
now I'm doing time, before noting that a baseball game
was canceled due to the rain. Honestly, the document it
reminds me of most is a diary kept by Franklin Seacreast.
(23:04):
I was a young man who set a synagogue on
fire in Austin in twenty twenty one. Seacrest's diary is
the similar sort of strange stream of consciousness, accounting of
his frustrations with women, his daily activities interspersed with these
outbursts of violent desire. After taking two weeks away from
his diary to deal with the tragedy of failing to
(23:25):
kill Richard Nixon, Rehmer went to see Clockwork Orange. As
he watched the movie, he decided he would kill George
Wallace instead, though he lamented that this was a second
rate target, writing, I won't even rate a TV interruption
in Russia or Europe. When the news breaks, they never
heard of Wallace. If something big and nom flares up,
(23:45):
I'll end up at the bottom of the first page.
In America, the editors will say Wallace dead. Who cares?
He won't get more than three minutes on network TV news.
I don't expect anybody to get a big, throbbing erection
from the news. You know, a storm in some country
we never heard of, kills ten thousand people, big deal.
Past the beer and what's on TV tonight. I hope
(24:08):
my death makes more sense than my life. Days before
he finally took the shot, he wrote yesterday, I even
considered mc govern as a target. If I go to
prison as an assassin, solitary forever, guards in my cell,
et cetera, or get killed or suicided, what difference to me?
Ask me why I did it, and I'd say I
(24:29):
don't know, or nothing else to do, or why not,
or I have to kill somebody. It bothers me that
they are about thirty guys in prison now who threatened
the president and we never heard a thing about him
except that they're in prison. Maybe what they need is organization.
Make the first lady a widow incorporated, chicken in every
pot and bullet in every head incorporated. They'll hold a
(24:52):
national convention every year to pick the executioner. A winner
will be chosen from the best entry in forty thousand
words or less, preferably less upon the theme how to
do a bang up job of getting people to notice you?
Or get it off your chest. Make your problems everybody's.
(25:12):
On May thirteenth, two days before the shooting, Bremer attended
a Wallace rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There are photographs of
Bremer at the rally that day, and he even spoke
to a police officer who responded to a call about
a suspicious vehicle parked near the venue. Bremer told the
officer he just wanted to be early to get a
good spot at the rally and complied when asked to
move his car. His loaded thirty eight was in his
(25:35):
jacket pocket. He writes in his diary that he could
have taken his shot that day, but at the last minute,
two teenage girls got between him and his target, and
he thought they'd be disfigured or blinded. If he fired
through the glass they were pressed up against, writing, I
let Wallace go only to spare these two stupid, innocent,
delighted kids. His final entry, the night before the shooting
(25:58):
ends with got a signed from campaign headquarters here to
shield the gun. Is there anything else to say? My
cry upon firing will be a penny for your thoughts.
On May fifteenth, nineteen seventy two, Arthur Bremmer was one
of about a thousand people who showed up to hear
George Wallace speak at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland
(26:21):
around four p m. Just as Wallace finished speaking, Bremer
pushed his way through the crowd, hoping to shake Wallis's hand,
and unloaded his thirty eight. He struck George Wallace four
times and wounded three others, a state trooper, a campaign volunteer,
and a Secret Service agent. He forgot to shout anything
at all as he did it. He was convicted and
(26:43):
sentenced to sixty three years, later reduced to fifty three
years on appeal. In nineteen ninety five, George Wallace wrote
to Bremer in prison, telling him that he forgave him
for the shooting and hoping they could correspond a bit
to get to know one another, responded, and George Wallace
died in nineteen ninety eight. Arthur Bremmer was denied parole
(27:06):
in nineteen ninety six after arguing at his hearing that
quote shooting segregationist dinosaurs isn't as bad as harming mainstream politicians,
but he was eventually paroled in two thousand and seven
after serving thirty five years. For the last eighteen years,
Arthur Bremer has lived in Maryland under the conditions of
his supervised release. He's been on electronic monitoring, he has
(27:29):
to submit to mental evaluations, and he's been required to
stay away from all elected officials and candidates for office.
His supervision actually ends this month, on May fifteenth, twenty
twenty five, the fifty third anniversary of the shooting. He'll
be seventy five years old this year, and he's been
a model parolee as far as I can tell, So
(27:50):
I doubt he'll be getting up to anything interesting once
he's legally allowed to leave the state of Maryland. So
I guess he shot George Wallace for no reason at all.
And Robert de Niro's study of the diary he left
behind inspired the performance that made Hinckley shoot Reagan. There's
nothing hard to believe at all about the idea that
(28:13):
Thomas Crooks wanted to shoot a president just to be remembered.
Is anyone at all? Wee Little Guys in a production
(28:36):
of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and
recorded by me Polly Coner. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lettterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by
Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys
podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
(28:58):
on the Weird Little Guy subpreddit. Just don't post anything
that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.
Cool Zone Media. Hello everyone, Molly Konger here. You've probably
noticed this episode showed up on your feed on an
unusual day. If you're a diehard listener of another show
on the network, it could happen here. You may have
(00:21):
also noticed that this isn't exactly a brand new episode.
But I'm not here this week. I'm not thinking about
were Little Guys at all right now. I'm on my honeymoon.
The show feed will run old episodes this week and
next week, so there will be something on your feed
on the usual day, but I wanted to drop in
a little something extra this week too. This episode is
(00:44):
one that originally aired last summer on It could Happen here,
so some of you may have heard it already, and
there are a few references to the fact that it's
August of twenty twenty four. I didn't change those lines,
but I have slightly edited and re recorded the episode
so my talented audio engineer Rory could give this the
full weird little guy's audio feel. So if you missed
(01:06):
it last summer, I hope you'll enjoy this story about
the very weird little guy who shot a segregationist Because
it turned out shooting Richard Nixon was too hard. Remember
that time Donald Trump got shot? I kind of don't.
(01:31):
It feels like it was one hundred years ago or
in a dream. I barely remember who I was during
those tense few days where it seemed possible Trump would
ride that momentum to victory, imagining posters of that photo
of Trump with blood dripping down his face, fist raised.
And then it kind of didn't matter at all anymore.
(01:52):
We all forgot. The shooter wasn't a Biden sleeper agent
sent to take down the opposition. He was just some
kid with a rifle and the kind of uniquely American
desire to cause chaos with it. And that was really
hard for a lot of people to swallow. What do
you mean it doesn't seem like he was politically motivated.
(02:13):
He shot the former president. He shot him while he
was on stage at a rally for his campaign to
retake the presidency. Everything about the situation was political. How
could the shooter have had any other motivation? But he
wouldn't be the first guy to take a shot at
a president or a presidential candidate for what seems like
(02:35):
no reason at all. Far from it, As it turns out,
while I was doing the research for the first episode
of Wee Little Guys, I got lost on some side quests.
That's always happening to me. But as I breathed past
a quick mention of George Wallace, the four term governor
of Alabama who is perhaps best remembered for his rallying
(02:58):
cry of segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. You know,
the one I remembered that he had gotten shot while
he was running for president too. During the primary in
nineteen seventy two, George Wallace was paralyzed after surviving an
attempted assassination on the campaign trail. Surely, whoever shot a
(03:19):
man like George Wallace did it out of a deep
ideological commitment to something right. Maybe it was a civil
rights activist who opposed Wallace's views on race, or a
McGovern voter concerned about Wallace's attempt to gain the Democratic
Party nomination after he'd won five states as a third
party candidate in nineteen sixty eight. Or maybe it was
(03:42):
a diehard Nixon supporter who saw Wallace as a spoiler,
siphoning conservative votes away from Nixon. But that's not what happened.
When Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace four times in the
chest and stomach on May fifteenth, nineteen seventy two. It
had nothing at all to do with Wallace's policy positions,
or honestly, even really anything to do with George Wallace.
(04:07):
Rehmer had been planning for months to assassinate Richard Nixon,
but it turned out that was too hard. He just
wanted to shoot somebody important. I hesitate to draw too
many comparisons to the Trump shooter because there's a lot
we still don't know and may never know. But it
has come out that Thomas Crooks was equally interested in
(04:29):
shooting Joe Biden. Trump just happened to have had a
campaign rally close to his home in Pennsylvania with weak
perimeter security. Crooks had also looked into how to get
close to FBI Director Christopher Ray, Attorney General Merrick Garland,
and inexplicably Kate Middleton. Yes, that Kate Middleton, the Princess
of Wales. If Biden had been campaigning in western Pennsylvania,
(04:53):
or if Richard Nixon's security had been less vigilant, Crooks
may have shot Biden and Remer may have killed Nixon.
It doesn't seem like it really mattered to either of
them who they shot, as long as they shot a
guy running for president. One of the funny things about
history is realizing we've always been what we are now.
(05:17):
There's truly nothing new under the sun. Within hours of
the attempt on George Wallace's life, before there was any
clear information at all, Nixon was demanding that the White
House Deputy Director of Communications, Kenneth Clawson, put out a
statement that the shooter was a supporter of George McGovern,
the front runner and the Democratic primary Nixon would go
(05:39):
on to defeat McGovern later that year. Just say we've
got unmistakable evidence, Dixon said, Of course, they didn't have
any evidence of any kind, and when they did get
that evidence, it certainly didn't show the shooter working on
the McGovern campaign. But that was the rumor Nixon hoped
to spread in those early hours. Rumors ball and put
(06:02):
it on the right and right away you can get there.
You put it to must get out before they fit
them on the right way. It's a bit fuzzy, but
you can hear Nixon saying that they need to act
quickly to pin this on the left. Rumors are going
(06:26):
to spread, and they want theirs to spread first and fastest.
It doesn't matter what's true, It matters what people believe. Unfortunately,
we don't have thousands of hours of secret tape recordings
inside the offices of today's Republicans, but we did see
something similar in the immediate aftermath of the Trump shooting.
(06:47):
He's a Biden voter, he's a Democrat, he's a radical leftist,
he's Antifa. We can already tell. We just know it's obvious.
We have proof. The fact that there was no proof
of anything on day one, it doesn't matter. It matters
even less that no proof ever materialized. You just have
to get the room or out first. You have to
(07:08):
make an impression while the cement is wet and sometime
little stick. One thing that is not on the Nixon tapes, though,
is a conversation that allegedly occurred that afternoon in May
of nineteen seventy two that was reported by Seymour Hirsch
twenty years later in nineteen ninety two. Despite a Supreme
Court ruling in the seventies the tapes belonged to the
(07:30):
National Archives, the full volume of the Nixon tapes were
not made available to the public until two thousand and seven. Now,
whatever you think of his later career, Seymour Hirsh wasn't
a making stuff up kind of guy back then, So
I don't think he's fabricating any part of this story.
He's still alive and has a sub stack at eighty
(07:50):
seven years old, so I don't want any beef with Seymour.
He said a decade's long career as an investigative journalist
and a Pulitzer for exposing the cover up of the
Malai massacre. So I don't think he's patting the truth here.
But in his nineteen ninety two New Yorker piece Nixon's
last cover up, the Tapes he wants the Archives to suppress,
(08:11):
Hirsch wrote that the unreleased tapes from the afternoon of
the Wallace shooting contained recordings of Nixon directing I Howard Hunt,
the retired CIA officer who head at Nixon's White House,
plumbers to break into Arthur Bremer's apartment before the FBI
could search it and plant McGovern campaign literature. Hunt's own
(08:45):
autobiography admits only that at Nixon's direction, Nixon advisor Charles
Coulson did ask Hunt to quote take a look around
Bremer's apartment. Given that this is all taking place just
a month before Hunt did in fact play a key
role in the Watergate break in, this isn't exactly unbelievable.
(09:06):
I can absolutely believe that Richard Nixon asked E. Howard
Hunt to break into a building for some nefarious purpose,
because we know that happened at least once. And one
thing the varying accounts do seem to agree on is
that Hunt was unable to complete the assignment because the
FBI had already sealed off Bremmer's apartment in Milwaukee before
he got there. Hirsh's article in nineteen ninety two claims
(09:31):
that the tapes contain recordings of Coulson breaking the news
to Nixon that Hunt had arrived too late and the
apartment was already under police guard, and that the recording
captures Nixon berating Coulson for not doing more to slow
down the FBI. Again, this is all very believable if
you have even a passing knowledge of Richard Nixon, and
(09:51):
Colson himself was the one who related this account to
Seymour Hirsh in nineteen ninety two. The problem is we
have something now that Seymour Hirsch didn't have in nineteen
ninety two, and that's those tapes. Fifteen years after Hirsch's
article was published, researchers scoured the newly released recordings for
proof of this version of events, and it isn't there.
(10:16):
It's entirely possible that Coulson was recalling conversations that did
occur but outside the presence of the tape machine, or
maybe he's misremembering how much of this was actually spoken
aloud and what was simply understood. It's not out of
the realm of possibility that Coulson is recalling something Nixon
definitely wanted. It's just not on the tapes. Absence of
(10:40):
proof isn't proof of absence. But we do have a
pretty complete record of Nixon's conversations on the afternoon of
May fifteenth, nineteen seventy two. There are famously eighteen missing
minutes in those tapes, but those are from a different
afternoon in nineteen seventy two. On May fifteenth, though, Nixon
had just gotten out of a budget meeting around four pm,
(11:02):
shortly after the shooting, and that's when he first got
the news. His first phone call was to his own wife,
Pat and then he called George Wallace's wife, Cornelia. He
then asked Secretary of the Treasury John Connolly to call
Ted Kennedy to offer him full Secret Service protection. And
presumably this is because he believed Ted Kennedy would be
(11:23):
McGovern's vice presidential pick. But I guess if people are
getting assassinated, you need to account for all your Kennedy's.
It's actually kind of wild to dig into those tapes
and see where Everwend's heads were on that afternoon in
the Oval office. A recording from around seven pm, so
three hours after the shooting, captures speculation that the shooting
(11:44):
may have been a false flag by Wallace's own people,
but the idea was quickly dismissed. He wouldn't have had
his own people shoot him in the stomach. They would
have gone for something less likely to end up killing him,
like shooting him in the foot, which is a conversation
we all heard immediately after the Trump shooting. Isn't it right?
Maybe this is a stunt, but why would he have
(12:06):
them shoot at his head? That's so risky. And this
recording to captures top Nix and aids hoping that whoever
did this was a left wing nut and not a
right wing nut. It could be one of his own
people too. They wouldn't shoot that man, and they would
have shot him in the foot or something. I haven't
(12:30):
it wouldn't be It is not one of those other
people shoot him in the stot did to kill him? Oh,
I think the guy. The guy has to be a
nut of some kind. I just don't be the left
wing nut, not a right wing So Nixon tried to
put a thumb on the scale after the fact, but
the exact nature of his meddling will forever be up
(12:51):
for debate, and the Nixon tapes aren't the only unique
primary source for what went down that day. In the
early months of nineteen seventy two, as Arthur Bremmer prepared
to shoot Nixon, gave up on shooting Nixon and ultimately
shot George Wallace, he kept a diary, and in nineteen
seventy three, Harper's Magazine Press published that diary. I couldn't
(13:16):
find a physical copy of that original bound book for
less than a small fortune, but I did find an
original scan of Bremer's diary that was produced in court
as evidence. The diary is a strange and fascinating document.
Only the latter half was published. He'd thrown away the
first hundred and forty eight pages, a fact he notes
(13:37):
on the first page of the version that we do have.
In nineteen eighty a construction worker named Sherman Griffin found
the first one hundred and forty eight pages wrapped in
plastic inside of a backpack under the twenty seventh Street
Viaduct in Milwaukee from prison. Arthur Bremmer actually tried to
sue Griffin for ownership of the document, saying it would
only be used to embarrass him, but in nineteen eighty
(13:59):
one a court ruled that Griffin could keep it. Find
your skeepers. But the portion that we do have, that
latter half of the diary is a lot of things.
It's full of spelling errors and disorganized thinking, and sexual
fantasy and mundane rambling stream of consciousness of a guy
(14:20):
going about his day to day life as he tries
to figure out how to assassinate the president. A few
months after it was published, The New York Review published
an essay by A. Gourvadal speculating that Brehmer hadn't written
the diary at all. As a literary critic, it was
Vidal's professional opinion that Brehmer could not have written such
a document, though it was riddled with spelling errors. Vidal
(14:42):
writes that they come and go, almost as though the
writer is remembering, as he writes that he's supposed to
be a twenty one year old bus boy of mediocre intelligence.
He also doubts Brehmer was well read enough to make
references to Soljhanitson's Day in the Life of von Denisovitch
or quip A he crossed the Great Lakes, call me Ishmael.
(15:04):
Both Denisovich and Ishmael are misspelled, but that could be intentional, right, No,
Gore Vidal believes, or perhaps would like you to think
he believes. You know, it's hard to say that the
diary was falsified in its entirety by E. Howard Hunt
Nixon Spook. Hunt was a prolific writer, giving Thedal a
(15:26):
large volume of material for comparison, and he claims there
are similarities in the writing styles. Again, just as Hirsch's
claims about the Secret Tapes in nineteen ninety two were
called into question when we got the tapes in two
thousand and seven, Vidal's essay was published in nineteen seventy three,
seven years before the first half of the diary was found.
(15:48):
So even if you're inclined to believe Hunt was crafty
enough to construct this elaborate plot with a fake diary
and a patsy shooter, it's a real stretch to think
that he would write one hundred and forty eight pages,
wrap them in plastic, hide them in a backpack, and
tuck that backpack into a nook in a bridge in
Milwaukee to be discovered by a construction worker years later.
But it's also possible that Gorvittal was just doing a
(16:10):
bit that were not clever enough to understand. But the
legacy of that diary lives on in some surprising ways.
In those early confusing days after the Trump shooting, before
we all forgot what ever happened, I did see a
lot of people point out that the last time at
president took a bullet, it wasn't over politics at all.
(16:33):
John Hinckley Junior shot Reagan to impress Jody Foster. Remember,
And Okay, here's where I have to admit something kind
of embarrassing. I've always just accepted that statement at face value.
It makes no sense at all. But he wasn't acting rationally,
so it's not something that seemed like I needed to
(16:53):
make sense of. He shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jody Foster.
I guess he just thought she'd find that impressive. No
need to interrogate that further. A lot of women might
find it impressive if he shot Ronald Reagan, so there's
not a lot of follow up to do on that.
The thing is, i'd never seen the movie Taxi Driver.
I truly never pieced together that he thought shooting the
(17:16):
president would impress Jody Foster because she had starred as
a child sex worker in the movie Taxi Driver, in
which the protagonist Travis Bickle plans to shoot a presidential
candidate named Charles Palatine. Hinkley shot Reagan to impress Jody
Foster makes a lot more sense with that added cultural context,
And I fear I may have been the last person
(17:37):
in America to realize that. So maybe everybody else already
knows this part too. Taxi Driver owes a lot to
Arthur Bremer, the guy who shot George Wallace. Screenwriter Paul
(18:05):
Schrader has always denied basing any part of the movie
on Bremer's diary. In a nineteen seventy six interview, Schrader
says he was inspired by the shooting itself, but that
the script was actually finished before the diaries were published,
telling Richard Thompson for a film comment, I want to
emphasize that the script was written before any of the
(18:27):
diary was published. After I read the diary, I was
very tempted to take some of the good stuff from
it and add it to taxi Driver, but I decided
not to because of legal ramifications. Bremmer is sitting there
in jail with nothing better to do than sue us,
which is why I made certain the script was registered
before the diary came out, and that nothing was changed
(18:47):
after the diary's publication. And it's actually kind of prescient
of him, come to think of it. He's saying in
nineteen seventy six that Brehmer could file some kind of
nuisance lawsuit from prison, and this is years before he
tried to get half a million dollars and his diary
back from that construction worker. And look, I'm obviously not
(19:07):
a film buff. Like I said, I only recently saw
a taxi driver for the first time, so I won't
say Paul Schrader isn't telling the truth. And I don't know.
Maybe if you're a film buff, you'd say there's a
difference between changing the script and changing the screenplay. Those
are kind of different things, right, I guess that's true.
I don't know, because there are some scenes in Taxi
(19:30):
Driver that, unless Scarcese and Trader had some kind of
deep psychic connection to whatever forces in the universe motivated
Arthur Bremmer, they absolutely came from the Diary. You can't
tell me if they don't come from the diary, because
when I sat down to watch the movie, I had
just finished reading the Diary. So when I saw the
(19:50):
scene where Travis Bickle, the titular taxi driver, pulls up
outside of a building with his fair Bartin Scorsese himself
in the back seat, I did that, Leonardo DiCaprio pointing
me at my TV when the camera panned to the
woman in the window and she's smoking a cigarette, partially
obscured by the gauzy curtains, And that's a rather specific
(20:11):
visual image. And just a few pages into Bremer's diary,
he describes a very similar scene before he flew back
to Milwaukee to try across the border into Canada to
shoot Richard Nixon at an event in Ottawa. He wrote
this in his diary, My last night at the Howard
Johnson's in the Jamaica Area, New York City. I didn't
(20:32):
sleep much. A beautiful naked lady across the parking lot
of the next motel out by her window Florida ceiling,
smoking cigarettes, and I had to watch her. Her table
room light was on, and a thin veil of curtain
allowed me to watch as she passionately kissed a man
who wore clothes. I never saw them in each other's
arms more than a minute at a time. They must
(20:53):
have been fighting through binoculars. I saw them gesture like
Italians and open their mouths very wide, very often. So
maybe Schrader did finish the script before he read the diary,
but the diary absolutely influenced the way the film was shot.
According to Andrew Rausch's book on the Films of Martin Scorsese,
(21:13):
Robert de Niro prepared for the role by getting a
New York taxi license and driving around the city listening
to a cassette tape of Bremer's diary. The diary is
genuinely odd. Normally, I'm firmly in the camp of please
do not read or recommend that others read the manifesto
left behind by a shooter. But I really don't think
(21:36):
anyone will read Arthur Bremer's diary about leaving a nude
massage parlor frustrated that he's still a virgin, and feel
inspired by it. But I do think it's a fascinating document.
I think I learned more about what's inside the mind
of a nihilist aspiring shooter from Bremer's diary than I've
learned from any self indulgent little manifesto left by a
(21:58):
mass shooter. After failing to get his shot at Nixon
at the appearance in Ottawa in April, he wrote, I
just need a little opening in a second of time.
Nothing has happened for so long three months. The last
person I held a conversation with in three months was
a near naked girl rubbing my erect penis, and she
wouldn't let me put it through her failures. A few
(22:21):
pages later, he writes that he thought about getting really drunk,
but quote decided against it. Just wanted to pick a
fight with a bartender somewhere someone and get arrested, and
then where am I? I got something to do something
big before I ever get arrested again. He writes that
he's tired of waiting. He wants to be a madman
(22:41):
who kills, and then abruptly transitions to saying he quote
goes crazy when he hears Johnny Cash's new single, quoting
the lyrics I shot you with my thirty eight and
now I'm doing time, before noting that a baseball game
was canceled due to the rain. Honestly, the document it
reminds me of most is a diary kept by Franklin Seacreast.
(23:04):
I was a young man who set a synagogue on
fire in Austin in twenty twenty one. Seacrest's diary is
the similar sort of strange stream of consciousness, accounting of
his frustrations with women, his daily activities interspersed with these
outbursts of violent desire. After taking two weeks away from
his diary to deal with the tragedy of failing to
(23:25):
kill Richard Nixon, Rehmer went to see Clockwork Orange. As
he watched the movie, he decided he would kill George
Wallace instead, though he lamented that this was a second
rate target, writing, I won't even rate a TV interruption
in Russia or Europe. When the news breaks, they never
heard of Wallace. If something big and nom flares up,
(23:45):
I'll end up at the bottom of the first page.
In America, the editors will say Wallace dead. Who cares?
He won't get more than three minutes on network TV news.
I don't expect anybody to get a big, throbbing erection
from the news. You know, a storm in some country
we never heard of, kills ten thousand people, big deal.
Past the beer and what's on TV tonight. I hope
(24:08):
my death makes more sense than my life. Days before
he finally took the shot, he wrote yesterday, I even
considered mc govern as a target. If I go to
prison as an assassin, solitary forever, guards in my cell,
et cetera, or get killed or suicided, what difference to me?
Ask me why I did it, and I'd say I
(24:29):
don't know, or nothing else to do, or why not,
or I have to kill somebody. It bothers me that
they are about thirty guys in prison now who threatened
the president and we never heard a thing about him
except that they're in prison. Maybe what they need is organization.
Make the first lady a widow incorporated, chicken in every
pot and bullet in every head incorporated. They'll hold a
(24:52):
national convention every year to pick the executioner. A winner
will be chosen from the best entry in forty thousand
words or less, preferably less upon the theme how to
do a bang up job of getting people to notice you?
Or get it off your chest. Make your problems everybody's.
(25:12):
On May thirteenth, two days before the shooting, Bremer attended
a Wallace rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There are photographs of
Bremer at the rally that day, and he even spoke
to a police officer who responded to a call about
a suspicious vehicle parked near the venue. Bremer told the
officer he just wanted to be early to get a
good spot at the rally and complied when asked to
move his car. His loaded thirty eight was in his
(25:35):
jacket pocket. He writes in his diary that he could
have taken his shot that day, but at the last minute,
two teenage girls got between him and his target, and
he thought they'd be disfigured or blinded. If he fired
through the glass they were pressed up against, writing, I
let Wallace go only to spare these two stupid, innocent,
delighted kids. His final entry, the night before the shooting
(25:58):
ends with got a signed from campaign headquarters here to
shield the gun. Is there anything else to say? My
cry upon firing will be a penny for your thoughts.
On May fifteenth, nineteen seventy two, Arthur Bremmer was one
of about a thousand people who showed up to hear
George Wallace speak at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland
(26:21):
around four p m. Just as Wallace finished speaking, Bremer
pushed his way through the crowd, hoping to shake Wallis's hand,
and unloaded his thirty eight. He struck George Wallace four
times and wounded three others, a state trooper, a campaign volunteer,
and a Secret Service agent. He forgot to shout anything
at all as he did it. He was convicted and
(26:43):
sentenced to sixty three years, later reduced to fifty three
years on appeal. In nineteen ninety five, George Wallace wrote
to Bremer in prison, telling him that he forgave him
for the shooting and hoping they could correspond a bit
to get to know one another, responded, and George Wallace
died in nineteen ninety eight. Arthur Bremmer was denied parole
(27:06):
in nineteen ninety six after arguing at his hearing that
quote shooting segregationist dinosaurs isn't as bad as harming mainstream politicians,
but he was eventually paroled in two thousand and seven
after serving thirty five years. For the last eighteen years,
Arthur Bremer has lived in Maryland under the conditions of
his supervised release. He's been on electronic monitoring, he has
(27:29):
to submit to mental evaluations, and he's been required to
stay away from all elected officials and candidates for office.
His supervision actually ends this month, on May fifteenth, twenty
twenty five, the fifty third anniversary of the shooting. He'll
be seventy five years old this year, and he's been
a model parolee as far as I can tell, So
(27:50):
I doubt he'll be getting up to anything interesting once
he's legally allowed to leave the state of Maryland. So
I guess he shot George Wallace for no reason at all.
And Robert de Niro's study of the diary he left
behind inspired the performance that made Hinckley shoot Reagan. There's
nothing hard to believe at all about the idea that
(28:13):
Thomas Crooks wanted to shoot a president just to be remembered.
Is anyone at all? Wee Little Guys in a production
(28:36):
of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and
recorded by me Polly Coner. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lettterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by
Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys
podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
(28:58):
on the Weird Little Guy subpreddit. Just don't post anything
that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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