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