Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to could Happened Here. You're a daily dose
Speaker 2: of something a little unsettling. I'm Molly Conger, your occasional
Speaker 2: host here on this feed, and the host of a
Speaker 2: new weekly show from Kool Zone Media called Weird Little
Speaker 2: Guys that I think you'll probably like. Today, I'm a
Speaker 2: little shamelessly promoting my own show by giving you a
Speaker 2: little taste of the kinds of stories I like to
Speaker 2: dig into over on the Weird Little Guy's Feed. So,
Speaker 2: remember last month when Donald Trump got shot? I kind
Speaker 2: of don't. It feels like it was years ago. I
Speaker 2: barely remember who I was during those tense few days
Speaker 2: where it seemed possible Trump would ride that momentum to victory,
Speaker 2: imagining posters of that photo of Trump with blood dripping
Speaker 2: down his face, fist raised, and then kind of didn't
Speaker 2: matter at all anymore. The shooter wasn't a Biden sleeper
Speaker 2: agent sent to take down the opposition. He was just
Speaker 2: some kid with a rifle and the kind of uniquely
Speaker 2: American desire to cause chaos with it. And that was
Speaker 2: really hard for a lot of people to swallow. What
Speaker 2: do you mean it doesn't seem like he was politically motivated.
Speaker 2: He shot the former president. He shot him while he
Speaker 2: was on stage at a rally for his campaign to
Speaker 2: retake the presidency. Everything about the situation is political. How
Speaker 2: could the shooter have had any other motivation? Thomas Crooks
Speaker 2: wouldn't be the first guy to take a shot at
Speaker 2: a president or a presidential candidate for no reason at all.
Speaker 1: Far from it. While I was doing.
Speaker 2: Research for the first episode of my show, which theoretically
Speaker 2: you could pick up your phone and subscribe to right
Speaker 2: now while you're listening if you wanted to, he got
Speaker 2: lost on a few side quests. That's always happening to me.
Speaker 2: But as I breezed past, a quick mention of George Wallace,
Speaker 2: the four term governor of Alabama, best remembered for his
Speaker 2: rallying cry of segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. I'm
Speaker 2: not going to do it in his accent. I'll spare
Speaker 2: you that. I remember that he got shot while running
Speaker 2: for president too, during the primary in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 2: He was paralyzed after surviving an attempted assassination on the
Speaker 2: campaign trail. Surely, whoever shot a man like George Wallace
Speaker 2: did it? Out of a deep ideological commitment to something right.
Speaker 2: Maybe a civil rights activist opposed to Wallace's views on race,
Speaker 2: or a McGovern voter concerned that Wallace's cynical attempt to
Speaker 2: gain the Democratic Party nomination after winning five states as
Speaker 2: a third party candidate in sixty eight might actually work.
Speaker 2: Or maybe it was a diehard Nixon supporter who saw
Speaker 2: Wallace as a spoiler, siphoning conservative votes away from Nixon.
Speaker 1: But that's not what happened.
Speaker 2: When Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace four times in the
Speaker 2: chest and stomach on May fifteenth, nineteen seventy two. It
Speaker 2: had nothing at all to do with Wallace's policy positions,
Speaker 2: or Nixon's or McGovern's. It didn't even have really anything
Speaker 2: at all to do with George Wallace. Bremer had been
Speaker 2: planning for months to assassinate Richard Nixon, but it turned
Speaker 2: out that was too hard. He just wanted to shoot
Speaker 2: somebody important. I hesitated to draw too many comparisons to
Speaker 2: the Trump shooter, because there's a lot we still don't
Speaker 2: know and may never know. But it did come out
Speaker 2: early on that Crooks was equally interested in shooting Joe Biden.
Speaker 2: Trump just happened to have a campaign rally close to
Speaker 2: where he lived in Pennsylvania, and that rally happened to
Speaker 2: have weak perimeter security. Crooks had also looked into how
Speaker 2: to get close to FBI Director Christopher Ray, Attorney General
Speaker 2: Merrick Garland, and inexplicably Kate Middleton, Yes, that Kate Middleton,
Speaker 2: the Princess of Wales. If Biden had been campaigning in
Speaker 2: western Pennsylvania, or if Richard Nixon's security hadn't been so tight,
Speaker 2: crooks may have shot Biden and Bremer may have killed Nixon.
Speaker 2: It doesn't seem like it really mattered to either of
Speaker 2: them who they shot, as long as they shot somewhat important.
Speaker 2: One of the funny things about history is realizing that
Speaker 2: we've always been the way that we are now. There
Speaker 2: truly is nothing new under the sun. Because within hours
Speaker 2: of the attempt on George Wallace's life, before any information
Speaker 2: was clear at all, Nixon was demanded ending his aides
Speaker 2: put in a call to the White House Deputy Director
Speaker 2: of Communications, Kenneth Clawson to put out a statement that
Speaker 2: the shooter was a supporter of George McGovern that was
Speaker 2: the front runner and the Democratic primary, whom Nixon would
Speaker 2: go on to trounce terribly at the election at the
Speaker 2: end of that year.
Speaker 1: So Nixon's saying.
Speaker 2: Just say, we've got evidence, We've got unmistakable evidence. Of course,
Speaker 2: they didn't have evidence of any kind, unmistakable or not.
Speaker 2: And when the evidence did emerge, it certainly didn't show
Speaker 2: the shooter working on the McGovern campaign, which is the
Speaker 2: rumor Nixon was hoping to spread in those early hours.
Speaker 2: Bob Kennedy, I.
Speaker 1: Mean away, you put him to having.
Speaker 2: To get a bust before they get in this on
Speaker 2: the right of way. Now, we don't have thousands of
Speaker 2: hours of secret recordings from inside the offices of today's Republicans,
Speaker 2: but we did see something really similar in the immediate
Speaker 2: aftermath of the Trump shooting. He's a Biden voter, he's
Speaker 2: a Democrat, he's a radical leftist, he's Antifa. We can
Speaker 2: already tell. We just know it's obvious, we have proof.
Speaker 2: The fact that there was no proof of anything on
Speaker 2: day one doesn't matter. It matters even less that no
Speaker 2: proof ever materialized. You just have to get the rumor
Speaker 2: out first. You have to make an impression while the
Speaker 2: cement is wet, and sometimes that's permanent. One thing that
Speaker 2: is not on the Nixon tapes, though, is a conversation
Speaker 2: that allegedly occurred that afternoon in May nineteen seventy two
Speaker 2: that was reported by Seymour Hirsch twenty years later in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety two. Despite a Supreme Court ruling in the
Speaker 2: seventies the tapes belong to the National Archives, the full
Speaker 2: volume of the Nixon tapes were not made available to
Speaker 2: the public until two thousand and seven. Now, Seymour Hirsh
Speaker 2: is not a making stuff up kind of guy. I
Speaker 2: don't think he was fabricating any part of this story.
Speaker 2: He's still alive and has a sub stack at eighty
Speaker 2: seven years old, So I don't want any beef with Seymour.
Speaker 2: That's not what I'm saying. He has a decade's long
Speaker 2: career as an investigative journalist and has a Pulitzer for
Speaker 2: exposing the cover up of the Myli massacre. I don't
Speaker 2: think he's patting the truth here. But in his nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety two New Yorker piece called Nixon's Last cover Up
Speaker 2: the tapes he wants the Archives to suppress, Hirsch wrote
Speaker 2: that the unreleased tapes from the afternoon of the Wallace
Speaker 2: shooting contained recordings of Nixon directing E. Howard Hunt, the
Speaker 2: retired CIA officer who headed his White House plumbers, to
Speaker 2: break into Bremer's apartment before the FBI could search it
Speaker 2: and to plant McGovern campaign literature. Hunt's own autobiography admits
Speaker 2: only that at Nixon's direction, Nixon advisor Charles Colson did
Speaker 2: ask Hunt to take a look around Brehmer's apartment. Even
Speaker 2: that this is all taking place just a month before
Speaker 2: Hunt did in fact play a key role in the
Speaker 2: Watergate break in, This isn't exactly unbelievable. I can absolutely
Speaker 2: believe that Richard Nixon would ask E. Howard Hunt to
Speaker 2: break into a building for some nefarious purpose, because we
Speaker 2: know he did that at least once. And one thing
Speaker 2: the varying accounts seemed to agree on is that Hunt
Speaker 2: was unable to complete the assignment because the FBI had
Speaker 2: already sealed off Bremmer's apartment in Milwaukee before he got there.
Speaker 2: Hirsh's Peace claimed the tapes contained recordings of Coulson breaking
Speaker 2: this news to Nixon, that Hunt arrived too late and
Speaker 2: the apartment was already under police guard, and further claims
Speaker 2: that on the recordings, Nixon can be heard berating Coulson
Speaker 2: for not doing more to slow down the FBI. Again,
Speaker 2: all completely believable if you have even a passing knowledge
Speaker 2: of Richard Nixon, and Coulson himself related this account to
Speaker 2: Hirsh in nineteen ninety two. The problem is we have
Speaker 2: the tapes now, fifteen years after Hirsch's article was published.
Speaker 2: Researchers scoured the newly released recordings for proof of this
Speaker 2: version of events, and it isn't there. It's entirely possible
Speaker 2: that Colson is recalling conversations that occurred outside the presence
Speaker 2: of the tape machine, or is misremembering how much of
Speaker 2: this was actually spoken aloud and what was simply understood.
Speaker 2: It's not out of the realm of possibility that Colson
Speaker 2: is recalling something Nixon definitely desired. It's just not all
Speaker 2: the tapes. Absence of proof isn't proof of absence, of course,
Speaker 2: But we do have a pretty complete record of Nixon's
Speaker 2: conversations on the afternoon of May fifteenth, nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 2: Those missing eighteen minutes are from a different frantic afternoon
Speaker 2: that summer. But before we get to the rest of
Speaker 2: Richard Nixon's no good, very bad day. Here are some
Speaker 2: products and services. So on May fifteenth, Nixon got out
Speaker 2: of a budget meeting around four pm, which was shortly
Speaker 2: after the shooting, and that's when he first got the news.
Speaker 2: And we know from the tapes that his first phone
Speaker 2: call was to his own wife, Pat and then he
Speaker 2: called George Wallace's wife, Cornelia. He then asked Secretary of
Speaker 2: the Treasury John Connolly to call Ted Kennedy to offer
Speaker 2: him full Secret Service protection, which is not allowable under
Speaker 2: the structure of how that works, but he wanted it done,
Speaker 2: presumably out of some combination of the idea that Kennedy
Speaker 2: would be McGovern's vice presidential pick, and maybe just the
Speaker 2: general idea that if people are getting assassinated, you need
Speaker 2: to account for all your Kennedy's. It's actually kind of
Speaker 2: wild to dig into the tapes and see where everyone's
Speaker 2: heads were at that afternoon in the Oval office. A
Speaker 2: recording from around seven pm captures speculation that the shooting
Speaker 2: may have been a false flag by Wallace's own people,
Speaker 2: but the idea is quickly dismissed. He wouldn't have his
Speaker 2: own people shoot him in the stomach that could kill you.
Speaker 2: They would have gone for something less dangerous, like shooting
Speaker 2: him in the foot, which is a conversation we all
Speaker 2: had after the Trump shooting, isn't it.
Speaker 1: Oh maybe this is a stunt. Wait?
Speaker 2: Why would he have them fire at his head? That's
Speaker 2: so crazy, right, it's I mean, it's the same conversation
Speaker 2: with different names and body parts subbed in. And this
Speaker 2: recording too, capture Nixon's top aids, hoping that whoever did
Speaker 2: it was a left wing nut could want he's gone
Speaker 2: in er Well.
Speaker 1: I think it likely likely it could be one of
Speaker 1: his own people too.
Speaker 2: If they would shoot that many while, and.
Speaker 1: They would have shot him in the foot or something,
Speaker 1: why did he have another It wouldn't wouldn't be one
Speaker 1: of those other people shooting on the stomach. It's too
Speaker 1: easy to kill him. Well, I think the guy, the
Speaker 1: guy has to be another some kind of I just
Speaker 1: hope he's the left wing nut of right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, like that silly? I think I could kind of.
Speaker 1: Or it was really a left wing now.
Speaker 2: Rather than the right wing, and they tried.
Speaker 1: To make out of something but the right day the
Speaker 1: right wing or other. That's how the hell you do that?
Speaker 1: I showed you the twister had just started in.
Speaker 2: Twisse people, So Nixon tried to put a thumb on
Speaker 2: the scale. After the fact, the exact nature of his
Speaker 2: meddling will rever be up for debate, I guess, and
Speaker 2: the Nixon tapes aren't the only unique primary source for
Speaker 2: in down that day. In the early months of nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two, as Arthur Remmer prepared to shoot Nixon, gave
Speaker 2: up on shooting Nixon and ultimately shot George Wallace, he
Speaker 2: was keeping a diary, and in nineteen seventy three Harper's
Speaker 2: Magazine Press published that diary. I couldn't find a physical
Speaker 2: copy of the original bound book published by Harper's for
Speaker 2: less than a small fortune, but it did find an
Speaker 2: archival scan of the diary that was produced as evidence,
Speaker 2: and the diary is a strange and fascinating document.
Speaker 1: Only the latter half was published.
Speaker 2: He'd thrown away the first one hundred and forty eight
Speaker 2: pages of fact, he notes on the first page of
Speaker 2: the version that we have In nineteen eighty a construction
Speaker 2: worker named Sherman Griffin found those first one hundred and
Speaker 2: forty eight pages. So this again, eight years after the shooting,
Speaker 2: he found them wrapped in plastic inside of a backpack
Speaker 2: underneath the twenty seventh Street Viaduct in Milwaukee. From prison,
Speaker 2: Arthur Remmer tried to sue Griffin for ownership of the document,
Speaker 2: saying it would only be used to embarrasshim and it
Speaker 2: was his. He owned it, I need back, But in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty one a court ruled that Griffin could keep it.
Speaker 2: I'm sure it was more complicated in the end, all
Speaker 2: the back and forth in court, but ultimately Finder's keepers.
Speaker 2: The portion we do have is a lot of things.
Speaker 2: It's full of typos and disorganized thinking, and sexual fantasy
Speaker 2: and the mundane, rambling stream of consciousness of a guy
Speaker 2: going about his day to day life as he tries
Speaker 2: to figure out how to shoot the president. A few
Speaker 2: months after it was published, The New York Review published
Speaker 2: an essay by gor Vadal speculating that Brehmer hadn't written
Speaker 2: the diary at all. As a literary critic, it was
Speaker 2: his professional opinion that Brehmer could not have written such
Speaker 2: a document, though it was.
Speaker 1: Riddled with typos.
Speaker 2: But Doll believes they come and go and are not
Speaker 2: believable in their structure and format, as though the writer
Speaker 2: is remembering, as he writes that he's supposed to be
Speaker 2: a twenty one year old bus boy of mediocre intelligence.
Speaker 2: He also doubts that Bremer was well read enough to
Speaker 2: make reference to Solzhenitsyn's day in the Life of a
Speaker 2: von Denisovitch or quit as he crossed the Great Lakes,
Speaker 2: call me Ishmael. Both Deniseovich and Ishmael are misspelled, but
Speaker 2: that could be intentional, he says.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: Gorvadahal believes or perhaps would only like you to think.
Speaker 2: He believes it's hard to say that the diary was
Speaker 2: falsified in its entirety by E.
Speaker 1: Howard Hunt.
Speaker 2: Nixon Spook and Hunt was a prolific writer, giving the
Speaker 2: doll a large volume of material for comparison, and he
Speaker 2: claims there are similarities in the writing styles, and also
Speaker 2: notes that both Bremer and Hunt use the phrase Harry hippies.
Speaker 2: They have a distaste for Harry hippies. I wasn't alive
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy two. Maybe a lot of people hated
Speaker 2: Harry hippies. But again, just as Hirsh's claims, what the
Speaker 2: secret tapes in nineteen ninety two were called into question
Speaker 2: when we got the tapes in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 2: but All's essay was published in nineteen seventy three, seven
Speaker 2: years before the first half of the diary was found.
Speaker 2: So even if you're inclined to believe Hunt was crafty
Speaker 2: enough to construct this elaborate plot with a fake diary
Speaker 2: and a patsy shooter, it's a real stretch to think
Speaker 2: he would even bother writing one hundred and forty eight pages,
Speaker 2: wrapping them in plastic, hiding them inside of a backpack,
Speaker 2: and tucking that backpack into a little nook under a
Speaker 2: bridge in Milwaukee to be found by a construction worker
Speaker 2: a decade later. That part just doesn't make a lot
Speaker 2: of sense. But maybe Gorbadal was just doing an elaborate
Speaker 2: bit that I don't understand. The legacy of that diary
Speaker 2: lives on in some surprising ways. In those early days
Speaker 2: after the Trump shooting, before we all forgot what ever happened,
Speaker 2: I did see a lot of people point out that
Speaker 2: the last time a president took a bullet, it wasn't
Speaker 2: over politics. John Hinckley Junior shot Reagan to impress Jodi Foster. Remember, Okay,
Speaker 2: here's where I admit something kind of embarrassing. I've always
Speaker 2: just accepted that statement at face value. It makes no sense,
Speaker 2: But he wasn't acting rationally, so it's not something I
Speaker 2: felt like I needed to make sense of. He shot
Speaker 2: Reagan to impress Jody Foster. I guess he thought she'd
Speaker 2: find that impressive. No need to interrogate that further. I
Speaker 2: mean a lot of women might find it impressive if
Speaker 2: you shot Ronald Reagan, so there's not a lot of
Speaker 2: follow up to do on that. The thing is, i'd
Speaker 2: never seen the movie Taxi Driver. I never pieced together
Speaker 2: that he thought shooting the president would impress Jody Foster
Speaker 2: because she starred as the child sex worker in the
Speaker 2: movie Taxi Driver, in which the protagonist Travis Bickle plans
Speaker 2: to shoot a presidential candidate named Charles Palatine Hinkley chat
Speaker 2: Reagan to impress Jodi Foster. Makes I guess, like a
Speaker 2: little more sense if you have that cultural context. And
Speaker 2: I fear I may have been the very last person
Speaker 2: in America to find that out. So maybe everybody else
Speaker 2: already knew this next part too. I don't know, but
Speaker 2: Taxi Driver owes a lot to Arthur Bremer, the guy
Speaker 2: who shot George Wallace. Screenwriter Paul Schrader has always denied
Speaker 2: that he based any part of the movie on Bremer's diary.
Speaker 2: In a nineteen seventy six interview, Schrader says he was
Speaker 2: inspired by the shooting itself in nineteen seventy two, but
Speaker 2: that the script was actually finished before the diary was
Speaker 2: published in seventy three, and he registered the script with
Speaker 2: the WGA, So that is provably true, right. But he
Speaker 2: told film comments Richard Thompson in seventy six, I want
Speaker 2: to emphasize that the script was written before any of
Speaker 2: the diary was published. After I read the diary, I
Speaker 2: was very tempted to take some of the good stuff
Speaker 2: from it and add it to Taxi Driver, but I
Speaker 2: decided not to because of legal ratifications. Bremmer is sitting
Speaker 2: there in jail with nothing better to do than sue us,
Speaker 2: which is why I made certain the script was registered
Speaker 2: before the diary came out, and that nothing was changed
Speaker 2: after the diary's publication. And that's actually kind of prescient
Speaker 2: of him, come to think of it. He's saying this
Speaker 2: in seventy six that Bremer could file some kind of
Speaker 2: nuisance lawsuit from prison and that's years before Brehmer tried
Speaker 2: to get half a million dollars and his diary back
Speaker 2: from that construction worker. And I'm obviously not a film buff.
Speaker 2: We all just found out that I've never seen a movie.
Speaker 2: So he won't say Schrader's not telling the truth here.
Speaker 2: And maybe somebody who knows more about film would say, well,
Speaker 2: there's a difference between a script and a screenplay, right,
Speaker 2: those are different things. The script was done, but he
Speaker 2: still could have changed the look and feel of how
Speaker 2: it was shot, because there are some scenes in Taxi
Speaker 2: Driver that, unless Scorssa and Trader had some kind of
Speaker 2: deep psychic connection to whatever forces in the universe motivated
Speaker 2: Arthur Bremer, they absolutely came from the diary. I read
Speaker 2: the diary before sitting down to see what the movie
Speaker 2: was all about. So when Travis Bickele, the titular taxi driver,
Speaker 2: pulls up outside of a building with his fare, Martin
Speaker 2: Scorsese himself in the back seat, I was doing the
Speaker 2: Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme at my TV because the camera
Speaker 2: pans to a woman in a window smoking a cigarette,
Speaker 2: partially obscured by a gauzy curtain. And just a few
Speaker 2: pages into Bremer's diary, he describes a really similar scene
Speaker 2: before he flew back to Milwaukee to try to cross
Speaker 2: the border into Canada to shoot Richard Nixon in Ottawa.
Speaker 2: He wrote this in his diary, My last night at
Speaker 2: the Howard Johnson's in the Jamaica area in New York City.
Speaker 2: I didn't sleep much. A beautiful naked lady across a
Speaker 2: parking lot on the next motel out by her window
Speaker 2: Florida ceiling, smoking cigarettes, and I had to watch her.
Speaker 2: Her table room light was on, and a thin veil
Speaker 2: of curtain allowed me to watch her as she passionately
Speaker 2: kissed a man who wore clothes. I never saw them
Speaker 2: in each other's arms for more than a minute a time.
Speaker 1: Time. They must have been fighting. Through binoculars.
Speaker 2: I saw them gesture like Italians and open their mouths
Speaker 2: very wide, very often. So maybe he finished the script
Speaker 2: before he read the diary, but the diary absolutely influenced
Speaker 2: the way the film was shot. According to Andrew Rausch's
Speaker 2: book on the Films of Martin Scorsese, de Niro prepared
Speaker 2: for the role by getting a New York taxi license
Speaker 2: and driving around the city listening to a cassette tape
Speaker 2: of someone reading the diary aloud. The diary is genuinely odd. Normally,
Speaker 2: I'm firmly in the camp of please do not read
Speaker 2: or recommend that others read the manifestos left behind by shooters.
Speaker 2: There's not much to gain from it. It's what they want, this, that,
Speaker 2: and the other. There's plenty of writing on the topic,
Speaker 2: but I don't really think anyone will read Arthur Bremer's
Speaker 2: diary entry about leaving a nude massage parlor, frustrated that
Speaker 2: he's still a virgin, feel inspired to follow in his footsteps.
Speaker 2: But I do think it's a fascinating document. I learned
Speaker 2: more about what's inside the mind of a nihilist aspiring
Speaker 2: shooter from Bremer's diary than I've learned from any self
Speaker 2: indulgent little manifesto left behind by a mass shooter. After
Speaker 2: failing to get his shot at Nixon at the appearance
Speaker 2: in Ottawa in April, he wrote, I just need a
Speaker 2: little opening in a second of time. Nothing has happened
Speaker 2: for so long three months. The last person I held
Speaker 2: a conversation with in three months was a near naked
Speaker 2: girl rubbing my erect penis, and she wouldn't let me
Speaker 2: put it through her failures. A few pages later, he
Speaker 2: writes that he thought about getting really drunk, but quote
Speaker 2: decided against it. Just wanted to pick a fight with
Speaker 2: a bartender somewhere or someone get arrested, and then.
Speaker 1: Where am I?
Speaker 2: I got something to do something big before I ever
Speaker 2: get arrested again. He writes that he's getting tired of
Speaker 2: writing he wants to be a madman who kills, and
Speaker 2: then abruptly transitions to saying he goes crazy when hears
Speaker 2: Johnny Cash's new single, quoting the lyrics I shot you
Speaker 2: with my thirty eight and now I'm doing time, before
Speaker 2: noting that a baseball game had been canceled that day
Speaker 2: due to rain. Honestly, the document it reminds me the
Speaker 2: most of is the diary kept by Franklin Seacrest, the
Speaker 2: young man who set a synagogue on fire in Austin
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one. Large portions of his diary were
Speaker 2: produced as evidence in his trial, and his diary is
Speaker 2: sort of similar in that it's a strange stream of consciousness,
Speaker 2: accounting his frustrations with women, his daily activities, going to class,
Speaker 2: arguments with his mother interspersed with these strange outbursts of
Speaker 2: violent desire, and they're just sort of mixed in without
Speaker 2: any recognition that these things are incongruous. After taking two
Speaker 2: weeks away from his diary to deal with the tragedy
Speaker 2: of failing to kill Richard Nixon, Rember went to see
Speaker 2: Clockwork Orange. As he watched the movie, he decided he
Speaker 2: would kill George Wallace instead, though he lamented that this
Speaker 2: was a second rate target, writing I won't even rate
Speaker 2: a TV interruption in Russia or Europe. When the news breaks,
Speaker 2: they never heard of Wallace. If something big and nom
Speaker 2: flares up, I'll be get the bottom of the first page.
Speaker 2: In America, the editors will say Wallace dead. Who cares?
Speaker 2: He won't get more than three minutes on network TV news.
Speaker 2: I don't expect anybody to get a big throbbing erection
Speaker 2: from the news. You know, a storm in some country
Speaker 2: we never heard of, kills ten thousand people, big deal?
Speaker 2: Pass the beer. What's on TV tonight? I hope my
Speaker 2: death makes more sense than my life. And just days
Speaker 2: before he finally took his shot, he wrote, yesterday I
Speaker 2: even considered McGovern as a target. If I go to
Speaker 2: prison as an assassin, solitary forever, guards in my cell, etc.
Speaker 2: Or get killed or suicided, what difference to me? Ask
Speaker 2: me why I did it, and I'd say I don't know,
Speaker 2: or nothing else to do, or why not? Or I
Speaker 2: have to kill somebody. It bothers me that they are
Speaker 2: about thirty guys in prison now who threaten the pres
Speaker 2: and we never heard a thing about them except that
Speaker 2: they're in prison.
Speaker 1: Maybe what they need is organization.
Speaker 2: Make the first lady a widow, incorporated, chicken in every
Speaker 2: pot and a bullet on every head, Committee incorporated the
Speaker 2: whole to national convention every year to pick the executioner.
Speaker 2: A winner will be chosen from the best entry in
Speaker 2: forty thousand words or less, preferably less on the theme
Speaker 2: how to do a bang up job getting people to
Speaker 2: notice you? Or get it off your chest? Make your
Speaker 2: problems everybody's. On May thirteenth, two days before the shooting,
Speaker 2: Bremer attended a Wallace rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There are
Speaker 2: photographs of Bremer at the rally that day, and he
Speaker 2: even spoke to a police officer who responded to a
Speaker 2: call about a suspicious vehicle park near the venue. Bremer
Speaker 2: told the officer he just wanted to be early to
Speaker 2: get a good spot at the rally, and complied when
Speaker 2: asked to move his car. His loaded thirty eight was
Speaker 2: in his jacket pocket. He writes in his diary that
Speaker 2: he could have taken his shot that day, but at
Speaker 2: the last minute two teenage girls got between him and
Speaker 2: his target, and he thought they'd be disfigured or blinded
Speaker 2: if he fired through the glass they were pressed up against, writing,
Speaker 2: I let Wallace go only to spare these two stupid, innocent,
Speaker 2: delighted kids. His final entry, made the night before the
Speaker 2: shooting ends with got a sign from camp headquarters here
Speaker 2: to shield the gun. Is there anything else to say?
Speaker 2: My cry upon firing will be a penny for your thoughts.
Speaker 2: Round four pm on the fifteenth, after Wallace finished addressing
Speaker 2: a crowd in Laurel, Maryland, Bremer pushed his way through
Speaker 2: the people, hoping to shake Wallace's hand, and unloaded his
Speaker 2: thirty eight. He struck Wallace four times and wounded four others,
Speaker 2: a state trooper, a campaign volunteer, Wallace's personal bodyguard, and
Speaker 2: a secret Service agent. He was convicted and sentenced to
Speaker 2: sixty three years, later reduced to fifty three years on appeal.
Speaker 2: He was denied parole in nineteen ninety six after arguing
Speaker 2: at his hearing that shooting segregationist dinosaurs wasn't as bad
Speaker 2: as harming mainstream politicians, but he was released in two
Speaker 2: thousand and seven. George Wallace wrote to Bremer in prison
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety five, telling him that he forgave him
Speaker 2: for the shooting and hoped to correspond a bit to
Speaker 2: get to know one another. Bremer never responded, and George
Speaker 2: Wallace died in nineteen ninety eight. So we shot George
Speaker 2: Wallace for no reason, and Robert de niro study of
Speaker 2: the diary he left behind inspired the performance that made.
Speaker 1: Hinckley shoot Reagan. There's really nothing hard to believe at
Speaker 1: all in the.
Speaker 2: Idea that Thomas Crooks wanted to shoot a president just
Speaker 2: to be remembered as anyone at all.
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