Shooter Without A Cause

of don't. It feels like it was years ago. 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 kind of didn't matter at all anymore. 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. 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 is political. How could the shooter have had any other motivation? Thomas Crooks wouldn't be the first guy to take a shot at a president or a presidential candidate for no reason at all.

you that. I remember that he got shot while running for president too, during the primary in nineteen seventy two. He was paralyzed after surviving an attempted assassination on the campaign trail. Surely, whoever shot a man like George Wallace did it? Out of a deep ideological commitment to something right.

Maybe a civil rights activist opposed to Wallace's views on race, or a McGovern voter concerned that Wallace's cynical attempt to gain the Democratic Party nomination after winning five states as a third party candidate in sixty eight might actually work. Or maybe it was a diehard Nixon supporter who saw Wallace as a spoiler, siphoning conservative votes away from Nixon.

somebody important. I hesitated 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 did come out early on that Crooks was equally interested in shooting Joe Biden. Trump just happened to have a campaign rally close to where he lived in Pennsylvania, and that rally happened to

have 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, or if Richard Nixon's security hadn't been so tight, crooks may have shot Biden and Bremer may have killed Nixon.

It doesn't seem like it really mattered to either of them who they shot, as long as they shot somewhat important. One of the funny things about history is realizing that we've always been the way that we are now. There

truly is nothing new under the sun. Because within hours of the attempt on George Wallace's life, before any information was clear at all, Nixon was demanded ending his aides put in a call to the White House Deputy Director of Communications, Kenneth Clawson to put out a statement that the shooter was a supporter of George McGovern that was the front runner and the Democratic primary, whom Nixon would go on to trounce terribly at the election at the end of that year.

proof ever materialized. You just have to get the rumor out first. You have to make an impression while the cement is wet, and sometimes that's permanent. One thing that is not on the Nixon tapes, though, is a conversation that allegedly occurred that afternoon in May 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 belong to the National Archives, the full volume of the Nixon tapes were not made available to the public until two thousand and seven. Now, Seymour Hirsh is not a making stuff up kind of guy. I don't think he was fabricating any part of this story. He's still alive and has a sub stack at eighty seven years old, So I don't want any beef with Seymour.

That's not what I'm saying. He has a decade's long career as an investigative journalist and has a Pulitzer for exposing the cover up of the Myli massacre. I don't

think he's patting the truth here. But in his nineteen ninety two New Yorker piece called Nixon's Last cover Up the tapes he wants the Archives to suppress, Hirsch wrote that the unreleased tapes from the afternoon of the Wallace shooting contained recordings of Nixon directing E. Howard Hunt, the retired CIA officer who headed his White House plumbers, to break into Bremer's apartment before the FBI could search it

and to plant McGovern campaign literature. Hunt's own autobiography admits only that at Nixon's direction, Nixon advisor Charles Colson did ask Hunt to take a look around Brehmer's apartment. Even 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. I can absolutely believe that Richard Nixon would ask E. Howard Hunt to break into a building for some nefarious purpose, because we

know he did that at least once. And one thing the varying accounts seemed 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 Peace claimed the tapes contained recordings of Coulson breaking this news to Nixon, that Hunt arrived too late and the apartment was already under police guard, and further claims that on the recordings, Nixon can be heard berating Coulson

for not doing more to slow down the FBI. Again, all completely believable if you have even a passing knowledge of Richard Nixon, and Coulson himself related this account to Hirsh in nineteen ninety two. The problem is we have the tapes now, 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. It's entirely possible that Colson is recalling conversations that occurred outside the presence of the tape machine, or is misremembering how much of this was actually spoken aloud and what was simply understood. It's not out of the realm of possibility that Colson is recalling something Nixon definitely desired. It's just not all

the tapes. Absence of proof isn't proof of absence, of course, But we do have a pretty complete record of Nixon's conversations on the afternoon of May fifteenth, nineteen seventy two. Those missing eighteen minutes are from a different frantic afternoon that summer. But before we get to the rest of Richard Nixon's no good, very bad day. Here are some

products and services. So on May fifteenth, Nixon got out of a budget meeting around four pm, which was shortly after the shooting, and that's when he first got the news. And we know from the tapes that 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, which is not allowable under the structure of how that works, but he wanted it done, presumably out of some combination of the idea that Kennedy would be McGovern's vice presidential pick, and maybe just the general idea that if people are getting assassinated, you need

to account for all your Kennedy's. It's actually kind of wild to dig into the tapes and see where everyone's heads were at that afternoon in the Oval office. A recording from around seven pm captures speculation that the shooting may have been a false flag by Wallace's own people, but the idea is quickly dismissed. He wouldn't have his own people shoot him in the stomach that could kill you.

They would have gone for something less dangerous, like shooting him in the foot, which is a conversation we all had after the Trump shooting, isn't it.

Magazine Press published that diary. I couldn't find a physical copy of the original bound book published by Harper's for less than a small fortune, but it did find an archival scan of the diary that was produced as evidence, and the diary is a strange and fascinating document.

underneath the twenty seventh Street Viaduct in Milwaukee. From prison, Arthur Remmer tried to sue Griffin for ownership of the document, saying it would only be used to embarrasshim and it was his. He owned it, I need back, But in nineteen eighty one a court ruled that Griffin could keep it. I'm sure it was more complicated in the end, all the back and forth in court, but ultimately Finder's keepers. The portion we do have is a lot of things.

It's full of typos and disorganized thinking, and sexual fantasy and the mundane, rambling stream of consciousness of a guy going about his day to day life as he tries to figure out how to shoot the president. A few months after it was published, The New York Review published an essay by gor Vadal speculating that Brehmer hadn't written the diary at all. As a literary critic, it was his professional opinion that Brehmer could not have written such a document, though it was.

Harry hippies. But again, just as Hirsh's claims, what the secret tapes in nineteen ninety two were called into question when we got the tapes in two thousand and seven, but All's essay was published in nineteen seventy three, seven years before the first half of the diary was found.

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 he would even bother writing one hundred and forty eight pages, wrapping them in plastic, hiding them inside of a backpack, and tucking that backpack into a little nook under a bridge in Milwaukee to be found by a construction worker a decade later. That part just doesn't make a lot

of sense. But maybe Gorbadal was just doing an elaborate bit that I don't understand. The legacy of that diary lives on in some surprising ways. In those early 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 a president took a bullet, it wasn't over politics. John Hinckley Junior shot Reagan to impress Jodi Foster. Remember, Okay, here's where I admit something kind of embarrassing. I've always

just accepted that statement at face value. It makes no sense, But he wasn't acting rationally, so it's not something I felt like I needed to make sense of. He shot Reagan to impress Jody Foster. I guess he thought she'd find that impressive. No need to interrogate that further. I mean a lot of women might find it impressive if you 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 never pieced together that he thought shooting the president would impress Jody Foster because she starred as the child sex worker in the movie Taxi Driver, in which the protagonist Travis Bickle plans to shoot a presidential candidate named Charles Palatine Hinkley chat Reagan to impress Jodi Foster. Makes I guess, like a little more sense if you have that cultural context. And I fear I may have been the very last person

in America to find that out. So maybe everybody else already knew this next part too. I don't know, but Taxi Driver owes a lot to Arthur Bremer, the guy who shot George Wallace. Screenwriter Paul Schrader has always denied that he based any part of the movie on Bremer's diary.

In a nineteen seventy six interview, Schrader says he was inspired by the shooting itself in nineteen seventy two, but that the script was actually finished before the diary was published in seventy three, and he registered the script with the WGA, So that is provably true, right. But he told film comments Richard Thompson in seventy six, I want to emphasize that the script was written before any of

the 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 ratifications. 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 after the diary's publication. And that's actually kind of prescient

of him, come to think of it. He's saying this in seventy six that Bremer could file some kind of nuisance lawsuit from prison and that's years before Brehmer tried to get half a million dollars and his diary back from that construction worker. And I'm obviously not a film buff. We all just found out that I've never seen a movie. So he won't say Schrader's not telling the truth here.

And maybe somebody who knows more about film would say, well, there's a difference between a script and a screenplay, right, those are different things. The script was done, but he still could have changed the look and feel of how it was shot, because there are some scenes in Taxi Driver that, unless Scorssa and Trader had some kind of deep psychic connection to whatever forces in the universe motivated

Arthur Bremer, they absolutely came from the diary. I read the diary before sitting down to see what the movie was all about. So when Travis Bickele, the titular taxi driver, pulls up outside of a building with his fare, Martin Scorsese himself in the back seat, I was doing the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme at my TV because the camera pans to a woman in a window smoking a cigarette,

partially obscured by a gauzy curtain. And just a few pages into Bremer's diary, he describes a really similar scene before he flew back to Milwaukee to try to cross the border into Canada to shoot Richard Nixon in Ottawa. He wrote this in his diary, My last night at the Howard Johnson's in the Jamaica area in New York City. I didn't sleep much. A beautiful naked lady across a parking lot on 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 her as she passionately kissed a man who wore clothes. I never saw them in each other's arms for more than a minute a time.

of someone reading the diary aloud. The diary is genuinely odd. Normally, I'm firmly in the camp of please do not read or recommend that others read the manifestos left behind by shooters. There's not much to gain from it. It's what they want, this, that, and the other. There's plenty of writing on the topic, but I don't really think anyone will read Arthur Bremer's diary entry about leaving a nude massage parlor, frustrated that he's still a virgin, feel inspired to follow in his footsteps.

But I do think it's a fascinating document. 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 behind by a 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 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 or someone get arrested, and then.

due to rain. Honestly, the document it reminds me the most of is the diary kept by Franklin Seacrest, the young man who set a synagogue on fire in Austin

in twenty twenty one. Large portions of his diary were produced as evidence in his trial, and his diary is sort of similar in that it's a strange stream of consciousness, accounting his frustrations with women, his daily activities, going to class, arguments with his mother interspersed with these strange outbursts of violent desire, and they're just sort of mixed in without

any recognition that these things are incongruous. After taking two weeks away from his diary to deal with the tragedy of failing to kill Richard Nixon, Rember 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, I'll be get 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? Pass the beer. What's on TV tonight? I hope my

death makes more sense than my life. And just days before he finally took his shot, he wrote, yesterday I even considered McGovern as a target. If I go to prison as an assassin, solitary forever, guards in my cell, etc. Or get killed or suicided, what difference to me? Ask me why I did it, and I'd say I 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 threaten the pres and we never heard a thing about them except that they're in prison.

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 park 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 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, made the night before the shooting ends with got a sign from camp headquarters here

to shield the gun. Is there anything else to say? My cry upon firing will be a penny for your thoughts. Round four pm on the fifteenth, after Wallace finished addressing a crowd in Laurel, Maryland, Bremer pushed his way through the people, hoping to shake Wallace's hand, and unloaded his thirty eight. He struck Wallace four times and wounded four others, a state trooper, a campaign volunteer, Wallace's personal bodyguard, and

a secret Service agent. He was convicted and sentenced to sixty three years, later reduced to fifty three years on appeal. He was denied parole in nineteen ninety six after arguing at his hearing that shooting segregationist dinosaurs wasn't as bad as harming mainstream politicians, but he was released in two thousand and seven. George Wallace wrote to Bremer in prison in nineteen ninety five, telling him that he forgave him for the shooting and hoped to correspond a bit to

get to know one another. Bremer never responded, and George Wallace died in nineteen ninety eight. So we shot George Wallace for no reason, and Robert de niro study of the diary he left behind inspired the performance that made.