Shooter Without A Cause

Thomas Crooks wasn’t the first guy to take a shot at 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.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to could Happened Here. You're a daily dose
of something a little unsettling. I'm Molly Conger, your occasional
host here on this feed, and the host of a
new weekly show from Kool Zone Media called Weird Little
Guys that I think you'll probably like. Today, I'm a
little shamelessly promoting my own show by giving you a
little taste of the kinds of stories I like to
dig into over on the Weird Little Guy's Feed. So,

(00:26):
remember last month when Donald Trump got shot? I kind
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

(00:49):
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

(01:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Far from it. While I was doing.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Research for the first episode of my show, which theoretically
you could pick up your phone and subscribe to right
now while you're listening if you wanted to, he got
lost on a few side quests. That's always happening to me.
But as I breezed past, a quick mention of George Wallace,
the four term governor of Alabama, best remembered for his
rallying cry of segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. I'm

(01:47):
not going to do it in his accent. I'll spare
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.

(02:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
But that's not what happened.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
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 Nixon's or McGovern's. It didn't even have really anything
at all to do with George Wallace. Bremer had been
planning for months to assassinate Richard Nixon, but it turned

(02:53):
out that was too hard. He just wanted to shoot
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

(03:15):
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.

(03:38):
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

(04:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
So Nixon's saying.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Just say, we've got evidence, We've got unmistakable evidence. Of course,
they didn't have evidence of any kind, unmistakable or not.
And when the evidence did emerge, it certainly didn't show
the shooter working on the McGovern campaign, which is the
rumor Nixon was hoping to spread in those early hours.
Bob Kennedy, I.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Mean away, you put him to having.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
To get a bust before they get in this on
the right of way. Now, we don't have thousands of
hours of secret recordings from inside the offices of today's Republicans,
but we did see something really similar in the immediate
aftermath of the Trump shooting. He's a Biden voter, he's
a Democrat, he's a radical leftist, he's Antifa. We can

(05:28):
already tell. We just know it's obvious, we have proof.
The fact that there was no proof of anything on
day one doesn't matter. It matters even less that no
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

(05:49):
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.

(06:12):
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

(06:32):
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

(06:56):
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

(07:17):
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,

(07:40):
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

(08:00):
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

(08:22):
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

(08:48):
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

(09:08):
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

(09:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
Oh maybe this is a stunt. Wait?

Speaker 2 (09:50):
Why would he have them fire at his head? That's
so crazy, right, it's I mean, it's the same conversation
with different names and body parts subbed in. And this
recording too, capture Nixon's top aids, hoping that whoever did
it was a left wing nut could want he's gone
in er Well.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
I think it likely likely it could be one of
his own people too.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
If they would shoot that many while, and.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
They would have shot him in the foot or something,
why did he have another It wouldn't wouldn't be one
of those other people shooting on the stomach. It's too
easy to kill him. Well, I think the guy, the
guy has to be another some kind of I just
hope he's the left wing nut of right?

Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah, like that silly? I think I could kind of.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
Or it was really a left wing now.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Rather than the right wing, and they tried.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
To make out of something but the right day the
right wing or other. That's how the hell you do that?
I showed you the twister had just started in.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
Twisse people, So Nixon tried to put a thumb on
the scale. After the fact, the exact nature of his
meddling will rever be up for debate, I guess, and
the Nixon tapes aren't the only unique primary source for
in down that day. In the early months of nineteen
seventy two, as Arthur Remmer prepared to shoot Nixon, gave
up on shooting Nixon and ultimately shot George Wallace, he

(11:13):
was keeping a diary, and in nineteen seventy three Harper's
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.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
Only the latter half was published.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
He'd thrown away the first one hundred and forty eight
pages of fact, he notes on the first page of
the version that we have In nineteen eighty a construction
worker named Sherman Griffin found those first one hundred and
forty eight pages. So this again, eight years after the shooting,
he found them wrapped in plastic inside of a backpack
underneath the twenty seventh Street Viaduct in Milwaukee. From prison,

(11:55):
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.

(12:15):
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

(12:36):
a document, though it was.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
Riddled with typos.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
But Doll believes they come and go and are not
believable in their structure and format, 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 that Bremer was well read enough to
make reference to Solzhenitsyn's day in the Life of a
von Denisovitch or quit as he crossed the Great Lakes,
call me Ishmael. Both Deniseovich and Ishmael are misspelled, but

(13:02):
that could be intentional, he says.

Speaker 1 (13:05):
No.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
Gorvadahal believes or perhaps would only like you to think.
He believes it's hard to say that the diary was
falsified in its entirety by E.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
Howard Hunt.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
Nixon Spook and Hunt was a prolific writer, giving the
doll a large volume of material for comparison, and he
claims there are similarities in the writing styles, and also
notes that both Bremer and Hunt use the phrase Harry hippies.
They have a distaste for Harry hippies. I wasn't alive
in nineteen seventy two. Maybe a lot of people hated
Harry hippies. But again, just as Hirsh's claims, what the

(13:37):
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,

(14:00):
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

(14:20):
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,

(14:40):
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

(15:02):
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

(15:23):
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

(15:46):
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

(16:07):
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

(16:30):
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

(16:51):
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,

(17:13):
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.

(17:36):
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

(17:58):
in each other's arms for more than a minute a time.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
Time. They must have been fighting. Through binoculars.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
I saw them gesture like Italians and open their mouths
very wide, very often. So maybe he finished 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, de Niro prepared
for the role by getting a New York taxi license
and driving around the city listening to a cassette tape

(18:24):
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.

(18:45):
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

(19:07):
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

(19:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
Where am I?

Speaker 2 (19:46):
I got something to do something big before I ever
get arrested again. He writes that he's getting tired of
writing he wants to be a madman who kills, and
then abruptly transitions to saying he goes crazy when 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 had been canceled that day

(20:07):
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,

(20:29):
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

(20:51):
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

(21:12):
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.

(21:35):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
Maybe what they need is organization.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
Make the first lady a widow, incorporated, chicken in every
pot and a bullet on every head, Committee incorporated the
whole to 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 on the theme
how to do a bang up job getting people to
notice you? Or get it off your chest? Make your
problems everybody's. On May thirteenth, two days before the shooting,

(22:19):
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

(22:40):
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

(23:01):
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,

(23:22):
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

(23:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Hinckley shoot Reagan. There's really nothing hard to believe at
all in the.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
Idea that Thomas Crooks wanted to shoot a president just
to be remembered as anyone at all.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for it could happen here. Updated
monthly at coolzonemedia dot com, slash sources. Thanks for listening,