Shooter Without A Cause

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Speaker 23 the wait is over

Speaker 24 the next up live music finals are here on september 26th tick tock live and iHeartRadio bring you the biggest night in live music discovery streaming live from the legendary iHeartRadio theater in LA the top 12 artists hit the stage for one career defining performance the judges will crown the winner and you'll help choose the People's Choice Award.

Speaker 23 Don't miss it. September 26, 7 to 9 p.m.
Pacific.

Speaker 24 Follow at TikTok Live underscore US and watch it all go down.

Speaker 23 Only on TikTok Live.

Speaker 25 Stop settling for weak sound.

Speaker 26 It's time to level up your game and bring the boom.

Speaker 30 Hit the town with the ultra-durable LG X-Boom portable speaker and enjoy vibrant sound wherever you go.

Speaker 32 Elevate your listening experience to new heights because let's be real, your music deserves it.

Speaker 33 The future of sound is now with LGX X-Boom. And for a limited time, save 25% at LG.com with code FALL25.

Speaker 26 Bring a boom.

Speaker 26 X-Boom.

Speaker 24 I couldn't even believe it was real.

Speaker 36 Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of Film and Media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Speaker 39 Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Speaker 41 Kennedy was killed.

Speaker 42 Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Speaker 43 Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Speaker 37 Drew Pinske, Corey Feldman, and more.

Speaker 45 Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 46 Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 46 Hello, everyone. Molly Conger here.

Speaker 46 You've probably noticed this episode showed up on your feed on an unusual day.

Speaker 46 If you're a die-hard listener of another show on the network, It Could Happen Here, you may have also noticed that this isn't exactly a brand new episode. But I'm not here this week.

Speaker 46 I'm not thinking about weird little guys at all right now. I'm on my honeymoon.

Speaker 46 The show feed will run old episodes this week and next week, so there will be something on your feed on the usual day.

Speaker 46 But I wanted to drop in a little something extra this week too.

Speaker 46 This episode is one that originally aired last summer on It Could Happen Here, so some of you may have heard it already, and there are a few references to the fact that it's August of 2024.

Speaker 46 I didn't change those lines, but I have slightly edited and re-recorded the episode so my talented audio engineer Rory could give this the full weird little guy's audio feel.

Speaker 46 So, if you missed it last summer, I hope you'll enjoy this story about the very weird little guy who shot a segregationist because it turned out shooting Richard Nixon was too hard.

Speaker 46 Remember that time Donald Trump got shot?

Speaker 46 I kind of don't. It feels like it was 100 years ago or in a dream.

Speaker 46 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

Speaker 46 it kind of didn't matter at all anymore.

Speaker 45 We all forgot.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 And that was really hard for a lot of people to swallow.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 Everything about the situation was political.

Speaker 46 How could the shooter have had any other motivation?

Speaker 46 But he wouldn't be the first guy to take a shot at a president or a presidential candidate for what seems like no reason at all.

Speaker 46 Far from it, as it turns out.

Speaker 46 While I was doing the research for the first episode of Weird Little Guys,

Speaker 46 I got lost on some side quests. That's always happening to me.

Speaker 46 But as I breezed past a quick mention of George Wallace, the four-term governor of Alabama, who is perhaps best remembered for his rallying cry of segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever, you know the one.

Speaker 46 I remembered that he had gotten shot while he was running for president too.

Speaker 46 During the primary in 1972, George Wallace was paralyzed after surviving an attempted assassination on the campaign trail.

Speaker 46 Surely, whoever shot a man like George Wallace did it out of a deep ideological commitment to

Speaker 46 something, right?

Speaker 46 Maybe it was a civil rights activist who opposed Wallace's views on race, or a McGovern voter concerned about Wallace's attempt to gain the Democratic Party nomination after he'd won five states as a third-party candidate in 1968.

Speaker 46 Or maybe it was a diehard Nixon supporter who saw Wallace as a spoiler, siphoning conservative votes away from Nixon.

Speaker 45 But that's not what happened.

Speaker 46 When Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace four times in the chest and stomach on May 15th, 1972,

Speaker 46 it had nothing at all to do with Wallace's policy positions. Or, honestly, even really anything to do with George Wallace.

Speaker 46 Bremer had been planning for months to assassinate Richard Nixon, but it turned out that was too hard.

Speaker 46 He just wanted to shoot somebody important.

Speaker 46 I hesitate to draw too many comparisons to the Trump shooter because there's a lot we still don't know and may never know.

Speaker 46 But it has come out that Thomas Crooks was equally interested in shooting Joe Biden. Trump just happened to have had a campaign rally close to his home in Pennsylvania with weak perimeter security.

Speaker 46 Crooks had also looked into how to get close to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and inexplicably, Kate Middleton.

Speaker 46 Yes, that Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales.

Speaker 46 If Biden had been campaigning in western Pennsylvania, or if Richard Nixon's security had been less vigilant, Crooks may have shot Biden and Bremer may have killed Nixon.

Speaker 46 It doesn't seem like it really mattered to either of them who they shot, as long as they shot a guy running for president.

Speaker 46 One of the funny things about history is realizing we've always been what we are now. There's truly nothing new under the sun.

Speaker 46 Within hours of the attempt on George Wallace's life, before there was any clear information at all, Nixon was demanding that the White House Deputy Director of Communications, Kenneth Clausen, put out a statement that the shooter was a supporter of George McGovern, the frontrunner in the Democratic primary.

Speaker 46 Nixon would go on to defeat McGovern later that year.

Speaker 46 Just say we've got unmistakable evidence, Nixon said.

Speaker 46 Of course, they didn't have any evidence of any kind, and when they did get that evidence, it certainly didn't show the shooter working on the McGovern campaign.

Speaker 46 But that was the rumor Nixon hoped to spread in those early hours.

Speaker 46 Rumor's going to flow all over the place. Put it on the left right away.
I mean, can you do that?

Speaker 46 Who can you put it to and how can we get out? That's true. That's good.

Speaker 46 Must get out fast before they pin this on the right wing.

Speaker 46 It's a bit fuzzy, but you can hear Nixon saying that they need to act quickly to pin this on the left.

Speaker 46 Rumors are going to spread and they want theirs to spread first and fastest.

Speaker 46 It doesn't matter what's true. It matters what people believe.

Speaker 46 Unfortunately, we don't have thousands of hours of secret tape recordings inside the offices of today's Republicans.

Speaker 46 But we did see something similar in the immediate aftermath of the Trump shooting. He's a Biden voter.
He's a Democrat.

Speaker 46 he's a radical leftist, he's Antifa, we can already tell, we just know, it's obvious, we have proof.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 You have to make an impression while the cement is wet. And sometimes it'll stick.

Speaker 46 One thing that is not on the Nixon tapes, though, is a conversation that allegedly occurred that afternoon in May of 1972, that was reported by Seymour Hirsch 20 years later, in 1992.

Speaker 46 Despite a Supreme Court ruling in the 70s that the tapes belonged to the National Archives, the full volume of the Nixon tapes were not made available to the public until 2007.

Speaker 46 Now, whatever you think of his later career, Seymour Hirsch wasn't a making stuff up kind of guy back then. So I don't think he's fabricating any part of this story.

Speaker 46 He's still alive and has a substack at 87 years old, so I don't want any beef with Seymour.

Speaker 46 He's had a decades-long career as an investigative journalist and a Pulitzer for exposing the cover-up of the My Lai Massacre. So I don't think he's patting the truth here.

Speaker 46 But in his 1992 New Yorker piece, Nixon's Last Cover-Up, The Tapes He Wants the Archives to Suppress,

Speaker 46 Hirsch wrote that the unreleased tapes from the afternoon of the Wallace shooting contain recordings of Nixon directing E.

Speaker 46 Howard Hunt, the retired CIA officer who headed Nixon's White House plumbers, to break into Arthur Bremer's apartment before the FBI could search it and plant McGovern campaign literature.

Speaker 2 Tired of spills and stains on your sofa?

Speaker 6 WashableSofas.com has your back, featuring the Annabe collection, the only designer sofa that's machine washable inside and out, where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices.

Speaker 6 That's right, sofas started just $699.

Speaker 14 Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabrics.

Speaker 13 Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing.

Speaker 18 The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime.

Speaker 8 Check out washable sofas.com and get up to 60% off your Anibay sofa, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.

Speaker 20 If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund.

Speaker 22 No return shipping or restocking fees.

Speaker 10 Every penny back.

Speaker 1 Upgrade now at washable sofas.com.

Speaker 17 Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 23 The wait is over.

Speaker 24 Ladies and gentlemen, the next up live music finals are here.

Speaker 23 On September 26th, TikTok Live and iHeartRadio bring you the biggest night in live music discovery.

Speaker 24 Streaming live from the legendary iHeartRadio Theater in L.A.

Speaker 23 The top 12 artists you've been following will take the spotlight for one final career-defining performance.

Speaker 24 Judged by music gurus and industry powerhouses.

Speaker 23 Tom Pullman, chief programming officer at iHeartMedia.

Speaker 24 Beata Murphy, program director of 102.7 Kiss FM.

Speaker 23 Justina Valentine from MTV's Wild and Out.

Speaker 24 And viral guitarist John Dreddo.

Speaker 23 Hosted by iHeartRadio's JoJo Wright and EJ.

Speaker 24 This is the ultimate showdown.

Speaker 23 The The judges will crown the next up live music winner and you have the power to decide who takes home the People's Choice Award.

Speaker 24 Don't miss a second. Follow along at TikTok Live underscore US.

Speaker 23 And be there live, September 26, 7 to 9 p.m.

Speaker 24 Pacific. Together, let's witness the dawning of the next music superstar.

Speaker 23 Only on TikTok Live.

Speaker 25 Stop settling for weak sound.

Speaker 26 It's time to level up your game and bring the boom.

Speaker 30 Hit the town with the ultra-durable LGX X Boom portable speaker and enjoy vibrant sound wherever you go.

Speaker 32 Elevate your listening experience to new heights because let's be real, your music deserves it.

Speaker 33 The future of sound is now with LG X Boom. And for a limited time save 25% at LG.com with code FALL25.

Speaker 26 Bring the boom. X-Boom.

Speaker 24 I couldn't even believe it was real.

Speaker 36 Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Speaker 39 Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Speaker 41 Kennedy was killed.

Speaker 42 Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Speaker 43 Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Speaker 37 Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Speaker 45 Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 46 Hunt's own autobiography admits only that at Nixon's direction, Nixon advisor Charles Coulson did ask Hunt to quote, take a look around Remmer's apartment.

Speaker 46 Given that this is all taking place just a month before Hunt did, in fact, play a key role in the Watergate break-in,

Speaker 46 this isn't exactly unbelievable. I can absolutely believe that Richard Nixon asked E.
Howard Hunt to break into a building for some nefarious purpose because we know that happened at least once.

Speaker 46 And one thing the varying accounts do seem to agree on is that Hunt was unable to complete the assignment because the FBI had already sealed off Bremer's apartment in Milwaukee before he got there.

Speaker 46 Hirsch's article in 1992 claims that the tapes contain recordings of Colson breaking the news to Nixon that Hunt had arrived too late and the apartment was already under police guard, and that the recording captures Nixon berating Colson for not doing more to slow down the FBI.

Speaker 46 Again, this is all very believable if you have even a passing knowledge of Richard Nixon.

Speaker 46 And Coulson himself was the one who related this account to Seymour Hirsch in 1992.

Speaker 46 The problem is, we have something now that Seymour Hirsch didn't have in 1992, and that's those tapes.

Speaker 46 Fifteen years after Hirsch's article was published, researchers scoured the newly released recordings for proof of this version of events.

Speaker 46 And it isn't there.

Speaker 46 It's entirely possible that Colson was recalling conversations that did occur, but outside the presence of the tape machine.

Speaker 46 Or maybe he's misremembering how much of this was actually spoken aloud and what was simply understood.

Speaker 46 It's not out of the realm of possibility that Coulson is recalling something Nixon definitely wanted.

Speaker 46 It's just not on the tapes.

Speaker 46 Absence of proof isn't proof of absence, but we do do have a pretty complete record of Nixon's conversations on the afternoon of May 15th, 1972.

Speaker 46 There are famously 18 missing minutes in those tapes, but those are from a different afternoon in 1972.

Speaker 46 On May 15th, though, Nixon had just gotten out of a budget meeting around 4 p.m., shortly after the shooting, and that's when he first got the news.

Speaker 46 His first phone call was to his own wife, Pat,

Speaker 46 and then he called George Wallace's wife, Cornelia.

Speaker 46 He then asked Secretary of the Treasury, John Connolly, to call Ted Kennedy to offer him full Secret Service protection.

Speaker 46 And presumably, this is because he believed Ted Kennedy would be McGovern's vice presidential pick, but I guess if people are getting assassinated, you need to account for all your Kennedys.

Speaker 46 It's actually kind of wild to dig into those tapes and see where everyone's heads were on that afternoon in the Oval Office.

Speaker 46 A recording from around 7 p.m., so three hours after the shooting, captures speculation that the shooting may have been a false flag by Wallace's own people.

Speaker 46 But the idea was quickly dismissed. He wouldn't have had his own people shoot him in the stomach.
They would have gone for something less likely to end up killing him, like shooting him in the foot.

Speaker 46 Which is a conversation we all heard immediately after the Trump shooting, isn't it? Right? Maybe this is a stunt, but why would he have them shoot at his head? That's so risky.

Speaker 46 And this recording, too, captures top Nixon aides hoping that whoever did this was a left-wing nut and not a right-wing nut.

Speaker 46 Could be one of his own people, too. But they wouldn't shoot that many rocks.

Speaker 46 No, and they would have shot him in the foot or something.

Speaker 46 I think he had a nut. Wouldn't he? Is that one of his own people shoot him in the stomach? It's too easy to kill him.

Speaker 45 Oh, I think

Speaker 24 the guy has to be a nut of some kind, but I just hope he's a left-wing nut, not a right-wing nut.

Speaker 46 So Nixon tried to put a thumb on the scale after the fact.

Speaker 46 But the exact nature of his meddling will forever be up for debate.

Speaker 46 And the Nixon tapes aren't the only unique primary source for what went down that day.

Speaker 46 In the early months of 1972, as Arthur Bremer prepared to shoot Nixon, gave up on shooting Nixon and ultimately shot George Wallace,

Speaker 46 He kept a diary. And in 1973, Harper's Magazine Press Press published that diary.

Speaker 46 I couldn't find a physical copy of that original bound book for less than a small fortune, but I did find an original scan of Bremer's diary that was produced in court as evidence.

Speaker 46 The diary is a strange and fascinating document.

Speaker 46 Only the latter half was published. He'd thrown away the first 148 pages, a fact he notes on the first page of the version that we do have.

Speaker 46 In 1980, a construction worker named Sherman Griffin found the first 148 pages wrapped in plastic inside of a backpack under the 27th Street Viaduct in Milwaukee.

Speaker 46 From prison, Arthur Bremer actually tried to sue Griffin for ownership of the document, saying it would only be used to embarrass him. But in 1981, a court ruled that Griffin could keep it.

Speaker 46 Finder's Keepers.

Speaker 46 But the portion that we do have, that latter half of the diary, is a lot of things.

Speaker 46 It's full of spelling errors and disorganized thinking and sexual fantasy and mundane, rambling stream of consciousness of a guy going about his day-to-day life as he tries to figure out how to assassinate the president.

Speaker 46 A few months after it was published, the New York Review published an essay by Gore Vidal, speculating that Bremer hadn't written the diary at all.

Speaker 46 As a literary critic, it was Vidal's professional opinion that Bremer could not have written such a document.

Speaker 46 Though it was riddled with spelling errors, Vidal writes that they come and go, almost as though the writer is remembering as he writes that he's supposed to be a 21-year-old busboy of mediocre intelligence.

Speaker 46 He also doubts Bremer was well-read enough to make references to Solzhenitsyn's Day in the Life of Ivan Denisevich, or Quip as he crossed the Great Lakes, Call Me Ishmael.

Speaker 46 Both Denisevich and Ishmael are misspelled, but That could be intentional, right?

Speaker 46 No, Gorvidal believes, or perhaps would would like you to think he believes, you know, it's hard to say,

Speaker 46 that the diary was falsified in its entirety by E. Howard Hunt, Nixon's spook.

Speaker 46 Hunt was a prolific writer, giving Vidal a large volume of material for comparison, and he claims there are similarities in the writing styles.

Speaker 46 Again, Just as Hirsch's claims about the secret tapes in 1992 were called into question when we got the tapes in 2007, Vidal's essay was published in 1973, 1973, seven years before the first half of the diary was found.

Speaker 46 So even if you're inclined to believe Hunt was crafty enough to construct this elaborate plot with a fake diary and a Patsy shooter, it's a real stretch to think that he would write 148 pages, wrap them in plastic, hide them in a backpack, and tuck that backpack into a nook in a bridge in Milwaukee to be discovered by a construction worker years later.

Speaker 46 But it's also possible that Gorvidal was just doing a bit that we're not clever enough to understand.

Speaker 46 But the legacy of that diary lives on in some surprising ways.

Speaker 46 In those early confusing days after the Trump shooting, before we all forgot it 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 at all.

Speaker 46 John Hinckley Jr. shot Reagan to impress Jody Foster, remember?

Speaker 46 And okay, here's where I have to admit something kind of embarrassing.

Speaker 46 I've always just accepted that statement at face value. It makes no sense at all.
But he wasn't acting rationally, so it's not something that seemed like I needed to make sense of.

Speaker 46 He shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jodi Foster. I guess he just thought she'd find that impressive.
No need to interrogate that further.

Speaker 46 A lot of women might find it impressive if he shot Ronald Reagan, so there's not a lot of follow-up to do on that.

Speaker 46 The thing is, I'd never seen the movie Taxi Driver.

Speaker 46 I'd truly never pieced together that he thought shooting the president would impress Jodi Foster because she had starred as a child sex worker in the movie Taxi Driver, in which the protagonist, Travis Bickel, plans to shoot a presidential candidate named Charles Palantine.

Speaker 46 Hinkley shot Reagan to impress Jodi Foster makes a lot more sense with that added cultural context, and I fear I may have been the last person in America to realize that.

Speaker 46 So maybe everybody else already knows this part too.

Speaker 46 Taxi driver owes a lot to Arthur Bremer,

Speaker 46 the guy who shot George Wallace.

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Speaker 3 Shop now at washable sofas.com.

Speaker 21 Add a little

Speaker 7 to your life.

Speaker 17 Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 23 The wait is over.

Speaker 24 The next up live music finals are here.

Speaker 23 On September 26th, TikTok Live and iHeartRadio bring you the biggest night in live music discovery.

Speaker 24 Streaming live from the legendary iHeartRadio Theater in LA.

Speaker 23 The top 12 artists you've been following will take the spotlight for one final career-defining performance.

Speaker 24 Judged by music gurus and industry powerhouses.

Speaker 23 Tom Pullman, chief programming officer at iHeartMedia.

Speaker 24 Beata Murphy, program director of 102.7 Kiss FL.

Speaker 23 Justina Valentine from MTV's Wild and Out.

Speaker 24 And viral guitarist John Dretto.

Speaker 23 Hosted by iHeartRadio's Jojo Wright and EJ.

Speaker 24 This is the ultimate showdown.

Speaker 23 The judges will crown the next up live music winner and you have the power to decide who takes home the People's Choice Award.

Speaker 24 Don't miss a second. Follow along at TikTok Live underscore US.

Speaker 23 And be there live, September 26, 7 to 9 p.m.

Speaker 24 Pacific. Together, let's witness the dawning of the next music superstar.

Speaker 23 Only on TikTok Live.

Speaker 25 Stop settling for weak sound.

Speaker 26 It's time to level up your game and bring the boom.

Speaker 30 Hit the town with the ultra-durable LGX Boom portable speaker and enjoy vibrant sound wherever you go.

Speaker 32 Elevate your listening experience to new heights because let's be real, your music deserves it.

Speaker 33 The future of sound is now with LG X Boom.

Speaker 27 And for a limited time, save 25% at LG.com with code Fall25.

Speaker 26 Bring the boom.

Speaker 26 X-Boom.

Speaker 24 I couldn't even believe it was real.

Speaker 36 Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of Film and Media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Speaker 39 Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Speaker 41 Kennedy was killed.

Speaker 42 Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Speaker 43 Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Speaker 37 Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Speaker 4 Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 46 Screenwriter Paul Schrader has always denied basing any part of the movie on Bremer's diary.

Speaker 46 In a 1976 interview, Schrader says he was inspired by the shooting itself, but that the script was actually finished before the diaries were published. Telling Richard Thompson for film comment,

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 But I decided not to because of legal ramifications.

Speaker 46 Remer 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.

Speaker 46 And that's actually kind of prescient of him, come to think of it. He's saying in 1976 that Remmer could file some kind of nuisance lawsuit from prison.

Speaker 46 And this is years before he tried to get half a million dollars and his diary back from that construction worker.

Speaker 46 And look, I'm obviously not a film buff.

Speaker 46 Like I said, I only recently saw a taxi driver for the first time, so I won't say Paul Schrader isn't telling the truth.

Speaker 46 And I don't know, maybe if you're a film buff, you'd say there's a difference between changing the script and changing the screenplay. Those are kind of different things, right?

Speaker 46 I guess that's true. I don't know.

Speaker 46 Because there are some scenes in Taxi Driver that Unless Gorsese and Schrader had some kind of deep psychic connection to whatever forces in the universe motivated Arthur Bremer, they absolutely came from the diary.

Speaker 46 You can't tell me they don't come from the diary.

Speaker 46 Because when I sat down to watch the movie, I had just finished reading the diary.

Speaker 46 So when I saw the scene where Travis Bickel, the titular taxi driver, pulls up outside of a building with his fare, Martin Scorsese himself, in the back seat, I did that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme at my TV when the camera panned to the woman in the window.

Speaker 46 She's smoking a cigarette partially obscured by the gauzy curtains.

Speaker 46 And that's a rather specific visual image.

Speaker 46 And just a few pages into Bremer's diary, he describes a very similar scene.

Speaker 46 Before he flew back to Milwaukee to try to cross the border into Canada to shoot Richard Nixon at an event in Ottawa, he wrote this in his diary.

Speaker 46 My last night at the Howard Johnson's in the Jamaica area, New York City. I didn't sleep much.

Speaker 46 A beautiful naked lady across the parking lot of the next motel, out by her window, floor to ceiling, smoking cigarettes, and I had to watch her.

Speaker 46 Her table room light was on and a thin veil of curtain allowed me to watch as she passionately kissed a man who wore clothes. I never saw them in each other's arms more than a minute at a time.

Speaker 46 They must have been fighting. Through binoculars, I saw them gesture like Italians and open their mouths very wide, very often.

Speaker 46 So maybe Schrader did finish the script before he read the diary. But the diary absolutely influenced the way the film was shot.

Speaker 46 According to Andrew Rausch's book on the films of Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro prepared for the role by getting a New York taxi license and driving around the city listening to a cassette tape of Bremer's diary.

Speaker 46 The diary is genuinely odd.

Speaker 46 Normally, I'm firmly in the camp of, please do not read or recommend that others read the manifesto left behind by a shooter.

Speaker 46 But I really don't think anyone will read Arthur Bremer's diary about leaving a nude massage parlor frustrated that he's still a virgin and feel inspired by it.

Speaker 46 But I do think it's a fascinating document.

Speaker 46 I think I learned more about what's inside the mind of a nihilist aspiring shooter from Bremer's diary than I've learned from any self-indulgent little manifesto left by a mass shooter.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 11 Failures.

Speaker 46 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, someone, and get arrested.

Speaker 46 And then where am I? I got something to do. Something big before I ever get arrested again.

Speaker 46 He writes that he's tired of waiting.

Speaker 46 He wants to be a madman who kills, and then abruptly transitions to saying he, quote, goes crazy when he hears Johnny Cash's new single, quoting the lyrics, I shot you with my 38, and now I'm doing time,

Speaker 46 before noting that a baseball game was canceled due to the rain.

Speaker 46 Honestly, the document it reminds me of most is a diary kept by Franklin Seacrest.

Speaker 46 That was a young man who set a synagogue on fire in Austin in 2021.

Speaker 46 Seacrest's diary is the similar sort of strange stream of consciousness accounting of his frustrations with women, his daily activities, interspersed with these outbursts of violent desire.

Speaker 46 After taking two weeks away from his diary to deal with the tragedy of failing to kill Richard Nixon, Bremer went to see Clockwork Orange.

Speaker 46 As he watched the movie, he decided he would kill George Wallace instead, though he lamented that this was a second-rate target, writing,

Speaker 46 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 end up at the bottom of the first page in America.

Speaker 46 The editors will say, Wallace dead?

Speaker 11 Who cares?

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 You know, a storm in some country we never heard of kills 10,000 people, big deal, past the beer and what's on TV tonight. I hope my death makes more sense than my life.

Speaker 46 Days before he finally took the shot, he wrote,

Speaker 46 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?

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 It It bothers me that there are about 30 guys in prison now who threatened the president and we never heard a thing about them, except they're in prison. Maybe what they need is organization.

Speaker 46 Make the first lady a widow incorporated. Chicken in every pot and bullet in every head incorporated.
They'll hold a national convention every year to pick the executioner.

Speaker 46 A winner will be chosen from the best entry in 40,000 words or less, preferably less, upon the theme, how to do a bang-up job of getting people to notice you.

Speaker 46 Or get it off your chest. Make your problems everybody's.

Speaker 46 On May 13th, two days before the shooting, Bremer attended a Wallace rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Speaker 46 There are photographs of Bremer at the rally that day, and he even spoke to a police officer who responded to a call about a suspicious vehicle parked near the venue.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 His loaded 38 was in his jacket pocket.

Speaker 46 He writes in his diary that he could have taken a 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,

Speaker 46 I let Wallace go, only to spare these two stupid, innocent, delighted kids.

Speaker 46 His final entry, the night before the shooting, ends with,

Speaker 46 Got a sign from campaign headquarters here to shield the gun. Is there anything else to say? My cry upon firing will be a penny for your thoughts.

Speaker 46 On May 15, 1972, Arthur Bremer was one of about a thousand people who showed up to hear George Wallace speak at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland.

Speaker 46 Around 4 p.m., just as Wallace finished speaking, Bremer pushed his way through the crowd, hoping to shake Wallace's hand, and unloaded his 38.

Speaker 46 He struck George Wallace four times and wounded three others, a state trooper, a campaign volunteer, and a secret service agent.

Speaker 46 He forgot to shout anything at all as he did it.

Speaker 46 He was convicted and sentenced to 63 years, later reduced to 53 years on appeal.

Speaker 46 In 1995, George Wallace wrote to Bremer in prison, telling him that he forgave him for the shooting and hoping they could correspond a bit to get to know one another.

Speaker 46 Bremer never responded, and George Wallace died in 1998.

Speaker 46 Arthur Bremer was denied parole in 1996 after arguing at his hearing that, quote, shooting segregationist dinosaurs isn't as bad as harming mainstream politicians.

Speaker 46 But he was eventually paroled in 2007 after serving 35 years.

Speaker 46 For the last 18 years, Arthur Bremer has lived in Maryland under the conditions of his supervised release.

Speaker 46 He's been on electronic monitoring, he has to submit to mental evaluations, and he's been required to stay away from all elected officials and candidates for office.

Speaker 46 His supervision actually ends this month, on May 15th, 2025, the 53rd anniversary of the shooting.

Speaker 46 He'll be 75 years old this year, and he's been a model parolee as far as I can tell, so I doubt he'll be getting up to anything interesting once he's legally allowed to leave the state of Maryland.

Speaker 46 So,

Speaker 46 I guess he shot George Wallace for no reason at all. And Robert De Niro's study of the diary he left behind inspired the performance that made Hinkley shoot Reagan.

Speaker 46 There's nothing hard to believe at all about the idea that Thomas Crookes wanted to shoot a president just to be remembered as anyone at all.

Speaker 46 Weir Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 46 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.

Speaker 46 I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

Speaker 46 Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.

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