It Could Happen Here - Shooter Without A Cause

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

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.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy

Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking

novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Cool Zone Media. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, your 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 Cool Zone Media called Weird Little Guys that I think you'll probably like. Today, I'm Molly Conger, your occasional host here on this feed and the host of a new weekly show from Cool 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 Guys feed.

So 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 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. Far from it. While I was doing 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, I 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 not going to do it in his accent. I'll spare you that. I remembered that he got shot while running for president too. During the primary in 1972, 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 68 might actually work. Or maybe it was a diehard Nixon supporter who saw

Wallace as a spoiler, siphoning conservative votes away from Nixon. But that's not what happened. When Arthur Bremmer shot George Wallace four times in the chest and stomach on May 15, 1972, 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. Bremmer had been planning for months to assassinate Richard Nixon, but it turned out that was too hard. He just wanted to shoot somebody important. 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, 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 Wray, 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 someone 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 demanding his aides put

in a call to the White House Deputy Director of Communications, Kenneth Clausen, to put out a statement that the shooter was a supporter of George McGovern. That was the front-runner in the Democratic primary who Nixon would go on to trounce terribly at the election at the end of that year. So Nixon's saying, 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. 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 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 that allegedly occurred that afternoon in May 1972

that was reported by Seymour Hersh 20 years later, in 1992. 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. Now, Seymour Hersh 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 substack at 87 years old, so I don't want any beef with Seymour. That's not what I'm saying. He has a decades-long career as an investigative journalist and has a Pulitzer for exposing the cover-up of the My Lai Massacre. I don't think he's padding the truth here, but in his 1992 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 Remmer'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 seem 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. Hersh's piece claimed the tapes contain 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 Hirsch in 1992. The problem is, we have the tapes now. 15 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 Coulson 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 Coulson is recalling something Nixon definitely desired. It's just not on the tapes 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 15th 1972 those missing 18 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 summer. But before we get to the rest of Richard Nixon's no good, very bad day, here are some products and services. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout?

Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley

into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and

want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, you look so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So on May 15th, Nixon got out of a budget meeting around 4 p.m., 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 Kennedys.

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 7 p.m. 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. I 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?

Oh, maybe this is a stunt. Wait, why would he have them fire at his head? That's so crazy. Right? I mean, it's the same conversation with different names and body parts subbed in. And this recording, too, captures Nixon's top aides hoping that whoever did it was a left-wing nut. Could be one of his own people, too. No, and they would have shot him in the foot or something

all right it wouldn't be it's not one of his own people shoot him in the stomach too easy to kill him oh i think the guy the guy has to be a nut of some kind i just hope he's a left wing not a right down like that silly thing So Nixon tried to put a thumb you the twist of distorted intelligence. So Nixon tried to put a thumb on the scale after the fact. But the exact nature of his meddling will forever be up for debate, I guess. And the Nixon tapes aren't the only unique primary source for what went down that day. In the early months of 1972, as Arthur Bremmer prepared to shoot Nixon, gave up on shooting Nixon, and ultimately shot George Wallace, he was keeping a diary. And in 1973, 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 I did find an archival scan of the diary that was produced as evidence. And the diary is a strange and fascinating document only the latter half was published he'd thrown away the first 148 pages of fact he notes on the first page of the version that we have in 1980 a construction worker named sherman griffin found those first 148 pages so this again eight years after the shooting he found them wrapped in plastic inside of a backpack underneath the 27th street viaduct in Milwaukee. From prison, Arthur Bremmer tried to sue Griffin for ownership of the document, saying it would only be used to embarrass him, and it was his, he owned it, I need it back. But in 1981, 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, finders 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 Gore Vidal speculating that Bremer hadn't written the diary at all. As a literary critic, it was his professional opinion that Bremer could not have written such a document. Though it was riddled with typos, Vidal 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 21-year-old busboy of mediocre intelligence. He also doubts that Bremer was well-read enough to make reference to Solzhenitsyn's Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, or quip as he crossed the Great Lakes, call me Ishmael. Both Denisovich and Ishmael are misspelled, but that could be intentional, he says. No, Gorbadov 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. Howard Hunt, Nixon's spook. And Hunt was a prolific writer, giving Vidal 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 hairy hippies. They have a distaste for hairy hippies. I don't know, I wasn't alive in 1972. Maybe a lot of people hated hairy hippies. But again, just as Hirsch's claims about the secret tapes in 1992 were called into question when we got the tapes in 2007, Bidal's essay was published in 1973, 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 148 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 gorbodal 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 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 john hinkley jr shot reagan to impress jodie foster remember, 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 Jodie 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 Jodie 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 Palentine. Hinkley shot Reagan to impress Jodie 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 Bremmer, the guy who shot George Wallace. Screenwriter Paul Schrader has always denied that he based any part of the movie on Bremmer's diary. In a 1976 interview, Schrader says he was inspired by the shooting itself in 1972, but that the script was actually finished before the diary was published in 73, and he registered the script with the WGA, so that is provably true, right? But he told Film Comments Richard Thompson in 76, 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 ramifications. Rubber's 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 76, that Bremer could file some kind of nuisance lawsuit from prison, and that's years before Bremer tried to get half a million dollars and his diary back from that construction worker. And I'm obviously not a film buff, right? We all just found out that I've never seen a movie.

So I 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 Scorsese and Schrader had some kind of deep psychic connection to whatever forces in the universe motivated Arthur Bremmer, they absolutely came from the diary. I read the diary before sitting down to see what the movie was all about. So when Travis Bickle, 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

Johnsons 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, floor to 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 at a time. They must have been fighting. Through binoculars, 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 Rauch'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 of someone reading the diary aloud.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire? Join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all.

It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Bremmer's diary entry about

leaving a nude massage parlor frustrated that he's still a virgin and 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 Bremmer'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 where am I? 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 he hears Johnny Cash's new single, quoting the lyrics, I shot you with my 38 and now I'm doing time, before noting that a baseball game had been canceled that day 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 2021. 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, Bremmer 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 at 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 10,000 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 there are about 30 guys in prison now who threaten the pres and we never heard a thing about them, except that they're in prison. Maybe what they need is organization. Make the First Lady a widow incorporated. Chicken in every pot and a bullet in every head committee incorporated. They'll hold a national convention every year to pick the executioner. A winner will be chosen from the best entry in 40,000 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 13th, two days before the shooting, 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 parked 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.38 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 campaign headquarters here to shield the gun. Is there anything else to say? My cry upon firing will be a penny for your thoughts. Around 4 p.m. on the 15th, 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.38. 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 63 years, later reduced to 53 years on appeal. He was denied parole in 1996 after arguing at his hearing that shooting segregationist dinosaurs wasn't as bad as harming

mainstream politicians. But he was released in 2007. George Wallace wrote to Bremer in prison in 1995, 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 1998. So, we shot George Wallace for no reason. And Robert De Niro's study of the diary he left behind inspired the performance that made Hinckley shoot Reagan. There's really nothing hard to believe at all in the idea that Thomas Crooks wanted to shoot a president just to be remembered as anyone at all. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.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.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once

we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home

and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From

thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything.