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May 6, 2025 - Weird Little Guys
43:31
Shooter Without A Cause

The guy who took a shot at Trump last summer wasn't the first person to shoot 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.

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Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Soledad O 'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back.
It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O 'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarky, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past.
The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s.
Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death.
Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season.
Find more crime and cocktails on Criminalia.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
After a crime, you read the headlines.
But do you know the story?
At the time that I called the police, he knew I had called him and left the house with a firearm and was texting me that he was going to use it.
I'm Hannah Smith.
And I'm Patia Eaton.
We host The Knife, a podcast from the Exactly Right Network that cuts to the heart of the story.
Through in-depth interviews and candid conversations, we'll bring you firsthand accounts of people living through the ripple effects of crime.
Most of us don't know the legal process.
And because they always tell you this word closure, I really wish people would stop using that word because there is no such thing as closure.
These are the scars that are left behind.
These are the voices you haven't heard.
New episodes every Thursday.
Listen to The Knife on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, everyone.
Molly Conger here.
You've probably noticed this episode showed up on your feed on an unusual day.
If you're a diehard 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.
I'm not thinking about weird little guys at all right now.
I'm on my honeymoon.
The show feed will run old episodes this week and next week, so there will be something on your feed on the usual day.
But I wanted to drop in a little something extra this week, too.
This episode is one that originally aired last summer.
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.
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.
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.
The World's War Remember that time Donald Trump got shot?
I kind of don't.
It feels like it was a hundred years ago, or in a dream.
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 it kind of didn't matter at all anymore.
We all forgot.
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 was political.
How could the shooter have had any other motivation?
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.
Far from it, as it turns out.
While I was doing the research for the first episode of Weird Little Guys, I got lost on some 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, who is perhaps best remembered for his rallying cry of segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever, you know the one.
I remembered that he had gotten shot while he was running for president, too.
During the primary in 1972, George Wallace 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 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.
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, honestly, even really anything 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 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.
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 had been less vigilant, crooks may have shot Biden, and Bremmer may have killed Nixon.
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.
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.
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 Clawson, put out a statement that the shooter was a supporter of George McGovern, the frontrunner in the Democratic primary.
Nixon would go on to defeat McGovern later that year.
Just say we've got unmistakable evidence, Nixon said.
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.
But that was the rumor Nixon hoped to spread in those early hours.
"Rumors are going to fall over the place.
Put it on the left right away.
Can you do that?
Who can you put it to and how it can get out?
That's terrible.
You know, it's better.
I mean, okay.
It must get out fast before they pin this on the right wing." It's a bit fuzzy, but you can hear Nixon saying that they need to act quickly to pin this on the left.
Rumors are going to spread, and they want theirs to spread first and fastest.
It doesn't matter what's true.
It matters what people believe.
Unfortunately, we don't have thousands of hours of secret tape recordings inside the offices of today's Republicans.
But we did see something 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 it'll stick.
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 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, whatever you think of his later career, Seymour Hersh wasn't a making-stuff-up kind of guy back then, so I don't think he's 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.
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 padding the truth here.
But in his 1992 New Yorker piece, 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 contain recordings of Nixon directing E. 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.
Music by Ben Thede Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid.
Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share.
Gilbert came.
I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley Season 2. Jeremy.
Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I'm Soledad O 'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s.
Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along a towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood...
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back, behind the heart.
...the police arrived in a heartbeat.
Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested.
He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black.
Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree.
Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist.
Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, my name's Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of On Purpose.
I just had a great conversation with Michelle Obama.
To whom much is given, much is expected.
The guilt comes from, am I doing enough?
Me, Michelle Obama, to say that to a therapist.
So let's unpack that.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama and someone who knows her best, her big brother Craig, will be hosting a podcast.
What have been your personal journeys with therapy?
We need to be coached throughout our lives.
My mom.
And she would always tell me, stop worrying about your sister.
Having been the first lady of the entire country and representing the country and the world, I couldn't afford to have that kind of disdain.
What would you say has been the most hardest recent test of fear?
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarky, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past.
The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s.
Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death.
Hear the story of the gentleman robber, the romantic darling of the ladies, and a tale about a wager over a sack of potatoes, but you'll have to tune in to learn who won that one.
Some highwaymen were well-mannered or faked it.
People were concerned about the romanticism of robbers, but most were just thugs.
Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season.
Call them robbers or bandits, some are legendary figures.
Listen to stories about historical crimes on Criminalia now, plus the cocktails and mocktails inspired by each.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
Given 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 asked E. Howard Hunt to break into a building for some nefarious purpose because...
We know that happened at least once.
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.
Hirsch's article in 1992 claims that the tapes contain recordings of Coulson 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 Coulson for not doing more to slow down the FBI.
Again, this is all very believable, if you have even a passing knowledge of Richard Nixon.
And Coulson himself was the one who related this account to Seymour Hersh in 1992.
The problem is, we have something now that Seymour Hersh didn't have in 1992.
And that's those tapes.
Fifteen years after Hersh'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 was recalling conversations that did occur, but outside the presence of the tape machine.
Or maybe he's 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 wanted.
It's just not on the tapes.
Absence of proof isn't proof of absence, but...
We do have a pretty complete record of Nixon's conversations on the afternoon of May 15, 1972.
There are, famously, 18 missing minutes in those tapes, but those are from a different afternoon in 1972.
On May 15, 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.
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.
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.
It's actually kind of wild to dig into those tapes and see where everyone's heads were that afternoon in the Oval Office.
A recording from around 7pm, so three hours after the shooting, captures speculation that the shooting may have been a false flag by Wallace's own people.
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.
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?
And this recording, too, captures top Nixon aides hoping that whoever did this was a left-wing nut and not a right-wing nut.
Could be one of his own people, too.
But they wouldn't shoot that man off.
No, and they would have shot him in the foot or something.
Why the hell's enough?
It wouldn't be if that one of his own people would shoot him in the stomach.
It's too easy to kill him.
Oh, I think the guy has to be a nut of some kind.
I just hope he's a left-wing nut, not a right-wing nut.
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.
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 Bremer prepared to shoot Nixon, He kept a diary.
And in 1973, Harper's Magazine Press published that diary.
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.
The diary is a strange and fascinating document.
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.
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.
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.
Finders keepers.
But the portion that we do have, that latter half of the diary, is a lot of things.
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.
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 Vidal's professional opinion that Bremer could not have written such a document.
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.
He also doubts Bremer was well-read enough to make references 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, right?
No, Gore Vidal believes, or perhaps would like you to think he believes, you know, it's hard to say, that the diary was falsified in its entirety by E. Howard Hunt, Nixon's spook.
Hunt was a prolific writer, giving Vidal a large volume of material for comparison, And he claims there are similarities in the writing styles.
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, 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 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.
But it's also possible that Gore Vidal was just doing a bit that we're not clever enough to understand.
But the legacy of that diary lives on in some surprising ways.
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.
John Hinckley Jr. shot Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, remember?
And, okay, here's where I have to admit something kind of embarrassing.
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.
He shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster.
I guess he just thought she'd find that impressive.
No need to interrogate that further.
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.
The thing is, I'd never seen the movie Taxi Driver.
I'd truly never pieced together that he thought shooting the president would impress Jodie Foster.
Because she had starred as a child sex worker in the movie Taxi Driver, in which the protagonist, Travis Bickle, plans to shoot a presidential candidate named Charles Palantyne.
Hinckley shot Reagan to impress Jodie 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.
So maybe everybody else already knows this part, too.
Taxi Driver owes a lot to Arthur Bremmer, the guy who shot George Wallace.
Taxi Driver Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid.
Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share.
Um, Gilbert came.
I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley, Season 2. Jeremy.
Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I'm Soledad O 'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s.
Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along a towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood...
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back, behind the heart.
...the police arrived in a heartbeat.
Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested.
He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black.
Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree.
Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist.
Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, my name's Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of On Purpose.
I just had a great conversation with Michelle Obama.
To whom much is given, much is expected.
The guilt comes from, am I doing enough?
Me, Michelle Obama, to say that to a therapist.
So let's unpack that.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama and someone who knows her best, her big brother Craig, will be hosting a podcast podcast What have been your personal journeys with therapy?
We need to be coached throughout our lives.
My mom.
And she would always tell me, stop worrying about your sister.
Having been the first lady of the entire country and representing the country and the world, I couldn't afford to have that kind of disdain.
What would you say has been the most hardest recent test of fear?
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarki, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past.
The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s.
Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death.
Hear the story of the gentleman robber, the romantic darling of the ladies, and a tale about a wager over a sack of potatoes, but you'll have to tune in to learn who won that one.
Some highwaymen were well-mannered or faked it.
People were concerned about the romanticism of robbers, but most were just thugs.
Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season.
Call them robbers or bandits, some are legendary figures.
Listen to stories about historical crimes on Criminalia now, plus the cocktails and mocktails inspired by each.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Screenwriter Paul Schrader has always denied basing any part of the movie on Bremer's diary.
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 a film comment, 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.
Grammer 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's actually kind of prescient of him, come to think of it.
He's saying in 1976 that Bremmer could file some kind of nuisance lawsuit from prison.
And this is...
Years before he tried to get half a million dollars and his diary back from that construction worker.
And look, I'm obviously not a film buff.
Like I said, I only recently saw Taxi Driver for the first time, so I won't say Paul Schrader isn't telling the truth.
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?
I guess that's true, I don't know.
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.
You can't tell me they don't come from the diary.
Because when I sat down to watch the movie, I had just finished reading the diary.
So when I saw the scene where Travis Bickle, 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.
She's smoking a cigarette, partially obscured by the gauzy curtains.
And that's a rather specific visual image.
In just a few pages into Bremer's diary, he describes a very similar scene.
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.
My last night at the Howard Johnsons in the Jamaica area, New York City.
I didn't sleep much.
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.
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.
They must have been fighting.
Through binoculars, I saw them gesture like Italians and open their mouths very wide, very often.
So maybe Schrader did finish 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, 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 Bremmer's diary.
Genuinely odd.
Normally I'm firmly in the camp of please do not read or recommend that others read the manifesto left behind by a shooter.
But I really don't think anyone will read Arthur Bremmer's diary about leaving a nude massage parlor frustrated that he's still a virgin and feel inspired by it.
But I do think it's a fascinating document.
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.
After failing to get his shot at Nixon at the appearance in Ottawa in April, he wrote, I just need a little opening and 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, someone, and 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 tired of waiting.
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 due in time.
Before noting that a baseball game was cancelled due to the rain.
Honestly, the document it reminds me of most is a diary kept by Franklin Seacrest.
That was a young man who set a synagogue on fire in Austin in 2021.
Seacrest's diary is this similar sort of strange stream of consciousness accounting of his frustrations with women, his daily activities.
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 end up 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 and what's on TV tonight.
I hope my death makes more sense than my life.
Days before he finally took the shot, he wrote, 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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
On May 15, 1972, Arthur Bremmer was one of about a thousand people who showed up to hear George Wallace speak at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland.
Around 4 p.m., just as Wallace finished speaking, Bremmer pushed his way through the crowd hoping to shake Wallace's hand and unloaded his.38.
He struck George Wallace four times and wounded three others, a state trooper, a campaign volunteer, and a Secret Service agent.
He forgot to shout anything at all as he did it.
He was convicted and sentenced to 63 years, later reduced to 53 years on appeal.
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.
Bremer never responded, and George Wallace died in 1998.
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.
But he was eventually paroled in 2007 after serving 35 years.
For the last 18 years, Arthur Bremer has lived in Maryland under the conditions of his supervised release.
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.
His supervision actually ends this month, on May 15th, 2025, the 53rd anniversary of the shooting.
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.
So, 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 Hinckley shoot Reagan.
There's nothing hard to believe at all about the idea that Thomas Crooks wanted to shoot a president just to be remembered as anyone at all.
Thank you.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcasts at gmail.com.
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.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Music Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Soledad O 'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back.
It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O 'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarky, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past.
The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s.
Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death.
Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season.
Find more crime and cocktails on Criminalia.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
After a crime, you read the headlines.
But do you know the story?
At the time that I called the police, I had called him and left the house with a firearm and was texting me that he was going to use it.
I'm Hannah Smith.
And I'm Patia Eaton.
We host The Knife, a podcast from the Exactly Right Network that cuts to the heart of the story.
Through in-depth interviews and candid conversations, we'll bring you firsthand accounts of people living through the ripple effects of crime.
Most of us don't know the legal process.
And because they always tell you this word closure, I really wish people would stop using that word because there is no such thing as closure.
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