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New Chapters in Assassin's Diary?
Insight on the News, Dec 14, 1998 by Timothy W. Maier
George Wallace went to his grave believing the 1972 assassination attempt on him was a conspiracy. Now FBI archives reveal some disturbing unanswered questions.
Did I kill him?" Arthur Bremer demanded of the police while strapped to a gurney at Prince George's County Hospital in Laurel, Md., nearly a quarter-century ago. "Did I kill him?"
"Yeah, yeah. You killed him. He's dead," replied Prince George's County Police Officer Michael Landrum, who stood over the would-be assassin from Milwaukee.
Meanwhile, doctors treated Bremer for a head injury sustained when spectators pummeled him to the ground moments after he shot Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, who was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, May 15, 1972.
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"We had to tell him that," recalls retired Circuit Judge Vincent Femia, who was the deputy state's attorney for Prince George's County. "We told him, `You got him. You killed him good.' It was very important to Bremer that he killed Wallace."
Why? For years, Bremer let his bizarre manuscript, published in 1973 as An Assassin's Diary, talk for him. He failed to kill President Nixon, he had written, so he set his sights on Wallace for publicity. He wrote that he believed the diary would be "the most closely read pages since the scrolls."
After a five-day state trial Bremer was convicted and, in 1973, sentenced to 53 years in prison. A year later federal charges were dropped after Maryland appeals courts upheld Bremer's state conviction.
End of story? Not yet. During a months-long review, Insight obtained Bremer's parole records and the once highly secret 5,413-page FBI report known as the WalShot Files -- a 26-volume package spanning eight years from the day of the shooting to 1980. Here too, for the first time, is not only a comprehensive review straight from the FBI archives but details from exclusive interviews with the lead prosecutor and defense attorney who, after 26 years, break their silence about the shooting of Wallace.
"I still have reservations about the case, and I'm not one for conspiracy theories," says former Prince George's County State's Attorney Arthur "Bud" Marshall, who prosecuted Bremer. "But it's worth taking a look at."
It is indeed. What follows is the story of how the FBI, led by Acting Director L. Patrick Gray, dug relentlessly into Bremer's background. And how Gray, who later admitted destroying Watergate records, prevented the Bremer case from being explored during the Watergate hearings. The most feasible rationale for this might be protection of the president from further wild rumor-mongering, but it also might be what Silent Coup author Len Colodny calls "Nixon's second operation."
"You know, of all the people who wanted Wallace dead, Nixon was on top of the list," says Colodny, who is working on a book about the Wallace/Nixon relationship. "But we have not found the smoking gun to support it. We're still looking."
What is known is that Nixon stepped in to control the Bremer investigation shortly after the shots were fired, according to Femia. At the hospital, an FBI agent hung up a hospital phone, turned to Femia and barked, "That was the president. We're taking over. The president says, `We're not going to have another Dallas here.'" Femia, who already had prepared an indictment, objected fiercely, but the agents pushed him aside and grabbed Bremer in the gurney.
Femia threatened to file assault charges against the FBI, but cooler heads prevailed. Bremer went to Baltimore with the FBI.
While the story of Nixon's crude seizure of the case remained buried for a quarter-century, it exemplifies his obsession with the Wallace shooting. Historian Dan T. Carter in The Politics of Rage traces this obsession to 1968 when Wallace captured 10 million votes on the American Party ticket. Pollsters Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg noted that four of five Wallace voters in the South would have voted for Nixon if Wallace had bowed out.
Using the Nixon papers, Carter showed how the president tried to forestall another Wallace presidential bid by pumping $400,000 from a secret slush fund into then Alabama Gov. Albert Brewer's unsuccessful attempt to defeat Wallace in 1970. Nixon's efforts continued with the "Alabama Project" which, according to Carter, consisted of more than 75 IRS officers digging "over the past tax returns of Wallace, his brothers and virtually every financial supporter who had done business with the state." The IRS probe found nothing, but the private war continued.
In 1972 Nixon dumped $600,000 into Wallace's Florida primary campaign to defeat Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie because Nixon believed the Democrats would not nominate Wallace, Colodny says. Wallace went on to win four primaries and finish a strong second in liberal Wisconsin. The popular Alabama governor roared into Maryland with his populist "Send them a message" campaign. Suddenly even Nixon began to wonder if Wallace would pull off the political upset of the century. That is when the would-be assassin struck.
