New FBI Revelations re: George Wallace Assassination Attempt
Blanche
Bremer and his failed attempt to assassinate Gov. George Wallace in May
1972. I expect the TV networks will be picking this up. It appears
Richard Nixon was more involved than was previously revealed. Why are we
not surprised?
I like the reference to the "26 volumes".
New Chapters in Assassin's Diary (AP)
George Wallace went to his grave in 1998 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 third
of a 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.
"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." In fact, it sold about fifty copies and promptly went out of
print.
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. Bremer's parole records have been made public 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 32 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
likely 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 wrote 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
control of the guerney on which Bremer lay.
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.
Bremer was in a Baltimore jail by the time he discovered he had not killed
but only paralyzed the fiery former Golden Gloves champion. When Bremer
learned he also had wounded a Secret Service agent, an Alabama state
trooper and a Wallace campaign worker, he blamed spectators who "deflected
his arm" and then told agents trying to identify him that "he was coming
from nowhere and going nowhere....and would stand mute."
Angered by the prosecution's portrayal of him as an unemployed busboy
living in his car, Bremer snapped at his arraignment, "Why would I be
living in my car when I stayed at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel? The press is
going to ----- up this case." He was right about the press. In what the
Chicago Tribune called a "circus atmosphere," reporters stampeded Bremer's
apartment after the FBI inexplicably failed to seal it. Bullets, a
personal notebook, clothing and other personal effects were removed by
journalists and curiosity seekers.
And Bremer's silence after his court appearance bothered prosecutor
Marshall. "We had concern that someone else was involved," Marshall says.
"The question I always had is how the Secret Service found out who he was
as quick as they did. They were in his apartment within an hour."
Forty-five minutes after the shooting, the WalShot Files show, a Baltimore
FBI agent called the Milwaukee FBI office identifying Bremer as the
shooter based on personal identification found on Bremer. The Secret
Service identified Bremer's address at 5:35 p.m., it claims, after tracing
his .38-caliber handgun. But 25 minutes earlier, at 5:10 p.m., when two
FBI agents entered Bremer's apartment, a Secret Service agent already was
there. How the Secret Service managed that remains a mystery, inspiring
conspiracy aficionados to speculate that the White House knew about Bremer
before the shots were fired. The Secret Service agent told the FBI he was
on an "intelligence-gathering mission."
All three agents left the apartment, but returned with another Secret
Service agent after reports that the press had managed to get inside. At
this point the Secret Service removed items from the apartment, setting
off a turf war between the agencies that ignited when the Secret Service
refused to turn over to the FBI the original of Bremer's "diary"
manuscript, found in his car, until Nixon ordered them to do so.
The WalShot Files show a detailed probe of Bremer's background, with
interviews ranging from grade-school teachers to bank tellers. He is
characterized as a non-violent loner whose politics changed daily.
Children called him "Crazy Man," because "he garbled like Donald Duck."
Bremer had been found sane in 1971 by a Milwaukee psychiatrist following
arrest for carrying a dangerous weapon, but three of 10 doctors at his
trial said he was insane.
The files also tell a tale of blundering G-Men. "The FBI butchered this
case so badly that if they were local cops they would have been fired,"
Femia says. There were multiple mistakes from failing to discover another
gun stuck in the wheel well of Bremer's car -- a detail that helped
support the accuracy of Bremer's diary -- to failing to obtain timely
search warrants or to seal Bremer's apartment. If Bremer's attorney
Benjamin Lipsitz hadn't brought the diary to light in an unsuccessful
attempt to prove insanity, it might not have been allowed into evidence.
Lipsitz says he didn't put Bremer on the stand because the attorney didn't
know what Bremer would say. But today Lipsitz says the rationale behind
the shooting as spelled out in Bremer's diary is still troubling. "I
thought Bremer rather admired Wallace," says Lipsitz, who believes the
shooter should be paroled. Asked about conspiracy, Lipsitz says, "I
couldn't tell you if I knew the answer. But when Bremer dies, I'll tell
you the whole story."
Prison sources say Bremer spends his time talking to "Coke machines and
inanimate objects." However, except for three fights during his first two
years and a 1980 incident in which he destroyed property, he has presented
authorities with no problems. Awaiting mandatory parole in 2008, Bremer
has never talked. Until now.
After Wallace died from respiratory failure and cardiac arrest on Sept.
13, 1998, the Maryland Parole Commission released to the Baltimore Sun the
1996 transcript of Bremer's first and only parole hearing to date.
Bremer told the board he shot Wallace because the governor did not engage
in "benevolent segregation, but a racial segregation of `In your face,' a
`You get out of here, boy' type of segregation." The parole commission
turned him down, saying early release would mean "open hunting season" on
politicians.
In 1997 Bremer appealed, claiming his hearing had focused on Wallace and
not him. "Victim's job today. Victim's job tomorrow. Victim's job
forever," Bremer wrote in an ugly parody of Wallace's infamous 1963
inaugural speech promising continued racial segregation of the schools.
"His `job' was segregationist....No open hunting season exists on
segregationist dinosaurs. They are extinct, not endangered, by an act of
God." Bremer pleaded like Rodney King, "Can't we all get along? Can we
get the Confederate flag off your Maryland license plate and be halfway
fair to Arthur Bremer? I got a 'Bama lynching at my parole hearing and
the chairman is whistling Dixie."
Quite a switch for Bremer, a one-time Wallace supporter who owned his own
Confederate flag, who opted for silence rather than announce such
political views when the world was waiting for an explanation. "I shy
away from publicity," he said at his parole hearing. That explanation
appears to be another contradiction in a case that is full of them. "If
he believed that, he would have been shouting that at the trial," Femia
says. "He would have written that in the diary he left to be found by
investigators."
Though in almost constant pain for the rest of his life, Wallace worked
hard to seek racial amity and forgiveness, even attending services at
Martin Luther King Jr.'s church in Atlanta in 1979. He forgave Bremer,
but the "fighting little judge" never believed Bremer's diary was anything
but a ruse. And the FBI reopened the case at least four times after
Bremer was convicted, most recently in 1993 following a request by Wallace
to President Clinton. That year the FBI conducted one interview and then
closed the case, says John Russell, spokesman for the Department of
Justice. Some news media filed a Freedom of Information request to
discover who was interviewed but have yet to hear from federal authorities
about the matter.
More than five years ago, at the request of a dying Wallace, the Alabama
attorney general's office contacted Judge Femia. "They were calling on
behalf of `The Governor,'" recalls Femia. "They still called him that --
`The Governor.' They wanted to know if there is any evidence of some sort
of conspiracy. He asked me for my read of Bremer and I told him, `Bremer
was a basic nut case who vowed to get attention and wanted to write a
book. This guy was a zealot driven for his own profit to do an act so
outrageous. I don't think George Wallace necessarily was the target. He
happened to be a target of opportunity.'"
Prosecutor Marshall is not convinced. What bothers him is Nixon's
obsession with the case, particularly the failure to turn over Bremer's
original diary, which the FBI had and provided to the White House. Or, as
Marshall always prefaces it: "If you believe Bremer wrote the diary."
The thousands of pages in the WalShot Files suggest Marshall's concern may
be well-founded. The files show Nixon ordered the FBI to take charge and
get the Secret Service out of the case. They show acting FBI Director
Gray provided Nixon with daily briefings on the case. And they show the
president personally ordered all materials seized inside Bremer's
apartment be taken NOT to FBI headquarters but to the White House.
When Nixon learned the FBI made copies of the transcripts of the diary and
provided them to the Secret Service, he ordered those copies surrendered
and destroyed. He then told Gray not only to destroy all records
indicating that the White House saw the diary but to issue a directive
that "no one is allowed access to the subject, even [Bremer's] lawyer."
According to the file, Nixon was concerned Bremer might be tied to the
White House "plumbers." He told Gray to chase down any plots to kill
Bremer and to rule out all conspiracy theories beyond doubt.
And there were many theories. One prompted the FBI to issue a three-page
memo to the Domestic Intelligence Division. Writing in the John Birch
Society's American Opinion magazine in 1972, Alan Stang had suggested a
Maoist radical who later was murdered in Canada had paid Bremer to shoot
Wallace. This prompted calls for a congressional investigation and nearly
every facet of the story eventually was targeted. Stang claimed that
Bremer lacked finances to pay for his extensive travel, for instance.
But FBI files characterize Bremer as a "miser" who saved every penny he
earned, and had $1,459 between March 14, 1972, and May 15, 1972, spending
about $928 and leaving more than enough to cover his trips. Maybe.
Stang says he remembers nothing of the preparation and details of his
sensational story -- giving rise to concern about speculation suggested in
the WalShot Files that the White House may have leaked stories to the
press to help Nixon. The FBI apparently was furious when someone leaked
Bremer's manuscript to Newsweek at a time when only the FBI and the White
House had copies.
While the FBI reviewed and traced Bremer's finances prior to the shooting,
the WalShot Files show no such check has been done since Bremer has been
in prison, especially in light of an anonymous tip in 1980 in which a man
claimed Bremer's brother "David" found $10,000 hidden in the floorboards
of the family home along with additional pages of Bremer's diary. The FBI
dismissed the report, noting Bremer has no brother named David -- even
though an additional 148 pages the diary was discovered at a nearby
construction site, according to a federal grand-jury document in the
WalShot Files.
Maryland private investigator Sharon Weidenfeld, who has interviewed
Bremer's fellow inmates, says that for someone with no friends "he always
seems to have money because of the things he buys in the commissary. In
prison that's a way of gauging how wealthy you are. No one I ever spoke
with knows where the money is coming from, but he gets money orders
monthly."
The WalShot Files show the FBI spent considerably more time and devoted
more agents to pursuing alleged plots to kill Bremer than investigating
allegations, however exotic, that pointed to the door of the White House.
Though responsive to Birch Society allegations, they refused to look at
other press reports that claimed the Watergate hearings might reveal some
dirty tricks linked to Bremen Lipsitz claims to have known something was
up with the plumbers because Senate Watergate investigators told him he
would be called to testify in the Senate Watergate hearings. "I thought
these guys were off the wall," Lipsitz says. "What does Bremer have to do
with Watergate?"
In 1974 Wallace told United Press International that "he hoped the
Watergate investigation would turn up the man who paid the money to have
him shot." Wallace later said he mis-spoke but privately told reporters he
believed the White House plumbers unit might have been involved.
The WalShot Files say Wallace had received a letter from Bernard Parker,
one of the men caught in the Watergate break-in. The alleged letter is
said to have claimed Bremer was paid by G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt
for shooting Wallace. All deny the allegation. According to the WalShot
Files, the FBI and Barker claim the letter is a fraud, and agents charged
the ailing Wallace was after sympathy to support a third run at the
presidency.
In 1975, Wallace's wife, Cornelia, told McCall's magazine that the FBI
urged Wallace not to press the issue. The FBI briefed Wallace on Aug. 20,
1974, for the second time after denying his request to see the WalShot
Files. But Cornelia says agents "didn't review any new developments.
All they wanted to do was assure my husband that Bremer was not involved
in a conspiracy."
When the New York Times reported Watergate hush-money operative Hunt
testified in a Senate Watergate hearing that White House aide Charles
Colson, upon hearing the news of the shooting, immediately ordered him to
"bribe the janitor" or pick Bremer's lock to find out what type of
literature Bremer read, the FBI faced public pressure to reopen the case.
The G-men created a memo citing Hunt's story as unlikely because Colson
called the Hunt statement "utterly preposterous." The FBI records state:
"The allegation that the plumbers might be involved with Bremer appears to
be far-fetched in that both Bremer's diary and our investigation indicate
Bremer was actively stalking President Nixon up to a short time prior to
his decision to shoot Governor Wallace."
In the midst of this a CBS News crew provided the FBI with a film clip
depicting a man resembling Liddy whom CBS alleged "led Wallace into
Bremer's line of fire." Could this mystery man be the same person who
chased down a photographer and paid $10,000 for pictures unseen and
undeveloped that were strictly of the crowd? FBI records show those
pictures were never pursued because they weren't considered important.
Regardless, the FBI told CBS in 1973 that the mystery man was not Liddy.
Although they admitted they had no idea who it was, they claimed the
mystery man was just shaking Wallace's hand.
The file shows the FBI hauled both Hunt and Colson in for secret
questioning in 1974. Both acknowledge that a conversation about Bremer's
apartment took place but deny Liddy or the White House had any role in the
assassination attempt. Hunt also told the FBI he never spoke to Liddy
about Bremer -- although Hunt clearly said in his Watergate book that he
did talk to Liddy about it.
In 1974, the FBI concluded Colson's "explanation is directly opposite"
Hunt's but recommended no further probe. The FBI chose not to interview
Bremer about the story as "it would not appear logical to expose Bremer to
such a weak theory." Likewise they did not try to interview Liddy, who
said recently, "You got to remember, I wasn't talking to anyone at that
time." Asked if he had any role in the Wallace assassination attempt,
Liddy replies, "No." Told there were pages about the claim in the FBI's
WalShot Files, he was dumfounded. "It sounds to me like these are wild
allegations," he said.
Asked where he was when Wallace was shot, Liddy replies, "I don't
remember. What's it say in my book?" His book, Will, says only that Liddy
was reading the Miami Herald the next day. Two decades later, Colson's
story changes. He publicly has admitted to ordering the Bremer break-in
but told Seymour Hersch in 1993 that he called it off.
Even as Nixon was publicly describing the shooting as "senseless and
tragic," he was privately encouraging a Bremer break-in. "Is he a
left-winger, right-winger?" Nixon asks about five hours after the
shooting, according to a recently released Nixon "abuse of power" tape.
Colson responds: "Well, he's going to be a left-winger by the time we get
through, I think." Nixon laughs and says, "Good. Keep at that, keep at
that"
"Yeah, I just wish that, God, that I'd thought sooner about planting a
little literature out there. It may be a little late, although I've got
one source that maybe ...," Colson says on the tape. "Good," Nixon
responds. And Colson replies, "You could think about that. I mean, if they
found it near his apartment. That would be helpful."
All of this may refer to just another third-rate burglary that never
materialized. Or did it? A Black Panther publication was found in
Bremer's apartment, according to the WalShot inventory record. But when
in 1974 the Los Angeles Times asked if the FBI found a Black Panther
publication, the FBI lied and said it had not.
Nixon might have laughed at that. But Wallace got the last laugh. The
Watergate tapes show that on July 23, 1974, after learning he would lose
all three Dixiecrats on the Judiciary Committee, Nixon asked Wallace to
exert political pressure on his behalf. When Wallace refused, Nixon
turned to White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig and said, "Well, Al,
there goes the presidency."
madnessint...@gmail.com
Assassination Team
https://lisaleaks.com/2012/10/18/the-alabama-project-nixons-assassination-team/