Did Nixon Try to Murder George Wallace?
A Question with Meaning for 2004
Author's Note: No one has really depicted the loathsome
depths to which Nixon and his henchmen sank in order
to reassure his reelection. The treason of Richard Nixon was that
he tampered with the pure, legal flow of
Democracy and Elections. In a very real way
he hand-picked George McGovern to be the
Democratic candidate as he dirty-tricked harshly & fiercely
in 1970, '71 and '72 against Hubert Humphrey,
Ted Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, John Lindsay, Henry Jackson
and of course Governor George Wallace of Alabama
Did Richard Nixon try to kill George Wallace in May of '72?
Till the day he died
George Wallace thought so.
The Background
Richard Nixon was never very personable
& always had to scheme with fierce & unfair campaigns
to stitch together his winning coalitions
It was clear by late '71 and early '72
that Governor Wallace
quite possibly
could siphon off enough Republican/Conservative votes
to deny Tricky Dick his reelection
& the Trickster was in a sweltry sweat
But first let's journey back to the election of '68
In the Nixon-Humphrey race
Humphrey had a faulty start coming out of the police riots in Chicago in August
but then had closed the gap with Nixon.
He broke tracks with LBJ on the issue
of escalation of the war
was about a single percentage point behind
& seemed likely to squeak to victory
till Nixon, thanks to Anna Chennault & Henry Kissinger,
was able to sabotage the fall '68 peace talks
with North Vietnam
see America, a History in Verse, Volume 3 (1962-1970)
or a more complete tracing of the time-flow]
There was a big problem looming in the '68 campaign
in that by September of 1968
George Wallace was up to 21% in the polls
as a candidate for the American Independent Party
and it seemed possible the AIP might
stop the Democrats or the Republicans
from getting enough electoral votes in November
& maybe toss the election into the House of Representatives.
But then October arrived &
mal-minded & bomb-batty AIP vp candidate
Curtis LeMay spent most of his first campaign speech
touting the grooviness of nuclear war
There were hecklers that kept confronting Wallace
"Wallace's increasingly venomous confrontations
with hecklers cost him voters"
as one history has described it
Then there was a large effort by unions
to bring their members to the Democratic Party
so that in November Wallace/LeMay won just 5 deep south states
& were peeled down to 13 % of th' vote
--that is, over 9 million votes
but not enough to pull victory away from Tricky
who squeaked into the Oval Office by 7/10's of 1 % over Humphrey
Sabotage against Wallace
Nixon worried non-stop about his close triumph over Humphrey
and very badly wanted Wallace out of the way
for 1972
and so in the spring of 1970
Nixon directly ordered the funneling of scads of cash
to Wallace's opponent, one Arthur Brewer,
in the Alabama race for governor
o stop Wallace's political come-back
Herb Kalmbach was in charge of $1,000,000 left over
rom the 1968 campaign
and $400,000,000 in cash was delivered
to prevent Wallace from winning.
It didn't work
Wallace nosed out ex-Gov. Brewer by a narrow 51.5 per cent
of the vote
Nixon also sicced the IRS on the Wallace family
May 1971
Gerald Wallace, George's brother,
was being investigated for feeding political kickbacks
to Geo through Gerald's law firm.
Nixon was in Alabama that month
and invited George Wallace to
accompany him on plane trip
Mobile to Birmingham
There are no tape transcripts of the chit-chat on the flight
but Wallace agreed to run in 1972
as a Democrat and not as an independent
Not long afterward the tax case on Gerald Wallace
was halted
and lo! Wallace announced he would run for President
as a Democrat
Nixon's Muskienoia
Senator Ed Muskie of Maine of course was the real "danger" to Nixon
as polls in '71 showed the popular Muskie would beat Nixon
in 1972
but Attorney General John Mitchell said at the time
that in a race between Muskie, Nix and Wallace
if only Wallace could be snuffed from the race
4/5's of the Wallace votes would go to Nix
You can go to the article on the Woodstock Journal
website " The Sabotage of the Campaign of Senator
Edmund Muskie" to trace how Nixon hounded Muskie beginning
n 1971 and into '72
so that he left the 1972 Presidential race]
September 1971
A young human from Milwaukee
named Arthur Bremer bought an blue Rambler for $800
half his income for 1970
Around October o' 1971
Nixon's henchmen
paid for a campaign in California
to try to purge American Independent Party voter lists in California
so that the AIP wouldn't have enough voters to get on
the California ballot in 1972
California law required a party's registration
to exceed 1/15th of total state registration
to qualify for the ballot. The deadline for re-registering
AIP California registrants was 1-1-72.
The scheme didn't work, but it showed Nixon's
determination to wreck fair democracy
(the Washington Post ran a piece on the drive in October of 1972)
Nixon's Ongoing Wallacenoia
Wallace, as we have seen,
promised Nixon he'd run as a Democrat in '72
but what if Wallace, losing the spring Democratic primaries,
decided after all to run as an independent?
That might sink Nix
During the Democratic Primaries o' 1972
Wallace won several, did well in others
& henchmen of Nix were fully aware
that the racist populist from Alabama
was "still keeping his third party options open"
March 1972
Wallace won the Florida Democratic primary
42 percent Humphrey 18.6 percent Henry Jackson 13 Muskie 8.9
Lindsay 7 percent McGovern 6.2 percent
April 4, 1972
Wisconsin primary
George McGovern 30 percent
Wallace 22 percent Humphrey 21 percent Muskie 10 percent
Another Loathsome Robo-Diary
Similar to Sirhan Sirhan's)
April 5
The human named Arthur Bremer kept a diary.
Around this date Bremer apparently buried the first 148 pages
of the diary somewhere not far from the furnished room
in which he lived on the near west side of Milwaukee
He began jotting his current activities in the last 113 pages.
The first entry is April 5, with Bremer in a motel near LaGuardia
having planed in from Milwaukee on April 4
Next entry April 13 apparently written in Canada April 13.
April 7 & 8, 1972
Bremer stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria in NYC
(Humphrey was set to be at the W-A on April 7
(but that was not a public knowledge thing)
April 9, 1972
Writer-researcher Donald Freed sleuthed the Bremer question
back in 1972 and claimed that Arthur Bremer
was seen on "several occasions talking with an
older, heavy set man" as they rode back and forth on a Michigan ferry boat.
One such ferry ride occurred on April 9 when
"Bremer met his contact on the Luddington, Michigan ferry"
Bremer apparently was seen on "several occasions talking with an
older, heavy set man" as they road back and forth on the ferry boat.
—Donald Freed writing in the Los Angeles Free Press 6-23-72
The implication was that Bremer had a control agent
perhaps working to Artichoke him into
murder
Ca April 19, Mr. Bremer returned to Milwaukee
stayed there till second week in May when he tracked
Governor Wallace into Michigan.
April 25, 1972
With Muskie hounded from the race by Nixon by this time
the Massachusetts Democratic primary went as follows:
Mcgovern 52.7 Muskie 21.3 Humphrey 7.9 Wallace 7.4
The question troubling Nixon—
Was Wallace going to switch to an independent line?
May 12, 1972
Bremer stayed at a hotel in Kalamazoo
not far from where a Wallace rally was to be held
on the 13th
May 13-14, Sat.-Sun
Late Saturday or early Sunday
Bremer left Kalamazoo for Wheaton, Md. in his Rambler
Like Sirhan Sirhan or James Earl Ray
the "loner" was stalking his prey
It's possible that Bremer was plied with
Artichoke-esque robo-programming
then given money & free time
then stalk
then shoot
then forget
[See the information on the CIA Artichoke method
of wiring up humans to kill, in America, a History in Verse,
Volume 2 (1940-1961) page 283 ]
Bremer Shoots Wallace
May 15, 1972
Wallace held a rally that day in Wheaton, Md
where Bremer was filmed by a TV crew
There were hostile hecklers on hand
so that Wallace could not do a handshake wade
into the crowd
but then at the next rally at a shopping center
In Laurel
there were no hecklers
(did the forces of Nix pull the hecklers?)
and so Wallace could do a wade
leaving the bullet-proof shielded podium
for a wade toward the smiling Bremer
Where just after 4 p.m. Bremer fired five times
Wallace's chief state security man, E. C. Dothard
received a flesh wound in the abdomen
and Wallace faced 54 days and a series of operations
in the hospital leaving him with paralyzed legs
Nixon's First Reaction Upon Hearing of the Shooting
Nixon was "agitated" when informed
of the shooting, and "voiced immediate concern
hat the assassin might have ties to the Republican
Party, or, even worse, to the President's Re-election Committee"
(See the book All the President's Men, p. 329
and the White House tapes of 1-2-73)
It was another murky torrent of Clio (the Muse of History)
but one in which the sleazesome E. Howard Hunt
appeared as he did too often in
sleazesome tracks of the 20th century
Chief Nixon dirty-trickster Charles Colson called Mr. Hunt
Hunt was to fly to Milwaukee and get into Bremer's pad.
According to Hunt, Hunt claims to have told
Colson it was too late
the apartment, Hunt claims he felt, would be sealed
In fact, for a 90 minute period after the shooting
reporters were allowed to enter and leave Bremer's Milwaukee pad.
& a number of reporters
had carried away papers and other stuff from the pad.
"Investigators found his one-bedroom, third-floor apartment cluttered
with notebooks and papers on which he apparently was
constantly scribbling his thoughts, aphorisms or verse."
--NY Times, Monday 5-22-72
Dinner with Nixon
Nixon had dinner with henchman Charles Colson
the evening after the Wallace shooting
Nixon asked "if he a left-winger, right-winger?"
Colson replied, "Well, he's going to be a left-winger by the
time we get through, I think."
Colson said "I've got one source that maybe...." implying they could
plant literature in Bremer's pad in Milwaukee
By 7 pm, May 15, 1972
a White house aide "announced to the press that papers found
in Bremer's Milwaukee apartment linked him to 'leftist'
causes, perhaps to the campaign of Senator McGovern.
Planting Black Panther Literature in Bremer's Apartment in Milwaukee
As the Watergate scandal was breaking in full sewery flush (in late '73)
I learned from a reliable West Coast investigator
that an ACLU attorney had gone to Arthur Bremer's apartment
right after the shooting
to see if he could assist in the legal defense
The attorney saw a guy using a press pass
from a California press service run by
a well-known religious cult
get into Bremer's apartment &
deposit Black Panther or Angela Davis literature
inside
The Gilday Assertions
According to Anthony Summers' engrossing book
The Arrogance of Power-- the Secret World
of Richard Nixon, Viking 2000, p. 406
a guy named William Gilday
"has claimed since 1974 in communications with
The New York Times, and others, including (Anthony Summers) that
Nixon aides had asked him and a crony as early as 1970, in
Boston, to take part in schemes ranging from dirty tricks to murder.
"Those he was incited to kill, Gilday has said, included Senator Edward
Kennedy and George Wallace. The aides in question are unnamed here for
legal reasons, but Gilday has appeared to have knowledge of corroborating
details-- their nicknames, for example-- and has provided
reconnaissance photographs he said were taken with Kennedy's
murder in view."
Nixon Talks with Colson
Summers describes and quotes from a White House tape of Jan 3, 1973:
"In one of Nixon's most conspiratorial taped conversations, recorded
after Watergate, he discussed with Colson the mistakes that had been
made in mounting operations that were 'very close to me.'
"'I did things out of Boston,' Colson replied. 'We did some blackmail
and.....my God, uh, uh, uh, I'll go to my grave before I ever disclose it.
But, uh, we did a hell of a lot of things and never got caught.... you had
one of the men who was in line at your Christmas tree lighting
reception who ran 15 or 20 black projects in Boston,
and that'll never be traced. No way. And I could under oath say
I didn't know how it happened.... that's the way to do it.'"
Sirhan's Robo-Diary in Bremer's Car
In Bremer's Rambler in Maryland several books were allegedly found
Robert Blair Kaiser's RFK Must Die
and Sirhan by Azis Shabab
both checked out of the Milwaukee Public Library
on May 5
(RFK Must Die contains a photocopy of
Sirhan's "RFK must die" diary
Perhaps they wanted to look at Sirhan's robo-diary
to recall what such a document would look like)
Finding Bremer's Own Putative Diary
Bremer's putative handwritten diary was found in his Rambler
the day after his arrest
along with the books cited above.
Unlike Sirhan's famous diary (which was used as evidence in
its handwritten form)
the FBI typed Bremer's diary, retaining the misspellings "that often
lead Bremer into grotesque puns and juxtapositions"
(To the best of my knowledge, the actual diary
has not been examined by any independent investigator)
Did Hunt Write the Diary?
Gore Vidal wrote an interesting article for the
New York Review of Books in December of 1973
entitled "The Art and Arts of E. Howard Hunt"
which posed the question
Did E. Howard Hunt write Bremer's diary?
Hunt was a known forger
He'd forged State Department documents in '71
trying to link JFK to the assassination of Diem in Nam
& may have been involved in the assassination of John Kennedy
Hunt was a dirty tricksters' dirty trickster
but Vidal, with tongue in cheek, wrote
"Although Howard Hunt is a self-admitted forger of state papers
I do not think that he actually had a hand in writing
Bremer's diary on the ground that the journal is a brilliant
if flawed job of work, and beyond H.H.'s known literary competence."
[If anyone has a photocopy of Bremer's actual diary
please send me a copy; also I once read that the buried
first 148 pages of Bremer's diary was dug up in 1980.
Does anyone have a copy of that they could send me?
Woodstock Journal, Box 805, Woodstock, NY 12498.
Many thanks.]
With Wallace Paralyzed
With Wallace gone, Nixon was was sliming with triumph
as Theodore White noted in The Making of the President--1972 pp. 251-252
"For two years George Wallace had haunted the planning of
the White House. Whether public-approval ratings went
up or down, whether Mr. Nixon went to China
or reorganized the economy, his ratings in the major polls
had stuck like a jammed needle at the same 43-percent-for-Nixon
which the President had drawn in 1968. What jammed
the needle was George Wallace, consistently picking up
whether in the Harris or the Gallup poll, from 9 percent
to 13 percent of the American national vote."
Nixon's forces realized that if Wallace should lose
the Democratic primaries
then run on his own
it could be a disaster. Wallace's strength in the north
is what bothered the dirty-tricksters of Nix
"The South, plus the Rocky Mountain states, plus the farm states,
promised the President between 182 and 227 of the 270 electoral votes
needed to win. The Pres needed only two or three of the big industrial
states to add to that total and his election would be guaranteed."
Wallace had gotten 11.8 % of Ohio in '68
10 % of Michigan 9 % of NJ 8 in Illinois and Pa
"With Wallace (in 1972) apparently stronger in the
primaries of 1972 than he had ever been before.....
the President was still vulnerable"
(until smiling Bremer struck)
It was over for Wallace
and Nixon, forcing all from the race
except George McGovern
was headed to victory in November.
When Nixon returned from Moscow a few days after the shooting
he post-Wallace-hit polls showed that
he was surging over McGovern 54-38
Wallace Suspecting Nixon The Rest of His Life
George Wallace told a news conference in 1974
"I have no evidence but I think my
attempted assassination
was part of a conspiracy"
and felt the same the rest of his
wheel-chaired life.
