An Assassin's Diary

by Arthur Bremer

On May 15, 1972, an unemployed busboy named Arthur Bremer, twenty-one years old and disappointed in love, attempted to assassinate Governor George Wallace of Alabama. As he had in almost all other endeavors in his life, Arthur Bremer failed. During Bremer's trial, in support of his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, the defense introduced into evidence a document identified by the FBI as "Manuscript Found in Bremer's Vehicle". The manuscript consists of the last 113 pages of a diary in which Bremer confided for months. The first 148 pages of the diary he presumably buried in the ground somewhere in the vicinity of the furnished room in which he lived on the Near West Side of Milwaukee.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Memoir, Politics

144 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Arthur Bremer attempted to assassinate George Wallace on 15 May 1972. George Wallace was at this time a Presidential Candidate for the Democratic Party in the USA.

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found-document noir. Hotel rooms, diners, campaign stops, loneliness. It has something to say about the last century of American life.

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take a look into the mind of Arthur Bremer, the man who shot and paralyzed George Wallace. It is chilling because it is unfiltered; you feel as if you get to know Arthur. Paul Schrader was inspired by Bremer's diary when he wrote the screenplay for the 1976 film Taxi Driver - a must read for anyone in law enforcement.

[WJEP · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing chilling here. Bremer is aware of his ineptitude and cracks jokes throughout. Everything goes wrong in his hunt for Nixon: Gets a flat tire on his 67 Rambler Rebel, gets lost in Toronto and crosses the bridge to Hull at least twice, accidentally discharges his Browning Hi-Power at the Howard Johnson's, and gets a not-so-happy-ending at a massage parlor.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

interesting and creepy

[Tom Shannon, Jr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crazed authentic psychojournal fragment from the lunatic who shot and paralyzed Wallace in '72, which was his Plan B after failing to shoot "Nixy-boy."

His journey had him ferrying from home base of Milwaukee to Ludington, then crisscrossing Michigan by car, among other locales (Ottawa, NYC, etc) and modes of travel (limo, 'copter, plane.)

Grand Rapids native Paul Schrader once claimed on Fresh Air that the similarities between this narrative and his Taxi Driver script were coincidental, which is hard to believe, because they're alike in tone, character and plot. Either way, this reads well in DeNiro's "Travis Bickle" voice to the tune of Bernard Herrmann jazz.

The analytical intro by playwright and soap opera screenwriter Harding Lemay is worth reading, but isn't much fun. It's illustrative and perceptive, but at 22 pages long, feels too preachy and rambling. It would benefit from being shortened.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

A document of trickle-down dissatisfaction that leaked to every facet of Bremer's life, from broad social and economic complaints to the quality of the apple pie he's served; this relentless cycle of unhappiness with one's position, fed as much internally as externally, is one that makes this book almost quintessentially American, just with an unusual conception of the American Dream (perhaps not even that unusual, as these solutions still seem to appeal to Bremer's brand of young American white man). Unimpeachably American, too, is the pairing of the overestimation of oneself with that frustration with everything external, essentially the same timeless combination of delusion that is responsible for America's irrepressible true nature as an imperialist nation. The spelling errors create a hurried feeling that accentuates the building frustration (though this frustration is built without the benefit of actual tension, per se, given that the ending is now popularly known) as Bremer waits for his own life to hurry along with itself even as he bungles it at every opportunity, as if his success is inversely related to the amount of thought, if not planning exactly, that he puts into things. In a sense, it doesn't matter, though, as it seems almost as if Bremer had succeeded in his goal and managed to elude escape, he wouldn't have bothered writing it down; his obsession seems to be his own failure, which he sometimes seems to almost perpetuate in order to actuate his perception of himself. His self-obsession runs so deeply that it's more his grandiose self-importance than any paranoia that leads him to constantly assume the authorities and bystanders are interested him; it also leads him to assume that there would be an audience of readers eager to see this book published, and in that he was right, an indictment of the reader that seldom goes forgotten, with each direct address of his to the reader sticking a needle. In that way, in addition to his occasionally startling lucidity, self-aware and/or self-referential comments, and humor, this reads a lot better than it might have, coming off as less amateurish than his plot; unfortunately, I kept wishing for even more. Not just the beginning of the diary, which he at one point requests be paid for (and has since been recovered but never published except for very few fragments), but a broader frame of reference. An Assassin's Diary feels like what could be a very satisfying finish to a book, but lacks a narrative arc of its own, that ideally would have been built by Bremer's account of something more approximating a typical life, especially detailing his short-lived relationship with Joan Pemrich the jobs he worked and quit; welcome, too, would have been more bits like the diary's last page, where there is straight non-fictional information recorded for Bremer's own purposes in his notebook, an interruption that played as almost dos Passos–like and is additionally pleasing because it is the rare segment written for his own benefit only, and not that of a potential readership. As it stands, much of the book's interest relies on external details; the publisher seems to have recognized this, but their choice to precede the text with a lengthy and mostly superfluous introduction and follow it with an editor's note did very little to address the issue. It's a fascinating story of a fascinating character, but the limited scope and perspective can't help but render this a mere shadow of Bremer's life.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not long after Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace and paralyzed him for the rest of his life, his diary was published. I read it many years ago and found it mildly interesting. It's more interesting to think of what might have happened if his initial target, Richard Nixon, had been the one he shot. Bremer removed Wallace from the national political scene, and Jimmy Carter finished the job four years later by roundly defeating Wallace in Southern primaries. Wallace was never a factor anywhere outside his native Alabama after that. But if Bremer had fired his weapon at Richard Nixon, the course of history might really have been altered.

[J.t. Conroe]

Arthur Bremer is the man who attempted to assassinate George Wallace in 1972. His book is only interesting as an illustration of the banality of evil. It may have been written, not by Arthur Bremer, but by someone with connections to the CIA -- possibly E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame. There may also be a connection to the CIA's MK Ultra research program.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, I had no idea Taxi Driver poached so much material from this diary.

[John Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arthur Bremer's diary is a slice of American life. Bremer already knows how things are going to end for him and wrote a pathetic but sincere tome on how he had gotten to be a potential assassin.

He didn't care about the policies of Richard Nixon or George Wallace, of courses, and couldn't read a map in order to arrive at one of Nixon's rally on time. The book begins with him renting a limo for 100 dollars and going to "a massage parlor". She likes him, but before things get hot and heavy, she is called up upon by her employer in the establishment and he is told to leave.

This pattern of frustrated personal failure is the message and the content of his diary. But Bremer is also angry as hell, and when he sees hippies pass out flowers, his fury rises to the book's surface: "I want to push them aside and take out my pistol and show them this is how political protest is done, and shock the shit out of the Secret Security being so calm and cool doing it." Bremer never ended up finding Nixon, one of the small dark amusements of this diary, but found George Wallace.

Bremer experiences himself as a nobody, and this sad humility/self loathing translates beautifully in the prose. He is "just another goddamn failure" in his mind, and repeats this sentiment ad nauseum. However much reflection he does, he is determined to commit an act of violence in the political theatre.

He ends by writing: "There isn't anything else to say, is there?" Scriptwriter Paul Schrader spent a brief period as a cab driver in NYC, and during a period of aggravated alcoholism he read this. One can easily see how it became "Taxi Driver"--even the picture of Bremer, looking nothing so much as a office jockey hybrid mannequin in a crowd at a political rally with a "Wallace" button on, is basically interchangeable with the photo of a completely insane Travis Bickle and his Indian mohawk.

Dark comical, also reflective of the times it was written in.

[Kevin McAvoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I give it a 10/10 because it is an honest account of Arthurs feelings about his life and his society, he hates them both.
I can understand Arthurs frustrations and he acknowledges over and over that he thinks of himself as a failure.
The hundreds of spelling mistakes neatly display his error-bound existence.
I read he was out of jail in 2007 and on parole until 2025, his 75th birthday.

[Courier E · Rating 5 out of 5]

9/10

Raw.