Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

Bremer was an unemployed busboy whose only extended conversation with another friendly human in months was with a girl in a massage parlor whom he was disappointed to learn wasn’t a prostitute. He had a plan, however, to get noticed: he would shoot the president of the United States and go out in a blaze of glory. He wrote it all down in a diary, comparing himself to Melville’s Ishmael and Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich: This will be one of the most closely read pages since the scrolls in those caves. But everything was going awry. He started his hunt in New York. You had to be twenty-five to rent a car there, so he wouldn’t be able to tail the president. On his way back to Milwaukee he left the suitcase with his guns on the plane (he was impressed with himself to hear his name called over the airport loudspeaker). His ’67 Rambler Rebel was decrepit, which at least provided him a rusted cavity beneath the floor mat in which to hide a .38. But then he pushed it too deeply into the floorboards and lost access to the gun. Bremer headed toward Canada to meet Nixon on his pre–Earth Day trip to Ottawa. Then he worried he wouldn’t be able to cross the border without his car registration—so he called U.S. customs and asked. Then, at his motel on the way, he accidentally discharged his Browning 9mm. He got rid of his excess ammunition (except for one bullet he later found in his pocket) and threw his gun cases into a pond (and thereupon discovered they floated). He’d cut his hair t...