HAGERSTOWN, MD. — After 35 years in prison, the man who shot and paralyzed Alabama Gov. George Wallace during his racially charged 1972 presidential campaign is scheduled to be released today into a society more diverse and more restrictive on guns.
The state’s automated victim-notification system sent e-mails announcing the impending release of Arthur Bremer, 57.
Wallace, a fiery segregationist during the 1960s, was wounded on May 15, 1972, during a campaign stop in Laurel, Md. He abandoned his bid for the Democratic nomination, spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair and died in 1998.
Bremer, a former Milwaukee busboy and janitor, was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 53 years. He has been held at the Maryland Correctional Institution since 1979, earning his mandatory release through good behavior and by working in prison.
Bremer’s diary, found in a landfill in 1980, made it clear he was motivated by a desire for attention, not a political agenda. He had also stalked President Nixon.
A prison system spokesman declined to say where Bremer would go once he got out. The head of the state’s parole commission has said there will be restrictions on Bremer’s activities, including a requirement to avoid political candidates and events.
“My father forgave him, and my family has forgiven him. That’s consistent with God’s law,” George Wallace Jr. said in Montgomery, Ala. But he added: “Then there is man’s law. I doubt the punishment has fit the crime.”
Peggy Wallace Kennedy, the governor’s daughter, said of Bremer: “I think he’s getting out 17 1/2 years too early.”
The Alabama governor made his famous “stand in the schoolhouse door” in 1963, decrying the enrollment of two black students at the all-white University of Alabama in a standoff against the Justice Department and the National Guard.
By 1972, he had tempered his racist rhetoric and adopted a more subtle approach, denouncing federal courts over the forced busing of children to integrate schools and pledging to restore “law and order,” a phrase sometimes regarded as a coded appeal to white racists.
But Wallace recanted his segregationist stand later in his career and won his final term with the help of black votes.
Four months before the attempt on Wallace’s life, Bremer was arrested and underwent a psychiatric evaluation after firing bullets into a ceiling at a shooting range, and was fined for disorderly conduct.
Bremer was partly the inspiration for the deranged Travis Bickle character in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver.” The movie, in turn, fascinated John Hinckley, who tried to kill President Reagan in a twisted attempt to impress the film’s co-star, Jodie Foster.
