Reply #45: He was definitely American Independent Party. [View All]

[JDPriestly]

George Corley Wallace, Jr. (August 25, 1919 – September 13, 1998) was the 45th Governor of Alabama, serving four terms: 1963–1967, 1971–1979 and 1983–1987. "The most influential loser" in 20th-century U.S. politics, according to biographers Dan T. Carter<1> and Stephan Lesher,<2> he ran for U.S. president four times, running officially as a Democrat three times and in the American Independent Party once. A 1972 assassination attempt left him paralyzed; he used a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He is best known for his Southern populist,<3> pro-segregation attitudes during the American desegregation period, convictions he renounced later in life.<4>

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For the next four months, Wallace's campaign went extremely well. However, Wallace was shot five times by Arthur Bremer while campaigning in Laurel, Maryland, on May 15, 1972, at a time when he was receiving high ratings in the opinion polls. Bremer was seen at a Wallace rally in Wheaton, Maryland, earlier that day and two days earlier at a rally in Dearborn, Michigan. As one of the bullets lodged in Wallace's spinal column, Wallace was left paralyzed from the waist down. Three others were wounded in the shooting and also survived. Bremer's diary, An Assassin's Diary, published after his arrest shows the assassination attempt was motivated by a desire for fame, not by politics, and that President Nixon had been an earlier target. Bremer was sentenced to sixty-three years in prison on August 4, 1972, later reduced to fifty-three years two months later. Bremer served thirty-five years and was released on parole on November 9, 2007. Wallace forgave Bremer 23 years later, in August 1995, and wrote to him, but Bremer never replied. Bremer's actions inspired the screenplay (1972)<34> for the 1976 movie Taxi Driver which in turn inspired the assassination attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr. in 1981.

Following the assassination attempt, Wallace was visited at the hospital by Democratic Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm,<35> a representative from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn who at the time was the nation's only African American female member of Congress. Despite their ideological differences and the opposition of Chisholm's constituents, Chisholm visited Wallace as she felt it was the humane thing to do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace

On March 1, 1972, Bremer began his diary with the words, "It is my personal plan to assassinate by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace. I intend to shoot one or the other while he attends a campaign rally for the Wisconsin Primary". Bremer's purpose was "to do SOMETHING BOLD AND DRAMATIC, FORCEFUL & DYNAMIC, A STATEMENT of my manhood for the world to see".<12> The following evening, Bremer attended an organizational meeting for Wallace at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee.

Although Bremer's main aim was to assassinate then-President Richard Nixon, on March 23, Bremer attended a Wallace dinner and rally at Milwaukee's Red Carpet Airport Inn. During the next two months, Bremer would trail Wallace, across the USA, travelling by car, plane, ferry and bus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Bremer

Wallace's assassin, Bremer, was, as some right-wing female candidates might put it, just "manning up."

Let's end that kind of simplistic rhetoric in our political discussion and talk about facts and issues.