Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson has written a new book that explores fear, how it has become one of the most powerful forces in American life, powerful enough to excuse violence, shape policy, and decide whose lives matter.
Chapter 2: What event does Heather Ann Thompson explore in her book?
Fear and Fury tells the story through a small cast of characters. Four black teenagers, a white man who decided he was under threat, a media ecosystem that turned fear into profit, and a political system that rewards weaponizing fear. Three days before Christmas in 1984, the teens, who were from the South Bronx, boarded the subway headed downtown. They were loud and rambunctious.
One of them asked the white man sitting alone for $5. That man, Bernard Goetz, stood up, unzipped his jacket, pulled out a gun, and shot all four of them. In the days that followed, Goetz became a hometown hero.
Tabloids crowned him the death wish vigilante, and he received thousands of fan letters, cash donations, and public praise from everyday New Yorkers to celebrities and powerful media figures who framed him as a man who had done what the city could not. A jury later acquitted Goetz of everything but carrying an unlicensed gun.
Thompson argues the case marked a political turning point when white racial fear was sanctioned by law and leveraged by elites who learned how useful fear could be. The book is titled Fear and Fury, the Reagan 80s, the Bernie Goetz shootings, and the rebirth of white rage. Heather Ann Thompson, welcome to Fresh Air.
So glad to be here.
I want to start with Bernie Goetz. He was acquitted of attempted murder for the shootings. He served less than a year on the gun charge. And he essentially returned to life in New York. Right now, he's in his 70s. He's still living in the city. He's still giving interviews. He defends what he did. But you actually decided not to interview him for this book. How come?
Well, in part because the really striking thing about this event at the time and as it's been remembered since is that the story is all about him. The story is about writing the justification for what he did on that subway so many decades ago and so much so that I am really embarrassed actually to say that when I –
began to think about this case again, I didn't know the names of the teenagers he'd shot. And I suspected that I was not alone, that there was a complete erasure, actually, of the serious victims of this crime.
And what I want to say to that, too, what's so interesting is even right now, as I introduced you and introduced the story, I didn't even name the four boys or the 14. Yeah.
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Chapter 3: Who were the victims in the 1984 subway shooting incident?
And so at the end of the day, I initially thought I would try to talk to everybody, even though most of the work I always do is really steeped in the documents of the moment and the words people were saying in the moment. But when I realized that I wasn't going to actually be able to talk to all of the victims, I wasn't going to be able to talk to one of them because he was –
permanently paralyzed and had suffered brain damage as a result of his injuries. I wasn't able to talk to another because he had killed himself on the anniversary of this event. I wasn't able to talk to the third because he had died after years of drug addiction, suffering this event. And the other one, the really kind of retreated from the public eye for all kinds of understandable reasons.
And so without talking to them, I thought, you know, I don't want to talk to the shooter. I want to let that moment in the past tell itself.
I want to get more into the young men and who they were and what you found out through your research. But I want to know what you found out about Goetz, who he was before the day he shot those teenagers.
I think he's on the one hand a very complicated figure because when I began to dig into his own biography, it is a troubled biography, I think, by any estimation. He was the youngest child of a clearly quite strict family. and quite domineering father. He grew up in rural New York, clearly felt alone, a bit picked on by his peers as a child, and I think raised rather sternly.
And I think from the very beginning was exhibiting a problem with authority and feeling misunderstood and anger and all of those things. But I also was struck by the way in which that was not the explanatory thing that we might think it was. Yes, he was a loner and he
was an electronics nerd who lived by himself and worked for himself in part because he had a difficulty, I think, getting along with others. But on the other hand, he was a guy who would step outside of his apartment in the 1980s New York and just be so irritated. And
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Chapter 4: What were the public's reactions to Bernhard Goetz's actions?
angered at the garbage piling up on the stoop and the sex trade going on on street corners and the scores of people suffering the ever-deepening AIDS epidemic. And he felt a degree of abandonment and fury by that and saw all of it as the fault of a liberal do-gooder government that that was not taking care of business, not cleaning things up.
And in that sense, he was this everyman white American who was feeling dislocated and discombobulated by the time of the 70s and ever more so as the austerity of the 80s kicked in.
And that viewpoint, that narrative, I mean, New York in 1984, just to put ourselves there, you articulated it quite well, but it was genuinely a dangerous place. Crime was high. The subway was very chaotic. Lots of crimes happening on the subway.
I remember it. Many of us do. It was grim. It felt dangerous to be in the subways. It felt abandoned to walk down almost any city street, wherever you grew up. And it felt like we were in an absolute crisis in the 1980s. And so it wasn't that I doubted the sentiment on the ground, but what was striking to me was why was it that people were interpreting that
really terrible urban situation as the fault of its weakest residents, its most marginalized residents, those who were already poor, those who were suffering, frankly, this crisis far worse than they were. And that was when I really began to dig into the politics of the Reagan 80s and, more importantly, the economics of the Reagan 80s.
The Reagan Republicans were so fascinating because they weren't new in the sense that they wanted to undo the social safety net and the kind of legacy of the New Deal liberal America. Rich people in America had long wanted to do that. Conservatives in America had long wanted to do that. But they were kind of brilliant in that they were able to understand the power of racial resentment.
They were able to connect that racial resentment to a critique of liberalism in a really kind of brilliant way, alarming but brilliant way. And so by the time they take the White House, they are meanwhile dismantling the very funding that people need for their public schools to have the trash picked up, to
Fund public health centers and research for public health and all of the things that New Yorkers really need are being stripped and are being eroded. But no one's eye is on that ball, right? They are instead focused on the wreckage that they see on the ground.
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Chapter 5: How did the media portray the Goetz case and its aftermath?
And where this takes us to, let's go to this day. Goetz is on the train. These four teenagers are on the train as well. They're traveling from the Bronx to lower Manhattan. One of the boys, Troy Canty, he either asked for or demanded $5 from Goetz. And then what happened next?
Well, before we can actually even get to what happens next, I think we need to go back a few years in the South Bronx where Troy Canty came from and his three teenage friends that were on the train that day. The suffering that Bernie gets saw on the street every day he left his Greenwich Village apartment. was all happening in the South Bronx in a far more acute way.
This is a neighborhood where people are absolutely in despair. Public sector jobs have dried up. One of the Important employers of teenagers, for example, in the summer, they were called CETA jobs. They're eradicated by the Reagan administration. Funding for drug rehab, funding for occupational and educational services. opportunities, all of these are being eradicated.
And so for these teenagers, there isn't much to do, there isn't much hope, and there's a whole lot of need on the ground to have some money. And there's a few choices, and one of them is the illegal drug trade. But teenagers themselves were very loathe and leery to get involved in that. Illegal markets are always dangerous. And these four teens were
on their way into Manhattan because they wanted to go to a video arcade there to jimmy open the coin receptacles. And we might remember those old arcades you'd put in a quarter to play pinball. Well, they would collect those quarters. They'd jimmy it open. They'd get a little cash that day.
And so what was kind of bringing everyone on the train together in that moment, including the passengers, was they're all sharing an urban crisis, but they are all responding to it differently, feeling differently about it. And that's how this whole moment kind of ignites, I would say, on December 22nd, 1984.
Right.
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Chapter 6: What influenced the legal outcomes of the Goetz trial?
So they're headed to lower Manhattan to go to an arcade to break into a video game and take the quarters, essentially, take the change and have a little bit of money. And Troy asks or demands that Gets give him $5.
Yeah, he says, you know, do you have $5? And even that is an interesting kind of moment because why does he want $5? He wants $5. Because he knows that if they go into this arcade with no money in their pocket, it's not even plausible that they're going to play some games. So that's sort of a thinking ahead kind of thing. But by axing for $5, this is panhandling.
And the other thing about New York City in this moment is – Panhandling is rampant. The others on the train that day had also seen these teenagers and were unalarmed. You know, they were unconcerned. And every exchange that these teenagers had with the other passengers, hey, how are you? Do you have a light? No one felt the need to get off the train. No one felt threatened.
No one felt the need to talk to the conductor. It all felt very ordinary. It felt very regular, but not to Bernie Getz.
Chapter 7: How did racial dynamics shape the narrative around the shooting?
When these four teenagers are on the train and when Bernie Getz stands up suddenly, by the way, Troy Canty thinks he's reaching for his wallet. He's relatively You know, he thinks, oh, OK, that's nice.
The man's going to give me $5.
The man's going to give me $5. And when he turns suddenly and he assumes a combat position and, to use his own words, lays down a pattern of fire and takes out first Troy Canty in the chest, then Barry Allen in the back as he is running, then James Ramseur through the arm and the bullet goes into his lungs as he's trying to flee, he misses Daryl Kabe.
And the most chilling part of this story is that he then walks over to Daryl Cabe, who at this point is cowering on his seat. And, you know, not a single one of these teenagers was taller than a five feet six. These are slight, small teens. And he's sitting there cowering and he says, you look all right. Here's another. And he shoots him point blank range, severing his spinal cord.
So he is immediately paralyzed. And that story will grow far grimmer when he then has a terrible episode of pneumonia because, of course, if you don't have the muscles thanks to paralysis, your lungs do not clear as easily or regularly. He has pneumonia. He goes into a life-threatening coma. and emerges brain damaged.
And it is an incredibly poignant story of what the wreckage of allowing rage to be unleashed really looks like.
I want to play a clip of Goetz. It's video of his first interrogation. He's talking with authorities about what he did and why he did it. Let's listen.
I would have shot them all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets and I was gonna gouge one of the guy's eyes out with my keys afterwards. You can't understand this. I know you can't understand this. That's fine. The only reason I didn't do it is because Tia changed as well.
That was Bernard Goetz during his first interrogation after he had turned himself in. And Heather, I'm sure that you have looked at this video many times. What did he mean when he said one of the boys changed his look?
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Chapter 8: What parallels can be drawn between the Goetz case and contemporary incidents?
And animals and articles that recounted all of the criminal charges that these teens had mounted against them. And I went back to the beginning and just started to unpack, first of all, who were they? Where did they come from? Daryl Kaby, for example, who ends up in public housing in the South Bronx because he is originally as a kid living in a house with his mom and dad and his brothers.
And his dad is hardworking, supporting the family. And his dad is killed. Someone steals his truck. He tries to protect the truck. He ends up killed. He ends up, you know, it's a horrible incident of crime and violence that puts him in public housing in the first start. That's just an example. These are kids that had a very, very difficult time growing up.
And what they did was they were breaking into the video arcades. They were jumping the turnstiles because they didn't have any money to ride the subway. So they had actually accumulated a whole lot of misdemeanor citations. And what was so incredible was once they get shot, they are in the ICUs. They are having surgery. They are in really, really bad shape.
And two judges in the Bronx suddenly decide to go back. They look at all of these old misdemeanor citations, and then they issue a blizzard of warrants against against these teenagers on the basis of these misdemeanor charges. So suddenly overnight, the media grabs hold of this and says they are dangerous criminals. Look at all the charges they have mounted against them.
Mind you, these are nonviolent misdemeanor citations. And one of the judges actually calls them, it says this is evidence that they are violent criminals. And of course, everything just flows from that. They then are no longer able to be victims.
There were essentially two trials. So there was the criminal trial, and it was a mostly white jury that acquitted Bernie Goetz of attempted murder. And then there was the civil trial that happened a few years later, and that was a mostly black jury. And they found Goetz liable and awarded Daryl KB $43 million, but he never received money for that. Is that right?
Yeah, that's right. This trial is an extraordinary example of a jury hearing evidence and Americans hearing a story unfold right before their eyes and nevertheless deciding in favor of the shooter, nevertheless deciding that he should be vindicated. It is a dramatic trial.
Bernie Goetz manages to get one of the most flashy, incredibly smart, really brilliant defense lawyers, Barry Slotnick, to defend him. This is a guy who has defended the mob. I mean, he knows how to really spin a yarn and get the jury on his side. But he has this extraordinary moment in the trial where he persuades the judge. to reenact what happened on that subway.
But what he does is he brings in these four burly-looking, kind of menacing-looking black men, puts them surrounding a white guy who's playing Bernie Getz. And, you know, it's a whole theater, a whole charade of what no witness testified to that never happened. It all plays out right there in the courtroom on the floor. in front of the jurors. It's just it's really kind of amazing to watch.
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