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Tonya Mosley (0:17)
This is FRESH air. I'm Tonya Moseley. 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. 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 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 the Reagan 80s, the Bernie Getz Shootings and the Rebirth of White Rage. Heather Ann Thompson, welcome to FRESH air.
Heather Ann Thompson (2:00)
So glad to be here.
Tonya Mosley (2:02)
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?
Heather Ann Thompson (2:28)
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.