Why a 1984 subway shooting still echoes across America in ‘Fear and Fury’

Historian Heather Ann Thompson had been in the midst of writing a book in 2023 when she realized she needed to stop and start a new one.

With Donald Trump on course to return to the White House, Thompson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her book about the Attica prison uprising, “Blood in the Water,” says she wanted to understand the rage that fueled many of his White, working-class supporters.

This led her back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, examining Reagan’s use of terms such as “welfare queens” and his decision to launch his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a location infamous for the 1964 murder of three civil rights advocates, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

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From there, she zeroed in on an infamous New York City subway shooting for her new book, “Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage.”

“What struck me was that I remembered Goetz, but I didn’t know anything about the people he had shot,” Thompson said in a recent video interview, adding that she sees a throughline from Goetz’s shooting of four teens to more recent acts of violence, such as Kyle Rittenhouse shooting three protesters in Wisconsin in 2020 and the 2017 murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, when a white nationalist drove a car into a group of people protesting the Unite the Right rally.

The book features faces still familiar today: Rupert Murdoch, Al Sharpton, Curtis Sliwa, Rudy Giuliani, and, of course, Donald Trump, but the focus is on Goetz, his history, the shootings and the trials that follow, as well as the four teens – Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, James Ramseur and Troy Canty – he shot.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. What did you hope to convey by telling this story now? 

My first task was to start from zero and piece the story back together again. Once I understood the story, my task was to rescue the narratives that we didn’t know – that of Darryl Cabey and his friends. 

But I was also interested in excavating how we as a country have become so comfortable with these acts of vigilante violence – not just culturally comfortable, but how we came to legally sanction them, with the courts becoming so comfortable with gun violence and self-defense as an excuse. Hopefully, this book can shine a new light on why we are where we are today. 

Q. Were you also thinking about gun control laws? 

Yes, this case was a gateway that set a precedent that will encourage other acts of particularly White violence. It’s not all gun violence per se; it’s not an accident that we see hate crimes in Howard Beach or Bensonhurst in New York after this, an absolute explosion of mob rage. 

Also, the NRA saw Bernie Goetz as an opportunity. They helped fund his defense, and afterwards, they see this as a moment to surge forward, to push for Stand Your Ground laws across the country, and to push for cases to go to the Supreme Court, rolling back this idea that you had a duty to retreat. 

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Q. Another book about the Goetz shooting, “Five Bullets,” just came out, too. Have you read it?

I will confess to being surprised when it was clear there were going to be two books. I have not had a chance to read it, but I’ve heard Elliot Williams [the author] talk and my sense is we come at this quite differently. He’s a former prosecutor and has a different sensibility. But getting in the weeds of how we legally ended up where we are is a really important service.

Q. Your subtitle uses the phrase “Rebirth of White Rage.” Can you talk about that?

I am by no means arguing that this came out of nowhere – White rage and racism is baked into the DNA of this country and certainly never went away.

That said, I do think that there is this particularly pivotal moment with Reagan’s election. The dual crises of the civil rights upheaval and then the fiscal downturn of the late ’70s created a unique opportunity to mainstream White rage and to utilize it to expressly political and economic ends. Reagan was able to dismantle the New Deal in powerful ways with this rhetoric.

Editors help title our books, and “Rebirth” was a lot shorter than “Re-legitimization” or “Normalization,” which would have been more accurate. 

Q. Why was it so vital to provide the broader context to the Goetz shooting? 

There was a temptation to just go ahead and narrate the story and let it be. But I felt strongly that something was afoot, making all this happen that didn’t get sufficient attention at the time. One thing is that this uptick in White rage is being actively curated, and stoked and fueled, particularly by this conservative media empire – Murdoch, in particular.

Reagan could care less about “welfare queens” – what he’s interested in is reducing the tax burden on wealthy people. And the whole fixation on what ill deeds people on the ground might be doing is brilliant political strategy. I wanted to call attention to that.

Also, crime was bad, and people were scared, and I wanted to give voice to that. It was real. But we needed to understand why – why were more people suddenly selling drugs, robbing each other and panhandling? Why is everything in such a crisis that Bernie Goetz feels the government is useless? 

Q. How much responsibility does the media bear for what happened back then and what has happened since?

The media bears a steep responsibility for this. But I don’t think I fully appreciated how self-conscious that was. The Reagan administration understood that they needed Murdoch. They say, “We need these papers because they will translate what we’re trying to do in a language that people are going to buy into,” and Murdoch wanted to roll back taxes, but also to get unfettered access to what will become the cable industry.

Soon, crime starts to dominate without context. Even the false story that the boys had sharpened screwdrivers shows up in the New York Times after the paper had accurately said they just had screwdrivers [in bags, which they didn’t take out]. 

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Q. Have we learned anything as a society?

The idea that the rule of law stops mattering haunts the story that I’m trying to tell. On the one hand, what happened in Minneapolis shows that we have now normalized civilian and state violence in this rhetoric of self-defense – what used to be directed overwhelmingly toward people of color now led to the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. That shows that, at some level, nobody is safe now.

On the other hand, there are moments both in my book and in Minneapolis that remind us it’s not a done deal, that this is always contested by ordinary people.

Americans do stand up for justice and for things that are right and righteous all the time.