While Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage largely fulfills its promise of a story about Bernie Goetz, the New Yorker who shot four Black teenagers on a subway in 1984, it also spends plenty of time addressing the broader scope indicated by its subtitle.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Heather Ann Thompson (Blood in the Water) names Ronald Reagan’s cuts to the social safety net as the original sin of the 1980s. She charts the rise of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which capitalized on racial resentments and economic anxieties of fearful, angry white New Yorkers who were disenchanted with liberal solutions to social problems. This was an America that undermined racial minorities at every turn and then relished in their downfall, while simultaneously tacitly permitting or even actively encouraging white vigilantism.
Readers learn about Goetz and the four teens—Barry Allen, Troy Canty, Darrell Cabey and James Ramseur—and experience the manhunt that commenced when Goetz fled New York state after the shootings. Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Curtis Sliwa make cameos. But the heart of Fear and Fury is twin courtroom dramas: the criminal trial of Goetz for the shootings and a civil trial seeking financial damages for one of his victims. The book is loaded with expert and witness testimony, behind-the-scenes jury deliberations and legal maneuvers. Thompson’s position is explicit, and the court record seems to back it up: Goetz was dangerous, reckless and unrepentant. Despite the media and his lawyers doing everything in their power to rationalize his shooting of the four teens, near-every time Goetz opened his mouth he made it clear that the shootings were premeditated, prejudicial and unnecessary.
Thompson’s survey of criminal justice, media and political history of America’s past 40 years can at times distract from the courtroom drama at the center of the book, but it places that drama within the broader context denied it by contemporaneous media coverage and public memory. When the reader is reminded of Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, the connections to the decades-old Goetz case come into greater focus. This is no John Grisham legal thriller with a neat conclusion. In Thompson’s capable hands, the Goetz saga, and its relationship to the present day, gets the messy resolution it deserves.
