American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck / Hardcover, 426 pages / Published by: Harper / Price: $26 / Publication Date: 2001
“This was not an easy story to tell,” acknowledge Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, reporters for the Buffalo News and co-authors of the chilling and incisive American Terrorist.. Interviewing Timothy McVeigh—the “decorated [Army] soldier” turned “mass murderer” responsible for the slaughter of 168 men, women, and children in the bombing of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah federal building—from death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, Michel and Herbeck “experienced feelings of horror and outrage” as they listened to McVeigh’s “matter-of-fact narration of events.” Observing McVeigh’s “extraordinary candor” and never detecting any remorse for the blood he shed was troubling to the authors. Indeed, McVeigh’s coldness still haunts the American psyche.
However gruelling, infuriating, misguided, and incomprehensible McVeigh and his actions on April 19, 1995, are to recall and digest, the publication of American Terrorist is invaluable. It reveals the mind-set of the man who describes the pain and humiliation his kindly, “crestfallen” father, Bill McVeigh, suffers and who reduces the deaths of the 19 babies and children at the Murrah building's America’s Kid’s day-care center —the youngest three months; the oldest five—to “collateral damage.”
It chronicles McVeigh’s transition from “average American boy” to the nation’s most notorious, most hated anti-government activist. It shows McVeigh as a clumsy, inadequate pursuer of women and as a calculating, arrogant, bullying man of conviction. And most important, American Terrorist makes public McVeigh’s “long-awaited confession.”
The Mastermind of Self-Righteous Devastation
McVeigh admits that he was the “mastermind of the entire scheme.” (Co-conspirators Terry Nichols and Mike Fortier were convicted; Nichols received a life sentence, and Fortier plea-bargained a sentence of 12 years. Their stories are also told in American Terrorist.)
McVeigh chose April 19 as the date to inflict self-righteous devastation for two reasons. Firstly, it was the second anniversary of the fiery standoff between federal law-enforcement agents and religious leader, David Koresh, and his Branch Davidian followers in Waco, Texas—a show of excessive federal government force against its own citizens that enraged McVeigh. Secondly, it was the 220-year anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the militiaman skirmish that lead to the American Revolution.
With his 7,000-pound bomb made from ammonium nitrate fertilizer and the highly explosive fuel nitromethane, McVeigh “wasn’t looking to spark a revolution.” To him, the bombing was an “act of tactical aggression—nothing more, nothing less. … an act of extremism in the service of liberty”:
His actions would wipe many innocent people off the face of the earth, but someday, McVeigh was convinced, historians would call him a martyr, maybe even a hero. … [He wanted] to end what he saw as a pattern of government-propagated violence and aggression of which Ruby Ridge and Waco might be only the beginning. A sharp, forceful blow, he believed, might bring government to its senses.
As American Terrorist points out in its finely detailed and outstanding biographical rundown of McVeigh, his beliefs about the federal government’s infringement on individual freedoms and his staunch support of the right to bear firearms become more and more militant and paranoid. McVeigh was convinced that the United Nations planned a “New World Order”—an “establishment of a single world government designed to place severe limits on … freedom… with American gun owners their prime targets.”
Dissatisfied with his ineffectual propaganda campaign—McVeigh wrote letters denouncing actions of the federal government; distributed anti-government bumper stickers and pamphlets; circulated copies of The Turner Diaries (1978) by former American Nazi Party official William L. Pierce—McVeigh decided to move to an “action stage,” to “put the lessons [of “unthinkable cruelty”] the Army had taught him to practice on native soil.”
“Unthinkable cruelty” hit at 9:01 A.M. in Oklahoma City. Just minutes before, McVeigh shoved a pair of earplugs into his ears, lit the fuses of his handmade truck bomb, parked his Ryder rental truck in front of the Murrah building, and walked away.
Two minutes later, the nine-story federal building was destroyed, every structure in a “sixteen-block area surrounding the blast was damaged,” 509 people were injured, and 168 were killed. “Most of the dead would not be positively identified for several days. For some, it took weeks.”
McVeigh's Trial, the FBI's Blunder, and a Silent Death
American Terrorist includes insightful, riveting testimony from McVeigh’s trial and the subsequent death-penalty phase. McVeigh never wavered in his admission of guilt to his lawyers. While his defense team travelled the world seeking out conspiracy theories, convinced that the bombing was the work of an international terrorist group and that McVeigh was its “patsy,” McVeigh was steadfast: He was the bomber, but he “wanted to make the government’s prosecutors and investigators work hard for any … conviction. … He would make the government prove its case, and he would take every opportunity to inconvenience and embarrass them along the way.”
Timothy McVeigh was scheduled to be executed on May 16, 2001. Due to a Federal Bureau of Investigations blunder, more than 3,000 documents regarding evidence against McVeigh were withheld from his defense team. The Justice Department maintained that the documents did not contain information that would exonerate McVeigh, and his execution date was rescheduled for June 11, 2001. And even though McVeigh ceased all appeals of his death penalty sentence at the end of 2000, McVeigh contended that his defense team provided him insufficient counsel. Indeed, Michel and Herbeck describe the team as “disjointed and disorganized.”
McVeigh was put to death on Monday, June 11, 2001. He did not utter a word prior to his execution.
American Terrorist is an astounding work of journalism, research, and story-telling. The life and thoughts of America’s unapologetic terrorist rest disturbingly between its pages—and the question Who was Timothy McVeigh? is answered.
Amy O'Loughlin - Amy O'Loughlin is an award-winning freelance writer with 13 years experience in newspaper, magazine, web-based magazine, and business ...
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