On April 19th, 1995, Timothy McVeigh, a former soldier and gun enthusiast, set off a homemade bomb at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma city, killing 163 people including 15 children. Although McVeigh acted alone, he had a support crew of two army cronies, a stoner from the desert wastes of Arizona and a Michigan farmer with a mail-order Fillipina bride. The men were steeped in the classic texts of right-wing extremism, justified their crime with a selective reading of the US constitution and regarded themselves as patriots.
Who was Timothy McVeigh? Jeffrey Toobin gives us the answers in his superbly detailed cautionary tale. McVeigh grew up in post-industrial Buffalo, in a suburb that voted for Donald Trump in 2020. His father was inattentive, his mother an absentee. He did well enough in school and fell under the allure of firearms as a boy, first a BB gun and next a .22 calibre rifle. After graduation he worked at Burger King and as a security guard. He spent every spare penny on weapons, among them an AR-15 assault rifle.
As many lost young men do, McVeigh joined the army. He was a model soldier and an expert marksman, and served with distinction in Iraq during Desert Storm. He wanted to join the elite Green Berets but failed to qualify and resigned with an honorable discharge. Unmoored, he drifted around the midwest, bunking with pals or sleeping in his car. He was a regular at gun shows, both buying and selling. He read Soldier of Fortune, listened to Rush Limbaugh and developed a deep mistrust of the government.
His mistrust spiked after the siege at Ruby Ridge in rural Idaho in 1992, where US marshalls tried to serve an arrest warrant for weapons charges on Randy Weaver, an extremist who refused to surrender. The marshalls shot Weaver’s son and the family dog; an FBI sniper killed his wife.
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Six months later agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms arrived in Waco, Texas to press similar charges on the Branch Davidians, a vaguely religious sect. Again the Feds botched the job. In the initial foray, four agents and five Branch Davidians died. A stand-off ensued until the FBI launched a tear gas attack on the compound, causing a fire that killed 76 Branch Davidians.
For McVeigh, the final straw was the ban on assault weapons that Bill Clinton signed in 1993. He felt compelled to act before his rights and guns were taken away. His manual for operations was The Turner Diaries, a novel that extreme right-wingers take as gospel. The author, William Luther Pierce, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist, self-published it in 1978. In Pierce’s apocalyptic story, a Jewish cabal called the System controls the government. Under its Cohen Act, privately owned arms can be confiscated. Blacks may attack whites without any penalty; whites can be jailed for fighting back.
Earl Turner, the novel’s hero, leads a resistance group known as the Organization. He blows up the FBI building in Washington, ending the lives of 700 “innocent bystanders”. Turner’s bomb consists of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, blasting caps and dynamite – a protoype to which McVeigh added high-octane racing fuel. “If we don’t destroy the System before it destroys us,” says Turner, “our whole race will die.” He felt no remorse for murdering civilians, nor did McVeigh.
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Toobin offers a brilliant analysis of how McVeigh evolved a logic from such farcical sources to give credence to his horrendous crime. He hoped that the Oklahoma bombing would spark a conflagration to restore the United States to its former glory. That same desire motivated the mob involved in the January 6th insurrection at the White House. The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other militias embrace the same warped logic and the same mythical America. Trump’s supporters march in solidarity with them.
Toobin understands the American predicament; his book is essential reading. He puts to rest the notion that terrorists such as McVeigh are lone wolves. Even before social media, McVeigh built up a network of like-minded individuals at gun shows. His dream of a revolution lives on in the hearts and minds of many disenfranchised citizens, heavily armed and in thrall to Tucker Carlson and the Fox News crew. If Dante were around, he’d find a place in hell for such pundits.
McVeigh was arrested after the bombing at a routine traffic stop. His car, a junker he intended to ditch, had no license plate. He spent years in federal prisons, once in a cell next to Ted Kacyznski, the Unabomber. Before his execution by lethal injection in 2001 he ate a last meal of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Instead of offering his last words, he wrote out a copy of the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley with its memorable lines: “I thank whatever gods may be/For my unconquerable soul.”
