The Banality of McVeigh

GOELMAN, AITAN

The Banality of McVeigh BY AITAN GOELMAN From his prison cell, Timothy McVeigh has made a final attempt to convince America to share his vision of himself. He granted Lou Michel and Dan Her-beck,...

...According to McVeigh, events went according to plan even after the bombing, because, he asserts, he wanted to get caught, wanted to be convicted, wanted to be sentenced to death...
...But his use of similar tactics to poison his young sister's mind was particularly despicable...
...Even the acts that led to his arrest by Oklahoma state trooper Charles Hanger little more than an hour after the bombing were calculated to help McVeigh escape—and not, as he suggests, to aid in his capture...
...The reality is that McVeigh's lies were mostly efforts to enhance his image as an anti-government warrior among the gun-show aficionados and militia enthusiasts...
...He granted Lou Michel and Dan Her-beck, reporters for the Buffalo News, over seventy-five hours of exclusive interviews, and the result—American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing—is a sympathetic account of McVeigh as intelligent, charismatic, and even sexy...
...American Terrorist documents Jones's efforts to fan the flames of these theories, both before the trial and in Jones's post-conviction attempt to drum up interest in his own book, Others Unknown, which asserts that the bombing was the work of a large, multinational conspiracy that used McVeigh as either a dupe or a foot soldier...
...Then, impressed with the group's concern for the erosion of our civil liberties, he sent twenty dollars for a "trial membership," though he "had virtually no idea what the KKK was all about...
...McVeigh's self-promotion was contemptible enough when he spread anti-government lies and rumors to like-minded adults...
...Instead of emphasizing that McVeigh, whose favorite book was a fantasy novel that ends with white Christian men killing virtually everyone else on the planet, paid money to join the KKK, Michel and Herbeck stress that McVeigh did not renew his membership—because, they seem to suggest, he had confused the KKK with the ACLU...
...He pled not guilty, defied a court order to provide handwriting exemplars, and played an active role in his defense—which employed the conventional strategies of attacking the government's evidence and blaming other perpetrators...
...They are two relatively nondescript men whose anger, resentment, and determination enabled them to commit a disproportionately evil crime...
...Whether it led to his acquittal or not, publicizing the government's misconduct was "central to what he saw as the ultimate success or failure of his mission...
...McVeigh now claims he wanted to use his trial to take responsibility for the bombing and argue to the jury that his action was necessitated by the government's aggression at Waco and elsewhere...
...He was also a devoted believer in one of the book's central mes-sages—that a small, committed group of freedom-loving Americans could and should instigate a revolution against an oppressive federal government that threatened their right to carry guns...
...But he is basically right: Much of the skepticism about the pair's ability to carry out the bombing comes from our desire for proportionality between crime and perpetrator...
...His letters to Jennifer were not the delusions of a zealot...
...That, of course, is one of the things that make McVeigh deeply unsettling...
...McVeigh left off the license plate so his getaway car would be more difficult to identify if a witness had noticed it, either during the three days it was parked in a lot across from the Murrah Building or while McVeigh was fleeing Oklahoma City after detonating the bomb...
...Strangely, however, he let his attorneys persuade him not to claim responsibility for the bombing...
...One of the first things I read when I joined the task force in 1995 was The Turner Diaries, a violent, racist novel by a leader of the American Nazi movement...
...and a narcissist, a man willing to sacrifice both strangers and friends, but never himself, in his thirst for notoriety...
...He admits he told anti-government farmers in Decker, Michigan, that the Army had injected a microchip into his buttocks...
...The answer, as it turns out, is no —save for the fact that McVeigh is even more appallingly self-satisfied than anyone imagined...
...When he saw that the United States government was increasingly acting as a fearless bully, attacking weaker nations and its own people with impunity, he nobly stepped forward, thereby sacrificing his own life...
...In fact, McVeigh himself didn't believe in the one-world government conspiracy about which he warned Strider and others...
...And then, too, there is the fact that McVeigh is, at his core, a coward...
...It should be needless to say that this bears little resemblance to the actual Tim McVeigh—McVeigh as I came to know him during the thirty months I served as a federal prosecutor on the Oklahoma City bombing task force...
...The book waters down evidence of McVeigh's racism by repeated assertions of his respect for other cultures and by the implication that he is somehow not responsible for his bigotry...
...Nothing is changed by his decision years later—after both the conviction and death sentence were upheld on appeal, and after he lost his subsequent habeas corpus motion—to abandon further appeals and begin defending the necessity for the bombing...
...His frantic efforts in the weeks before the bombing to prepare a post-bombing refuge are not the actions of a martyr preparing for his final mission...
...Because of the enormity of the crime, we want an evil of equal magnitude to be responsible...
...Six years later, McVeigh's crime stands not as the spark that lit a powder keg of anti-government resentment, but as an isolated and senseless act...
...They have furthered the effort of a narcissistic murderer to define himself as an idealistic martyr— which increases the risk that another notoriety-seeker will try to emulate McVeigh...
...But McVeigh must be thrilled with the result...
...Soon he will be unable to grant interviews or continue his correspondence with journalists...
...Not surprisingly, McVeigh's plan failed miserably...
...In his interviews with Michel and Herbeck, McVeigh does admit, for the first time, that he bombed the Alfred I? Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995...
...Michel and Herbeck themselves understand the importance of clarifying the historical record, expressing the hope that their book will prevent the Oklahoma City bombing from spawning decades of conspiracy-mongering and mistrust of the government...
...McVeigh had been an avid prosely-tizer for The Turner Diaries, selling the book at gun shows, sending it to friends and family, and encouraging associates to read it...
...McVeigh was arrested for driving without a license plate, which the authors describe as "a simple gesture" that "would make it easier for cops to apprehend him...
...Even with all its sycophancy toward its subject, American Terrorist is not entirely without value...
...He intended his Oklahoma City bombing to be the first shot in a second American revolution, of which he would be remembered as the founding father...
...McVeigh's claim of complete responsibility is exaggerated...
...The McVeigh of American Terrorist is smart (we're informed his IQ has been tested at 126), kind, and good looking...
...He refused to pay back money he owed the Army Reserves because, we are told, he felt he had earned it...
...McVeigh's last words will be wasted on an empty boast, an attempt to persuade us that he wants to die, and that by executing him, we are handing him his final triumph...
...Some theories point at residents of the racist enclave of Elohim City, Oklahoma, while others speculate the bombing was a government sting operation gone awry...
...So now, in his interviews with Michel and Herbeck, McVeigh claims his goal was merely to teach the federal government a lesson...
...The Turner Diaries contains a detailed description of a fertilizer-based truck bomb used to destroy the FBI's headquarters in Washington, and it is this description that investigators con-cluded—correctly—McVeigh had used as a blueprint for his bombing...
...He had scouted it at least four different times, and he admitted to John R. Smith, the psychiatrist hired by his defense team, that on at least one of his visits he had seen the shadow of a baby's crib through the glass front of the building...
...Although Michel and Herbeck, with McVeigh's permission, spoke to the psychiatrist at length (and found room to include his conclusion that McVeigh was "very intelligent"), they neglect to mention McVeigh's admission to Smith that he knew about the daycare center before he bombed the building...
...One of the most powerful segments of American Terrorist is McVeigh's response to the conspiracy theorists who insist that McVeigh and Nichols, two Army veterans without extensive training in explosives, could not have managed the bombing on their own...
...American Terrorist similarly describes McVeigh as refusing to shoot Hanger because "he had a grudging respect" for members of local and state law enforcement...
...They are not master criminals...
...Michel and Herbeck ascribe all this to a distraught, disillusioned young man forced to "conjure up a fantastic scenario to justify his outrage...
...As prosecutor Larry Mackey said in the government's summation at the trial, it is one thing to detonate a bomb against unsuspecting civilians, and another to "draw down on a veteran Oklahoma state trooper...
...Perhaps the most disturbing feature of American Terrorist appears only when you finish the book and realize that McVeigh never once expressed any real remorse for his 168 murders...
...It is especially unfortunate that American Terrorist repeats McVeigh's claim he didn't realize there was a daycare center in the Murrah Building...
...It's an astonishingly gentle treatment for the man who committed the bloodiest act of terrorism in American history, and it raises the question of whether the book actually reveals anything that might help us understand him...
...The version of his life that McVeigh gives in American Terrorist proves that he remains, even while facing his own execution, the fundamentally dishonest man he has always been...
...The entire episode, McVeigh says, was an elaborate version of "suicide by cop," where a person ends his life by provoking a police officer to shoot him...
...But American Terrorist is replete with stories of McVeigh's sexual conquests, including a particularly incredible episode in which, as a seventeen-year-old high school student "who had grown into a handsome young man with wavy brown hair," McVeigh used his after-school job at Burger King to meet and seduce an older, married woman...
...McVeigh consciously squandered a bigger, earlier platform to articulate his views in exchange for the chance to avoid conviction and the death penalty...
...In American Terrorist, McVeigh implicitly acknowledges the Brussels list was a fantasy, but he explains that it was warranted "to keep Strider on her toes and stir her curiosity...
...It conclusively demonstrates that McVeigh alone destroyed the Murrah Building with the bomb Terry Nichols helped him prepare...
...His bomb killed 168 people and injured many more...
...They were part of the web of lies McVeigh used to impress others, including his little sister—who would suffer for it by having to serve as a very powerful, and extremely reluctant, witness at her brother's trial...
...McVeigh's silence can be explained only as an effort not to be convicted, and, after conviction, to avoid the death penalty...
...Even while describing the tremendous suffering he caused, Michel and Her-beck can't help but marvel at the industriousness and resourcefulness McVeigh used in planning and executing the crime...
...The truth is that McVeigh was hoping to escape...
...And Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols are small...
...This will greatly disappoint the conspiracy theorists who have spent the last six years tirelessly seeking others to blame...
...Proponents of such theories have included adherents of the militia movement and Oklahoma state legislators, as well as Stephen Jones, McVeigh's trial attorney...
...But, in a particularly contemptible display of callousness, McVeigh describes the bombing's effect on his sister in the same carefree terms he uses for the children he killed: the inevitable and acceptable "collateral damage" of a successful "military action...
...McVeigh knew his target well enough to determine that the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Secret Service maintained offices there, while the FBI did not...
...The lens through which he would like his life and crime viewed is, he assures Michel and Herbeck, his lifelong hatred of bullies...
...But, he says, he was merely amusing himself with his audience's gullibility (and the farmers, Michel and Herbeck write, "failed to pick up on McVeigh's dry sense of humor...
...The authors paint their flattering portrait by explaining away or minimizing their subject's unrepentant racism, grandiose self-image, and dishonesty...
...American Terrorist reprints a portion of a 1993 letter to Jennifer in which McVeigh claimed the real reason he washed out of the Army's elite Special Forces was that he refused to become an "ultimate warrior" in a secret government squad of drug-runners and domestic assassins...
...American Terrorist has been advertised as the product of tough, "no-holds-barred" interviews, and the authors stress that they refused McVeigh's demand to review the book's content...
...Why, if he wanted to be caught, did he carefully wipe his fingerprints off the Ryder truck "lest any identifiable shred of the cab survive the blast...
...Jennifer McVeigh, who is six years younger than her brother, was an impressionable high school student who idolized Tim when he began educating her about the evils of the government...
...This is nothing but more bravado...
...Until then, however, he will continue to gloat, as he did to Michel and Herbeck, that his execution will mean only that the final tally is 168 to 1 in his favor...
...This attempt to package defeat as victory is both pathetic and dangerous, and Michel and Herbeck are far too accepting of McVeigh's self-indulgent rationalizations...
...And now he wants to be executed...
...We should decline to participate in this bizarre game of one-upmanship...
...Signing the letter "Desert Rat," he warned Strider that the "one-world government" had compiled a list of "over 300,000 names on a Cray supercomputer in Brussels, Belgium, of 'possible and suspected subversives and terrorists' in the U.S...
...Some of the victims of McVeigh's terrorism have called for a boycott of American Terrorist, and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Center has rejected the authors' offer to contribute a portion of their royalties...
...Characteristically borrowing words (this time from the film A Few Good Men), McVeigh tells doubters, "You can't handle the truth—because the truth is, it was just me...
...In fact, he passed up his right to testify at both the guilt phase and the punishment phase of the trial, when the spotlight would have been brightest...
...A more plausible explanation for the lie—and for McVeigh's false claim of being "sent" people, and even for his self-nominated title "Desert Rat"—is that he wanted to impress Strider by portraying himself as a dangerous outlaw...
...But he also poses as a committed, idealistic martyr who sacrificed himself for a greater good...
...He could not have predicted Hanger's sharp eyes would detect the bulge of McVeigh's gun, allowing the alert trooper to pull his own weapon before McVeigh could draw...
...Most of the people sent my way these days are of the direct-action type," he wrote in a 1995 letter to Gwenda Strider, a woman sympathetic to the "patriot" movement...
...Women find him irresistible...
...According to American Terrorist, it pained McVeigh to watch Jennifer's tearful testimony against him, and he resented what he regarded as the unfair pressure used on her by the FBI immediately after the bombing...
...McVeigh admits what the federal investigation concluded: There is no wider group of culprits who remain unapprehended...
...Far from being an impartial exploration of his wasted life and appalling crime, the book reads like the "as told to" biography of a controversial and misunderstood celebrity...
...We can deny McVeigh a posthumous victory by remembering him as he really was, instead of as he claimed to be...
...These sentiments are understandable, but Michel and Herbeck have performed a service by interviewing McVeigh and making his admissions part of the historical record...
...But, far from precipitating a war between the government and citizens, it generated widespread abhorrence for McVeigh's act and sympathy for his victims...
...He knew Trooper Hanger had pulled him over to give him, at worst, a ticket...
...The book ends with McVeigh's boast that, by bombing the Murrah Building, he gave the government a "bloody nose"—and "once you bloody the bully's nose, and he knows he's going to be punched again, he's not coming around...
...Worse, from McVeigh's point of view, the federal government managed to capture and put on trial those responsible—without abrogating the Constitution, declaring martial law, or sending "stormtroopers" to confiscate firearms from law-abiding Americans...
...That's far too generous...
...But it doesn't change his smallness or make him the virtually omnipotent figure he paints himself as in American Terrorist...
...These are understandable preferences, but they deprive him of the mantle of martyrdom he now claims...
...Nichols's help was essential...
...McVeigh probably calculated that his safest course would be to try to talk his way through the encounter and be on his way...
...McVeigh's contention that he wanted to be convicted is no more persuasive...
...That McVeigh, the real one, is a coward An attorney in New York, Aitan Goelman was a federal prosecutor in the Oklahoma City bombing case...
...The claim is pure bombast, and it is belied by the version of events the book itself presents...
...The FBI interviewed more than thirty thousand people during the investigation and found no credible information that McVeigh had ever been with a woman...
...Indeed, in a truly stunning bit of hypocrisy, he takes credit for the lack of violent anti-government incidents since 1995, arguing, for instance, that he is responsible for the peaceful ending to the 1996 standoff between federal agents and the Freemen in Montana...
...Still, that does not justify their treatment of McVeigh...
...McVeigh's affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan is explained as a combination of happenstance and youthful exploration: As the result of a forgivable enthusiasm for The Turner Diaries, he "wound up" on a Ku Klux Klan mailing list...

Vol. 6 • May 2001 • No. 33


 
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