politics & paranoia tim stanley
Outrage in Oklahoma Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism
By Jeffrey Toobin (Simon & Schuster 432pp £20)
On 19 April 1995, Timothy McVeigh parked a van full of fertiliser outside the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, lit a fuse and walked away. The blast killed 168 people, including nine- teen children.
McVeigh did it; there’s no doubt about that. Yet an aura of mystery surrounded the case because this 26-year-old decorated veteran didn’t look like the kind of terrorist you see on TV. Some speculated that he took the fall for a wider conspiracy; a few found him rather high-minded. Gore Vidal, who struck up correspondence with McVeigh while he was on death row, regarded him as a misguided defender of the constitution. It helped that he looked good in a jumpsuit.
All this ambiguity about McVeigh, says Jeffrey Toobin, is wrong and dangerous – and the unintended consequence of the federal prosecution strategy. Keen to avoid an O J Simpson-style debacle, federal prosecutors focused on the facts, eschewing the kind of cultural analysis that would have put the murder in context. This went against the instincts of President Bill Clinton, who, coming from Arkansas, was familiar with so-called ‘lone wolves’ like McVeigh and knew that they ran in packs.
The killer hung around gun shows, where he handed out copies of the execrable The Turner Diaries, a racist sci-fi novel that depicts fascists triggering a race war by setting off a bomb packed with fertiliser. His stated casus belli were the bloody federal raids on the Weaver family in 1992 and the Waco compound in 1993, and the conspiracy theories of extremists like McVeigh found a rhetorical echo in the Republican Party’s war on elites and bureaucrats. Thus Toobin draws a line from the Oklahoma bombing to the riots of 6 January 2021, which Donald Trump egged on. If you tell damaged people they are under attack, do not be surprised if they lash out.
McVeigh would probably have relished the events of 6 January, for his goal was to spark a wider rebellion. He was happy to be caught – it gave him a chance to publicly air his views – yet he also thought it would be a hoot if he was acquitted, exposing the state as inept. So he never quite acknowledged his guilt, adding to speculation that there was more to this case than there was. While McVeigh remained enigmatic, his lawyer, Stephen Jones, allegedly sought a book deal and was courted by journalists desperate for airtime with his client. He met Peter Jennings of ABC and found him arrogant (‘a name dropper’); Diane Sawyer was ‘very beautiful’. McVeigh himself was impressed with Barbara Walters (‘she didn’t act like a Hollywood snob’), but complained when the New York Times implied he was sexually abnormal because he did his own dishes.
There was no Simpson-style shock verdict – the jury had no problem ascertaining the defendant’s guilt – but McVeigh was still transformed into a celebrity. If this disturbs Toobin, as it should, we might ask why he’s chosen to write a book about him, let alone one in the style of a courtroom thriller (‘Prosecutors had made a serious blunder,’ he says at the end of one chapter, as if to signal to any reader who works for Netflix that this would be the ideal spot for a cliffhanger).
It ’s a sensationalist exercise in establishing guilt by association, via a constant (over time, tedious) assertion that McVeigh’s views were just like those of the Trumpers. Toobin’s takes are subjective and sometimes lack nuance. Perhaps Newt Gingrich shared the anti-bureaucratic instincts of McVeigh’s
Read the archive online www.literaryreview.co.uk friends on the far right, but the far right generally thought Gingrich was a globalist shill. Maybe Pat Buchanan’s warnings about the ‘New World Order’ meshed with McVeigh’s own fantasies, but isn’t it worth mentioning that Buchanan regarded McVeigh as a prime candidate for the death penalty? Yes, McVeigh registered as a Republican and joined the National Rifle Association, and in a letter to a local newspaper in 1992 he rehearsed complaints about crime and taxes that could have come from the mouth of Ronald Reagan. But he also suggested that the communist idea of free health care was a good one. His politics were complicated.
Fear of the government is not just a right-wing phenomenon. It used to be common among left-wingers too, justified by the Wa t e r g a t e s c a n d a l a n d t h e d o m e s t i c s u r v e i llance of civil-rights activists. There has also been plenty of left-wing subversive activity, carried out by the likes of the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Black Panthers. Countless attempts have been made to explain the American citizen’s tendency towards violence, but we can’t dismiss the record of the government itself.
The code name for the assault on Waco was ‘Showtime’ (is the American justice system a branch of the entertainment industry?) and it resulted in the deaths of twenty-eight children. Asked if he knew that there was a daycare centre in the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building, McVeigh said that he didn’t, but added that, had he known, he’d have bombed it anyway because the rules of engagement had been set at Waco.
McVeigh, who was given a lethal injection under a Republican administration in 2001, might have found ways to defer his execution, perhaps indefinitely, but chose not to. Conditions at his supermax jail, where he lived in a tiny cell between the Unabomber and a Pakistani terrorist, amounted to torture.
It is possible to choose the simplest explanation for his crime – that he was evil – while giving credit to Toobin for trying to demonstrate that it was part of a nationdefining pattern. How often do we hear that McVeigh’s was the worst terror attack in the country ’s history prior to 9/11? It was not. Toobin reminds us that in 1921, a white mob killed around three hundred black residents in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It wasn’t even the worst terror attack in the state’s history.
july 2023 | Literary Review 7
