An Ordinary Boy's
Extraordinary Rage
In deeply disturbing ways, he is a prototype of his
generation.
 He
lived the divorce revolution, age 10 when his parents
split in 1978 for that increasingly familiar reason: They
were just too different. He was an underachiever in high
school, uninterested in college. He hit the job market in
the mid-1980s as it ran out of room for young men with
blue-collar skills. Aware of affirmative action for women
and minorities, he began to feel shortchanged as a white
male.
He worked dead-end jobs, voiced fears of going nowhere,
tried a well-trod escape route -- the Army -- but bailed
out as the military downsized with the fall of communism.
Like millions in his generation, he ended up back home as
an adult, a man sleeping in a boy's room, headed exactly
where he'd feared: nowhere.
When he was charged with blowing up the Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, everyone who
knew Timothy James McVeigh in his formative years blamed
this monumental madness on the Army, on Desert Storm, on
places and people far from the wholesome community where
he came of age with an American flag flying over his front
yard. He was so indistinguishable from everyone else, they
said. Even the problems in his life -- his parents'
divorce, his alienated ennui as a young man -- were
average.
No set of experiences would predict -- or explain -- an
act as catastrophic as the Oklahoma bombing. Yet the roots
of McVeigh's extremism are clearly traceable to his youth
in pastoral western New York. By the time he was in junior
high school, an early interest in guns had become an
obsession; by high school, when he ran track and sold fast
food, he was arming himself to fight alone in an
apocalyptic war; by age 20, he was making and exploding
bombs and shooting guns on a wooded lot that he described
to Army buddies as a survivalist bunker.
Americans were shocked to learn that the prime suspects
in the Oklahoma City bombing were not foreign terrorists
but men from the nation's heartland. The plot was not
hatched in Beirut or Baghdad but possibly in the backwoods
of northeast Michigan by a paramilitary cell that
investigators allege McVeigh formed with accused
conspirator Terry Lynn Nichols and Nichols's brother
James.
Both Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols are products of
Middle America, and their lives raise troubling questions
about the strength of the social fabric there. This
two-part series of articles will explore their experiences
against the backdrop of their times.
For the most part, any aberrations in Tim McVeigh's
life were hidden under an exterior so bland as to be
nondescript. Many acquaintances had to struggle to think
of something -- anything -- to relate about him. His
interest in firearms was known only to friends who also
liked them; a good friend from the track team never even
knew McVeigh owned a BB gun. In retrospect, merely
appearing regular seems to have been a lifelong pursuit.
Even today, as the case against him grows ever tighter,
a person who has seen and talked to McVeigh in prison near
Oklahoma City saw in him a normalcy that rendered him
"the scariest man in the world."
"There's nothing alarming about him --
nothing," this person said. "He's respectful of
his elders, he's polite. When he expresses political
views, for most of what he says, Rush Limbaugh is scarier.
That's what's incredibly frightening. If he is what he
appears to be, there must be other people out there like
him. You look at him and you think: This isn't the end of
something; this is the beginning of something."
Psychologists have warned for years that young people
like McVeigh born in the late 1960s, whose families
fractured in record numbers, whose economic frustrations
far exceed those of their parents, are unusually alienated
and vulnerable to fringe movements. In this view, the
social and economic upheavals of the last 20 years have
planted a virus in American society with still unrealized
capacity for damage.
"A kid from the heart of America who feels the
society has let him down can be very dangerous if he has
underlying emotional quirks," said Charles Bahn, a
forensic psychologist from John Jay College of Criminal
Justice in New York who studies the psyche of terrorists.
"In urban America, gangs fill this void. In the
Midwest, it's cults, the macho gun world, militias,
belonging to fringe groups."
McVeigh's mother, Mildred Fraser, remarried and living
in Florida, recently wrote of her son to the local Fort
Pierce Tribune: "Sounds like he could be any of our
children, right? People who live in glass houses should
not throw stones. It could happen to your family just as
it has to this one."
Growing Up: An Unexceptional Boy Who Never Showed Any
Troubled Side'
McVeigh's beginnings mirror so many millions of others
in small-town America that the generic "John Doe No.
1" initially assigned him by the government seems as
fitting as his own name. Almost from the start, there were
two TimothyMcVeighs: one the "boy next door," as
his lawyer dubbed him, named Timmy; another germinating in
a secret cocoon, the future John Doe No. 1.
He was raised in a conservative, almost exclusively
white community, where changes arrived years after
sweeping metropolitan centers. Long patches of farmland
separated many houses in Pendleton, N.Y., near Buffalo.
McVeigh's father, Bill, 55, worked the midnight shift then
as now in the same auto plant where his own father had put
in 30 years. Bill McVeigh raises money for civic causes,
bowls, runs bingo night at the Catholic church, gardens
and golfs. He is a registered Democrat and union man who
on a recent afternoon sported a black nylon United Auto
Workers windbreaker and baseball cap.
His staid style was a factor in the breakup of his
marriage to Mildred "Mickey" McVeigh, who
considered him "too domesticated," said an
acquaintance of hers. "Bill's idea of a Friday night
was to have a pizza, watch the ballgame and water his
plants," the acquaintance said. Neighbors said Mickey
McVeigh often went without her husband to bars,
restaurants and clubs.
In 1978, as the hit movie "Kramer vs. Kramer"
projected the public's anguish over the nation's rising
divorce rate, Mickey McVeigh moved out. "Just like
that," Bill McVeigh's friend Richard Pearce recalled.
"There was no trial separation. She just packed her
bags and left. I guess the kids took it pretty bad. It
hurt Bill badly."
Tim, then 10, and sister Patty, 12, stayed with their
father; 4-year-old Jennifer went with her mother to
neighboring Lockport, but later also joined her father.
Friends of Tim's do not recall seeing his mother after
that except when she drove up wearing a business suit (she
worked in a travel agency), stayed a few minutes and drove
off.
The prevailing view in Pendleton was that Tim weathered
the storm well. "People ask me, Wasn't Tim crushed?'
" said Father Paul Belzer, the family priest for 20
years. "But he didn't seem to be. He lived in the
same house, had the same friends. Yeah, he'd have to miss
his mother, but so many of the anchors were there."
The mother of one of Tim's best friends paid close
attention to him, assuming he wanted to talk. "I just
felt for him," she said. "His mother wasn't
around. The father worked nights. The kids were alone. But
he never showed any troubled side to me. He never seemed
to be affected by it. He was always smiling, always
polite."
Neighborhood boys noticed differences between the
McVeighs' home and theirs. Adults were rarely around. Tim
never had birthday parties. His chief disciplinarian was
his sister Patty, only two years his senior, who summoned
his friends' mothers to reprimand the boys when they got
out of hand.
Tim wanted to have the kind of home where friends
congregated after school, like the Maurer brothers down
the street, who always had a crowd around. So he made it
happen. He built a skateboarding ramp in his driveway,
invited everyone to shoot baskets in his hoop, created a
haunted house in his basement and held weekend casino
fairs, acting as dealer. He charged admission to the
haunted house and won money from the casino -- "like
a young entrepreneur, trying to make money on his
own," recalled friend John Waugh.
"He was very advanced for our age," Keith
Maurer said. "I remember saying to myself: I wouldn't
have thought of that."
Only in retrospect would friends find it odd that Tim
never mentioned his mother, almost from the day she left,
although he spoke fondly of his father, who coached Little
League, raised him as a Buffalo Bills fanatic and never
raised his voice. "I thought his mother was dead or
something," said Army roommate and friend William
"Dave" Dilly.
In a region of hunting enthusiasts, it caused little
stir when Tim, at 10, became interested in guns. But a
close relative said that the family saw this as a bid for
attention by a boy who didn't know how else to ask for it.
Bill McVeigh had little interest in hunting, having
bought only one gun in his life -- a shotgun when he was
19. But he eventually bought his son a .22-caliber rifle,
which Tim used for target shooting in the deep,
uninhabited woods behind his home. He soon had a
semiautomatic BB gun that could fire 15 rounds with the
pull of a trigger; other boys had only single-shot
varieties. Tim used to show them at school how he held it,
posing police-style with hands clasped together. During
boring classes, when other students doodled, he drew guns.
At 14, Tim confided that he was a survivalist,
stockpiling food, camping equipment and weapons "in
case of a nuclear attack or the communists took over the
country," recalled a neighbor whose daughter was
Tim's schoolmate. The neighbor said Tim had always talked
patriotically of defending America. Perhaps it made sense
that a young boy often forced to fend for himself would
fantasize about fighting the world all alone. But, said
the neighbor, "some people thought maybe the divorce
put Tim over the deep end."
To outsiders, these impulses went unnoticed. At school,
he always had friends. When neighborhood boys played
hockey or other sports, Tim was always there,
differentiated only by his skin-and-bones build and
noticeable clumsiness. Teased often for his lack of
coordination, he took taunts without sulking. "The
next day, he'd always show up ready to play again,"
Maurer said. "I gave him a lot of credit."
Tim was unusually bright, but didn't show it in high
school. Teachers expressed surprise when the quiet,
unmotivated boy with the mop of blond hair won a state
Regents scholarship his senior year for high scores on
standardized tests. "He was a boy who did well in
subjects he was interested in, passably in subjects he
wasn't interested in," said Harold Smith, his
guidance counselor.
Tim's high-school yearbook entry in 1986 listed no
organized activities (he omitted the track team), rather:
"staying away from school, losing sleep, finding it
in school." Under future plans: "Take it as it
comes, buy a Lamborghini, California girls." This
last reference surprised schoolmates, who said McVeigh
never had a girlfriend in high school and seemed
uninterested in dating.
Smith said he was struck by the alienated tone of
McVeigh's entry. The boy who celebrated "staying away
from school" had not missed a day of classes from
seventh through twelfth grade.
After High School: In and Out of Work, Increasingly
Obsessed With Guns
McVeigh's teens coincided with the most traumatic
economic times since the Depression. Buffalo's experience
was typical of the Rust Belt. Major blue-collar employers
-- steel and auto plants -- shut down or downsized
dramatically. Two major banks failed, throwing thousands
of white-collar workers out of jobs and causing downturns
in real estate, advertising, law and other fields.
Closer to home, the Harrison Radiator plant, the
biggest blue-collar employer in the area and Bill
McVeigh's employer, halted hiring in 1979. The talk in
plant workers' homes was filled with fear that the country
had lost its way, foreign competition had destroyed the
American Dream for their children and the federal
government wasn't helping.
"There are no jobs around here unless you want to
work for $6 an hour or less at a McDonald's or
Wendy's," Bill McVeigh said. "It's rough for
anybody looking for work."
Race was becoming another theme for blue-collar
resentment. "People said if you were a minority, you
had a better chance of getting an apprenticeship {in
skilled trades} than if you were a white male," said
Richard Ludwig, a classmate of McVeigh's and son of a
Harrison worker. "There was a lot of resentment of
affirmative action."
With work options slim, more than 90 percent of
McVeigh's classmates went to college, but not Regents
scholar McVeigh. He took a couple of computer courses at a
two-year business college in Buffalo, then quit, saying he
was bored. A school spokeswoman said no teacher even
remembered him.
He took a job driving an armored truck, delivering
money to banks and businesses. He told a co-worker that
the job bored him except for two requirements: He loved
wearing a uniform and carrying a gun. The co-worker, who
asked not to be named, viewed McVeigh as gun-obsessed. He
said he once came to work wearing bandoliers laden with
deer slugs, "looking like Pancho Villa." He
owned a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle, handguns and a
semiautomatic Desert Eagle so large he had trouble
wrapping his bony hands around it.
McVeigh, who seemed bland in the extreme in high
school, struck a co-worker as wild. McVeigh gave him rides
home, tearing down side streets at 70 miles an hour. From
the truck, the man said, McVeigh yelled at slower drivers
and grabbed the butt of his shotgun, "like he was
going to blow them away."
"Sometimes when I was driving, he'd put his face
right next to mine and scream that the cars were going too
slow, and then just keep his face there and stare at
me," the co-worker said. "Other days he'd be all
right. It was like sometimes he was on medication. I think
maybe he was just starting to go crazy when I knew
him."
The co-worker said McVeigh never talked politics except
to complain, as he opened his paycheck, that the
government took out too much money. He also observed in
McVeigh both anger and indifference toward women. A woman
once passed her phone number to the co-worker, seeking a
date with McVeigh. "He looked at the piece of paper
and just ripped it to pieces," the co-worker
recalled.
McVeigh also worked briefly as a gun salesman in
Lockport at a large sportsmen's shop with guns lining most
walls.
In January 1988, McVeigh bought 10 acres of thickly
wooded land southeast of Buffalo with a high-school
friend, David Darlak. Darlak's mother said the boys wanted
the land for hunting and an investment. McVeigh and Darlak
paid for the land in monthly installments from their
earnings on the $7,000 price. A year later, in the Army,
McVeigh told friends that the land was to be a survivalist
bunker.
Charlie Morgan, who lived nearby, recalled that McVeigh
and two friends spent five hours there one day in May 1988
shooting and setting off what sounded like large
explosives that "rocked the entire valley for
hours."
In the evenings after work, McVeigh would talk at home
with his father and a fellow auto worker who often stopped
by. Tim vented frustration, saying he felt he was going
nowhere. He complained that he was unemployable except at
jobs that paid "no money," the friend recalled
-- exactly the fate the two older men had feared for their
children.
"Bill and I had both been in the service,"
the friend said, "and one night we said to Tim,
That's what you ought to do: go in the service.' A week
later, he had joined."
"It happened in a split second. I never saw a guy
who wanted to go in the Army that bad," said
McVeigh's fellow truck driver. "I asked him why the
Army, and he said, You get to shoot.' He always wanted to
carry an M-16."
"The people who have no options are always the
ones who go into the military," a boyhood friend
recalled. "Tim was so bright. He had lots of options.
Nobody could understand it."
The Army: Shining as a Soldier While Preparing to Fight
Alone
McVeigh leapt at the Army as if it were his only hope
of shoehorning an increasingly strong passion for guns
into a life that looked normal from the outside.
Dave Dilly, McVeigh's Army roommate, recalled meeting
an extremely thin, underconfident 20-year-old at basic
training at Fort Benning, Ga., in May 1988. McVeigh
gravitated toward a soldier 13 years his senior, Terry
Nichols from Michigan, who was similarly directionless but
had an impressive air of experience because of his age.
McVeigh and Nichols were "hard into guns,"
recalled Dilly. In long talks, they discovered both were
survivalists who believed warnings in gun magazines that
the government would take away their weapons.
McVeigh's love of guns and explosives stood out even in
the Army, where gun lovers abound. In the first weeks of
basic training, when soldiers learn to make explosives,
recalled platoon mate Fritz Curnutte, McVeigh boasted to
fellow soldiers that he already knew how to make a
powerful bomb using a bottle, then told them how to make a
Molotov cocktail.
The soldiers were sent together to Fort Riley, Kan.,
and assigned to Charlie Company of the 2nd Battalion, 16th
Regiment of the First Infantry Division, famous as the Big
Red One. If McVeigh's potential lay hidden in high school,
it was lit up in lights at Riley. His entrance test scores
reflected exceptional intelligence -- with particular
skill in math, science, electronics and high-tech. He
fired a rare perfect score in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle
gunner competition. Always eager to please, he carefully
starched the pleats into his uniform, spit-polished his
shoes, won days off for immaculate appearance. He was
always early, always up for guard duty no one else wanted.
"Any test, he'd ace it. He got the top score on
everything," said Dilly. "He knew he was exactly
what the Army wanted. It was going to be an easy life for
him."
One of the first in his company to make sergeant,
McVeigh was considered a rising star, but with one blind
spot: race. Todd Regier, who served with him, said McVeigh
was criticized for assigning undesirable work to black
specialists. Other soldiers said he made derogatory
remarks about blacks.
Dilly said McVeigh "picked the best man for the
job," adding that his views on race were not unusual
for whites in the unit. "If you're white," he
said, recalling their conversations, "you can do
better on a {fitness} test, show up on time every day,
look perfect in your uniform, and if eight jobs are open,
five will go to blacks no matter if they're overweight,
barely pass the test, and their uniform is wrinkled."
(A supervisor of the two men said: "Race was an
issue, like everywhere in America, but not one that
affected anyone's promotion.")
McVeigh was always flush with cash and became the
barracks bank, lending money for a price. If a recruit ran
out of cash, McVeigh would lend him $75, for a payback of
$100 on payday. He drove soldiers for a fee to and from
bars in nearby Junction City, but he rarely stayed,
spurning alcohol and women. Instead, he read survivalist
magazines and watched videos such as the 1983 Cold War
fantasy "Red Dawn" -- he rented it four times --
about Midwestern high-school teenagers taking on the
Soviet army.
By now McVeigh's preparations for disaster or communist
attack had become obsessive. Dilly said McVeigh rented a
storage locker in Junction City, stockpiling military
meals ready to eat (MREs) saved from field maneuvers,
weapons and a 100-gallon jug of water. He separated the
MREs by vintage, often replacing old with fresh ones,
Dilly said, selling spares to Army surplus stores for
cash. He also freshened the water at regular intervals.
On weekends, he covertly hauled at least 20 guns in a
duffel bag into the barracks -- breaking Army rules -- and
cleaned them meticulously. Dilly once asked McVeigh what
he did in his spare time. "Buy guns," came the
answer. According to Dilly, McVeigh had rifles, assault
weapons and semiautomatic pistols but no revolvers --
"he thought revolvers were too slow."
The guns were "all ready to go all the time,"
Dilly said. Ready for what? "I can remember him
saying that when the crap hit the fan, he would be
ready," said Troy A. Charles, a platoon mate. If
soldiers scoffed at his preparations, they recalled, he
said: "Just wait."
Fellow soldiers said McVeigh was extremely
uncomfortable around women. He once showed Ayers Anderson
a picture of a woman with whom his sister Jennifer wanted
to set him up. "We encouraged him to follow up on it,
but he seemed really awkward," Anderson said.
"He just kept turning red."
Jennifer was the only female McVeigh mentioned fondly,
other soldiers said. Family friends said Tim loved
protecting her as a child, as if it filled an emotional
hole. Dilly said he used to call her often from Riley.
"I remember him saying that he loved her so
much," Curnutte said.
"There were things we never knew about him because
he was so much to himself, and I wonder if there must've
been an emptiness there," said Anderson. "He was
always the perfect soldier, uniform always perfect, and
yet here's this guy who I don't know if he ever had a
date. One side is outstanding and another side so lacking.
It makes me think the Army filled a lot of voids, and when
he no longer had the Army, he had to fill the void with
something."
If McVeigh thought the Army would shield him from the
perils of the civilian economy, his outlook soon changed.
When he enlisted, the Berlin Wall was standing tall and
communism was entrenched in Eastern Europe. "Ronald
Reagan was president and it all seemed real good,"
said Anderson. By the end of 1989, the Berlin Wall was in
pieces, communism along with it, and the military was
headed for a downsizing. Dilly said McVeigh decided then
to try out for the Green Berets, a corner of the Army
unaffected by cutbacks.
He trained compulsively for the punishing physical
exam, doing 400 push-ups a day, 50 at a time with
30-minute rests, Dilly said. When others relaxed after
drills, McVeigh loaded his rucksack with 80-pound sandbags
and marched around the post -- a spectacle Curnutte saw as
"so gung-ho it was wacky."
But his tryout, scheduled for November 1990, was put
off; Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait,
and McVeigh was training for war in the Persian Gulf.
As a Bradley gunner, McVeigh saw less action than he
expected. He told Newsweek only one shot was fired the
first day, and the targeted Iraqis then surrendered. His
fellow soldiers remember him hitting an Iraqi tank more
than 500 yards away with that shot. He also hit an Iraqi
from 1,100 yards with a 25mm cannon, said Regier,
recalling: "He said his head was there one minute and
it was gone the next."
If some soldiers suffered emotionally, McVeigh took war
in stride, several soldiers recalled. Dilly said McVeigh
took photographs, many of dead Iraqis.
The Army showered McVeigh with war medals, including a
Bronze Star and the coveted Combat Infantry Badge. He was
called home soon after the cease-fire for his long-awaited
Green Berets tryout, but Dilly said McVeigh had not been
able to maintain his conditioning during the war, and
feared he'd fail the physical test.
Two days into the tryout, he washed out. "I am not
physically ready and the rucksack march hurt more than it
should," he said in a handwritten letter released by
the Army. There were no second chances.
When McVeigh returned to Riley, his spirit was broken.
He also felt a letdown from the war's end and the
departure of close friends for civilian life, according to
Newsweek. Other soldiers taunted the sergeant who once
could do no wrong, said Capt. Terry Guild, one of his
supervisors.
"He always wanted to do better than everyone, and
that {Green Berets} was his way of trying to do it,"
Guild said. "He took a lot of flak. He was really
down on himself."
McVeigh expressed frustration with the Army and was
vocal about his fear that government agents would try to
seize his weapons, according to fellow soldiers. Still,
Guild observed, his performance was excellent. A December
1991 Army evaluation released by McVeigh's lawyer, Stephen
Jones, rated him "among the best" in leadership
potential and an "inspiration to young
soldiers."
At about that time, McVeigh called Dilly, who had left
the Army to become a correctional officer, and said he too
planned to leave. He seemed emotionally detached, said
Dilly, explaining that he flunked the Special Forces
tryout because of an injury. If he couldn't be a Green
Beret, he told Dilly, he wouldn't rise quickly enough to
make the Army worth the effort -- hardly the view of his
Army evaluators.
"I thought he had wised up," Dilly said.
"He said he thought he'd go back to New York and
start selling guns. At that point, I'd have pegged him as
somebody who'd end up being real rich."
After Discharge: Anti-Government Drifter Who Clung to
Military Issue
A rail-thin, low-wage security guard patrolling the
desolate grounds of a Buffalo defense contractor was
hardly the way Dilly envisioned McVeigh's future. But that
was where he landed after a Dec. 31, 1991, discharge.
Outside the Army's rigid structure and expectations,
outside a world organized around guns and uniforms,
McVeigh was rudderless.
"I always thought he was the lost child looking
for something solid, to be accepted," said Irene
Fortier, mother of Michael, an Army friend of McVeigh's
now under investigation as a possible conspirator in the
bombing. "There was something about him that wanted
normalcy so badly. Each time he came back and got a job I
thought, Well, he finally settled down,' and then he was
gone again."
He showed up in his hometown of Pendleton; in Decker,
Mich., home of Terry Nichols; and in Kingman, Ariz., home
of Fortier, each time telling people he was looking for a
place to settle after the Army. But no matter how much
time passed, or how far he traveled, he wore all or part
of his Army uniform. The shirt around Pendleton. The
military-issue underwear in Decker. The hat at the lumber
yard at True Value hardware in Kingman. The full battle
fatigues at his grandfather's estate sale in Lockport last
November. The pants when he rented a motel room days
before the bombing.
In Decker, he told some people the Army had implanted a
microchip in his buttocks so the government could spy on
him. But he greeted Gary Blackwell, who served in the Army
in the 1960s, with a salute, declaring: "Thank you
for serving and making this a great country and place I
could live."
"Not making the Special Forces was something that
was very hard for him to deal with," said a law
enforcement source. "In his mind, much of his life
has been one of thinking that he is in a kind of Special
Forces of his own."
Federal investigators believe McVeigh's violent
anti-government views evolved gradually after the Army,
not in a blaze of conversion.
He spent the first year back in Pendleton living with
his father, working as a security guard. Anne Marie
Fitzpatrick, a real estate agent, said he was "very
dynamic" and had "a twinkle in his eye and a
smile" when she helped sell his and Darlak's land. He
needed the cash, he told her, because "My life is
starting." That May, the security company that
employed him promoted him to supervisor, according to
records released by McVeigh's lawyer.
But co-workers at the Niagara Falls convention center,
one of the sites his security company was responsible for,
knew him as emotionally spent, veering from passivity to
volcanic anger. A supervisor placed him at the back door
to minimize contact with crowds after he exploded at a
teenage girl while checking her identification. An old
friend said he looked "like things were really
weighing on him."
McVeigh resumed a close relationship with his sister
Jennifer, then a high-school senior, who did not appear to
share his political views. Wearing a glamorous cloud of
hair and a double-wide smile in her class photo, she wrote
in her yearbook under "favorites": "dancing
. . . & passing out" and "i layed on the
ice," the words "purr" and "meow"
interspersed here and there. She was a waitress at the
Crazy Horse Saloon, where she was a champion jello
wrestler, fighting male patrons while wearing a bikini,
ankle-deep in gelatin.
McVeigh by now was railing at virtually every aspect of
American government, and at least beginning to consider a
violent solution, as reflected in letters he wrote to the
Lockport Union-Sun and Journal in February and March 1992.
The first bewailed rising crime, "cataclysmic"
taxes, politicians serving only themselves and the
disappearance of the "American Dream . . .
substituted with people struggling just to buy next week's
groceries." Just as communism failed, he said,
democracy "seems to be headed down the same road. No
one is seeing the big' picture . . . AMERICA IS IN
DECLINE."
He closed: "Do we have to shed blood to reform the
current system? I hope it doesn't come to that! But it
might."
The second letter extolled the moral superiority of
hunting one's own food rather than buying it. Animals
raised for slaughter live and die in misery, McVeigh said;
those shot by hunters live blissfully. "Would you
rather die while living happily or die while living a
miserable life?" he wrote.
McVeigh's father told a friend he disapproved of the
letters and told his son so. "Bill felt that what you
believe is your own business. Publishing it in the paper
was something else," the friend said. "He
thought that was one reason Timmy finally left; he wanted
to be somewhere he could talk about what he really
believed."
The Last Two Years: Fitting Right In With the Far-Right
Militants
In the summer of 1992, McVeigh made his first extended
visit to Terry Nichols at the northeast Michigan farm
owned by Nichols's brother James. From early 1993 until
shortly before the bombing, he moved between Kingman and
northeast Michigan, two centers of burgeoning interest in
paramilitary, anti-government organizations. In between
working odd jobs, he hovered on the edges of the gun show
circuit in Arizona and Nevada, using "Tim
Tuttle" as his business name. He told Phil Morawski,
a neighbor and friend of the Nichols brothers, that he
needed an alias to protect himself from people at gun
shows who disagreed with his political views.
He conducted much of his gun business by mail, and once
advertised an anti-tank missile launcher in the far-right
national newspaper the Spotlight, which has been
criticized by Jewish groups as being antisemetic. He
regularly visited gun shops, many of which had become
distribution points for militia tracts.
If McVeigh needed provocation to turn to violence, he
did not lack for it in this new world. The survivalist
movement he had followed since his teens had shifted after
the fall of communism from warning of Soviet-inspired
disasters to inveighing against the federal government and
gun control. The militia movement sprang to life as Bill
Clinton campaigned for president on a platform of gun
control, which militia leaders called a prelude to
tyranny. The National Rifle Association, to which he
belonged, became increasingly incendiary in its attacks,
although McVeigh dropped out in 1994, saying the group was
soft on defending assault weapons.
The August 1992 shootout between federal agents and
survivalist Randy Weaver at his cabin in Idaho, in which
Weaver's wife and son were killed, followed by the April
19, 1993, inferno near Waco, Tex., that consumed about 80
followers of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, deeply
radicalized many pro-gun forces.
As an NRA solicitation letter put it recently:
"Not too long ago, it was unthinkable for federal
agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper
uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens. Not today."
Federal investigators know from more than 20 letters
McVeigh wrote to his sister Jennifer that he believed all
this and more. In his mind, said a source, war had been
declared. He was merely responding, a soldier defending
his country from oppressors. He became fascinated by the
significance of April 19, the date of both the Waco attack
and the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775, which
opened the American Revolution.
The 51-day Waco siege, covered nightly on television,
further turned McVeigh against his government, according
to a knowledgeable source. McVeigh traveled to Waco to
witness part of the standoff, the source said. A co-worker
said McVeigh also traveled to Ruby Ridge to perform his
own inspection after the Weaver shootings, and returned
certain that federal agents intentionally killed Weaver's
wife and son.
(Courtesy: The Washington Post
)
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