American Terrorist

American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, 388 pages

On April 19, 1995, three tons of nitromethane explosives packed into the back of a Ryder truck were detonated outside the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, instantly demolishing over half the building and killing 168 people, wounding hundreds more.  The bomb was built, placed, and detonated by Timothy McVeigh, a decorated veteran of Desert Storm who had become convinced that the US government was preparing for a war against its own people.  April 19 was a double anniversary, of the battles of Lexington and Concord that began the American Revolution, and of the fiery end of the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas two hundred years later, which McVeigh saw as emblematic of a new tyranny.  How an all-American kid from upstate New York grew into a soldier in a one man war against the federal government is the subject of American Terrorist, written by a pair of journalists from Buffalo with unequalled access to the McVeigh family.

Their account makes it clear that McVeigh was not, himself, the victim of injustice at the hands of the government.  To the contrary, American Terrorist reveals his remarkable attempts to provoke authorities - from flatly refusing to return extra money erroneously paid to him during his military service to speculating about whether he could shoot down a police helicopter with a flare gun in the presence of a man he knew was an undercover cop to trespassing at Groom Lake - without consequences.  Only with the bombing would he become, in his own eyes, the martyr he always wanted to be, sacrificing himself for The Cause.

One issue that the authors are unable to settle concerns McVeigh's attitudes on race.  McVeigh himself, while in prison, denied being a racist, and a number of witnesses support him on this.  Yet he did, at one point, join the Klan, he was cited while in the Army for using racial slurs, he associated with white supremacists such as those at Elohim City, and he was fixated on the virulently racist novel The Turner Diaries, to the point that he handed out copies like an evangelist might hand out Bibles.  Perhaps, as he claimed, the racial slurs were just locker room talk, his mail order KKK membership was a mistake, and the Elohim City and Turner Diaries connections were the result of a shared anger with the US government and not a shared racist ideology.

This reflects the major question surrounding this book - as reliant as it is on McVeigh's own account, to what extent can we trust McVeigh?  Surprisingly for a true crime book, in this case the subject comes across as quite candid - after all, McVeigh wanted people to know what he had done and why.  Michel and Herbeck communicate this effectively, and their tale of McVeigh's road to mass murder reveals more than about their subject than he intended.