Suspect

The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen, 334 pages

On July 27th, 1996, Richard Jewell, a former sheriff's deputy doing security work during the Olympic Games, noticed a suspicious package under a bench in Atlanta's Centennial Park.  The bomb squad was summoned and Jewell joined his coworkers in attempting to clear people from the area.  Less than half an hour later, the bomb inside the package exploded, killing two people and injuring dozens more.  Within days, the press was reporting, based on leaks from within the FBI, that investigators had determined that Jewell had planted the bomb himself.  Tom Brokaw told millions of Americans that there was "probably" already sufficient evidence to arrest and prosecute Jewell.  Three months later, the FBI officially announced that it had, in fact, never had any real evidence to tie Jewell to the bombing, its focus on him having been driven by their belief that he fit the "profile" of a lone bomber, this despite the fact that the FBI knew early on that he couldn't have carried out the bombing alone.  As Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen report, Richard Jewell's guilt had been a "convenient myth" - it had given the FBI a suspect, the media a story, and the Olympics a chance to move on.  That it had almost destroyed Jewell was a small price to pay.

If their book is a cautionary tale, it is not, however, a polemic.  Alexander and Salwen write in a way that is factual, compelling, and deeply personal, not surprising in that both were tangentially involved in the story and knew many of the players, Alexander as a US Attorney and Salwen as an editor for the Wall Street Journal.  It would be a hard heart indeed which is not moved by their account of the later years of Kathy Scruggs, the reporter who broke the Jewell story, and it is even possible to feel a grudging admiration for Eric Rudolph, the actual bomber, who spent over five years as a fugitive in the Carolina mountains, sleeping in caves and surviving only on what he could catch or scavenge.  Perhaps the greatest insight the book can give is into the direction of the massive power of the federal government and public opinion by ordinary, imperfect people just trying to do their jobs.