The Messenger Kills

Some may recall a curio in 2001's sleepy late-summer news season, equal parts shark attack and trade with Mexico: a lengthy article Gore Vidal wrote for the September Vanity Fair in the wake of Timothy McVeigh's execution. Since McVeigh was no longer with us, Vidal believed the time was right for a retrospective on the Oklahoma City bombing.

The reasons for the bombing were readily available. Turns out McVeigh, like the Unabomber, had a manifesto: a series of letters he exchanged with Vidal after reading an earlier article Vidal had written on civil liberties. The right-wing extremist McVeigh felt much the same as his left-wing expatriate correspondent: something had gone terribly wrong with what was passing for "liberty" in the United States. Where one railed against this with the published written word, the other spoke in violence, using it as a perverse kind of emphasis, a punctuation mark.

When Vidal's article went to press in the September Vanity Fair, the Oklahoma City bombing was the worst terrorist attack in history on American soil. It was worth understanding why it happened. Particularly since, as Vidal explains, four years before the bombing McVeigh was a patriotic Army man, a model soldier in the Gulf War. This seems like a contradiction. But McVeigh's war service was part of the reason his anti-government fervor was eventually to grow so formidable. The experience allowed McVeigh to say of Waco and Ruby Ridge that "[f]or all intents and purposes, federal agents had become 'soldiers' (using military language, tactics, techniques, equipment, language, dress, organization and mindset) and they were escalating their behavior."

McVeigh's specialized knowledge certainly made it likely he would be among the first to register any looming mobilization of the American army against the nation's citizens. His sensitivity to the implications of his own conduct, though, seems much less keen. In appropriating military tactics to mount his assault on Oklahoma City, McVeigh inflicted on the American people exactly what he claimed to be most upset about. He became for all intents and purposes a soldier acting on U.S. soil, directing the nightmarish violence of the U.S. war machine against his fellow citizens.

Although he never explains why his act doesn't merit the same derision he casts on U.S. foreign policy, McVeigh does at least try to justify himself: "Bombing the Murrah Federal Building was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations," he explains. "Based on observations of my own government, I viewed this action as an acceptable option."

But if bombing Iraq is "morally" "acceptable," one wants to reply, whence the outrage that led to the destruction of the Murrah Building in the first place? If, on the other hand, bombarding populations is morally unacceptable, shouldn't other means be used to combat it? The apparent difference for McVeigh is that the violence at Waco was directed against Americans. The war, as he perceived it, was between the country's government and its citizens.

The murder of government employees was unfortunate but necessary in his mind, because it could make the government stop attacking the people. But it wasn't possible to destroy the government or force it into submission with a single strike. Instead, McVeigh's point with Oklahoma City was to send a message. "He committed the act mostly out of revenge because of the Waco assault," Vidal quotes McVeigh's psychiatrist as saying, "but also because he wanted to make a political statement about the role of the federal government and protest the use of force against the citizens."

A man who plainly knew a great deal about violence, McVeigh seems to have had a much poorer grasp of effective communication strategies. He demonstrates both in a letter to Mr. Vidal, in which he says that Waco was all the evidence he needed to prove that a war was underway on U.S. soil, and that therefore:

" . . . (S)hould not the OKC bombing be considered a "counter-attack" rather than a self-declared war? Would it not be more akin to Hiroshima than Pearl Harbor? (I'm sure the Japanese were just as shocked and surprised at Hiroshima — in fact, was that anticipated effect not part and parcel of the overall strategy of that bombing?)"

The message of Hiroshima, as parsed by President Truman in the days following in a statement to the Japanese, was: "surrender, or face complete destruction." By this logic, presumably, the federal government would capitulate following the shock and surprise of Oklahoma City? Hardly. Instead they passed an anti-terrorism law far more injurious to American civil liberties than to terrorists — thus compounding the problem that led to Oklahoma City in the first place. The message McVeigh hoped to send appears not to have gotten across. Chalk this up to poor communication.