The deadliest act of domestic terrorism in America came without warning on April 19, 1995, when a rental truck packed with 7,000 pounds of explosive material blew up in front of Oklahoma City’s federal building. The shattering attack, carried out by a delusional Gulf War Army veteran hostile to the U.S. government, killed 168 people, including 19 infants and children.
Although it was overshadowed by the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Oklahoma City bombing remains a topic of broad interest. Its effects were felt widely and can be detected yet today.
The bombing notably accelerated movement toward a more guarded, more security-inclined America. It wasn’t long for the heart of Washington, D.C., to take on a bunker-like air.
A month after the attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, authorities set up concrete barriers and closed vehicular traffic to two blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue nearest the White House. The move was preemptive, intended to prevent destruction on a scale of the Oklahoma City bombing. The move also was ordered unilaterally, without notice or public debate. And it was permanent.
Elsewhere in the capital, the installation of barriers and steel gates lent a wary, distrustful look that is obvious today. Architecture critic Witold Rybczynski once observed: “We used to mock an earlier generation that peppered the U.S. capital with Civil War generals on horseback; now I wonder what future generations will make of our architectural legacy of crash-resistant walls and blast-proof glass.”
As the Washington Post noted years later, the Oklahoma City bombing effectively “ended the capital’s life as an open city. Suddenly, driving into a garage involved guards wielding mirrors to inspect car bottoms. Jersey barriers undid the designs of landscapers and architects. An architecture of fear came into vogue.”
Of course, the consequences of the Oklahoma City bombing went beyond enhanced security-mindedness and transformed aesthetics in Washington. In the years after the attack, upgraded devices including metal detectors, security cameras and magnetometers were installed at federal buildings across the country, at a cost of millions of dollars. Even then, such efforts were marred by lapses and inefficiency. A federal government audit once reported that dozens of closed-circuit televisions and other security equipment had been delivered to federal buildings but remained unpacked long after being purchased.
The 1995 attack rejuvenated anti-terrorism legislation that had been languishing in Congress. The upshot was the controversial but bipartisan Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which has been called “the most important law you never heard of.”
The measure granted U.S. officials authority to deport non-citizens suspected of terrorism while sharing little more than a summary of the evidence against them. But, as critics have noted, the legislation also imposed procedural restrictions on federal habeas corpus appeals brought by state prisoners. The measure made it more difficult for state prisoners to pursue their appeals to federal courts.
The attack at Oklahoma City also revealed a recurring flaw in news reporting of sudden or dramatic major events — a tendency to err in important details. This failing characterized aspects of reporting about the Columbine school shootings, the early days of the Gulf War, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Duke lacrosse hoax, the Boston Marathon bombings, the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop and the riot at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. That catalog of error is illustrative, not exhaustive.
In the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, rumor mingled with speculation as suspicions about the perpetrators fell on Middle East terrorism. The news media rode that angle hard and got it memorably wrong. Connie Chung, who then was in her final weeks as a CBS News anchor, declared in a report from Oklahoma City on the day of the bombing: “This is the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil ever. A U.S. government source has told CBS News that it has Middle East terrorism written all over it.”
On ABC News, the network’s national security correspondent, John McWethy, reported that “if you talk to intelligence sources and to law enforcement officials, they all say … that this particular bombing probably has roots in the Middle East.”
And in a commentary published shortly after the bombing, syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer asserted “the indisputable fact is that it has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East.”
Surprise was substantial when, two days after the attack, the Oklahoma City bomber was brought briefly before television cameras as he was taken into federal custody. The bomber was no foreigner. He was not from the Middle East. He was Timothy McVeigh, a lanky white American from upstate New York.
McVeigh nursed numerous grievances about the federal government. He was outraged by the deadly assault by federal agents in 1993 to end a weeks-long siege near Waco, Texas, at the compound of the Branch Davidian cult. McVeigh timed his attack on the nine-story Murrah building to coincide with the second anniversary of the fiery end to the standoff in Waco, in which 76 Branch Davidians were killed.
According to his biographers, McVeigh was neither a leader nor a member of an extremist hate group or of a self-styled paramilitary militia. Contrary to a New York Times report four days after the Oklahoma City attack, there was no “broader plot behind the bombing” nor was there “a conspiracy hatched by several self-styled militiamen who oppose gun laws, income taxes and other forms of government control.”
McVeigh essentially acted alone in planning and carrying out the attack. He had help, mainly in constructing the massive bomb, from Terry Nichols, an Army buddy. Another friend from his Army days, Michael Fortier, knew about McVeigh’s plans but did nothing to thwart the attack.
Fortier spent a little more than 10 years in jail. Nichols was sentenced to federal prison for life. McVeigh was put to death for his crimes in 2001.
W. Joseph Campbell is a professor emeritus at American University in Washington, DC. He has written seven solo-authored books including 1995: The Year the Future Began (University of California Press).
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