Extremism: The Dangerous Origins of the Radical Right

all right here we go Oklahoma City homegrown Jeff tuvan um Jeff I'll never forget covering the Oklahoma City bombing I was anchoring The Today Show when it happened I think we stayed on the air obviously because it was a huge news story but it was also pure pandemonium initially and every expert we had on that morning I'll never forget it said it was Middle Eastern terrorists why was that the automatic default why was that the automatic default explanation well I to answer that question I think there there are two I'll give you two explanations one which is the more um under I guess the fairer one is it had been a little more than two years since um the First World Trade Center uh bombing and Ramsay Youssef The Mastermind had just been arrested in February of 1995 just you know a little more than two months before the Oklahoma City bombing so the issue of Islamic terrorism was very much in the mix so that is is to me a kind of reasonable re reason to at least raise the possibility the more Sinister and disturbing explanation is that um it was a assumption that Americans couldn't do this and and that this is just something Americans do not do and that was was pernicious and wrong and fortunately the evidence came out so quickly about mcveigh's involvement but the the urge to blame Foreigners for something that Americans do do or did is is a profound one and and a bad one but that's what I think that's that's the negative explanation of what was going on that that um that morning this is a continuing pattern in American life and it is something that has gone on with the Oklahoma City bombing even after it's been convincingly proved that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols acted alone there is a political interest especially on the American right you know in the right wing to say that we don't do this that this these these kinds of Acts are not us and and the desire to push the excellent to push the responsibility onto Islamic terrorists as opposed to the right-wing Americans who did it it's a political act I mean it is an attempt to steer responsibility away from political if not allies people who are at least somewhat sympathetic to you so you know it's it it is a it is a bad thing that um we um try to blame uh Foreigners for acts that very clearly um are entirely native grown your book is so well written and and actually thrilling to read in terms of the suspense and everything that transpired before and after Oklahoma City I'm curious why you decided to write about this you've written nine books everything from OJ to Patty Hearst and what caught your eye or your attention about Oklahoma City well I sometimes when when I've had book subjects it's just sort of evolved this book arose from something very specific in October of 2020 um the FBI arrested a number of people in The Conspiracy to kidnap Governor Whitmer of Michigan I started looking into that and it became very clear almost from the start that most of the perpetrators were involved with the Michigan militia I had covered the McVeigh and Nichols trials in 1997. unlike you I didn't cover the bombing itself in 95 I didn't go to Oklahoma City when it was still you know in Ruins but I did Cover the trial so I knew the facts in a more detailed way than I know most stories from that long ago and I knew that Terry Nichols and his brother James had been affiliated with the Michigan militia and so I thought somebody said I know these people I know what they believe and any so I started you know working you know trying to figure out what was going on there it was only you know right after the election January 6th that of course January 6 happened and it was quite clear to me that the people who were the co-conspirators in the Whitmer kidnapping attempt and the January 6 people were very similar that in turn reminded me that they were like McVay and Nichols so that story that the connection between McVeigh and Nichols and what came you know just recently was really what prompted me to write the book The it's it and and just from a purely book writing perspective I looked around and I saw there has been very little written about the Oklahoma City bombing um in in subsequent years and I found much to my surprise and Delight that there was this uh unbelievable source of information at the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas that no one almost no one had ever looked at I just want to point out just as a personal on a personal note you covered the the Nichols trial I think with my late husband Jay Monahan right I I covered OJ with Jay I covered all the big Trials of the 90s I covered with Jay I I remember I remember in in your living room him showing off his stack of pleadings uh I believe that was from O.J that he had been studying so yes indeed I certainly covered more than one trial with Jay Jeff talk about this Treasure Trove of files donated by mcveigh's lead attorney a man I interviewed many many times because he did love the camera to the University of Texas so first of all why did he donate them and how helpful were they in writing this book you know Katie I have spent my entire career covering the law and often covering trials in the aftermath of Trials and it was The Ultimate Dream Come True to find this archive Stephen Jones was the lead attorney for Timothy McVeigh he assembled at government expense an enormous team of lawyers like a dozen lawyers investigators they traveled all over the world and they interviewed their client multiple times and as a result every time one of them interviewed their client they would write a memo about what McVeigh said and then send it around to everyone what Stephen Jones did which I had no idea about until I started looking into this is he donated everything every scrap of paper in connection with uh the McVeigh case to the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas now if there are any lawyers listening or the first question anybody says is how can a lawyer do this what about attorney-client privilege what about client confidences what a client tells his lawyer is protected forever and that is true even if the client dies as Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001. so how could Jones have done this well that's a question that I put to him and it's a question he's addressed in various forms and his view is that uh McVeigh by attacking Jones later after his um conviction effectively waived the attorney-client privilege I don't think that's true I don't think it's accurate but who would sue Jones anyway well that was the thing and it is also true that Jones took a three hundred thousand dollar tax deduction for giving it to um the University of Texas which was ultimately disallowed by the courts that could be one motivation but In fairness to Stephen Jones another thing he has said is he realizes how important this case was and he wrote quoting Felix Felix Frankfurter history too has its rights and he wanted the opportunity to have the story told this was before I started writing the book but you know I have it would be churlish and unfair of me to criticize Stephen Jones too much for this since I was such a beneficiary of it but the answer to your question is I don't think he had the right to give this stuff away I don't think it was right I thought he was subject to um discipline from the bar association hasn't happened but I don't think this is what a proper behavior for a lawyer just but it's not my problem but thank you exactly I mean that's why you're helping me right now and are you the first author that really had you know combed through these files because other people have written about Timothy McVeigh I I I'm not the first person to have looked at any of it uh I don't know that it's ever been cited before I'm certainly the first person to look at it in detail and um it's been there since the early 2000s but almost no one has looked at it as far as I was aware let's go back to those days Jeff when you were covering the McVeigh and Nichols trials in 1997 you write that you quote fail to understand much less explain mcveigh's place and the broader slipstream of American history with the benefit of hindsight now and a re-examination of everything that happened before and after the Oklahoma City bombing how have you come to understand Timothy McVeigh differently you must feel at this point you know him pretty intimately I do I do and um I and I do feel that the picture of him that I and others presented it wasn't exactly inaccurate but it was very much incomplete the um the picture that you got of Timothy McVeigh from my work and I think for most coverage in in the mid 90s was of a loan eccentric a a a a lone wolf someone who was uh fueled by his own idiosyncratic grievances uh to do these terrible acts and what the documents that I found at the Briscoe Center and all of my reporting um proved to me was that's wrong is that Timothy McVeigh was part of a movement he was a he a a phrase you to this day often hear about McVay is that he was anti-government that's wrong he was not anti-government he was not an anarchist he was anti-vis the government in power then Bill Clinton's government he was a right-wing extremist he was not an anarchist he was part of the movement of Newt Gingrich he was part of Rush Limbaugh's ditto head audience one of the things he talked about with his lawyers often is that as he went for these very long drives around the country whether he was going from his home and near Buffalo to visiting Nichols in Michigan to visiting his friend uh in Arizona to visiting the scene of Waco or his sister in Florida these incredibly long drives he was always listening to Rush Limbaugh I mean he was part of the right right-wing movement of the 1990s and one haunting thing he said to his lawyers was I knew there was an Army out there an army out there of people like me but I never found it and he didn't because he didn't have the tools and just to get to you know one of the larger points of the book which is the difference between McVeigh and January 6th is the internet and 19 and social media because the people who wanted to kidnap Governor Whitmer they could find each other on Facebook private chats if you look at somewhat so many of the right ring the people who shot the guy who shot up the Walmart the guy who shot up the grocery store in uh in Buffalo the Tree of Life the Tree of Life guy in Pittsburgh all of them were radicalized uh online and McVeigh didn't have that and he didn't have the opportunity to to to find others even though he was looking I was going to say having said that Jeff there there were people out there and there were people organizing and uh you know less efficient way back then right there were I mean there were right-wing extremists you know he was um McVeigh was obsessed with the book The Turner Diaries this terrible dystopian novel about um a supposed takeover of the federal government by blacks and Jews and then the counter-revolution led by the hero of the book Earl Earl Turner and it was found in the back seat of his car there were excerpts from it found and he would go to gun shows and sell copies of it uh that was one of the ways he made a very meager living was selling copies of the Turner diaries that novel had lots of readers then I mean there were people who agreed with him I'm surprised he didn't meet more like-minded people not the aforementioned gun shows and during his travels selling this this horrible propaganda that's where you get to mcveigh's personality which was not that of of a charismatic leader he was not someone who could recruit others he could not you know talk to other people and and and bring them in as he as he sort of acknowledged to his to his uh to his lawyers um so he did you and that but that was the idea he was he went to these gun shows but but it it never it never worked to the extent someone actually joined in the conspiracy tell us a little bit about Timothy mcveigh's personality because it it was so long ago and of course his picture and his photograph Loom large in my mind but about his just sort of what was this guy like loner kind of unable to attract girls a real are you describe him I think as a modern day in cell in some ways but tell tell us a little bit more about him as a person well the the let's start with where he grew up outside Buffalo his father worked at a GM plant um that made mostly air conditioners for 30 years his grandfather worked at the same GM plant for 30 years there was a stability in that community that by the time Tim was growing up uh was was gone there were 9 000 people who worked in that plan at one point it's down to one thousand now it's it's still open but the option of going into the the family business as it were was not available to him so this sense of economic dislocation was was a big part of it also his parents had a um unhappy marriage um the and and here here's where you know a lot of people's parents have unhappy marriages but here there's a particularly distinctive fact that to me always seemed highly relevant they're in the family there were two daughters and um one son and McVeigh was in the middle the mother kept moving out during his teenage years she she would move to Florida for a while she moved elsewhere in the Buffalo area and every time she moved away she took the two daughters but not Tim and it always seemed to me like a kind of Sophie's Choice situation where your mother like doesn't pick you and that I think had had a psychological impact on him and the way he talked about his mother with tremendous bitterness that she was a drunk and a [ __ ] and who knows when and any of that was true but that anger against women came through in his later Life After High School he went to a business college for a while didn't do well there he enlisted in the Army he was a very good soldier a very effective Soldier won a bronze star in the in the first Gulf War but when he came back he tried out for the Green Berets for special forces and he bombed out of the test almost immediately so he was at complete sea in his life because he really wanted to be in Special Forces and so in the in 1991-92 that was when his life sort of fell apart because he wasn't in the military he couldn't make a connection with a woman he had no Financial prospects there was nothing for him in Buffalo and that's when he turned to the political extremism a lot of depictions of McVay portray him as sort of a freakish Outsider but you make the point that his views were very much aligned with sort of mainstream Republican uh Doctrine at the time right that's right I mean you it's it's important to remember sort of what was going on in American politics at that point you know Newt Gingrich in 1994 um Newt Gingrich um led the Republican led the Republicans with the contract with America to uh a huge victory in the midterm elections where they retook the house they retook the Senate and and Bill Clinton was was almost a a marginal figure um in in the lead up to the 94 elections one of the ways Bill Clinton wanted to restore you know some sort of political success was in September of 1994. he succeeded in getting Congress to pass the assault weapons ban over Furious Republican opposition that was the act that convinced McVay to conduct the bombing you know I think many people may remember that McVeigh was anguished and very angry about the situation in Waco when the FBI raided the the the Branch Davidian compound 76 people were killed and that's true but people forget how angry he was about the assault weapons ban which was a very conventional Republican view now obviously most Republicans did not engage in terrorism but he his his views were an exaggerated version of very very conventional Republican views of that era let's listen to Bill Clinton as he's signing the assault weapons ban on September 13 1994. this bill makes it illegal for juveniles to own handguns and yes without eroding the rights of Sportsmen and women in this country we will finally ban these assault weapons from our street that have no purpose other than to kill gosh it could be yesterday I was going to say maybe yesterday I find this frightening because there is a big move to Once Again by the way the assault weapons ban expired it had it had a 10-year Sunset right by that point George W Bush was president and there wasn't even an attempt to bring it back right but now there are a lot of cries given all the school shootings and the use of AR-15s and so many of these mass murders and I'm a little worried just hearing Timothy mcveigh's reaction to Bill Clinton that God what would happen if if the assault weapons ban went into effect again not that I think that's likely by the way well right but but when um you see mcveigh's reaction and you see mcveigh's obsession with gun rights in the Second Amendment it is one of the clearest connections between McVeigh and January 6 2021 that the the fixation of gun rights on the right is so intense and so powerful and um really bigger than any other issue bigger than abortion bigger than taxes that's what they that's what the the modern right wing cares about and it's what mcveade cares about cared about and and I I think you're right that the passion on that issue is just as great now I remember hearing Chris Murphy of Connecticut those talking about how guns have been become a proxy for so much more than just second amendment rights I I couldn't agree more which makes it all the more um important to people because if you are saying to someone I want to uh limit limit or eliminate your right to buy an AR-15 you're not just talking about AR-15s you're talking about an entire world view it becomes an existential threat to you as a person taking away your your assault weapon and that's how McVeigh saw it and that's how a lot of people see it today you talk about Timothy mcveigh's personality but what about Terry Nichols he helped him build the bomb right and um how did those two hook up and you have Mike Fortier as well um the three of them met on the first day of basic training when they've all enlisted in the Army in 1988 but they were three very different figures with some aspects in common uh McVeigh was from uh outside Buffalo a land of industrial decline Terry Nichols was from the thumb of Michigan an area of agricultural decline his family were small farmers who just couldn't make it anymore and and so in that respect their lives were very were very parallel Mike Fortier was from a a grim town called Kingman Arizona and all he wanted to do was get high and was different from the two of them and was not actively involved in the conspiracy knew about it he knew about it but he did not participate in it but um nickels is a very different personality than than McVeigh McVeigh was an evil person he was also highly intelligent effective organized resourceful and really smart in certain ways Nichols was a screw-up from the day from day one whose life he cascaded from one failure to the next you know he he bombed out of his attempt to go to college he never really got got a job he moved to Las Vegas to try to find a job you know what it's easy to find a job in Las Vegas he moved there twice and couldn't find a job in Las Vegas he was married to a woman in Michigan she dumped him while he was in the Army he goes to the Philippines and gets a mail order bride a 16 year old who he was pleased to report weighed less than a hundred pounds because he he needed a docile um you know help me even though she wound up you know not very happy with him either I mean he left to his own devices would never I think have conducted the Oklahoma City bombing on his own but led by McVeigh did participate in the conspiracy Mike Fortier ended up uh basically cooperating with the government he became the star witness for the government in its case against McVeigh again a screw-up but a different kind of screw right he married his high school girlfriend and they would you know he he worked at Ace just above minimum wage job at a hardware store just enough money to buy crystal meth and pot and and that's what they did all the time and he had sort of vague libertarian views he had the the Gaston flag the the yellow flag that people know with the the snake that right that that don't tread on me don't tread on me which um you know is is a symbol of the right wing but he was not especially political and McVeigh in these endless travels around the country tree would ought would sometimes go to Kingman Arizona and visit with Mike and Laurie Fortier and and try to get them involved in the conspiracy and at one point um they drove across the country together and McVeigh took him to Oklahoma City and said look this is where I'm going to set off the bomb the the the horror of Mike fortier's story is that if he had gotten off his ass and made one phone call to the FBI and said stop this guy because he's really going to do it he could have saved dozens and dozens of lives so Mike Fortier is not an honorable person in this and he wound up pleading guilty to a variety of charges um lying to the FBI and whatnot that landed him in prison for for about eight years but I it is fair to say he was not an active conspirator in someone you know helping McVeigh and Nichols to actually set off the bomb meanwhile Terry Nichols is currently serving a life sentence without a possibility of parole my understanding is he has expressed some Contrition I know you tried to get an interview with him what are your impressions of how he views his participation I've heard a variety of things about Terry Nichols over the year years uh you know he he is in the super max prison in Florence Colorado where they are locked down 23 hours a day except for an hour of recreation in a little cage from what I understand it's driven him pretty crazy as it well might I mean that is a pretty rough way to spend to spend your life um I don't know that he has Contrition I I don't know what he's thinking as you mentioned I reached out to him I wrote him a bunch of letters never heard back um he's his his mail order bride has moved back to the Philippines with their their child it's a um uh it's a I don't feel sorry for Terry Nichols but but it is a sort of pathetic story I'm curious how mcveigh's and Nichols convictions galvanized the right wing you know you were earlier he had a hard time and of course he wasn't a very charismatic person who could recruit other people but what impact did the trial and the conviction have on this growing movement of right-wing extremists in this country um a a tremendous effort to distance McVeigh from the movement there was a full Congressional investigation in the later 90s led by a congressman from from California Dana robacher who meh I won't say manufactured but used really bogus evidence to suggest that Terry Nichols was really in League with Islamic terrorists um it was it was it was ridiculous but I think it's it's it was part of the effort that um the right way of the right wing to say well he really wasn't one of us just like after January 6th you heard from Donald Trump and others that it was really well antifa from the left-wing ajan provocateurs who were really just trying to discredit our movement that these bogus explanations come up every time the right wing uh the right wing does something and and the use of the term for example anti-government to describe McVeigh uh as if he was someone like Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber who was genuinely a loner who was genuinely anti-government in the sense of all against all government that attempt to associate McVeigh like Kaczynski is an effort to to uh distance McVeigh from the right way do you think anyone else was involved I don't I I you know this is something I took very seriously because you know this is there there have been now on the left interestingly just as there's been an attempt on the right to distance um McVeigh from the right-wing movement there's been an attempt on the left to associate McVeigh with the broader right-wing movement and to suggest that there were lots of people who wanted to blow up the Murrah building you know shortly before um uh April 19th 1995 McVay made a call to a guy named Andre strassmeyer at the um Elohim City which was a right-wing compound near the Arkansas Oklahoma border and and some have suggested that that meant that McVeigh was um and Cahoots In Cahoots with this broader right-wing movement every piece of evidence I've seen said that they never actually made the connection they had met at a gun show McVeigh was looking for a place to go after the bombing he never even reached strasmeier on the phone there is absolutely no evidence that I've seen that anyone was involved in this bombing except McVeigh Nichols and Fortier in the sense that he knew about it even if he didn't participate you interviewed President Clinton for your book and he told you that he was almost immediately convinced that this was homegrown terrorism this to me was the most interesting reporting experience I had when I was working on homegrown just because of the order you do reporting you know you never know exactly how it's going to unfold I had interviewed several people who were in The White House on April 19 1995 and as you pointed out a lot of people on television were saying these were Islamic terrorists like the First World Trade Center bombing and these were people who were in The Oval Office with Clinton at the time and Clinton of course didn't say this publicly he didn't want to prejudge the investigation but he said to them this was not foreign this was homegrown these were the militias I know these people and so when I went to interview Clinton after talking to these other people I said to him well how did you know that it was domestic when everybody was saying that it was foreign and he proceeded to tell me you know I knew these people from Arkansas and then he started reciting chapter and verse of right-wing extremism including some very violent deadly stuff that he had dealt with in Arkansas when he was governor and meanwhile I'm interviewing Bill Clinton in 2022 and he is telling me about day-by-day events in 1983 8485 I went back and checked it out his memory was impeccable so it was fascinating to me that Clinton understood the anger the passion the violence that was so um evident in the militia movement and he saw in the Oklahoma City bombing before the experts did who was really behind him doesn't that lend a little more credibility though to the notion that somehow McVay if these people were making their their feelings known and Bill Clinton kind of predicted right away that they were responsible that perhaps Timothy McVeigh had some connection with these people well I think it lends Credence to mcveigh's statement to his lawyers there's an army out there I know there's an army out there but you know and here's here's where you get into the nitty-gritty of the evidence of the case and this this to me is just such a perfect like little nugget that that it tells you so much McVeigh and Nichols um wanted to cover their tracks They knew they were in God and they in one of the right-wing magazines they read called the spotlight they found an ad you can buy a phone card you may remember you're far too young to remember this okay yeah but it used to be that you would have phone cards where you would punch in a code if you wanted to make a long distance call and they figured oh well if we buy this phone card from this magazine no one will ever no one will ever find it Well when they searched Terry Nichols house after the the bombing they found the card itself and they reconstructed every long distance phone call they made from the beginning of the conspiracy to April 19th and they found all the um fertilizer stores where they bought the fertilizer they found the fuel oil they found the the rider rental car places if it wasn't on the phone card they didn't do it they didn't make the call so the fact that they were able to show who they were in contact with showed they were not in touch with the people from elohom City they were not in touch with other co-conspirators because they had in essence this Diary of all their contacts fascinating yeah and I sometimes think that the government doesn't get enough credit I mean the way they handled the aftermath of Oklahoma City the fact that he was arrested Timothy McVeigh what 90 minutes after the bombing by a very Alert state trooper who noticed his license plate was missing yeah there's a lot there's some with serendipitous and some was just really good investigation I mean you know the FBI gets criticized for a lot and and for good reason they did a superlative job and Trooper Charlie hanger that also did some something amazing but just to remind people how this all unfolded the bombing took place at 902 a.m on April 19th it was this horrible explosion and then two blocks away something came spinning through the air and nearly crushed someone who was in a Ford Fiesta right right there it was a truck axle and um the the FBI understood everybody could tell this came from very far away the the for the um Axel had a VIN number a vehicle identification number on it it's traced to Rider Truck Rental Ryder says that truck was rented in Junction City Kansas by a guy named Robert Kling k-l-i-n-g um three days earlier FBI agents go they fan out over the city Junction City Kansas they go to all the motels they go to they go to the Dreamland Motel this this kind of sleazy Motel right by the highway and they asked the proprietor and they say has anybody been here with a Ryder truck and they say yeah a guy parked a rider truck three days ago and he and he stayed here what was his name Timothy McVeigh so what and then they found that that person had ordered Chinese food um from from the hunam restaurant and he had registered he had he he had ordered food from room 25 because they had the phone records under the name Timothy McVeigh under the name Robert Kling so that's how they discovered that Robert Kling and Timothy McVeigh were the same person he used Timothy McVeigh to rent the hotel room what a dope it was all cash he was careless he made a mistake he but he had ordered Chinese food under the same name as he rented the car and then the state trooper again the crazy coincidences Charlie hanger um who I have to say is like the coolest guy in the world I was I interviewed him 90 minutes after the bombing he is he is pissed because he wants to be sent to Oklahoma City where all the action is but they say no continue your regular patrols he sees a broken down Old Mercury Marquee driving north away from Oklahoma City with no license plate he pulls over he pulls the car over and as the guy gets out of the car the driver of this car he sees as his jacket opens that he's carrying a gun and he spins them around and puts and um you know puts him against the the car uh you know to Frisk him and and McVay says to him you know that gun's loaded and Charlie hanger puts the gun to mcveigh's the base of mcveigh's skull and says so is mine which is like the badass line of all time I just love that uh anyway um he he brings him in because in in Oklahoma at that time to carry an unregistered gun is a crime let's fast forward to today when the right-wing government of Oklahoma has dis has ended that requirement if Tim McVeigh had been arrested today Charlie hanger couldn't have arrested him all he could have done is give him a ticket for having an un node license plate because it's legal now to carry an unlicensed gun in in Oklahoma anyway so McVay is sent to um the the the prison in Perry Oklahoma to you know to face charges of uh having an unregistered gun and uh he has to sort of wait until his case is called well the judge the judge's son misses his bus to still water so he has to be held overnight there's no one to arraign him then the next day there's a contentious divorce and so the judge can't hear the case it takes you know 48 hours for the FBI to make the connection they put mcveigh's name in the database of people arrested and they discover we have this guy in custody in Oklahoma they call the the courthouse and the in the jail and they say do you have a guy named Timothy McVeigh there yeah we're about to release him because it was such minor charges and they started screaming don't release him don't release him and they send a helicopter and that's how they get him but anyway so it's a combination of great detective work but also the Serendipity of McVeigh not only being arrested be being held for two days on these really minor charges because the judge couldn't get around to his case I know the book has been option for a scripted series and it's pretty much writing right here right oh I hope so from from my lips to God's ears um let's talk about the remarks Bill Clinton delivered at the memorial service at the Oklahoma Fairgrounds you describe it as one of the most consequential of his presidency why was it such an important address well the the national feeling of horror and outrage was was really profound I mean remember this is 1995 it's before 9 11. there has really never been an event like this in modern American history and Clinton who you know he wasn't a senator he was a governor so he had done a lot of funerals he had comforted people and you know the thing that many people to this day remember about Bill Clinton is that he felt other people's pain and in his speech at the Oklahoma City Fairgrounds you know he he really captured that feeling of uh National sorrow and National purpose in a way that was where he really rose rose to the occasion and after losing control of the House and Senate in the uh previous midterms November this is only five months later this was really the beginning of Bill Clinton's political Resurrection which continued into his re-election the following the following year you recently wrote a piece for the New York Times Really comparing Merrick Garland's response and timeline after January 6 to the way he dealt with the Oklahoma City bombing and and again you have to remember what was going on at the same time the Oklahoma City bombing is April of 29 of 1995. the O.J Simpson case is at its peak of uh National Obsession in that at that time on the April 19th that's where I was I was covering the O.J Simpson case Garland was repelled by all the publicity and the way the prosecutors got so much attention and the way there was so much um you know craziness associated with OJ he has this tremendous aversion to public uh publicity about legal matters he thinks it should be dealt with just just in the courtroom in his role in 1995 and 1997 I can understand that one ground for criticism I think of him in 1997 is we needed to we we need to hear more of the Merrick garland from his confirmation hearings he has essentially stopped talking about uh the investigation of of January 6. he says you know you can get into trouble if you if you give too much pre-trial publicity that's true only in the most extreme cases we have a situation now where Donald Trump and much of the Republican party is trying to revise the history of January 6 is trying to say these people are political prisoners that what they did was not was was not so terrible and and Garland with this aversion to publicity which was born in the OJ case in 1995 is staying on the sidelines uh as a public figure and I and I think that that's a disappointment but I think it's also something that can be traced to what went on in the mid 90s he has an aversion to publicity but also to making a broader political statement right with his with his cases absolutely and and you know Bill Clinton in addition to the speech um at the Oklahoma City Fairgrounds which was not political he gave a series of speeches um in the spring and summer of 1995 where he was saying look at the violence in the language of people on talk radio about politics today and you know Rush Limbaugh knew who that was directed at and he was all wounded innocence like don't blame me neither one of them knew how right Clinton was that that that Clinton that McVeigh was inspired uh by Rush Limbaugh style rhetoric and that is something that now is Attorney General all mcve Garland could be saying but he chooses not to in fact we have some sound of Rush Limbaugh from 2010 trying to connect Bill Clinton and Janet Reno to the Oklahoma City bombing and Waco let's listen to that let me ask you a question what was a more likely cause Clinton and Janet Reno's Hands-On management of Waco the Branch Davidian compound and maybe to a lesser extent Ruby Ridge don't forget that the the Oklahoma City bombing occurred two years to the day after the Waco invasion President Clinton's ties to the domestic terrorism of Oklahoma City are tangible talk radio's ties are non-existent your reaction wow I never heard that before that's fascinating I I and and perverse in in the extreme is that by supervising the situation in Rey in Waco where tragically so many people died 76 people died Bill Clinton should have known Rush Limbaugh says that that was going to lead to Timothy mcveigh's violence which is so perverse and crazy that um I it's even hard to know how to how to respond to it but it is indicative of how the right is trying to distance themselves and have continued to try to distance themselves from the fact that Timothy McVeigh was a right-wing extremist at the same time didn't Waco fuel his actions absolutely absolutely and and it is true that McVay chose the a date April 19th because it was the second anniversary of Waco but to to turn that into it's the fault of the people who were trying to deal with the situation in Waco and obviously it did not work out well and it was not a good moment for the FBI but the idea that that somehow means they are responsible for Tim mcveigh's criminal act is is perverse in the extreme do you think Rush Limbaugh ever realized that Timothy McVeigh listened to him non-stop on these road trips I I don't think he I don't think he did because frankly no one knew how um passionately McVeigh followed Limbaugh until I found the records of it in his discussion of it in these um in these papers at the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas I'm interested in what has galvanized the movement almost step by step leading to where it is today after 9 11 our attention obviously turned overseas while we weren't looking was something nefarious happening one of the things that really shocked me um I have a I have a long epilogue in homegrown which is uh which Chronicles not in a detailed way but in a somewhat comprehensive way all the right-wing activity right-wing violence that has taken place during the subsequent during subsequent years and one of the things you notice and and the experts in the field have noticed is that during Democratic administration's right-wing terrorism goes up during Republican administrations it goes down because the right wing is not so angry when George W bush is President um and then it spikes dramatically when Barack Obama becomes president this is not um Lone Wolf activity even if individuals are not working with others it is a movement that uses violence as a matter of course and they are more active when Democrats are in power than when Republicans are what is the state of sort of domestic terrorism today well it's um you know it is in recent years uh moved largely to the form of mass shootings as opposed to bombs um the if you look at many of the mass shootings not all of them but but many of them whether it's um you know shooting up uh the the gay nightclub in in Orlando or the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh or the Walmart in El Paso or a grocery store in Buffalo these are right-wing extremists who were radicalized by the internet and uh it is easy in this country to get your hands on a semi-automatic weapon an assault weapon like AR-15s and so many of these shootings have been with AR-15s uh and and other other assault weapons that's where um the focus is in terms of law enforcement looking for it but it's very hard when there are thousands and thousands of AR-15s in circulation in this country it's very easy to get one and um you know law enforcement is largely um you know well it's not just their gun they they have to react uh you know when I worked at CNN I will always remember Brooke Baldwin who was the anchor in the afternoon um she I remember one day during one of these many mass shootings she said you know we have we we have a way to cover this and we cover it we we we we have we we know how to do this and isn't that outrageous I mean we there have been so many mass shootings and anyone who tells you they can keep them apart and remember which is which is lying to you because there have been so many and you know now um you know we get the thoughts and prayers from the Republicans and talk you know vague talk about Mental Illness but nothing ever changes and uh yes it's not bombs at the moment although it could be bombs again but right-wing extremism is now largely conducted through assault weapons rather than bombs like McVeigh but the people are just as dead we were hearing Rush Limbaugh connect Waco to Bill Clinton but other Republicans have done that very effectively most recently Donald Trump who announced his candidacy in Waco uh on the 30th anniversary of The Siege there so there is still this narrative out there that Waco was responsible for Oklahoma City well and that Waco in a broader sense is an example of how the Federal Government is out of control that the the the Waco is a synonym as it was for McVay of how the Deep State the federal government is a pernicious force in America I mean amazingly much of the right wing now believes that the FBI the FBI of all government institutions is some sort of left-wing hotbed because of things like like Waco and then obviously also leading into you know the investigations of trump himself but um this this is the world we live in and and um as incredible as it may seem and and you know one reason I wrote homegrown is this story of 1995 is a story of what's going on in the world in 2023. in fact you write that the events of January 6 2021 saw the full flowering of McPhee's Legacy and contemporary politics let's listen to Alex Jones just before the insurrection they are not God the answer to their 1984 it is 1776 the other team 76 the prologue to my book the the the chapter is called 1776 and one of the links between McVeigh and Alex Jones and in the insurrectionist is this weird obsession with the founding fathers and the the sense that our Rebellion against the federal government is just like our forefathers Rebellion against the British uh Timothy McVeigh had memorized much of the Declaration of Independence most people don't know much about the Declaration of Independence after the first famous opening much of the Declaration of Independence is a justification for why we were fighting the British and this has become sort of right right-wing code Marjorie Taylor green talks about the daily the Declaration of Independence and the duty to rebel against tyrants so when you think about the links between um the McVeigh McVeigh and the January 6 people it's not just a gun Obsession it's not just a belief in violence it's a identification with the American Revolution and a justification for their actions just like the people in 1776. I know you interviewed Merrick Garland for this he wouldn't even utter the words January 6. are you frustrated that once again we're seeing him be being so cautious and as a result once again there's a vacuum where right wing propaganda is filling the void well I I am frustrated that he is not a more vocal presence on the on on the national stage however In fairness to Garland that investigation of January 6th is not over and Jack Smith the the outside Council who was supervising it let's see what happens let's see if there are prosecutions other than the thousand people who actually went inside the capitol um I'm prepared to wait I mean I know as a former Federal prosecutor it seems like forever since January 6 because it's been two years in an investigation of this magnitude with uncooperative Witnesses this is not that long an investigation um I it's got to be done by the end of 2023 because you know Donald Trump cannot be indicted in the middle of a in the middle of a active campaign but I I let's see I mean I'm just not prepared to criticize the end of Investigation before there is an investigation one gruesome fact uh in closing Timothy McVeigh wanted his ashes spread over the Oklahoma City National Memorial which is so disgusting he never even if his lawyers hadn't talked him out of it that never could have happened well it could have because well it I mean well I mean I mean having been Frank Keating say no but haven't having been to the memorial many times you could just walk in there I mean it's it's very open to the public somebody with a with a canister could just but he was I mean he was executed I mean but his ashes didn't look any different from anyone else's that we could have been done secretly it absolutely could have been done it would not have been a ceremony but you know that that is like that is open to the public it is a heinous heinous horrible idea and fortunately his lawyer Rob Nye talked him out of it but I think it's in again it shows how McVeigh had this theatrical sense of himself as a as a man of of um historical significance and his desire to sort of have one last laugh over the uh the the people that he had tormented um was you know just showed what kind of person he was which was evil but also a kind of a theatrical is is the word I guess that that comes to mind it's hard to believe that in 2025 it will be the anniversary 30-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing how do you assess those 30 years I mean where are we now versus where we were then well um you know I I again I I think um I don't want to say something good came of it but you know people of Oklahoma to this day they talk about the Oklahoma standard which is um the the um Civic involvement and that that led to um that was part of the response and and that is something that is worth I don't think celebrating is the right word but at least recognizing but you know we are a country in on on the negative side where right-wing violence is a persistent problem it didn't start with Timothy McVeigh but this attempt to sort of put McVeigh in a box as someone who was an aberration that's why I wrote homegrown to show that he was not an aberration and that his legacy uh lives on in in both people and ideas that that are persistent to this day Jeff tuben homegrown Timothy McVeigh and the rise of right-wing extremism it's a terrific book thank you so much for coming in to talk about it thanks Katie

Channel: Katie Couric

Views: 27,627

Keywords: Katie Couric, Katie, Celebrity, Entertainment

Id: wjybzBmxqJU

Length: 60min 7sec (3607 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023