The world’s first reaction to the young military veteran and far-right radical who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City 30 years ago this month was near-universal revulsion at the carnage he created and at the ideology that inspired it.
A crowd yelled “baby killer” – and worse – as 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh was led away in chains from a courthouse in rural Oklahoma where the FBI caught up with him two days after the bombing. He had the same crew cut he’d sported in his army days and stone cold eyes.
An hour and a half’s drive to the south 168 people lay dead, most of them office workers who had been providing government services, along with 19 young children in a day-care centre directly above the spot where McVeigh parked his moving truck packed with ammonium nitrate and other explosives.
The children were, most likely, his prime target.
Bill Clinton, then president, rallied the country by vowing justice that would be “swift, certain and severe”. His attorney general wasted no time announcing she would seek the death penalty. Whatever flirtation the country had been entertaining with rightwing militia movements in the wake of a national assault weapons ban that enraged gun rights activists and controversies over the heavy-handedness of federal law enforcement came screeching to a halt.
Even elements of the radical right, McVeigh’s fellow travellers, were stunned by the sight of firefighters pulling dead babies out of the wreckage. Before the bombing, they had been full of heady talk of war against the government, but many of them imagined this would involve an attack on federal judges who had displeased the movement, or blowing up a building at night.
“Didn’t he case the place?” one acquaintance of McVeigh’s asked incredulously. “The bastard has put the Patriot movement back 30 years,” lamented an erstwhile mentor of McVeigh’s from Arizona.
Fast-forward those 30 years, and the movement is not only very much revived but has moved from the outer fringes of American politics to the very centre.
McVeigh wanted to strike at what he saw as a corrupt, secretive cabal running the US government – what Donald Trump and his acolytes refer to as the Deep State and are now busy dismantling.
McVeigh believed the US had no business extending its influence around the world or becoming entangled in foreign wars when white working-class Americans from industrial cities like Buffalo, his home town, were suffering – an early expression of Trump’s America First ideology that won him tens of millions of blue-collar votes last November.
McVeigh’s favourite book, a white supremacist power fantasy called The Turner Diaries, blamed a cabal of Jews, black people and internationalists for perverting America’s true destiny – a sentiment now finding coded expression in Trump’s twin wars on immigration and on diversity, equity and inclusion.
McVeigh believed it was up to ordinary citizens like him to take up arms and fight against a tyrannical ruling order, no matter the cost in innocent lives, because that was what the country’s founders had done during the American civil war. The T-shirt he wore when he was arrested carried a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
During the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021, the QAnon-friendly Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert expressed much the same as she cheered on the rioters smashing and bloodying their way past uniformed police officers into the halls of Congress. “Today is 1776,” she tweeted.
The parallels have not been lost on political veterans of the 1990s. Clinton himself observed in a recent HBO documentary: “The words [McVeigh] used, the arguments he made, literally sound like the mainstream today. Like he won!”
The threat the far right poses to the US government is no longer a physical one – not when it comes to the executive branch, anyway – since the radicals intent on cleaning house now have like-minded leaders like Trump and Elon Musk doing it from the inside. It’s hard to imagine McVeigh, who was executed by lethal injection in 2001, objecting to the administration’s campaign to hollow out the international aid agency, kicking career prosecutors and government watchdogs out of the Department of Justice, or vowing to refashion “broken” institutions like the FBI.
“Their beliefs and values are allied,” said Janet Napolitano, who in 1995 played an administrative role in the bombing investigation as US attorney for Arizona and went on to run the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama. “It is a far cry to say that there are people in political power in the United States now who want to blow up federal buildings. We have to be very clear about that. But the notion that the country has somehow been stolen from them, that it’s run by elites, that they are trying to take away our guns – that has become a very accepted view among many.”
Present and former members of the governing class still have reason to fear threats from the far right, either because they have been tagged as Deep State enemies by groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, or because they have been identified by President Trump as targets for “retribution”.
Those threats, in the Trump era, have included a foiled plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and a hammer attack on the husband of then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi. In concert with the administration, activists sympathetic to Trump have engaged in doxxing and other forms of harassment at people deemed to be political enemies and their families, including whistleblowers, college campus protesters and former associates turned critics of the president.
Seasoned national security experts like Napolitano fear it may not stop there, however, and worry particularly about judges who have issued rulings hostile to administration interests. “Those far right groups – they’ve all been given permission,” she said. “Pardoning all the January 6 defendants sends a terrible message about the rule of law in this country, just like purging from DoJ and the FBI sends a terrible message.”
It was a very different world when McVeigh washed out of the army in 1991 following his service in the first gulf war. After bouncing from one dead-end job to another and racking up thousands in sports gambling debts, he hit the road in his trusty Chevy Geo Spectrum to sell army surplus supplies and copies of The Turner Diaries at gun shows around the country. This was the very definition of a marginal existence.
McVeigh was part of a cohort of so-called “angry young men” who felt the brunt of a downturn in manufacturing and defence contracting jobs at the end of the cold war and found their solace in guns, gun culture, and radical politics verging on the paranoid. Talk at the gun shows – which one violence prevention group memorably nicknamed “Tupperware parties for criminals” – obsessed over black helicopters and jack-booted government thugs. McVeigh himself told people the government had inserted a computer chip in his backside.
Some of the movement’s loudest grievances were entirely genuine. McVeigh kept a list of raids that federal law enforcement agencies conducted in the name of the War on Drugs and the innocent people caught up in them through error or inadvertence. He was appalled when the feds besieged a cabin in the Idaho mountains in October 1992, killing both the wife and the 14-year-old son of a survivalist who had refused to act as an informant on the far right. And he was appalled all over again the following spring by a second botched raid at a religious compound outside Waco, Texas, culminating in a deadly fire that killed more than 80 men, women and children.
In Washington, these events were not generally viewed as indications of deep structural rot, but rather as operational screw-ups to be addressed through internal after-action reports and congressional review. McVeigh, though, was shocked by the sight of Bradley fighting vehicles moving in to force an end to the Waco siege, because he’d driven Bradleys in the Gulf and, as a decorated military gunner, knew just how deadly they could be. Using them against civilians, including children, struck him as an abomination that cried out for revenge.
Despite his later protestations to the contrary, compelling evidence suggests that McVeigh targeted the daycare centre as revenge for the children who died at Waco. The centre’s operator, Danielle Hunt, told the FBI she remembered McVeigh visiting four months before the bombing, pretending to be an active member of the military with his own young children. He asked a lot of strange questions about security, she recalled, looked at the windows and said, over and over, “There’s so much glass”.
The FBI confirmed that McVeigh was indeed in Oklahoma City at the time, along with his friend and fellow veteran Michael Fortier, who ended up cutting a deal with prosecutors in exchange for his testimony against McVeigh at trial.
When agents first showed photographs of the dead children to Fortier, he showed no empathy for them, according to contemporary FBI records. Rather, he jumped out of his seat and exclaimed: “This is about Waco! Those parents did not kill their own children!”
“These guys were just evil people,” said Kenneth Williams, one of the first FBI agents to question Fortier. To this day, Williams believes Fortier should have received a far harsher sentence than the 12 years he and the government agreed on.
Largely because of the children, the radical far right soon abandoned its dream of overthrowing the government by force. Even McVeigh, who hoped to be seen as a hero and a martyr to the cause, came to wonder if he shouldn’t have opted for targeted killings of federal agents instead of indiscriminate slaughter.
Much of the high emotion surrounding the bombing has been lost in the intervening decades. Outside of Oklahoma, few Americans under 30 know much if anything about it. In the age of Trump, that looks like a lost opportunity – for the country to understand the nature of the disillusionment and rage building for decades in “rust belt” cities and in farming communities across the heartland.
Part of the reason for that lost opportunity is the US government’s failure at trial to tell the full story of who McVeigh was, the subculture he moved in, and the deep ideological wellsprings that led to his act of folly. For reasons largely dictated by courtroom expediency, prosecutors chose to depict McVeigh as a lone mastermind, with significant help from only person, another fellow army veteran named Terry Nichols, who later confessed helping McVeigh to purchase materials for the bomb and to assemble it.
“Two evil men did this, and two men paid,” the Oklahoma governor at the time of the bombing, Frank Keating, said when the trials were over. Yet few in government or on the prosecution team believed that everyone involved in the plot had been caught, or that those who had been identified necessarily received the punishment they deserved.
“Some people got away with bloody murder, Fortier being one of them,” Williams, the former FBI agent, said.
Related: ‘More than just a crime story’: the Oklahoma City bombing and a rise in domestic terrorism
The government dropped several promising lines of investigation – into a radical religious compound in eastern Oklahoma, into a neo-Nazi bank robbery gang, some of whose members later accused others of involvement in the bombing, or into Louis Beam, at the time the chief propagandist of the anti-government right, who was reported to have said in 1994 that “some kid” was going to blow up a building in Denver, Dallas, or Oklahoma City in revenge for Waco.
The justice department’s fear was that following one or more of these leads and pointing to a wider conspiracy would weaken the case against McVeigh, when the directive from above was to obtain the death penalty at all costs. “At some point,” Napolitano acknowledged, “a strategic decision was made to focus and get a clean straightforward case against McVeigh, and not pursue every rabbit down its hole.”
And so the wider story, of a heartland America desperate and cynical about its government, of a small but growing minority willing to embrace the notion that one day it might have to take up arms against tyranny in Washington, went largely untold. In 2025, we know at last how important that story was, and where it was destined to lead.
Andrew Gumbel is the author of Oklahoma City: What The Investigation Missed – And Why It Still Matters (William Morrow, 2012)