The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

The night of the explosion, CNN reported that the bombing had all the signifiers of an attack from the Middle East. Network anchorwoman Connie Chung said, “A U.S. government source has told CBS News that it has Middle East terrorism written all over it.” The Wall Street Journal compared the event to the kind of car bombs normally seen in Beirut. There was, for roughly forty-eight hours, a shared incorrect assumption about why the Murrah building had been destroyed. Once McVeigh was apprehended, the explanation was reversed and the complexity evaporated. This wasn’t someone from Syria. This was someone from upstate New York. It wasn’t an international network of terrorists. It was one guy, helped by two other guys (Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, and Fortier’s involvement was so minor he spent less than nine years in prison). There was also no confusion over McVeigh’s purpose: When arrested, he was wearing a T-shirt that said, “Sic semper tyrannis,” the Latin phrase supposedly exclaimed by John Wilkes Booth after he’d assassinated Abraham Lincoln. McVeigh was candid about his reasons for blowing up the federal building, directly pointing to the 1992 government standoff at Ruby Ridge and the 1993 siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Because the media had been so wrong in their preliminary analysis, this wholesale correction somehow seemed extra reliable. McVeigh is the worst domestic terrorist in U.S. history, self-motivated by personal animosity toward t...