Timothy McVeigh
Most of what we know about the Timothy McVeigh trial for the Oklahoma City bombing comes not from McVeigh himself but from others. Unlike Adler, Hill, and Armstrong, who were loquacious dissenters, McVeigh was a laconic dissenter, perhaps a taciturn zealot.
They sought to justify their violent acts, while McVeigh was given to terse comments before, during, and after his trial and sentencing. Even when Federal Judge Richard Matsch invited him to make a statement at the sentencing, McVeigh merely read a cryptic quotation from Justice Louis Brandeis: “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.” Is this a reference to his own death sentence or to the actions by the government which led him to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building? It was widely understood by commentators as a reference to the government assault on the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, two years before the Oklahoma City bombing, but in an interview following the passing of the death sentence, McVeigh suggested what he meant: “In the instant context, you could take [the statement] to reflect on the death penalty and the charges leveled against me. I was accused and convicted of killing.… They say that’s wrong, and now they’re going to kill me.”48Yet the evidence presented by the prosecution and accepted by the jury suggests that McVeigh was a dissenter frustrated by government, a Gulf War soldier who had served with distinction and thought that the federal government had betrayed him and its calling. April 19 was selected for the Oklahoma City bombing because it was two years after the government assault at Waco. As Michael Fortier, a former army buddy, testified for the prosecution, “they wanted to bomb the building on the anniversary of Waco…to cause a general uprising in America… hopefully that would knock people off the fence.” As for the innocent people who would be killed—the death total was 168—Fortier testified that McVeigh commented: “They may be individually innocent, but they were part of an evil empire, they were guilty by association.”49