American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck / Hardcover, 426 pages / Published by: Harper / Price: $26 / Publication Date: 2001
“This was not an easy story to tell,” acknowledge Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, reporters for the Buffalo News and co-authors of the chilling and incisive American Terrorist.. Interviewing Timothy McVeigh—the “decorated [Army] soldier” turned “mass murderer” responsible for the slaughter of 168 men, women, and children in the bombing of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah federal building—from death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, Michel and Herbeck “experienced feelings of horror and outrage” as they listened to McVeigh’s “matter-of-fact narration of events.” Observing McVeigh’s “extraordinary candor” and never detecting any remorse for the blood he shed was troubling to the authors. Indeed, McVeigh’s coldness still haunts the American psyche.
However grueling, infuriating, misguided, and incomprehensible McVeigh and his actions on April 19, 1995, are to recall and digest, the publication of American Terrorist is invaluable. It reveals the mind-set of the man who describes the pain and humiliation his kindly, “crestfallen” father, Bill McVeigh, suffers and who reduces the deaths of the 19 babies and children at the Murrah building’s America’s Kid’s day-care center —the youngest three months; the oldest five—to “collateral damage.”
It chronicles McVeigh’s transition from “average American boy” to the nation’s most notorious, most hated anti-government activist. It shows McVeigh as a clumsy, inadequate pursuer of women and as a calculating, arrogant, bullying man of conviction. And most important, American Terrorist makes public McVeigh’s “long-awaited confession.”
The Mastermind of Self-Righteous Devastation
McVeigh admits that he was the “mastermind of the entire scheme.” (Co-conspirators Terry Nichols and Mike Fortier were convicted; Nichols received a life sentence, and Fortier plea-bargained a sentence of 12 years. Their stories are also told in American Terrorist.)
