McVeigh's failures with women did not make things better. In the Army, he relied on a no-frills seduction line: "Okay, we've just met. We could sit here for three hours, wasting money on drinks, or we could just go now and get laid."

"It worked once or twice, but not often," the authors comment, presumably with no better evidence than their subject's word that it worked even once. Later, McVeigh apparently slept with Marife Nichols, the mail-order bride of his co-conspirator pal Terry Nichols; other than that, his romantic life seems to have been empty. (McVeigh asserts that he slept with Nichols; when contacted, she replied, "I don't think so.")

The second key element in McVeigh's life was his embracing of right-wing ideology. After dropping out of a two-year business college, he decided to educate himself. The materials he chose to read had a decisive impact on what he came to believe -- and, eventually, do. Besides gun magazines, which he devoured, he was influenced by a book called "To Ride, Shoot Straight and Speak the Truth" by Jeff Cooper, an authority on self-defense and firearms. Cooper's book was a training manual that extolled masculine, tough-guy virtues -- like Soldier of Fortune magazine, another favorite.

Even more important to McVeigh was "The Turner Diaries," a notorious novel by a former American Nazi that, as the authors explain, "had become a kind of bible for a loose movement of gun collectors, militia groups, and government protesters after its publication in 1978. The 200-page book related the story of Earl Turner, a gun enthusiast who reacts to tighter firearm laws by making a truck bomb and destroying the FBI headquarters building in Washington. The book described gun laws as links in a chain. The links form slowly, one by one, until finally citizens find that their individual rights have been choked off." In a bitterly ironic twist, the authors reveal that while awaiting trial McVeigh read another anti-government novel, John Ross' "Unintended Consequences," which tells the story of a hunter who, enraged by government atrocities against members of America's gun culture, assembles a team of heroic, patriotic killers who murder government agents individually. "McVeigh considered 'Unintended Consequences' a much more compelling story than 'The Turner Diaries,'" the authors note, saying that McVeigh might have mounted a sniper campaign rather than a bombing mission if he had read Ross' book first. They quote him as saying "It might have changed my whole plan of operation if I'd read that one first."

McVeigh, convinced that the threat to American liberties described in "The Turner Diaries" was real, decided that he had to be able to survive if the government descended on the people and chaos reigned. He began to stockpile food and water and became an avid gun collector. (Guns, in survivalist circles, are more than tools that allow their owners to survive: They can also be used for barter, to replace money.) He became a security guard to make more money so he could buy more guns. One of the reasons he joined the Army, as he did a year after becoming a security guard, was to "buttress his survival and shooting skills." After leaving the Army, when his life began to spiral downhill, he embraced ever more radical versions of anti-government ideology -- brooding about the coming One World Order, reading pamphlets asserting that the government was building massive crematoriums to dispose of its victims, cursing and hurling things at the TV when President Clinton appeared. By the end, he was firmly convinced that it was his duty as a patriot to teach the government a lesson it would never forget, to strike a blow for liberty. He is still certain that he did the right thing.

McVeigh was an intelligent man, but cartoonish ideas ruled large regions of his brain. He was a devoted Trekkie for whom "Star Trek: The Next Generation" "represented a utopian model for the future." More disturbingly, he rationalized the deaths of the innocent men and women he was going to kill in the Murrah building with a moral argument drawn from "Star Wars."

"McVeigh saw himself as a counterpart to Luke Skywalker, the heroic Jedi knight whose successful attack on the Death Star closes the film. As a kid, McVeigh had noticed that the 'Star Wars' movies showed people sitting at consoles -- Space-Age clerical workers -- inside the Death Star. Those people weren't storm troopers. They weren't killing anyone. But they were vital to the operations of the Evil Empire, McVeigh deduced, and when Luke blew up the Death Star those people became inevitable casualties. When the Death Star exploded, the movie audiences cheered. The bad guys were beaten: that was all that really mattered. As an adult, McVeigh found himself able to dismiss the killings of secretaries, receptionists, and other personnel in the Murrah building with equally cold-blooded calculation. They were all part of the Evil Empire.

"'I didn't define the rules of engagement in this conflict,' he said later. 'The rules, if not written down, are defined by the aggressor. It was brutal, no holds barred. Women and kids were killed at Waco and Ruby Ridge. You put back in [the government's] faces exactly what they're giving out."

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