Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Before turning to the substance of Michel and Herbeck's book, one thing should be noted: There is absolutely nothing objectionable about it or its publication. Many of the victims of the bombing are outraged by the fact that the authors, by publishing a book based in part on interviews with McVeigh, gave the mass murderer a forum for his views; they believe that the book is exploitative and its profits blood money. Some have called for a boycott. Apparently yielding to pressure, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, announced on April 5 that it would not carry "American Terrorist."
All of these charges are baseless, and Wal-Mart's decision to drop the book is cowardly and outrageous. While the sensitivity of the victims' relatives and friends is understandable, there is nothing exploitative about this book. McVeigh committed the worst terrorist crime, and after Jonestown the second-worst act of violence, in American history: Anything he says is by definition newsworthy. Michel and Herbeck present McVeigh's point of view, as it is their responsibility as journalists to do, but they don't regurgitate it uncritically. The portrait of McVeigh that emerges is of a zealot, still convinced he was right, without remorse, who sees his deed as an act of revolutionary violence and has a highly developed rationalization for why it was necessary. This is information that we are all better off having.
Immediately after the bombing, most authorities and many Americans believed that a Middle Eastern terrorist group was responsible. But an FBI agent named Clinton R. Van Zandt, who had been the bureau's main negotiator at Waco, had a better idea. Van Zandt recognized the significance of the date of the bombing -- April 19, the anniversary of the fiery conclusion of the siege. "You're going to have a white male, acting alone, or with one other person," Michel and Herbeck quote Van Zandt as saying. "He'll be in his mid-twenties. He'll have military experience and be a fringe member of some militia group. He'll be angry at the government for what happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco."
Van Zandt was right on every particular. And if he had added that the white male came from a fractured and emotionally sterile family, had read "The Turner Diaries," was a gun nut and a survivalist, had no girlfriend and a dead-end, low-paying job, his portrait would have been even more accurate.
But if just about every detail of Timothy McVeigh's life is exactly what you would expect if you were trying to imagine the biography of an extreme-right-wing terrorist, his mind and personality is another matter. It isn't easy to be certain that the authors have really captured McVeigh, or for that matter any of their characters. Michel and Herbeck are solid just-the-facts-ma'am newspaper reporters, with about the level of literary sophistication and analytical power generally found among daily reporters. In some ways this is a good thing: They don't muddy the waters with any highfalutin speculations or psychoanalyzing, and they don't let their own egos or literary ambitions get in the way. But though they've assembled all the facts, their limited ability to synthesize them, to put them together into a compelling psychological portrait, prevent any of their characters from really coming to life. Nor do they evaluate the sincerity or lack thereof of any of McVeigh's statements: If he is a con, they don't tip the reader off. Still, by the end of the book you feel like you've been given enough information to fill in most of the psychological blanks yourself. And it really isn't a very complicated story.
Four things in McVeigh's biography stand out -- any one of which, if changed, would probably have prevented the catastrophe from occurring. Those four are his relations with his family, his right-wing ideology, his military experience and the Waco siege.
McVeigh's home life was rather sad and sterile. McVeigh's father, Bill, as portrayed by Michel and Herbeck, is almost a caricature of a repressed American dad: a decent but emotionally distant man, a hard-working provider who was incapable of relating in any demonstrative way with his family. McVeigh's mother, Mickey, had a completely different personality type, but she was no more successful at establishing a bond with her son: an outgoing beauty, she came to feel increasingly bored and stifled by her marriage. When they separated, the parents let the three children decide which parent they wanted to live with: The two daughters (13 and 5 at the time) decided to stay together and chose their mother, but 11-year-old Timothy chose his father, saying, "I don't want Dad to be alone."
The authors don't go into this, but the separation and its aftermath must have inflicted a double wound on Timothy: He was not only cut off from his mother, but from his two sisters. (Not to mention the trauma of the choice itself: being forced to make such a decision, which the 11-year-old McVeigh must have viewed as betraying his mom, could not have been easy.) Little Tim was left with his dad, whose long hours at the Lockport, N.Y., General Motors radiator factory meant that he was rarely around. When he was around, he didn't connect with Tim. In an emblematic anecdote, the authors relate how Bill tried to make his son into a softball player, but scared and humiliated him by throwing the ball at him too fast.
McVeigh later denied that his mother's departure hurt him that much, although his father believes it did -- as did McVeigh's first and only girlfriend, who sensed his anger towards her. In 1992, after leaving the military, McVeigh denounced his mother to a woman he was interested in, calling her a "whore" and a "bitch." But to the authors, his criticisms were much more muted: "The real problem, he said, was that he never really felt that close to his parents in the first place. He wished they spent less time at work and more time with him and his sisters." The authors quote him as saying "I have very few memories of interactions with my parents."
McVeigh did have a close relationship with one person: His paternal grandfather. But that relationship, infrequent after McVeigh's youth, seems not to have been enough to warm his soul. McVeigh was certainly capable of friendship and loyalty (after his arrest, he forgave his old friend and semi-conspirator Michael Fortier for testifying against him), and there are occasional stories throughout the book that reveal that he could be both generous and caring. But the overwhelming sense is of an icily angry young man who could increasingly turn his emotions off entirely, becoming a virtual zombie -- a person who never cared about any other human being enough, or felt he was cared about enough, to develop any real feeling for others.
How much one should blame his parents for this it's impossible to say. McVeigh himself refuses to do so, telling the authors, "I am not looking in any way, shape or form to blame anything on my parents or my upbringing. All in all, from birth to age eighteen, I emerged pretty much a functional person in the real world, and that's all that counts."
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