'The bomber's words sound mainstream. Like he won ' Oklahoma City's tragedy

Summary

The world’s first reaction to the young military veteran and far-right radical who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City 30 years ago this month was near-universal revulsion at the carnage he created and at the ideology that inspired it.A crowd yelled “baby killer” – and worse – as 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh was led away in chains from a courthouse in rural Oklahoma where the FBI caught up with him two days after the bombing. He had the same crew cut he’d sported in his army days and stone cold eyes.An hour and a half’s drive to the south, 168 people lay dead, most of them office workers who had been providing government services, along with 19 young children in a day care centre directly above the spot where McVeigh parked his moving truck packed with ammonium nitrate and other explosives.The children were, most likely, his prime target.Bill Clinton, then president, rallied the country by vowing justice that would be “swift, certain and severe”. His attorney general wasted no time announcing she would seek the death penalty. Whatever flirtation the country had been entertaining with rightwing militia movements in the wake of a national assault weapons ban that enraged gun rights activists, and controversies over the heavy-handedness of federal law enforcement, came screeching to a halt.Even elements of the radical right, McVeigh’s fellow travellers, were stunned by the sight of firefighters pulling dead babies out of the wreckage. Before the bombing, they had been full of heady talk of war against the government, but many of them imagined this would involve an attack on federal judges who had displeased the movement, or blowing up a building at night.“Didn’t he case the place?” one acquaintance of McVeigh’s asked incredulously. “The bastard has put the Patriot movement back 30 years,” lamented an erstwhile mentor of McVeigh’s from Arizona.Oklahoma City federal building on 20 April 1995 as rescuers continued searching for bodies in the aftermath of the explos...