Tim McVeigh, Average White Man

A guy I knew collected rents for a slum landlord. He was a big, whey-faced Irishman. The job took him into some very poor black neighborhoods. He used to laugh about how he'd knock on a door, see a rustle of curtains in the window and then hear someone inside call out, "White man! White man at the door!" In those neighborhoods, when the White Man knocked on your door it almost always meant trouble.

Timothy McVeigh strikes me as a really angry White Man. Say what you will about your Crips and Bloods or your Islamic fanatics, nothing freaks America out like White Man on a rampage.

I'm looking at two photos of McVeigh in Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck's American Terrorist (ReganBooks, 426 pages, $26). One's a photo from that famous day when they perp-walked him out of the Noble County Courthouse in Oklahoma, after he'd been fingered as a suspect. That's the McVeigh we all remember best. A skinny young white guy with a severe military flattop, his long, narrow, lipless face set in a self-consciously stern and defiant scowl. An FTW face. He looked a bit like a killer that day. It was that look that convinced people (a) that he was guilty and (b) that he should burn.

The second is a recent photo of him on death row. He's still got the short hair but it's not the severe military flattop anymore, it's softer and more juvenile. The years of starchy prison food have chunked him up, padded out the hard and bony planes of his face. More than before, he looks like a very Average White Man, bland, innocuous, like every guy who ever rotated the tires on your car or installed a phone jack in your house. His prison overalls even look like a mechanic's. He's looking right into the camera and smiling slightly. There's not a trace of defiance in his expression, though maybe there is a hint of that calm, self-amused smugness we've seen sometimes on the faces of weirdo killers like Manson or Richard Ramirez?that look of Now that you've got me in custody, what do you think you can do to me?

Still, he looks like anything but a mass murderer or terrorist. Unlike a Manson or Ramirez, he doesn't look smart or interesting enough.

And that's probably a big part of what has made McVeigh so intriguing to people, and so disturbing: he seems such a cipher. How could this Average White Man get so worked up that he could murder 168 men, women and children in one stroke? Fanatical Muslim martyrs on a global jihad, sure. But this tire rotator, this phone-jack installer? And if this White Man could get himself so worked up, how many others are out there walking around with their corks about to pop?

Fittingly, the coauthors of American Terrorist are pretty average White Men themselves, both reporters for McVeigh's hometown Buffalo News. Michel is the dogged shoe-leather newshound who worked his way into the confidences of the McVeigh family and then the killer himself; Herbeck's his mentor and, one suspects, rewrite man. They've turned out a very average, two-newshounds-get-a-big-book-contract book. You can tell how by the numbers it is just by the chapter titles: "The Boy Next Door," "Ready to Kill," "Body Count," "Murderers' Row." Don't expect many more insights than the coauthors have already served up on their tv appearances. The acuity of their observations tends to be in the range of: "Of all the things he missed about life outside prison, one of the greatest was the feeling of freedom..." (The same day the review copy of American Terrorist arrived, I received a true crime paperback called Deadly Secrets, about a pair of high school dropouts in the state of Washington who slaughtered a former schoolmate and her entire family in their suburban home. White Kids on a rampage. The two books are strikingly similar. There's a formula to these things.)

We're told that McVeigh grew up in the very white, rural/industrial area outside Buffalo. Clock-punching dad, mom who wanted to be an airline stewardess (they eventually break up), lower-middle-class, Middle American. We get a story about Little Timmy being upset when he sees a neighbor drown a bag of kittens. ("For Tim, who loved animals and especially kittens, the realization of what he had witnessed hit him hard. He cried about the incident for days.") He's skinny little "Noodle" McVeigh, preyed upon by bullies. Although smart, he drops out of college, starts reading things like The Turner Diaries, survivalist and White Power literature.

Enlists in the Army, where he meets Terry Nichols. Participates in Desert Storm as the gunner in a Bradley fighting vehicle he names after the band Bad Company. Kills some Iraqis. Becomes increasingly disappointed and bitter after failing to qualify for the Green Berets, and gets into some racially tinged contretemps with black soldiers. Quits. "He no longer felt comfortable serving a government that, in his opinion, pushed the values of political correctness at the expense of individual rights. McVeigh felt he could no longer stomach being part of a government that fought so hard against the sacred Second Amendment rights of gun owners. He no longer wanted to work for a government he was beginning to hate."

And blah blah. Ruby Ridge and Waco tip him over the edge into a complete militiaman doomsday mentality. He blows up the Murrah building, gets caught, gets a death sentence. Along the way, we learn nothing about the guy that we didn't already know or couldn't have predicted. We've already read all his best quotes, about how the children were "collateral damage," about how he blew up the building during work hours to get a good "body count," and so on. In fact, Michel and Herbeck don't quote him at any length anywhere in the book, preferring to paraphrase his thoughts and ideas. It's very frustrating. I'd rather have read one decent-size Q&A with him than this long plod of a book.

One of the few places things get interesting is very near the end, when McVeigh shares a special wing of the Supermax prison in Colorado with a remarkable trio of other killers: Ted Kaczynski, World Trade bomber Ramzi Yousef and Latin Kings founder Luis Felipe. McVeigh and the Unabomber became jailhouse friends, and Kaczynski, in a long letter he wrote to Michel and Herbeck, offers the most interesting?and best-written?commentary in the book. He reports:

I said, "So what would I need armor-piercing ammunition for?" In reply, McVeigh indicated that I might some day want to shoot at a tank... I think McVeigh knew well that there was little likelihood that I would ever need to shoot at a tank?or that he would either, unless he rejoined the Army. My speculative interpretation is that McVeigh resembles many people on the right who are attracted to powerful weapons for their own sake and independently of any likelihood that they will ever have a practical use for them. Such people tend to invent excuses, often far-fetched ones, for acquiring weapons for which they have no real need. But McVeigh did not fit the stereotype of the extreme right-wingers. I've already indicated that he spoke of respect for other people's cultures, and in doing so he sounded like a liberal. He certainly was not a mean or hostile person, and I wasn't aware of any indication that he was super patriotic. I suspect that he is an adventurer by nature, and America since the closing of the frontier has had little room for adventurers.

And on McVeigh's methods:

[A]ssuming that the Oklahoma City bombing was intended as a protest against the U.S. government in general and against the government's actions at Waco in particular, I will say that I think the bombing was a bad action because it was unnecessarily inhumane. A more effective protest could have been made with far less harm to innocent people. Most of the people who died at Oklahoma City were, I imagine, lower-level government employees?office help and the like?who were not even remotely responsible for objectionable government policies or for the events at Waco. If violence were to be used to express protest, it could have been used far more humanely, and at the same time more effectively, by being directed at the relatively small number of people who were personally responsible for the policies or actions to which the protesters objected. Such protest would have attracted just as much national attention as the Oklahoma City bombing and would have involved relatively little risk to innocent people.

In other words, he should've been more like the Unabomber. You go, Ted.

By the end of the book, we know little more about how McVeigh's mind works and why he did what he did than we knew at the start. It's left for us to decide whether that's because Michel and Herbeck never really figured McVeigh out, or the more troubling possibility: that there's not a lot about McVeigh to figure out. That he's a rather plain, not very outstanding guy who did an extraordinarily bad thing. Average White Man on a rampage, indeed.

Then again, the conspiratologists would say that the fact McVeigh is so boring only proves that he could not have acted alone in Oklahoma City. A guy this dull could only have been a soldier in some larger terrorist organization. McVeigh's own lawyer, Stephen Jones, has always disputed McVeigh's claim that he acted alone. Jones' 1998 book Others Unknown is being updated and rereleased next month?just in time for McVeigh's execution.

Afterwords

While I applaud the idea of the New Yorker Festival ("A Literary & Arts Celebration") the magazine is touting, I do think "Festival" is a bit too strong a word to describe the proceedings. Might I suggest something more like "Soiree"? "Salon"? "Sojourn"? "Idyll"? "Series of Chats"?

I mean, it sounds like it's going to be a very David-Remnick's-New-Yorker affair. (Say what you will about Tina Brown, if there's one thing homegirl knows, it's how to host a fiesta.) Endless readings and panel discussions featuring Calvin Trillin and Annie Proulx, August Wilson and Julian Barnes, Woody Allen interviewed by Remnick, Christopher Guest interviewed by Susan Orlean, Ang Lee interviewed by David Denby, Remnick again chairing a panel discussion on Bob Dylan's work, a panel on fashion, a panel on food... Oh how jolly.