He remains, as Jannie Coverdale, the grandmother of two children who
died in the bombing, has described him, "the devil in a Ryder truck."
But he has his believers.
"I shudder to think that people like Mr. McVeigh will have any
legacy," Mr. Gross said. He said that the only people who would buy,
publicly and wholeheartedly, this latest of American conspiracy
theories were "a tiny, crazy fringe of people."
"Among that extremely small group," Mr. Gross said, "the sequence of
events leading up to his execution will reinforce their beliefs."
That will not be thousands of people, he said, but a few hundred.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/10/national/10MCVE.html
Mr. McVeigh's father, Bill, said there was nothing in his son's
boyhood that foretold this tragedy. Fellow soldiers said he was a
racist, but a lot of people talked the way he did. Only as he neared
the end of his service, as he came to read the literature of hate
groups, to stockpile guns and to begin talking to others in racist,
antigovernment rhetoric, did he seem extreme, said people who knew
him then.
But that, too, was just a facade. There was a meanness, a zeal in
him, that was hidden still.
Mr. McVeigh has tried to manipulate his legacy, through the
book "American Terrorist," in which he admits his guilt but tries to
rationalize it, and through letters and carefully selected interviews.
In an April letter to Rita Cosby of the Fox News Channel, Mr. McVeigh
wrote that the bombing was a "retaliatory strike," and he described
federal agents as soldiers. "Additionally, borrowing a page from U.S.
foreign policy," he wrote, "I decided to send a message to a
government that was becoming increasingly hostile, by bombing a
government building and the government employees within that building
who represent that government. Bombing the Murrah Federal Building
was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a
government building in Serbia, Iraq or other nations."
But it was the federal government that gave Mr. McVeigh - ultimately -
the greatest means by which to justify his antipathy, with its own
mistakes, said experts on the law and hate groups, and some of the
people he hurt with his bomb.
"At its root," it creates distrust of the agency that was charged
with upholding the law, said Leonard Zeskind, the founder of the
Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights in Kansas City,
Mo., who has studied hate groups for 20 years.
Any credibility that Mr. McVeigh gains is a slap to his victims.
"It's stupid for us to execute him now," said Mr. Welch, who has
opposed the death penalty for Mr. McVeigh from the beginning, in part
because he sees no good in one more death, in part because he fears
that it will erase any chance of finding others who may have been
involved.
But now Mr. McVeigh's execution may do the one thing that Mr. Welch
and others here cannot abide. It gives people like him evidence that
the federal government did not properly prosecute Mr. McVeigh.
"In many ways, they win," Mr. Welch said. "There is no question about
his guilt, but now it's tainted."
Experts on the law and on hate groups said that despite the smudge on
his prosecution, Mr. McVeigh was still seen as a monster who brutally
murdered old people, babies, mothers and fathers.
He is still seen as a perversion, still regarded as a sick and
distorted version of what an American soldier is supposed to be. Most
of his victims, those still alive, have said they regret this latest
development, but still want him to die.
He remains, as Jannie Coverdale, the grandmother of two children who
died in the bombing, has described him, "the devil in a Ryder truck."
But he has his believers.
"I shudder to think that people like Mr. McVeigh will have any
legacy," Mr. Gross said. He said that the only people who would buy,
publicly and wholeheartedly, this latest of American conspiracy
theories were "a tiny, crazy fringe of people."
"Among that extremely small group," Mr. Gross said, "the sequence of
events leading up to his execution will reinforce their beliefs."
That will not be thousands of people, he said, but a few hundred.
But, he pointed out, the frightening fact is that it took only a few
people to design and build the bomb. And it only took one, Mr.
McVeigh, to drive the truck to the front of the building.
In the way that Mr. McVeigh was affected by the government's actions
near Waco will the cloud over Mr. McVeigh's execution convince other
extremists of the government's corruption and conspiracies?
Mr. Welch and others in Oklahoma City fear that it may.
"If we had given him a life sentence, he would not be tormenting
anyone now," Mr. Welch said. "Terry Nichols isn't tormenting anyone,"
he said, referring to Mr. McVeigh's co-conspirator, who is serving
life in prison.
But even with the government's inadvertent help in lending a smidgen
of credibility to Mr. McVeigh's war on that government, his ultimate
legacy is one of fire and pain.
In "American Terrorist," by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, Mr. McVeigh
referred to the children killed in the blast as "collateral damage"
and said that, when he first saw television pictures after the blast,
his first feeling was regret for not bringing the whole building down.
His efforts to remake himself, to form his legacy, had been mostly
laughed at or ignored. When he said he was not a racist, that it was
the gun control aspects of a racist novel, "The Turner Diaries," that
moved him, that he joined the Ku Klux Klan only because he wanted one
of its T- shirts, both the public and experts on militias and hate
groups just shook their heads.
"You don't need to join to get the T-shirt," Mr. Zeskind said.
Mr. McVeigh will die an enigma, said many who have followed his case,
never fully explaining why he did what others only talked about
doing. Even his writings give no real clue to his character.
His motives for the bombing were addressed, but hardly made clear, in
letters to friends and others. In those letters, he seemed to be
quoting from antigovernment pamphlets.
In a letter to Robert Popovich, a former neighbor of Terry L.
Nichols's, Mr. McVeigh wrote: "It was at this time, after waiting for
nonviolent checks and balances to correct ongoing federal abuses and
seeing no such results, that the assault-weapons ban passed, and
rumors subsequently surfaced of nationwide Waco-style raids scheduled
for the spring of 1995 to confiscate firearms. It was in this climate
then that I reached the decision to go on the offensive, to put a
check on government abuse of power, where others had failed in
stopping the federal juggernaut run amok."
-- Anonymous, June 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/13/national/13WACO.html?
pagewanted=print
June 13, 2001
Branch Davidians Shed No Tears for McVeigh
By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
ACO, Tex., June 12 — Their ranks are small these days,
outnumbered by
the 80 crape myrtles planted at the Mount Carmel compound to
commemorate each of
the Branch Davidians who died here eight years ago.
Their arguments are fierce, for no fewer than three factions of
Branch
Davidians have laid legal claim to the 77-acre property outside the
city,
producing yet another bizarre standoff, with separate churches for
two factions
and a histrionic display by the third, which dismisses the entire 51-
day siege
by federal agents at the compound as a diversion.
"The standoff was a cover-up of over 30 years religious
persecution of the
original church including land ripoffs, judicial oppression and
murder by
poison," a sign just inside the entrance reads. It is the first of
several
displays to greet curious tourists who still thread the roads east of
Waco to
visit the site.
Yet the Branch Davidians all agree on one point: Timothy J.
McVeigh, who
cited his rage over what happened here as the prime reason he blew up
the
Federal Building in Oklahoma City two years to the day later, will be
no martyr
for their cause.
"I don't mourn him, and we would never support what happened in
Oklahoma
City," said Sheila Martin, 54 years old, in reaction to Mr. McVeigh's
execution
on Monday. "I wish Timothy McVeigh had come and talked to us. If he
really had
all that anger, I would have told him to redirect it in a different
way. I would
have asked him to come and help rebuild our church."
Mrs. Martin's husband and four of her seven children died in the
fire that
consumed the Branch Davidians' compound on April 19, 1993, shortly
after federal
agents in tanks rammed the building in an effort to drive the people
out.
Clive Doyle, 60, a former government currency printer in Australia
who
escaped the flames but lost his daughter, Shari, 18, in the fire,
also said he
saw no honor in Mr. McVeigh's action.
"Retaliation is not what we're about," Mr. Doyle said. "And Tim
McVeigh is
not any sort of champion from our point of view."
The ruins of the compound's foundation peek out in the tall grass,
where
children of some Davidians play among the artifacts left behind,
including two
burned-out buses and a motorcycle that belonged to David Koresh, the
group's
leader.
A rival faction to the one Mr. Doyle and Mrs. Martin follow has
erected a
headstone at the compound, memorializing "all the men, women and
children who
were victimized and brutally slaughtered" in the April 19, 1995,
Oklahoma City
bombing.
Several antigovernment extremist groups carried accounts of Mr.
McVeigh's
execution on their Web sites, though with little characterization of
the man;
one, posted by Posse Comitatus, a paramilitary group, issued a call
for Monday
to be commemorated as Timothy James McVeigh Day.
"The day that this soldier is called home will henceforth be
remembered," the
site said, "and his efforts will not be forgotten." It added: "The
blood of our
fallen martyrs shall be avenged!"
But for the Branch Davidians, any prospect of violence, whether in
response
to what happened here or to Mr. McVeigh's execution, would be
abhorrent.
The siege at Mount Carmel began on Feb. 28, 1993, after several
dozen federal
agents tried to arrest Mr. Koresh on weapons charges, and a gun
battle left four
agents and six Branch Davidians dead.
Government officials said the Branch Davidians deliberately set
fire to the
compound and that many inside died of gunshot wounds they inflicted
on each
other or themselves as the flames spread; the Branch Davidians say
tear gas from
the tanks ignited the fire. The damage was so severe that neither
side has been
able to prove what happened.
Last fall, a federal judge in Waco ruled that the government owes
nothing to
the surviving Branch Davidians or to the families of sect members who
died in
the fire. About 100 plaintiffs had filed a wrongful- death suit.
In a separate trial, held in state court, the three factions have
battled
over ownership of the compound, but the matter remains unresolved.
No one disputes that the Branch Davidians still own the property,
but no one
agrees just who the rightful Branch Davidians are. The sect's roots
date back to
the 1930's, when disgruntled members of the Seventh- day Adventist
Church broke
to form their own church.
This year on April 19, the eighth anniversary of the fire, the
Branch
Davidians held their annual memorial and the bell at the new chapel
pealed for
those who died in the fire. Mr. Doyle, who has burn marks on his arms
from the
inferno, read the names, breaking into tears when he recited his
daughter's.
Most remaining members expressed a bedrock faith that Mr. Koresh
and the
others would return to earth someday.
"He's going to come back," Catherine Matteson, who is 85, said of
Mr. Koresh.
"He'll be back with the Seven Seals, and the Seven Seals will tell
you
everything."
After losing four children in the fire and the fifth afterward to
meningitis,
Mrs. Martin has two left, Danny, 14 and Kimmy, 12. They come to
services at the
compound on Saturday, the Davidians' sabbath, but their beliefs
aren't
particularly fervent, she said.
"They're typical teenagers," she said. "They'll say, `Is it 4
o'clock yet,
Ma? O.K., Ma, it's time to go home and get something to eat.' "
"I'm still waiting for them to come back," she added, referring to
her
husband, Wayne, and to their children who died in the fire. "I'm
still waiting.
It feels a little closer. But it's hard.
"Some days I thank God that there's a floor to wash, dishes to do,
a lawn to
mow, anything to keep busy," she said. "Because the waiting is hard."
-- Anonymous, June 13, 2001