Despite the contrary evidence, the grand jury gave the phantom John Doe No. 2 something of a lifeline. It said it was unable to “put closure to the question of the existence of John Doe II.”69 Even so, it is puzzling how McVeigh’s putative accomplice could have been so visible in the days before the bombing but afterward concealed himself so thoroughly as to remain at large since 1995. In that contradiction lies evidence that John Doe No. 2 never existed.
McVeigh’s disavowal of John Doe No. 2 cannot be dismissed, either. In a letter to the Houston Chronicle in 2001, a few weeks before he was put to death by lethal injection, McVeigh wrote that there was no John Doe No. 2. His letter was written in response to the newspaper’s inquiry about a claim by McVeigh’s court-appointed former lawyer, Stephen Jones, that McVeigh had inflated his role in the Oklahoma City bombing. “Jones has been thoroughly discredited, so I’m not going to break a sweat refuting his outlandish claims point-by-point,” McVeigh wrote, adding, “Does anyone honestly believe that if there was a John Doe 2 (there is not) that Stephen Jones would still be alive?”70
McVeigh and Jones were at odds throughout McVeigh’s trial in federal court in 1997, and afterward they fell out completely. A key element in the dispute was Jones’s opinion that McVeigh was a cog in a much wider conspiracy to attack the Murrah Building. McVeigh routinely told his lawyers that he had been the mastermind of and the prime mover behind the bombing. “There was no big conspiracy. It was mostly me,” McVeigh was quoted by his biographers as saying. “The few friends who helped me were acting under duress, and none of them had any control over when I was going to blow up the Murrah Building.”71
Jones, however, suggested that McVeigh was but a patsy72 who lacked the training and technical know-how to build the device that blew up the Murrah Building.73 In his book about the case, Jones spun an extravagant if unpersuasive theory that the Oklahoma City bombing was the work of a vast and elusive international conspiracy. “The real story of the bombing . . . is complex, shadowy, and sinister,” Jones wrote. “It stretches weblike, from America’s heartland to the nation’s capital, the Far East, Europe, and the Middle East, and much of it remains a mystery.”74 Jones hinted—but offered no compelling proof—that Terry Nichols had met in the Philippines with Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who organized the attack in 1993 on the World Trade Center. If Yousef “had used the Philippines as a base, and Terry Nichols had made numerous visits there, who knew who might have been recruited? Or whom might have recruited whom?” Jones wrote.75 He added that, if Nichols had “gone to the Philippines to be instructed by Ramzi and his band in the art and techniques of blowing up a nine-story building—then mightn’t he have learned another part of Ramzi Yousef’s modus operandi? That it’s always most prudent to leave someone else holding the bag?”76
Much of Jones’s book was like that: provocative in raising questions but failing to answer them with compelling evidence. He speculated profusely and invoked the likes of Yousef and even Osama bin Laden to imply that a vast international plot loomed behind the Oklahoma City bombing.77 But it was mostly disjointed conjecture—vaguely suggestive but unpersuasive. A “rhetorical game,” as one reviewer wrote.78
The passage of time, moreover, imposes stern tests on theories of vast, far-flung conspiracies like the one Jones proposed. Such plots, given their complexity, are exceedingly difficult to keep intact for extended periods.79 Mistakes and missteps are inevitable; conspirators can fall prone to disputes and rivalries. Incentives to explode the conspiracy from within can be many. The prominence of the criminal act—the bombing in Oklahoma City was, and remains, the worst act of domestic terror in U.S. history—attracts ceaseless interest and attention, adding to pressures on the conspirators. As time passes, a vast, far-flung plot becomes increasingly difficult to sustain and conceal. The case of Watergate, America’s greatest political scandal, is instructive in this regard: the cover-up of the crimes of Watergate began unraveling within months of the break-in at offices of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972. Twenty men associated with Richard Nixon’s presidency or his reelection campaign eventually went to prison for crimes such as perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy.
Indeed, the absence of plausible evidence of widespread conspiracy argues powerfully against the notion of a vast international plot in the Oklahoma City bombing. As Vincent Bugliosi noted in his monumental debunking of conspiracy theories in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy:
Perhaps the most powerful single piece of evidence that there was no conspiracy in the murder of President Kennedy is simply the fact that after all these years there is no credible evidence, direct or circumstantial, that any of the persons or groups suspected by conspiracy theorists (e.g., organized crime, CIA, KGB, FBI, military-industrial complex, Castro, LBJ, etc.) or anyone else conspired with Oswald to kill Kennedy. And when there is no evidence of something, although not conclusive, this itself is very, very persuasive evidence that the alleged “something” does not exist. Particularly here where the search for the “something” (conspiracy) has been the greatest and most comprehensive search for anything in American, perhaps world, history.80
Similar factors apply to the Oklahoma City bombing: A vast plot probably never existed. McVeigh, most likely, was truthful in telling his biographers that he initiated, developed, and pulled off the attack on the Murrah Building. Had there been a wider conspiracy, McVeigh’s accomplices, Nichols and Fortier, would have had incentives to bargain for reduced prison sentences by offering up the identity of other conspirators. They never did.81
McVeigh was the remorseless ringleader. Nichols was his primary accomplice. Fortier knew about the plot but did nothing to thwart it. That was the likely extent of a ragtag conspiracy that brought about the Murrah Building’s destruction. But for many Americans, it was just too ragtag, too improbable to embrace. The gravity of the attack in Oklahoma City—not unlike the assassination of President Kennedy—seemed to cry for a plot more substantial and a conspiracy more elaborate and sophisticated than misfit Army buddies angry at the federal government.
Public opinion polling conducted in the years following the bombing indicated that large majorities of Americans suspected the conspiracy went beyond McVeigh, Nichols, and Fortier. A survey conducted in 1997 for Time magazine and CNN reported that 77 percent of respondents in a nationwide survey thought other conspirators in the Oklahoma City bombing had yet to be arrested.82 A Gallup poll conducted in 2000 on the fifth anniversary of the attack on the Murrah Building found that 64 percent of respondents thought others were responsible for the bombing.83 Another Gallup poll, conducted just before McVeigh was executed in June 2001, reported that 65 percent of Americans thought McVeigh had not disclosed the names of everyone who assisted him in the bombing.84
Running down rabbit holes in pursuit of the likes of the chimerical John Doe No. 2 or of shadowy, international conspirators85 serves to obscure the broader significance of the Oklahoma City bombing—that the attack represented a turning point in domestic security and security precautions for Americans. The attack did not usher in a period when bombings became “a brutal commonplace of American life,” as the New York Times had speculated.86 Nor did it bring a sudden awakening for Americans to the harsh realities of terrorism at home. The World Trade Center bombing in 1993 had accomplished that. Rather, the Oklahoma City bombing helped to mold and put in place a hypercautious, security-first mindset that encouraged the imposition of restrictions intended to thwart the prospect of terrorist attack, a prospect that often seemed vague, amorphous, or abstract. These restrictions became tighter and more obsessive over the years, especially after terrorists flew hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001.
FIGURE 11. A lasting consequence of the Oklahoma City bombing was the imposition of security restrictions intended to thwart prospective terrorist attacks. The far-reaching nature of the response was lampooned by Herb Block, editori
al cartoonist at the Washington Post. (Photo credit: A 1995 Herblock Cartoon; ©The Herb Block Foundation)
The security-minded restrictions introduced following the Oklahoma City bombing were not without strong popular support. Trading a measure of civil liberties for enhanced security was a deal most Americans seemed inclined to make in 1995. A national survey conducted by the Los Angeles Times shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing found that 58 percent of Americans would be willing to give up some civil liberties if necessary to curb terrorism; 20 percent were opposed, and 17 percent said it would depend on other circumstances.87 At the same time, though, Americans doubted whether law enforcement officials, even given enhanced tools to combat terrorism, would be able to prevent terrorist attacks in the United States.88
Striking evidence of the preemptive, security-first mindset came in Washington, D.C., a month after the Murrah Building’s bombing. Before dawn on May 20, 1995, authorities set up concrete barriers to detour vehicular traffic from two blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue nearest the White House. The closure was ordered unilaterally, without public debate and without prior notice. It was justified under the Treasury Department’s broad mandate to protect the president and his family. Although the closure had been privately under consideration for weeks, it became inevitable following the bombing in Oklahoma City. “It was really just a question of whether [Pennsylvania Avenue] was going to close before we had an explosion,” the Secret Service director, Eljay B. Bowron, said, “or after we had an explosion.”89
The move was prudent and practical, insisted President Bill Clinton, who likened the closure to installing metal detectors at airport terminals. Think of it, he said, as “a responsible security step necessary to preserve our freedom, not part of a long-term restriction on our freedom.”90 But the effect was to make the White House seem more fortresslike, and the president seem even more remote, even more deeply ensconced within a security cocoon.91 The two-block closure was “a concession to terrorism that should not be made permanent,” the Washington Post railed in an editorial, deploring what it called the conversion of “America’s Main Street” to little more than a sidewalk. “Two world wars did not close Pennsylvania Avenue,” the Post declared. “Neither did the Civil War or past attempts on presidents’ lives. . . . The avenue stayed open despite a British invasion, and despite street riots in the 1960s. But now, because of the devastation in Oklahoma City, the history of Pennsylvania Avenue may be erased by bulldozers.”92
The closure stirred extravagant rhetoric in Washington. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the district’s nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives, said the closure had left downtown Washington “dysfunctional and disfigured.” Pennsylvania Avenue, Holmes Norton added, “is not a park. It is the major downtown east-west artery in the nation’s capital.”93 And in a commentary written for the Washington Post, Rod Grams, a Republican senator from Minnesota, urged Clinton to reopen Pennsylvania Avenue to traffic. “We must not allow fear to claim the victory,” Grams declared. “Dismantle the barricades, Mr. President, and may the souls of the patriots who founded this nation in freedom’s name take pity on us if we don’t.”94
It wasn’t to be. The Post from time to time renewed its call to reopen the avenue while deploring the unsightly clutter of concrete planters and Jersey barriers. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the issue lost momentum. Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House has since been landscaped to remove the Jersey barriers, but the portion of “America’s Main Street” nearest the White House remains off-limits to vehicular traffic and is patrolled by police on motorcycles, on bicycles, and in vans. Twenty years later, that portion of Pennsylvania Avenue wears the obvious look of a closed-off street masquerading as a pedestrian mall.
The case of Pennsylvania Avenue signaled not only an embryonic security-first mindset but the emergence of the capital as a bunker: several streets near the Capitol also were closed to vehicular traffic in the summer of 1995. Concrete planters and Jersey barriers went up near other government buildings that were presumed to be potential targets of terrorists. An architecture of defensiveness became plainly visible in the capital, and its trappings—the barriers and the steel gates—have lent a shabby look to the avenues in the heart of Washington. Witold Rybcznski, a professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, has observed wryly: “We used to mock an earlier generation that peppered the U.S. capital with [statues of] Civil War generals on horseback; now I wonder what future generations will make of our architectural legacy of crash-resistant walls and blast-proof glass.”95
It was the Oklahoma City bombing, the Washington Post observed years later, “that ended the capital’s life as an open city. Suddenly, driving into a garage involved guards wielding mirrors to inspect car bottoms. Jersey barriers undid the designs of landscapers and architects. An architecture of fear came into vogue. . . . Defenders of the American tradition of openness cried out against the capital as bunker, but their arguments were usually trumped by the security officers’ simple retort: ‘Are you ready to risk lives?’”96 The urgency of preemptive security easily trumped the aesthetic appeal.97
The effects of the Oklahoma City bombing went far beyond aesthetics in the capital. The attack revived antiterrorism legislation that had been stalled in Congress. And while it took more than a year, Congress passed, and Clinton signed, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. The measure allocated about $1 billion to be spent over four years on counterterrorism initiatives, enhanced criminal penalties for terrorist acts, banned fund-raising in support of terrorist organizations, required manufacturers of plastic explosives to include microscopic markers called “taggants” to make them easier to track, and restricted habeas corpus appeals by federal and state death-row inmates.98
The measure also permitted U.S. officials to deport noncitizens suspected of terrorism or supporting terrorism—and to do so while sharing little more than a summary of classified evidence against them. Civil libertarians deplored that component of the bill. “For the first time in 200 years, secret evidence will be allowed in a U.S. court,” David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, said at the time. “It is impossible to challenge or refute evidence you cannot see.”99 That aspect of the law was of such dubious constitutionality that it has never been invoked.
Cole and James X. Dempsey offered a withering critique of the 1996 antiterrorism law in their book, Terrorism and the Constitution, saying the measure represented “some of the worst assaults on civil liberties in decades.”100 Cole and Dempsey pointed out that the law could be used to punish people “not for crimes that they commit or abet, but for supporting wholly lawful acts of disfavored groups.” Had such a measure been on the books during the 1980s, they noted, “it would have been a crime to give money to the African National Congress, during Nelson Mandela’s speaking tours here, because the State Department routinely listed the ANC as a ‘terrorist group.’”101 The antiterrorism law also “revived the practice of denying visas to foreigners based on mere membership in undesirable groups” as designated by the State Department.102
Clinton, however, praised the legislation as representing “tough new tools to stop terrorists before they strike.” In fact, he wanted a tougher and more expansive measure than what Congress passed: he had sought broader wiretapping authority for law enforcement agents, greater access to telephone, hotel, and other records in cases of suspected terrorism, and expanded use of taggants in explosives made from black powder.103 Although such provisions had been stripped from the bill he signed, Clinton had begun to prepare the ground for sterner and more expansive measures to combat terrorism—measures of the sort that were embedded in the controversial USA Patriot Act, enacted in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act on April 24, 1996, at a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House. In attendance that day were survivors and family members of victims of the Murrah Bui
lding attack. A few of them wiped away tears as the president signed the measure into law. “While this is a good day for America,” Clinton said, “you can’t really say it is a happy day.”104
Oklahoma City has not languished since 1995. Far from it. In recent years, it has ranked highly on comparative assessments of the country’s “most affordable” cities or its “most recession-proof” places.105 A key to Oklahoma City’s renewal and vitality lies in decisions taken in the early 1990s to impose a one-cent sales tax to raise funds for building projects for the city’s commercial districts and neighborhoods. The tax revenues helped build a minor league baseball stadium, a library, a museum, schools, and a canal that is a centerpiece of the Bricktown entertainment district, a short walk from the high-rise buildings downtown.106 “Anyone visiting our downtown in the early 1990s,” the Daily Oklahoman noted a few years ago, “would find it unrecognizable to the one they see today.”107
The renaissance is striking and even a bit surprising, considering how the bombing so shocked and devastated the city. Its bold response to the attack lent a measure of confidence and quiet self-assuredness. Oklahoma City undeniably is a hospitable place where visitors can quickly develop affinity for the city and its people. That feeling is borne not from pity for what happened in 1995 but rather from the ready congeniality of a city that is not full of itself. The site of the bombing has been impressively remade since 1995. The hulking, bombed-out shell of the Murrah Building was brought down four weeks after the attack, in a controlled demolition watched by hundreds of spectators and broadcast live on CNN. The demolition took all of eight seconds. Afterward, many spectators wept quietly and stared at the smoking ruins.108
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