1995
Page 27
131. Shel Kaphan said the converted garage in suburban Seattle “was just like an office.” Kaphan, interview with author.
132. Jeff Bezos, “Electronic Book Selling,” C-SPAN, March 18, 1999, video accessed July 5, 2013, www.c-spanvideo.org/program/121884–1.
133. See, for example, Ryan Nakashima, “Amazon Nears Debut of Original TV Shows,” Associated Press, April 17, 2013, retrieved from LexisNexis database. See also Andrea Chang, “Bezos Known for His Unusual Forays,” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2013, and Peter Whoriskey, Jia Lynn Yang, and Cecilia Kang, “Chief Executive Is Noted for Patience,” Washington Post, August 6, 2013.
134. See Jeff Bezos, “A Bookstore by Any Other Name,” speech to the Commonwealth Club of California, July 27, 1998, accessed July 5, 2013, http://web.archive.org/web/20090622000804/http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/98/98–07bezos-speech.html.
135. Robert Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000), 69. See also Richard L. Brandt, One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011), 81. Brandt wrote that Amazon’s launch on July 16, 1995, “was just in time—just as masses of people started moving onto the Internet and before many competitors had created good commercial sites.” Shel Kaphan said that had Amazon been launched “another year or two years later, it would have been rougher to get a toehold.” Kaphan, interview with author.
136. See Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press, “Technology in the American Household,” 51. Most online purchases at the time, according to the Times Mirror study, “were made with credit cards, but little concern was found regarding card number security. Forty-two percent said they were ‘not at all’ concerned, 40% were concerned ‘a little’ and 17% said they worried ‘a lot’ about the risk inherent in this procedure.”
137. See Sangmoon Kim, “The Diffusion of the Internet: Trend and Causes,” Social Science Research 40, no. 2 (2011): 603.
138. Bezos, “Electronic Book Selling.” See also Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast, 59. Spector noted that half of Amazon.com’s early customers “phoned in their credit card numbers. . . . Some customers paid by check, while others chose to place their orders online. The latter group had to enter only the last five digits of their card number online, then call Amazon.com by phone with the remaining digits.”
139. Quoted in John Cook, “Meet Amazon.com’s First Employee: Shel Kaphan,” GeekWire, June 14, 2011, accessed July 5, 2013, www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-employee-1/3/.
140. Kaphan, interview with author. He likened Amazon’s launch to “some random guys trying to pull something out of their hats.”
141. Cited in Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2013), 39–40.
142. See Bezos, “Electronic Book Selling.”
143. Bezos, “A Bookstore by Any Other Name.” Amazon was hardly the first to make use of door desks. In the late 1960s, desks from doors were installed in offices of the technology company Bolt Beranek and Newman, or BBN. See Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 94–95.
144. Bezos, “Electronic Book Selling.”
145. Bezos, “A Bookstore by Any Other Name.”
146. See John Cassidy, Dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 140. See also Simon Avery, “From Early Web Visions, They Spun Gold,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), August 1, 2005.
147. See Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast, 70.
148. Jeffrey P. Bezos, “1997 Letter to Shareholders,” accessed April 20, 2014, www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312511110797/dex991.htm.
149. In his book about Bezos and Amazon.com, Brandt described the claims as “a nice marketing gimmick of questionable veracity.” Brandt, One Click, 70.
150. Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast, 68. Spector quoted one of Amazon’s first employees, Paul Barton-Davis, as saying: “We came up with a phrase ‘almost-in-time’ delivery. In other words, we don’t have the books you want, but we can get them real soon.”
151. Quoted in Cook, “Meet Amazon.com’s First Employee,” GeekWire (emphasis added).
152. See Stone, The Everything Store.
153. Kaphan, interview with author.
154. Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast, 36.
155. Bezos, “A Bookstore by Any Other Name.”
156. Kaphan, interview with author.
157. Bezos, “Electronic Book Selling.”
158. In late 1999, the Washington Post anonymously quoted an Amazon customer-service representative as saying, “We’re supposed to care deeply about customers, provided we can care deeply about them at an incredible rate of speed.” Mark Leibovich, “At Amazon.com, Service Workers without a Smile,” Washington Post, November 22, 1999.
159. Richard Howard, “How I ‘Escaped’ from Amazon.cult,” Seattle Weekly, July 15, 1998, accessed July 5, 2013, www.seattleweekly.com/1998–07–15/news/how-i-escaped-from-amazon-cult/.
160. Ibid.
161. See Jonathan Chait and Stephen Glass, “Amazon.Con,” Slate, January 5, 1997, accessed March 11, 2013, www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/1997/01/amazoncon.html.
162. See Jacqueline Doherty, “Amazon.bomb,” Barron’s, May 31, 1999, 28.
163. Knecht, “Reading the Market.” A not-infrequent critic of Amazon in recent years has been Paulo Santos of Seeking Alpha, an online financial news site launched in 2004. See David Streitfeld, “Amazon’s Prophet and Losses,” New York Times, December 16, 2013.
164. John Cassidy, in his book Dot.con, asserted: “It was the media that transformed Amazon.com from an interesting small business story into a multibillion-dollar corporate thriller” (140). That characterization seems hyperbolic, but it does offer a sense of the benefits of favorable attention from America’s largest business-oriented daily newspaper.
165. Knecht, “Reading the Market.”
166. Stone, Everything Store, 176.
167. See David Streitfeld, “Amazon Delivers Some Pie in the Sky,” New York Times, December 3, 2013, and Greg Bensinger, “Hurdles Surround Amazon’s Goal of Using Drones,” Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2013.
168. Bezos, not Amazon, owns the newspaper. About that purchase, Kaphan said: “It’s clear that [Bezos] likes being in the limelight. What better place to put yourself in the limelight than being the owner of one of the most prestigious papers in the country, if not the world?” Kaphan, interview with author.
169. Jack Shafer, “Jeff Bezos Has Two Words for You: ‘No Comment,’” Reuters, August 19, 2013, accessed October 19, 2013, http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2013/08/19/jeff-bezos-has-two-words-for-you-no-comment/.
170. Joshua Cooper Ramo, “The Fast-Moving Internet Economy Has a Jungle of Competitors . . . and Here’s the King,” Time, December 27, 1999, 51.
171. Ibid.
172. Steven Levy, “Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think,” Wired, November 13, 2011, accessed July 8, 2013, www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/ff_bezos/.
173. Adam Lashinsky, “Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter,” Fortune, December 3, 2012, 100.
174. See Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Technology Review: The King of Internet Sales,” Washington Post, January 8, 2012. Vaidhyanathan wrote: “A strong case can be made that Amazon, more than any other company or institution, made the Web safe for commerce. Or, at least, the security innovations that Amazon installed early in its existence gave people the confidence to enter credit card numbers and other sensitive information into Web sites.”
175. The definition of the wiki was adapted from Brenda Chawner and Paul H. Lewis, “WikiWikiWebs: New Ways to Communicate in a Web Environment,” Information Technology and Libraries, March 2006, 33.
176. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 33.
177. Quoted in “Interviews: Ward Cunningham,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, October–December 2011, 65.
178. Ward Cunningham
, interview with author (March 13, 2013).
179. Ibid.
180. Ibid.
181. See Ryan Songel, “Veni, Vidi, Wiki,” Wired, September 7, 2006, accessed July 19, 2013, www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/09/71733?currentPage=al.
182. Cunningham, interview with author.
183. The idealistic ethos of the Internet of the 1970s and 1980s, as Berners-Lee wrote in Weaving the Web, “was one of sharing for the common good” (197).
184. Ibid., 33.
185. See ibid., 57. Berners-Lee observed that as Web browsers were developed in the early 1990s, “no one working on them tried to include writing and editing functions. There seemed to be a perception that creating a browser had a strong potential for payback, since it would make information from around the world available to anyone who used it. Putting as much effort into the collaborative side of the Web didn’t seem to promise that millionfold multiplier.”
186. Ibid., 57.
187. Quoted in “Interviews: Ward Cunningham,” 66.
188. See Songel, “Veni, Vidi, Wiki.”
189. “A Wiki for Your Thoughts,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2005, accessed July 10, 2013, www.latimes.com/news/la-ed-wiki17jun17,0,924091.story.
190. See Joe Strupp, “‘L.A. Times’ Pulls Plug on ‘wikitorial,’” Editor & Publisher, July 1, 2005, 16.
191. See Howard Kurtz, “Michael Kinsley, L.A. Times Part on ‘Unfortunate Note,’” Washington Post, September 14, 2005.
192. Robert Niles, “Wikis Will Help Readers Direct the Community’s Most Powerful Voice,” The Masthead, Autumn 2005, 10. Niles also wrote: “What news publishers need is a tool that will allow any interested readers a seat at the table, with the ability to help direct what ought to be their community’s most powerful voice. Something like, oh, say, a wiki” (11).
193. Quoted in Evan Hansen, “Wikipedia Founder Edits Own Bio,” Wired, December 19, 2005, accessed July 10, 2013, www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69880.
194. Cunningham, interview with author.
195. See Wendell Cochran, “A Watershed Event for Online Newspapers,” American Journalism Review, June 1999, accessed May 3, 2012, www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=2006.
196. Jon Katz, “Guilty,” Wired, September 1995, accessed July 11, 2013, www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/oj.html. Katz also noted: “For better or worse, great stories have always transformed the media that cover them and the institutions they cover.” Todd Copilevitz, technology writer for the Dallas Morning News, said online coverage of the bombing ranked as his top “cyberculture” moment of 1995. Second on Copilevitz’s list was the emergence of Netscape; third was the telecommunications bill then making its way through Congress. See Copilevitz, “Top 10 Cyberculture Events,” Dallas Morning News, December 29, 1995.
197. Sue Hale, interview with author (August 19, 2013).
198. Hale’s recollections are from an oral history interview she gave in 2000. See Sue Hale, oral history interview (March 20, 2000), Oklahoma City National Memorial Center. Hale did not identify Williams in her oral history but supplied his name in an interview with the author. She also said she was not certain “how he got through to me. But he did.” Hale, interview with author.
2. TERROR IN THE HEARTLAND, AND A WARY AMERICA
1. See Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Regan Books, 2001), 229–30.
2. For details about the bomb and how McVeigh and Nichols prepared the explosives, see ibid., 215–20.
3. Ibid., 2. Michel and Herbeck wrote that McVeigh’s perceived grievances against the federal government included “U.S. military actions against smaller nations” and “no-knock search warrants” as well as “crooked politicians, overzealous government agents, high taxes, political correctness, gun laws.” McVeigh was also angered about the government siege in 1992 at the home of Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Weaver’s wife was fatally shot in that standoff. The federal government paid Randy Weaver $100,000 to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit. His three daughters each were awarded $1 million.
4. “Sketches of Victims Killed in Bombing,” Associated Press, April 28, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
5. “Terrorism’s Innocent Victims,” USA Today, May 12, 1995.
6. See “Those Who Were Killed: John Karl Van Ess III,” Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum, accessed February 5, 2014, www.oklahomacitynationalmemorial.org/secondary.php?section=1&ordering=146&catid=24.
7. “Those Who Died,” Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, Okla.), April 29, 1995.
8. Aren Almon-Kok, oral history interview (March 19, 2000), Oklahoma City National Memorial Center.
9. Paul R. Pillar discussed the 1995 National Intelligence Estimate in a commentary in the New York Times in 2004, stating: “The estimate postulated that the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993—in which the bombers’ objective was to topple the twin towers and kill thousands—had probably crossed a threshold in terms of ‘large-scale terrorist attacks’ and that more of the same would be coming. The kinds of targets the estimate identified as being especially at risk were ‘national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol and symbols of U.S. capitalism such as Wall Street.’” Pillar, “A Scapegoat Is Not a Solution,” New York Times, June 4, 2004.
10. Ted Koppel, “America’s Chronic Overreaction to Terrorism,” Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2013. Koppel, a television journalist, wrote: “At home, the U.S. has constructed an antiterrorism enterprise so immense, so costly and so inexorably interwoven with the defense establishment, police and intelligence agencies, communications systems, and with social media, travel networks and their attendant security apparatus, that the idea of downsizing, let alone disbanding such a construct, is an exercise in futility.”
11. Penny Owen, “Fresh Day in City Turns into New-Found Horror,” Daily Oklahoman, April 20, 1995.
12. Porter’s recollections are drawn from an oral history interview he gave to the Newseum, the museum of the news in Washington, D.C. See Charles Porter, oral history interview (April 22, 2003), Newseum.
13. A photograph very similar to Porter’s was taken by Lester (“Bob”) LaRue, then an employee of the Oklahoma Natural Gas Company. LaRue’s photograph appeared on the cover of Newsweek the week after the bombing. The gas company claimed ownership of the photograph, given that LaRue took it with a company camera while on company time. LaRue disputed that view and lost his job. See “Work Week,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 1997.
14. Lindel Hutson, oral history interview (March 20, 2000), Oklahoma City National Memorial Center.
15. Ibid.
16. Quoted in Joe Strupp, “The Photo Felt Around the World,” Editor & Publisher, May 13, 1995, 12.
17. Almon-Kok, oral history interview. Within hours of the bombing, Almon-Kok learned from a doctor that Baylee had been killed. Upon seeing Porter’s photograph in the newspaper the next day, Almon-Kok said she felt “so crushed.”
18. See Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist, 231.
19. McVeigh had placed a hand-lettered sign in the windshield, asking that the car not be towed. Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist, 231.
20. Michael Whiteley, “McVeigh in Long Line of ‘Party Barge’ Drivers,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, June 20, 1995.
21. Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist, 232.
22. Ibid., 237. They wrote that McVeigh thought he would be pulled over by police somewhere in Kansas, adding, “Cops in Oklahoma, he was sure, would be too busy dealing with the bombing.”
23. Quoted in Melinda Henneberger, “The Trooper: A By-the-Book Officer, ‘Suspicious by Nature,’ Spots Trouble and Acts Fast,” New York Times, April 23, 1995. Another acquaintance of Hanger was quoted as saying: “He even comes to church in his uniform.”
24. Hanger’s recollections and remarks about arresting McVeigh are drawn from his discussion in 2012 at the Oklahoma National Memorial and Museum. See Charles Hanger, “First
Person Summer Series Features Charlie Hanger,” Oklahoma National Memorial and Museum, August 24, 2012, video accessed June 4, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=e35EDGXtIlE&feature=player_embedded#!
25. Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist, 239–40.
26. Ibid., 226, 241.
27. Hanger, “First Person Summer Series Features Charlie Hanger.”
28. See Richard A. Serrano, “Witness Describes Horror of Truck Debris Flying By,” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1997, accessed June 5, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/1997–05–15/news/mn-59005_1_witness-stand.
29. See Weldon L. Kennedy, On-Scene Commander: From Street Agent to Deputy Director of the FBI (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007), 208.
30. See Nolan Clay and Robby Trammell, “Quick Legwork, Luck Almost Didn’t Catch Bomb Suspect,” Sunday Oklahoman, April 23, 1995.
31. See “2 Suspects Arrested in Blast,” Saturday Oklahoman and Times, April 22, 1995.
32. Jonathan Alter, a columnist for Newsweek, offered a sense of how jarring it was that the bombing suspects turned out to be white Americans. He wrote: “Who can deny that it would have been emotionally easier if foreigners had done it? Had ‘They’ been responsible, as so many suspected, the grief and anger could have been channeled against a fixed enemy, uniting the country as only an external threat can do. We might have ended up in war, but what a cathartic war it would have been! Or so it felt, in brief spasms of outrage, to more Americans than would care to admit it. And if we couldn’t identify a country to bomb, at least we could have the comfort of knowing that the depravity of the crime—its subhuman quality—was the product of another culture unfathomably different from our own.” Alter, “The Media: Jumping to Conclusions,” Newsweek, May 1, 1995, 55.