33. As another example, early news reports greatly exaggerated the violence and mayhem that Hurricane Katrina unleashed on New Orleans in 2005. See W. Joseph Campbell, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 163–83.
34. Stephen Sloan, oral history interview (October 20, 1999), Oklahoma City National Memorial Center.
35. It was erroneously reported, for example, that a second bomb had been found inside the ruins of the Murrah Building and disarmed. See “Washington Officials Can Cite No Probable Cause,” CNN, April 19, 1995, transcript retrieved from LexisNexis database.
36. See “Analyst—Oklahoma Bombing Has Look of Mid-East Terror,” CNN, April 19, 1995, transcript retrieved from LexisNexis database. Sloan also said on the CNN program that the bombing likely was the work of “a well-organized group with a clandestine infrastructure and the logistics and capabilities to [survey] the area and engage in a very horrible operation.”
37. Chung was fired about a month later as the CBS Evening News coanchor, an assignment she shared with Dan Rather. A front-page report in the Philadelphia Inquirer said about her dismissal: “Connie Chung had one real assignment as Dan Rather’s co-anchor on CBS Evening News: Raise plummeting ratings and help the network resurrect itself as broadcasting’s leading news outlet. She failed.” Gail Shister and Stephen Seplow, “Chung’s Exit Blamed on Falling Ratings; She Says She’s the Fall Guy,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 23, 1995. At the time, Peter Jennings on ABC was the evening-news ratings leader. His program was watched in about 8.5 million homes. Tom Brokaw of NBC was next, in 7 million homes. The Rather-Chung duo was third, in 6.5 million homes.
38. “CBS News Special Report: Terror in the Heartland,” CBS News, April 19, 1995, transcript retrieved from LexisNexis database.
39. “The Bombing in Oklahoma City,” ABC News Primetime Live, April 19, 1995, transcript retrieved from LexisNexis database.
40. “FBI Beefs Up Security Nationwide after Explosion,” CNN, April 19, 1995, transcript retrieved from LexisNexis database.
41. Laura E. Keeton et al., “In Broad Daylight, Terrorism Hits Home: U.S. Building Bombed,” Wall Street Journal, April 20, 1995.
42. Owen, “Fresh Day in City Turns into New-Found Horror.”
43. Indeed, the lead FBI agent on the Oklahoma City bombing case, Weldon L. Kennedy, wrote in a memoir in 2007: “It’s not surprising that there would have been suspicion about Middle Easterners. The bombing took place only two years after the World Trade Center bombing, in which a Ryder rental truck had also been used.” Kennedy, On-Scene Commander, 207.
44. See Steve Lackmeyer and David Zizzo, “City Struggles with Shock of Deadly Bombing; Scores Killed in Bomb Blast,” Daily Oklahoman, April 20, 1995.
45. Sam Vincent Meddis, “Terror in Heartland: 12 Kids among 31 Dead in Oklahoma Bombing,” USA Today, April 20, 1995.
46. See Steve Lackmeyer and David Zizzo, “Scores Dies in Downtown Explosion,” Daily Oklahoman, April 20, 1995. See also Judy Gibbs, “At Least 33 Killed in Deadliest U.S. Bombing in 75 Years,” Associated Press, April 20, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database. See also “Comparison of the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center Blasts,” Associated Press, April 19, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
47. Hanger, “First Person Summer Series Features Charlie Hanger.”
48. “Reliable Sources,” CNN, April 23, 1995, transcript retrieved from LexisNexis database.
49. Wolf Blitzer, “Jordanian-American Bomb Suspect Discusses His Ordeal,” CNN, April 23, 1995, transcript retrieved from LexisNexis database. Ahmad said he was well treated in Chicago and offered to stay the night there, to demonstrate he was not fleeing the country.
50. Blitzer, “Jordanian-American Bomb Suspect Discusses His Ordeal.”
51. Quoted in Jeremy Bowen, “Investigating Islamophobia,” documentary (2001), accessed October 20, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGKzBrZhDS4.
52. Tim Weiner, “F.B.I. Hunts 2d Bombing Suspect and Seeks Links to Far Right,” New York Times, April 23, 1995.
53. Keith Schneider, “Terror in Oklahoma: The Far Right; Bomb Echoes Extremists’ Tactics,” New York Times, April 26, 1995. Alter, the Newsweek columnist, also discussed suspicions about right-wing extremists: “The militia movement has mostly operated below the country’s radar—this despite the fact that the numbers of violent right-wing extremists dwarf those of the much more publicized left-wing radicals of the past. . . . Right-wing groups are much harder to stereotype, which makes the need for vigilance against them all the stronger. They look like mainstream Americans (white, male, rural, blue collar), and their self-proclaimed patriotism masks their sometimes treasonous intent. If they are not us, they are close enough.” Alter, “The Media: Jumping to Conclusions,” 55.
54. Eric E. Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, quoted in Ed Timms, “McVeigh and the Militia: His Legacy Differs from Member to Member,” Dallas Morning News, June 8, 2001. See also Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (New York: Harper, 2013), 279–80. Walker wrote: “There are conflicting accounts as to whether McVeigh attended a Michigan Militia meeting, but even the witness who believes he was there states that he attended as a guest, not a member” (280).
55. Victoria Loe Hicks invoked the diary metaphor in a detailed article in 1998, writing that McVeigh and Nichols “inadvertently kept a virtual diary of their plotting: the phone card they used to locate bomb components, reserve the bomb truck and communicate with each other.” Hicks, “On the Trail of a Phantom: No Trace of John Doe Bomb Suspect,” Dallas Morning News, June 7, 1998, article retrieved from Access World News Research Collection database.
56. Weldon Kennedy, the lead FBI agent on the Oklahoma City bombing case, stated in his memoir that agents “were able to reconstruct every move, contact, and telephone call” made by McVeigh, Nichols, and Fortier in the eighteen months before the bombing. Kennedy further wrote: “I can say with total confidence that we identified all three conspirators in this case and arrested them.” Kennedy, On-Scene Commander, 220.
57. For a book-length claim that the conspiracy likely went beyond McVeigh, Nichols, and Fortier, see Andrew Gumbel and Robert G. Charles, Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed—and Why It Still Matters (New York: William Morrow, 2012). The authors write: “The Oklahoma City bombing was a conspiracy, and McVeigh and Nichols were charged accordingly. The real question is: how far did the conspiracy go?” (12). It is a question, ultimately, that the authors did not fully answer.
58. See Fred Bayles, “Two Men Taken into Custody in Missouri,” Associated Press, May 2, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
59. Peter Carlson, “In All the Speculation and Spin Surrounding the Oklahoma City Bombing, John Doe 2 Has Become a Legend,” Washington Post Magazine, March 23, 1997, 14.
60. Peter Carlson wrote in the Washington Post Magazine that the front-on sketch of John Doe No. 2 was developed by a sketch artist using the FBI Facial Identification Catalogue—“a book of 960 photographs of faces, all of them front views.” The mechanic, Kessinger, was asked “to point out the pictures that showed the correct nose and eyes and chin. The artist then used Kessinger’s choices to create the sketches. In the case of John Doe 1, this method yielded a sketch that looked remarkably like McVeigh. In the case of John Doe 2, however, it produced a front-view sketch of a man never seen from the front, a bare-headed sketch of a man never seen without a hat.” Carlson, “In All the Speculation and Spin Surrounding the Oklahoma City Bombing, John Doe 2 Has Become a Legend,” 14.
61. See ibid.
62. Penny Owen, “McVeigh’s Team Tries to Show Search Based on Wrong Men,” Daily Oklahoman, May 24, 1997.
63. See Hicks, “On the Trail of a Phantom.” Hicks’s article quoted Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, an expert on human memory, as saying: “What we have here is unconscious transference, a mistaken recollection of a person seen in one
situation with a person seen in another.” See also David Ross et al., “Unconscious Transference and Mistaken Identity: When a Witness Misidentifies a Familiar But Innocent Person,” Journal of Applied Psychology 79, no. 6 (December 1994): 918–30.
64. Todd Bunting told an interviewer in 1997: “I still get stares going down the street. They think, ‘God, that guy looks familiar.’” He also said: “This whole thing has left me in limbo for the last two years.” Quoted in Mona Breckenridge, “Former Soldier Still Haunted by Mistaken Label of ‘John Doe No. 2,’” Associated Press, April 2, 1997, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
65. Sandra Sanchez, “Getting On with His Life: Man Who Wasn’t ‘John Doe No. 2’ Seeks Anonymity,” USA Today, July 12, 1995. See also Pierre Thomas and George Lardner Jr., “FBI Finds ‘John Doe 2,’ Drops Him as Suspect,” Washington Post, June 15, 1995.
66. Quoted in Nolan Clay and Penny Owen, “Nichols’ Defense Hopes to Shift Attention to John Doe 2,” Daily Oklahoman, December 3, 1997.
67. After a trial in an Oklahoma state court seven years later, a jury convicted Nichols on 161 counts of first-degree murder in the bombing. He was sentenced, again, to life in prison.
68. See “Excerpts from Grand Jury Report,” Daily Oklahoman, December 31, 1998. In her closing arguments at Terry Nichols’s federal trial in 1997, prosecutor Beth Wilkinson said that “sightings of John Doe 2 were about as common and credible as sightings of Elvis.” See Jo Thomas, “Closing Arguments Made In Oklahoma Bomb Case,” New York Times, December 16, 1997.
69. “Excerpts from Grand Jury Report.”
70. Quoted in “McVeigh Tells Newspaper There Never Was a John Doe No. 2,” Associated Press, May 15, 2001, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
71. Quoted in Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist, 286. The authors noted that McVeigh “never wavered from his story: he alone drove the truck bomb to Oklahoma City, parked it in front of the building, and lit the fuses. And he alone made the decision to bomb the building during daylight hours, when it was full of people. Yet Jones [his lawyer] seemed to think that McVeigh was sacrificing himself to protect others.”
72. Stephen Jones and Peter Israel, Others Unknown: The Oklahoma City Bombing Case and Conspiracy (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), 90.
73. In their 2012 book, Gumbel and Charles noted this conundrum, writing: “One of the prickliest problems with the government’s case was its failure to explain how McVeigh and Nichols could build a huge destructive device without advanced explosives training and be confident it would go off.” Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 351.
74. Jones and Israel, Others Unknown, xii.
75. Ibid., 121.
76. Ibid., 143. The reference to “holding the bag” pertains to Yousef’s escape from New York City following the first World Trade Center attack, which killed six people and injured hundreds. He was arrested in Pakistan in February 1995.
77. See Jones, Others Unknown, 142. Nichols was reported in 2005 to have denied involvement with Yousef, telling a California congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, that such claims were “baloney.” See Jim Crogan, “The Rohrabacher Test,” LA Weekly, July 7, 2005, accessed June 12, 2013, www.laweekly.com/2005–07–07/news/the-rohrabacher-test/.
78. James William Gibson, “An Explosion of Conspiracy Theories on the Oklahoma City Bombing,” Washington Post, December 21, 1998. Mark Singer of the New Yorker called Jones’s book “tendentious, self-serving, bloated with irrelevant details that bespeak its lack of substance.” Singer, “Time to Kill: The Tents Are Up, the Crowds Are Ready—and Still Waiting,” New Yorker, May 28, 2001, 60.
79. Vincent Bugliosi, in his hefty book debunking conspiracy theories in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, noted that the “conspiracy argument in the Kennedy assassination requires the belief that for over forty years a great number of people have been able to keep silent about the plot behind the most important and investigated murder of the twentieth century. In other words, it requires a belief in the impossible.” Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (New York: Norton, 2007), 1442.
80. Ibid., 1439 (emphasis in the original).
81. See Hicks, “On the Trail of a Phantom.”
82. Time/CNN poll, June 6, 1997, data cited here retrieved from Polling the Nations database.
83. Gallup poll, April 19, 2000, data cited here retrieved from Polling the Nations database.
84. Gallup poll, June 8–10, 2001, data cited here retrieved from the Gallup organization’s online “Gallup Brain” database.
85. For a discussion of one journalist’s extended but unavailing search for John Doe No. 2, see Jo Thomas, “The Third Man: A Reporter Investigates the Oklahoma City Bombing,” Syracuse Law Review 59 (2009): 459–69.
86. See “Precautions after Oklahoma City,” New York Times, April 21, 1995. The Times editorial stated: “It is impossible to look at the grotesquely shattered remains of the Oklahoma City Federal Building without wondering whether such bombings will become a brutal commonplace of American life.”
87. Data from the Los Angeles Times survey were retrieved from the Polling the Nations database. The question’s wording was, “Would you be willing to give up some civil liberties if that were necessary to curb terrorism in this country, or not?” The question was among those asked in a telephone survey of 1,032 American adults on April 30, 1995.
88. See Lynn M. Kuzma, “Terrorism in the United States,” Public Opinion Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2000): 103. Kuzma also wrote: “While Americans have consistently identified terrorism as a significant threat to U.S. security in the 1990s, there has been little evidence that most Americans have personalized this fear” (97).
89. Quoted in Ann Devroy and Steve Vogel, “Closing the Avenue: Barricades Seal Off a Symbol of Openness,” Washington Post, May 21, 1995. But it was unfair and misleading to compare the Murrah Building with the White House, Robert L. Hershey, president of the D.C. Society of Professional Engineers, wrote several years later: “The Oklahoma City bomb was in a truck parked 10 feet from the federal building. The White House is 350 feet from Pennsylvania Avenue. Blast pressure decreases roughly with the square of the distance. This means that pressure on the White House would be far less than one-thousandth of the pressure to which the Murrah Building was exposed. The buildings also are not comparable. The White House was rebuilt for security in the ’50s with heavy steel girders, 660 tons of steel reinforced concrete and walls roughly a foot thick. By contrast, most of the walls in the Oklahoma City building were quarter-inch glass. Because stress decreases with wall thickness, stresses at the White House would be a factor of several thousand less than at Oklahoma City if they were subjected to the same pressure. When the effects of distance and wall thickness are combined, the White House is safer from bomb blasts than the Oklahoma City building by a factor of several million.” Hershey, “Reopen America’s Street,” Washington Post, March 9, 2003.
90. Quoted in Devroy and Vogel, “Closing the Avenue.”
91. As noted in the Washington Post, the president’s schedule “is kept more secret, his movements are less visible to the outside world. Bigger motorcades, wider and deeper ‘perimeters’ between the president and regular people, audiences forced to spend hours going through metal detectors before a presidential event all signal the strengthening of the security cocoon around presidents.” Devroy and Vogel, “Closing the Avenue.”
92. “The Avenue: No Closed Case,” Washington Post, December 13, 1995.
93. Quoted in Ron Shaffer, “Dr. Gridlock: How to Reopen Pennsylvania Ave.,” Washington Post, May 30, 1996.
94. Rod Grams, “Dismantle Those Barricades,” Washington Post, May 20, 1996.
95. Witold Rybcznski, “The Blast-Proof City,” Foreign Policy, September 2, 2011, accessed June 11, 2013, www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/09/02/the_blast_proof_city.
96. “25 Moments: Capital Girds Against Terror,” Washington Post Magazine, December 4, 2011, 18.
; 97. The security response to the Oklahoma City bombing reached far beyond downtown Washington. “The new realities of terrorism protection are working themselves into the fabric of the American cityscape,” observed the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “We are taking steps to permanently armor our major public spaces.” Christopher Hawthorne, “Working Security—and People—into the Ellipse,” Washington Post, August 21, 2011.
98. See John F. Harris, “Clinton Signs ‘Mighty Blow’ against Terrorism; Softened Measure Becomes Law,” Washington Post, April 25, 1996. See also Terence Hunt, “Clinton Dedicates Anti-Terrorism Law to Victims’ Families,” Associated Press, April 24, 1996, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
99. Quoted in “Terrorism Bill Flaws,” Charleston Gazette (West Virginia), April 26, 1996.
100. David Cole and James X. Dempsey, Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security (New York: New Press, 2006), 135.
101. Ibid., 136. They also noted: “Curtailing civil liberties does not necessarily promote national security” (241).
102. Ibid., 136.
103. See “William J. Clinton: Statement on Signing the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996,” April 24, 1996, the American Presidency Project, accessed June 11, 2013, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=52713.
104. Quoted in Angie Cannon, “Law Aims to Hasten Executions by Limiting Federal Appeals,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 25, 1996.
105. See “Forbes Names Oklahoma City as Nation’s Most Affordable,” Forbes, October 28, 2010, accessed June 12, 2013, www.forbes.com/2010/10/28/affordable-cities-cost-of-living-lifestyle-real-estate-salaries.html.
106. For a glowing tribute to the city and its successes, see Sam Anderson, “A Basketball Fairy Tale in Middle America,” New York Times Magazine, November 8, 2012, accessed June 12, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/magazine/the-oklahoma-city-thunders-fairy-tale-rise.html.
107. “So Much Has Changed Since Attacks on 9/11,” Daily Oklahoman, August 7, 2011.
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