Blood and Politics (70 page)

Nevertheless, the production and publication of Herrnstein and Murray’s masterwork represented a most important break in conservative ranks. It also provided intellectual cover for those like Jared Taylor and his
American Renaissance
colleagues, who wanted to change the public discussion of race altogether. Much as Pat Buchanan’s rejection of the Persian Gulf War signaled his turn away from global interventionism, Charles Murray’s defection to the white side changed the balance of forces along America’s racial fault lines. Herrnstein, a psychology professor at Harvard, had long been looking for links between race and IQ measurements, but Murray was new to the field. With degrees from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he had spent decades studying social policy. First as a nonprofit program analyst in D.C. and then as an endowed fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Social Policy, he apparently grew increasingly critical of the welfare system and the “underclass” it supposedly created. In 1984, while still at the Manhattan Institute, he wrote a scalding critique entitled
Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980.
The federal welfare systems, he argued,
promoted crime and dependency, among other ills, and should be abolished. Murray’s book achieved Bible-like status in President Reagan’s administration and underwrote the arguments of those already on the campaign trail excoriating “welfare queens” and their supposed Cadillacs, even as Murray then abjured explicit discussion of race.
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When Murray took a step toward a study linking race and social stratification with IQ, some of his erstwhile conservative colleagues became nervous. According to a report in
The New York Times
, the president of the Manhattan Institute said that Murray “had little to gain in terms of useful knowledge as a result of his inquiry and much to lose.”
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Murray and the institute parted company. The mainline Brookings Institute also turned down an opportunity to sponsor Murray’s new research. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank highly regarded among economic conservatives, also passed. Finally, Murray landed at the American Enterprise Institute in 1990, carrying with him the same Bradley Foundation–endowed chair he had enjoyed at his Manhattan Institute perch. Business conservatives who had supported his earlier work on welfare switched sides after
The Bell Curve
appeared. “Biological determinism, which is what the Murray-Herrnstein book is all about, is anathema to the opportunity society,”
BusinessWeek
magazine declared.
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Jared Taylor’s
American Renaissance
, on the other hand, quickly embraced the book. It was simply restating ideas that it had promoted for years, the newsletter noted. It further believed that the controversy surrounding the book would help its cause. “The rules of dialogue may finally have changed,” the Renaissancers hoped. Would it become possible to once again publicly defend segregation in housing or education, on the basis that black IQs didn’t measure up? In one sentence that echoed David Duke’s claim that he said in public what others thought in private, the newsletter averred that “the tumult over this book cannot help but legitimize what millions of Americans already think privately.”
²²
The Bell Curve
might not immediately bring any new converts to its cause. But its appearance in suburban bookstores made it easier for those already convinced to express their ideas publicly. That process of legitimation, presumably, would eventually enable racially obsessed whites to win larger and more active followings.

April 19, 1995.
At 9:02 a.m., while elderly Social Security applicants waited for service and toddlers played in the day care center, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building collapsed in a jaggle of steel, concrete, and blood. Officials counted more than 500 wounded, many with life-changing injuries, and 168 dead, including 19 children. A rental truck, loaded with seven thousand pounds of fertilizer mixed with fuel oil in barrels, detonated by an arc of Tovex, had blasted apart the building, shattering all of downtown Oklahoma City and shaking Middle America’s sense of safety and proportion.
¹
At that moment this was the deadliest, most significant act of contemporary terrorism on American soil—incomprehensible in any commonsense terms. One initial response to the horror was to search for “Middle Eastern” terrorists, in part because of their use of truck bombs in the past.
²
But it soon became evident that the killers were Americans, born in the USA and bred on resentments circulating wildly in the terror zone where gun nuts met militias.
³

Within hours of the blast, investigators located the vehicle identification number inscribed on the rear axle. They traced the truck back to a Ryder rental agency outside Junction City, Kansas. After questioning agency personnel, the FBI developed composite drawings of two men who had rented the truck, a fair-haired John Doe One and a darker John Doe Two. One clue to the perpetrators’ motives became evident at that moment. To rent the truck, Doe One had displayed a North Dakota driver’s license with a birthday of April 19, the date of both the bombing and of the FBI’s final (and fiery) assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco. Agents then questioned area businesses and identified this Doe One as Timothy McVeigh, who had used his real name to rent a motel room. He had also listed a farmstead in Michigan belonging to James
Nichols as his home address. The FBI investigation moved to Michigan, and soon James’s brother Terry Nichols was wanted for questioning. Just days after the bombing, the FBI found McVeigh in an Oklahoma county jail. He had been picked up for driving without a license plate, which had fallen off in the blast. Two hours after that, Terry Nichols turned himself in to FBI agents in Kansas. Ultimately, one other coconspirator was located in Arizona. The olive-complected John Doe Two, however, was never identified.
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Who were these people? Terry Nichols and his older brother James had spent several years circulating on the edges of the militia movement in Michigan. They attended meetings, experimented with explosives, and adopted the common law sovereign status in order to distinguish themselves from so-called Fourteenth Amendment citizens. Terry Nichols, who had married a Filipina, was an odd candidate for such white nationalist pretensions. After moving from Michigan, he had settled in Kansas, not far from where his former army buddy McVeigh had been stationed at Fort Riley, and eked a living out of the gun and military surplus trade at the bottom of the paramilitary subculture.
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Timothy McVeigh was a disgruntled veteran of the First Persian Gulf War. He too traveled the gun and survivalist circuit, buying, selling, and trading weapons and paraphernalia. But he was more directly enmeshed in the milieu’s white nationalist undersprings. He carried copies of William Pierce’s
Turner Diaries
, and he adopted the militia movement’s public anger over Waco as his own cause. McVeigh used a telephone charge card issued by Liberty Lobby and made calls to known white supremacist outfits in the weeks before the bomb. And he had joined one of the many small Klan factions still taking memberships.
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By the time
Newsweek
issued its May 1 edition, with a color photo of a rescue worker cradling a bloodied baby in his arms, the public’s vision was split in two. One eye fixated on the senseless death and barbaric destruction in Oklahoma City. The other focused on the milieu from which the perpetrators had sprung. For the first time since The Order had captured headlines with tales of murder and armored car robberies, popular magazines and television footage focused on a movement that had survived largely in the recesses of public uninterest. While federal agents looked for leads in phone records and fertilizer sales receipts, journalists spread out to collect and report on the groups and individuals now euphemistically referred to as the antigovernment movement. Gun lobbyists at the National Rifle Association were brought under renewed scrutiny. Congressional representatives friendly to militia groups during the 1994 election season were now looked at more sharply. “Secretive,
paranoid, obsessed with guns and Waco, the militia movement may have 100,000 adherents,”
Newsweek
concluded.
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As a result of this media exposure, many main street Americans recoiled in horror at the antigovernment furor. President Clinton emerged as a combination tough federal cop and compassionate national father figure. As Clinton, who had been badly damaged by the 1994 election results, (temporarily) regained the stature of his office, the long free ride ended for gunslinging militia propagandists, as well as
The Spotlight
subscribers,
The Turner Diaries
fans, and other members of the movement. They howled in protest, as public opprobrium rose around paramilitarists and their apologists.
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William Pierce and the National Alliance, however, did not complain too loudly. McVeigh’s attachment to
The Turner Diaries
, and the similarities between a truck bomb in Pierce’s novel and the bomb in Oklahoma City pushed the National Alliance back into view for the first time since The Order. Pierce took advantage of the publicity and projected the image of a cold-blooded, but well-reasoned, revolutionary. Instead of claiming that white nationalists should be held innocent of murder and mayhem, he argued that more was soon to come. In an address broadcast across a shortwave radio band ten days after the bomb, Pierce laid down the direction he wanted his troops to go. The “government” was certainly the biggest terrorist, he claimed. To bolster his argument that society was diseased, he reprised complaints against “career women” who worked outside the home, “homosexuals” who had escaped the closet, “minorities” buffered by “artificial equality,” and of course the Jews. As such, he argued that it was natural for a few “normal people with healthy instincts” to respond to this so-called sickness with violence.

Pierce did not shrink from his conclusions: “Terrorism is a nasty business. Most of its victims are innocent people. Some of the office workers who died in the Federal Building in Oklahoma City may have been as much against the Clinton government as were those who set off the bomb. But terrorism is a form of warfare, and in war most of the victims are noncombatants.” This was not a new line of thought for him. He had written the same thing two decades before in the pages of
The Turner Diaries.
And in a summary of Robert Mathews’s Order, Pierce had argued that Mathews’s actions were not wrong, but simply premature. Now he made a corollary case. The problem with the bombing in Oklahoma City, he said in this broadcast, was that it needed to be connected to a larger “plan.” Absent such a plan, “we need to help people understand that a good bit, if not all, of the private terrorism we’ll be seeing in
the future will be a protest against the government’s destruction of America.”
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In effect, Pierce embraced McVeigh and the bombing.

Not surprisingly, Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby took a different tack from Pierce’s. Rather than consider the bombing the work of “healthy” individuals,
The Spotlight
’s first headline considered it a “cowardly” act.
¹⁰
As April and May turned to June, however, the tabloid began recirculating claims that the bomb itself was not simply a truckload of fertilizer and fuel oil. As these imaginary bombs grew in technical complexity, so did speculation about the actual perpetrators, and the tabloid became a clearinghouse for competing conspiracy theories.
¹¹

Soon the main lines of logic had been extended by
The Spotlight
and virtually every other movement media: if Timothy McVeigh was in fact guilty of detonating the truck bomb, then a set of mysterious others had put the plot in motion and turned him into the fall guy. These “others” were often considered to be federal agents of one kind or another. By these accounts, and they were multiple in number, it was the government, not the militia, that was responsible for the carnage in Oklahoma City. Thus the government was involved in a big cover-up of its crime. John Doe Two could not be found because the feds didn’t want to blow the cover off their story.
¹²
While few outside the paramilitary and white nationalist lines gave this reasoning much credence, it did serve those inside the ranks. A theory pinning the horror on the federal government rather than the “militia” kept those already within movement circles from jumping ship in disgust at the carnage. This new mantra was recited at every available opportunity after the bombing, while the identity of John Doe Two remained at the center of as many conspiracy theories as those of a second shooter on the grassy knoll.

Six weeks after the bombing, movement events promoted long before April 19 went on as planned. A pro-gunners rally on June 4, in Washington, D.C., drew four hundred to the Lincoln Memorial. Kirk Lyons climbed that platform to tout his civil suit on behalf of the estate of one of the Waco Davidians.
¹³
Lyons had, at various times, filed four different lawsuits against individual government officials. Two made civil rights and tort claims, and the largest,
Misty Dawn Ferguson et al. v. Janet Reno
, had twenty-three Davidians as plantiffs.
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A week later, June 11, a slightly different assembly gathered at Kansas City to defend “constitutionalism” from New World Order destroyers. Camouflage-clad militiamen stood security and took tickets from more than three hundred attendees. Here former Arizona Governor
Evan Mecham joined Colorado State Senator Charles Duke and California State Senator Don Rogers to defend states’ rights and the Tenth Amendment alongside a bevy of marginal Christian patriot characters out of a Posse Comitatus photo album.
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