Twenty-nine years ago today, the United States suffered its worst act of domestic terrorism: Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh and his ilk were motivated by a laundry list of real and imagined grievances they had been nursing for years. The story of the Oklahoma City bombing has been told many times over — by victims, journalists, government officials and academics; most recently in HBO’s An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th.
The new film comes from Blowback Productions duo Marc Levin and Daphne Pinkerson, but it’s Couric who is credited as the producer. She was also a driving force behind last year’s powerful America Inside Out With Katie Couric, which tackled issues like Confederate statues, free speech on college campuses and the media’s role in shaping our culture.
An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th marks one more attempt to make sense of what McVeigh did — this time through archival footage leading up to the event and expert testimonies from journalists, historians and survivors (available for streaming on Max). The documentary does a good job explaining not only what happened that day but how we got there; how close are we to getting there again or have we already?
It opens with grandmother Kathy Sanders remembering where she was hours before the bomb went off on April 19th, 1995 — getting her young grandsons Colton and Chase ready for daycare. As Sanders’ voiceover plays over home video footage of Colton helping his little brother put on his shoes — how could they have known? — you brace yourself for what’s coming next.
Then there’s a hard cut to chaos; those first moments after the bomb went off when downtown Oklahoma City must have looked like an active war zone. “This can’t happen here,” says journalist Mike Boettcher about what he remembers thinking that day. But it did. One hundred and sixty-eight people died that day, 19 of them children. It’s hard to watch, but you must look at this footage of death if you hope to learn the lessons An American Bombing has in mind.
You may have never seen a lot of this footage before, and starting with it underlines the fact that none of the following is meant to diminish what McVeigh did; only to explain it within a context that we still have not reckoned with. Starting with horror — with victims who remember their loss as if it just happened yesterday — creates a framework where there are no “good guys.”
After McVeigh’s crime in the 90s, we allowed his story to become our reality; and so it did, with a few exceptions. Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier aside, McVeigh was a lone wolf — or so we’ve been told. But that’s not entirely true, argues An American Bombing: The Oklahoma City Bombing Was Not an Isolated Incident of Right-Wing Extremism. It was part of a broader context of white supremacist movements in this country.
So the documentary charts the history of those movements, starting with the First Wave in 1983 after Vietnam veterans returned home and during the Farm Crisis of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Following their government down a rabbit hole filled with deception and abandonment, white power “patriots” were quick to step in and offer answers to this broken group’s questions about its own identity — leading among them being Louis Beam Jr., who first proposed leaderless resistance within the white power movement.
An American Bombing picks up again after the Fort Smith sedition trial in 1988 with the Second Wave in 1990. The Farm Crisis had taken hold by then, as had Reagan’s gutting of American industry — two events that shook Timothy McVeigh deeply.
But it wasn’t just these failures that brought out the worst responses from our government; it was also those failures fueled by Reagan’s War on Drugs that militarized federal law enforcement agencies like never before. That process reached its tragic apotheosis at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco in 1993, when FBI agents burned alive more than 75 men, women and children who were members or sympathizers of an offshoot sect called Branch Davidians — acts that only served to confirm for white supremacists what they already knew: The government is out of control; “patriots” need to put an end to their tyrannical reign.
An American Bombing does a great job of connecting the dots between McVeigh and the white supremacist groups he was affiliated with, tracing his path through the ideological movements that conceived him. Contrary to the lone wolf story McVeigh embraced against the advice of his legal counsel, this documentary argues he was inspired by — and quite possibly directed by — ideological forebears. It also raises questions about what the government knew and when it knew it, as well as what it might have done differently in response.
The film concludes with the Third Wave of American white supremacist movements coming to fruition on Jan. 6, 2021 — although grievances have changed since then, one thing is certain: Many who stormed the U.S. Capitol that day were cut from same cloth as McVeigh.
By repositioning Oklahoma City within a genealogy of white supremacy that runs through McVeigh, An American Bombing moves beyond a single-actor framework necessary for understanding contemporary attacks carried out under conditions of leaderless resistance. But is this sufficient? In an election year such as this one, where political talking points mirror those articulated by such movements; during a moment marked by rampant disinformation and misinformation campaigns fueled by social media platforms’ algorithms designed to maximize user engagement at any cost … can anything move these people?
Another point that could and should have been discussed is the media’s role in these cases. Whether it be fringe outlets that radicalize their audiences or mainstream sources desperate to have the next big thing, we have to ask ourselves what place they continue to occupy within our ideological landscape, which An American Bombing fails to do.
The victims tell the story of An American Bombing, namely Kathy Sanders and her family. A staunch victim’s rights activist who believes McVeigh didn’t act alone in his terrorism, Sanders has spent years demanding answers about what really happened on that day. It is through her that perhaps the most important message of An American Bombing comes to light: forgiveness can heal all wounds.
Though it doesn’t offer up any solutions for moving beyond the hate still corroding our political discussions, or suggest that forgiveness is the only one we’ve got, An American Bombing does identify where this hatred comes from more clearly than anything else I’ve seen. And maybe that knowledge, combined with forgiveness — every single one of us capable it — will be enough to save us all as we fight towards a brighter tomorrow. From HBO Documentary Films, An American Bombing: The Road To April 19th premiered April 19th and is streaming On Max below.
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