Involvement of Gore Vidal

Vidal praises Oklahoma bomber for heroic aims

Writer applauds executed killer McVeigh and his Revere-like message that 'the Feds are coming'

Fiachra Gibbons Arts correspondent
Friday August 17, 2001
The Guardian

The writer Gore Vidal yesterday compared the executed Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh to Paul Revere, the hero of American independence.

In a withering address at the Edinburgh book festival, the liberal novelist and elder statesman of the Gore political dynasty said the former soldier decorated for bravery in the Gulf war wanted to send out a warning that the government had been bought by corporate America and "its secret police, the FBI, were out of control. What McVeigh was saying was, 'The Feds are coming, the Feds are coming'. "

In his strongest identification yet with the man who confessed to blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people in retaliation for the FBI's "slaughter at Waco", Vidal described him as a "Kipling hero" with an "overdeveloped sense of justice" who did what he did because he was inflamed by the massacre, the FBI's subsequent cover-up, and the way it "had shredded the bill of rights and the constitution. He was the man who would be king."

Vidal, whom McVeigh asked to witness his execution in June after the pair corresponded for three years, insisted McVeigh did not actually carry out the bombing, and hinted he was now close to revealing the names of those who did.

"I am about to drop another shoe. I have been working with a researcher who knows at least five of the people involved in the making of the bomb and its detonation. It may well be that McVeigh did not do it. In fact, I am sure he didn't do it. But when he found out he was going to be the patsy, he did something psychologically very strange. He decided to grab all credit for it himself, because he had no fear of death."

Vidal maintained this was because "McVeigh saw himself as John Brown of Kansas", the anti-slavery campaigner who was executed after leading a raid into the south which sparked the American civil war.

Vidal alleged that the FBI not only knew about the plot, it was involved in it. Having infiltrated the rightwing militia group that planned it, it did nothing because it wanted to pressure President Clinton into pushing through draconian anti-terrorist legislation he was refusing to sign. "Within a week of the bombing, Clinton signed it for 'the protection of the state and of persons', using the exact language that Adolf Hitler used after the Reichstag fire of 1933."

America was in the grip of what he called "a revolutionary situation" because wealth had become concentrated in the hands of only 1% of the population. "The truth is that 80% are not doing well, and many of those are farmers out in the mid-west who have been driven off their land by big business. They are the backbone of the militia movement. Many of them are as crazed as you can find. But they number over 4m, 300,000 of which are active."

Vidal revealed that having had his last meal of mint ice-cream with chocolate sauce, McVeigh spent his last hours watching the Coen Brothers' film Fargo on a black and white TV. "It's a great film but bloody, a body is shredded and suchlike, and not quite what he wanted to see, poor fellow."

He saved his greatest venom for Janet Reno, the attorney general during the 52-day Waco siege, for "persecuting a perfectly harmless bunch of religious nuts" and for presiding over the "lies and cover-up" that followed it. "Her mother was a very famous alligator wrestler in Florida, a family profession she herself should have pursued."

 

Vidal calls McVeigh a 'good soldier'

Special report: Timothy McVeigh

Michael Ellison in New York
Thursday August 9, 2001
The Guardian

The writer Gore Vidal suggests today that the executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was a hero of sorts who took sole responsibility for the attack as a "good soldier" who might not have made or placed the explosives.

Vidal, the author of novels, plays, essays and memoirs, accuses the media of presenting McVeigh as a one-dimensional demon and speculates about whether the FBI's failure to follow up many leads makes it guilty of treason.

McVeigh started a three-year, on-off correspondence with the writer after he read and admired an article by Vidal in Vanity Fair which accused the US government of using its agencies to erode citizens' rights.

Vidal, who lives in Italy, was invited to attend McVeigh's execution for the bombing that killed 168 people in 1995 but was unable to do so. Invoking Wagner, Shakespeare, HL Mencken, Truman Capote, Machiavelli, Einstein and the movie Dr Strangelove, Vidal notes in the September issue of Vanity Fair that McVeigh made no final statement but instead produced a hand-written copy of WE Henley's poem, Invictus.

He turns to an anthology of Henley's work, Lyra Heroica, published in 1892, "about those who had done selfless heroic deeds".

"I doubt if McVeigh ever came across it, but he would, no doubt, have identified with a group of young writers, among them Kipling, who were known as 'Henley's young men', forever standing on burning decks, each a master of his fate, captain of his soul...

"The stoic serenity of McVeigh's last days certainly qualify him as a Henley-style hero. He did not complain about his fate, took responsibility for what he was thought to have done; did not beg for mercy as our always sadistic media require."

One of McVeigh's letters from death row says: "In the four years since the bombing, your work is the first to really explore the underlying motivations for such a strike against the US government and for that I thank you.

"If federal agents are like 'so many Jacobins at war' with the citizens of this country, and if federal agencies 'daily wage war' against those citizens, then should not the Oklahoma City bombing be considered a 'counterattack' rather than a self-declared war? Would it not be more akin to Hiroshima than Pearl Harbour?"

Vidal says that the prosecution's case against McVeigh was weak: experts had questioned whether a single fertiliser bomb could have caused the damage.

"I believe that by confessing McVeigh was, once again, playing the soldier, attempting to protect his co-conspirators," writes Vidal.