Learning the Lessons of the Oklahoma City Bombing 15 Years Later

Fifteen years after the Oklahoma City bombing that claimed 168 lives, the memory seemed so distant even in the state where it happened that Oklahoma officials earlier this month passed a law requiring the state's board of education to develop and teach courses about the death and destruction that occurred at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building at precisely 9:02 a.m. on Wednesday, April 19, 1995.

Discussing the new measure at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, Gov. Brad Henry found it difficult to explain why the state had to mandate the teaching of a topic of such obvious local and national significance.

"Although the events of April 19, 1995, are indelibly etched in the minds of so many Oklahomans, most of today's school children were not even born when that day dramatically changed our history," Henry said. "It is essential for them and the generations of students that follow to learn the significance of this horrific event.."

The new law -- House Bill 2750 -- says as much about the bombing's disappearance from our national narrative as it does about the impoverished state of public education in the Sooner state. Not only has the emotion and attention surrounding bomber Timothy McVeigh's cowardly assault on "the government" receded with time, as all historic events naturally do, it's been overshadowed by the much larger and much more complex attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. McVeigh was once on the cover of Time magazine as the face of terror. Now and forever more to hundreds of millions of Americans that face belongs to Osama bin Laden and his fellow travelers.

At the time, however, the Oklahoma City bombing was the largest and deadliest crime in American history. Former soldiers McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and maybe (or maybe not) others unknown, murdered 168 men, women and children and wounded hundreds more. The colossal flash of homemade explosives ended that generation's burgeoning anti-government movement -- a movement reflected in such incidents as the standoff in remote Ruby Ridge, Idaho, with a separatist family and the FBI's siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. To this day, the explosion that ripped the heart out of a "heartland" city remains the worst domestic crime ever committed by Americans and is otherwise surpassed in scope only by 9/11.

About 17 times as many people were murdered on 9/11 as were murdered on April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City. There were more people (255) who died on 9/11 whose last names began with the letter "S" than who died at the Murrah Building. But, as I wrote about on the first anniversary of 9/11, it isn't just the orders of magnitude involved between the two dreadful days that explains why the latter has superseded the former for most Americans. It isn't just that one was broadcast live on national television while the other one came to us in the 24/7 news world of the Internet age. It isn't just that one occurred at the cores of power and population while the other occurred in that vast expanse of country between both coasts.

Compared with the rippling (and in many ways crippling) effects wrought by 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing was a tidy affair from start to finish. It was the sort of storyline with which most Americans are familiar. There's the evil plot, the warped reality of the planners, the attack upon innocents, the heroic work by rescue workers and law enforcement officials, the lucky break and, ultimately, justice. Although many of the same elements exist, there has been no such straight narrative in the wake of the terror attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. It's still clearly an "ongoing event," as intelligence officials like to say, both in terms of future terror attacks and the fate of the terrorists we have in hand.

The legal and political and financial twists and turns stemming from the 9/11 attacks continue nearly a decade later. Debates even persisted on what should be built at Ground Zero. But less than three years after McVeigh lit the fuse and walked away from his rented Ryder truck, both he and Nichols had been captured, charged, tried and convicted. McVeigh's life story lasted just a few years more. On June 11, 2001, exactly three months before the Twin Towers fell to dust, McVeigh was executed on a hot, muggy morning in Terre Haute, Indiana. Nichols, meanwhile, has spent the past 12 years since his conviction mostly in silence and solitary confinement at the "Supermax" federal penitentiary near Florence, Colorado. Their awful story had a startling beginning, an instructive middle, and a comfortable end -- just like all those made-for-television movies.

No such script yet exists for the 9/11 crime. The hijackers all died instantly -- they never received their due justice in this realm. Nearly nine years after the attacks, Bin Laden is still free. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who already has confessed to the crime, remains un-tried, un-convicted and un-sentenced. So does Ramzi Binalshibh, another key 9/11 plotter. The only person convicted of a serious 9/11-related crime was the buffoon Zacarias Moussaoui (who pleaded guilty and tried to convince his jury to have him executed). The 9/11 story sure had its gut-busting, heart-breaking beginning but a decade later there is no end in sight. We're just stuck in the middle, fighting still over tribunal rules.

They probably don't teach irony in Oklahoma's public schools. But the great irony of the timing of Oklahoma's new education initiative is that while the import of April 19, 1995, has faded for many, the stark political and economic and racial and cultural dynamics that fueled its tragedy are ascendant again. Indeed, the enduring strain of American anger toward government, which led McVeigh to his deadly act of violence, April 19, 1995, persists. We saw it in last summer's rhetoric over health care, in the language used to describe the president of the United States, and in the signs painted for and proudly produced at "Tea Party" rallies.