WEDNESDAY AUGUST 08 2001
Vidal casts McVeigh as a hero
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2001272364,00.html
FROM JAMES BONE IN NEW YORK
GORE VIDAL, publishing the first extracts of his death row correspondence
with Timothy McVeigh, has described the executed Oklahoma City bomber as a
hero and cast doubt on whether he acted alone.
The American man of letters became an unlikely soulmate for McVeigh, a
self-styled anti-government warrior, when he published a 1998 essay in
Vanity Fair magazine lamenting the Government's assault on Americans'
liberties and the "shredding of our Bill of Rights". McVeigh, already in
prison for the worst terrorist attack on US soil, wrote to Vidal to commend
the piece, initiating what would become an off-and-on three-year
correspondence that culminated in an invitation to witness his execution.
Vidal has now published parts of his pen pal's letters along with his own
often polemical analysis of the case in Vanity Fair, hinting that government
infiltrators may have had a hand in the 1995 bombing that killed 168 people.
The kinship between the two men is apparent from the start. Writing with
perfect grammar and spelling in a slanting hand, McVeigh tells Vidal in his
second letter that he had read his "political musings" and "I think you'd be
surprised at how much of that material I agree with".
"As to your letter, I fully recognise that 'the general rebellion against
what our government has become is the most interesting (and I think
important) story in our history this century'," he wrote. "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.
"Although I have many observations that I'd like to throw at you, I must
keep this letter to a practical length - so I will mention just one: 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 OKC bombing be considered a 'counterattack' rather than
a self-declared war? Would it not be more akin to Hiroshima than Pearl
Harbor?" Vidal, whose historical fiction displays a penchant for conspiracy
theories, seems won over by McVeigh's logic. Noting that McVeigh made no
final statement before his execution other than copying out the poem
Invictus by W.E. Henley, he points out that Henley's other works included an
anthology entitled Lyra Heroica, (1892) about those who performed selfless
heroic deeds.
"The stoic serenity of McVeigh's last days certainly qualified him as a
Henley-style hero," Vidal writes. "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. He seems more and more to have
stumbled into the wrong American era. Plainly, he needed a self-consuming
cause to define him.
"The abolition of slavery or the preservation of the Union would have been
more worthy of his life than anger at the excesses of our corrupt secret
police."
Vidal missed McVeigh's execution when it was rescheduled because the FBI
found new documents that it had not provided to his defence lawyers. But his
subsequent investigations have left him deeply suspicious of the FBI's case
and convinced that, despite his own confession, McVeigh was part of a wider
conspiracy.
"Evidence . . . is overwhelming that there was a plot involving militia
types and government infiltrators - who knows? - as prime movers to create
panic to get Clinton to sign that infamous Anti-Terrorism Act," Vidal
writes.
