The Oklahoma City Bombing took place 25 years ago today. We look back at what inspired the despicable act of terrorism:
, primarily through mail order and at gun shows, and, to a very small extent, through bookstores. On a recent day on Amazon.com, the novel held the sales rank of 3,146 out of 2-5 million books, with an average customer evaluation of three and an half stars out of five.is a true underground classic, graphically reminding readers that before the “underground” was the spawning place for next season’s fashions and musical tastes, it was the hideout of hardened revolutionaries.
That Pierce might in some way have inspired so much destruction doesn’t exactly sadden him. He won’t debate the nature of his influence so much as quibble legalistically with the details. This afternoon, for instance, he takes exception to the notion that The Turner Diaries is an exact blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing. “McVeigh used a bomb in which the two essential ingredients were nitromethane and ammonium nitrate set off by a detonating cord,” he says.
“I try not to be obsessed with how much I dislike Morris Dees,” he says, “and what I would like to do to him if I could ever get him alone.” The Alliance is often described as a neo-Nazi organization, but Pierce, knowing the reflexive connotations of the word Nazi, prefers to use the expression “National Socialist.” He actually disdains those “hobbyists” who dress up in storm-trooper regalia, flex biceps tattooed with swastikas and march around screaming “nigger” this, “Jew” that.
With one hand on the wheel, Pierce casually steers his white Chevy Blazer through the hairpin turns of West Virginia State Highway 219. He seems preoccupied. He’s been married five times. The last three wives have been from Eastern Europe. He sighs. “I can’t really live alone,” he says. “I really do need to have a woman. I mean, I get depressed, I get antsy if I don’t have a woman. But what causes my marriages to break up? It’s because of my work. I’ve never been able to find a true soul mate.
“You could have used the postmistress’s phone,” Pierce says, riffling through two boxes of mail. There’s a copy of the Jerusalem Post, a Manila packet from a sympathizer in Zagreb, Croatia, and several stacks of letters, ten or fifteen to a bundle. “It’s the highlight of my day, seeing the membership applications arrive,” he says.
“It’s true I was arrested, but I didn’t do anything,” Pierce says. “When this woman talked to the police, she accused me of holding her as a sex slave, beating her up, stealing her purse, threatening her life. She had worked for me only four days. One day we had a big blow-up. I grabbed her purse and just hung it on the doorknob so she would leave. The magistrate didn’t seem very excited about the whole thing.
He set up shop in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Crystal City, Virginia, living on fifty dollars a month in his office above a real estate agency. The telephone hardly ever rang. By day, he scrawled his jeremiads. At night, he shared the bed with his epileptic cat, Harold.
When he arrived at Rice University in 1951, he studied physics and chemistry, a scholarship student among oil-rich frat boys. What he really wanted, however, was to be an astronaut. Growing up in the Thirties and Forties, he had become enamored of space travel even before it was a realistic possibility. He longed to see himself as a storybook hero, an outsider accomplishing great deeds against long odds — and incidentally winning the girl.
His sense of aesthetics violated, Pierce became intolerant of the Fairchilds’ marriage. “I just slowly withdrew from them,” he says. “I didn’t have enough self-confidence to say to him, ‘What are you doing married to a nonwhite woman?'” Pierce was taken as much by Rockwell’s ideas about white power as he was by his manner. It occurred to him that he, too, might like to try his hand at writing about race. He left Oregon State in 1965 after three years on the faculty and moved his wife and sons to the East Coast, accepting a job in North Haven, Connecticut, as senior research scientist for the Pratt and Whitney aerospace laboratory.
His friend Revilo Oliver, then a classics professor at the University of Illinois — and a longtime racist — suggested that he try disseminating his views through fiction, as was done in didactic novels such as Jack London’s The Iron Heel, an account of a working-class revolt against the wealthy. There’s a pulpy, Hollywood-disaster-movie feel to the novel that Pierce has tagged a “handbook for white victory.” Imagine Armageddon as engineered by middle-management white guys in short sleeves who just can’t take it anymore. From 1975 to 1978, he serialized the narrative in Attack! and its successor, the National Vanguard, both of which he often sold himself for twenty-five cents while walking around suburban shopping centers and the streets of Washington, D.C.
In 1983, at Pierce’s invitation, Mathews delivered a fiery anti-Semitic address at a National Alliance convention in Arlington, Virginia. “My brothers, my sisters,” Mathews began. “From the mist-shrouded, forested valleys and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, I bring you a message of solidarity, a call to action, and a demand for adherence to duty as members of the vanguard of an Aryan resurgence and, ultimately, total Aryan victory.” It ended, “We have broken the chains of Jewish thought.
Since his death, Mathews has become a martyr to the racist cause here and in Europe. He is commemorated in songs such as “True Heroes,” by the popular hatecore band Nordic Thunder . “They joked among themselves that the money came from Bob Mathews,” says Kirsten Kaiser. “Who has $95,000 in cash?”
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