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The hands that wrote the letters — as cordial and warmly worded as they were — had the blood of 168 people on them. It would’ve been easy, as the reader, to forget that. But if a reminder was ever needed of who Timothy McVeigh was, a remark in one of the letters provided it.
“It was a barbed comment and just repulsive,” said Phil Bacharach. “He was talking about the families and survivors of the victims — and he referred to them as ‘this woe-is-me crowd.’” Three decades later, those words from the Oklahoma City bomber, handwritten on a sheet from a yellow legal pad, still have the power to make Bacharach angry.
But just as disconcerting in hindsight, he said, is how he failed to see through McVeigh’s act. “I’d like to say I was just young, but I think I was 30 or 31,” he said. “Clearly, I was naïve.
It was sometime afterward that I think I realized what a skilled manipulator he was.” People are also reading..
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S. history left 168 people dead — Bacharach met the accused perpetrator in person about a year afterward. Arranged through McVeigh’s defense attorney, he was allowed into the El Reno Correctional Facility to talk with McVeigh as part of a group of news reporters.
From there, a correspondence began with McVeigh that lasted a couple of years. Bacharach kept the letters and later wrote about them, including in a story for Esquire magazine. Some have been displayed at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum.
Bacharach’s goal at the time, he said, was to keep the correspondence with McVeigh going. Growing more and more obsessed with the case, he wanted the opportunity to dig deeper. But there was also the possibility of more.
McVeigh was open about his desire to find a journalist with whom he could share his story for a book. Bacharach wanted the job. McVeigh came across as surprisingly normal Bacharach, who eventually left the news business, is in a different line of work these days.
Well known in Oklahoma political circles, he’s enjoyed a long run handling communications for a range of high-profile state leaders and offices. They include two governors, the State Department of Education and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, where he now works. While he misses a lot about journalism, being able to put some distance between himself and the bombing story has been a good thing overall, Bacharach said.
“For years I was consumed by the case. It kind of screwed me up, how much I was affected by it.” Now, if possible, he tries to “block out” everything, the annual anniversaries included.
This year’s, marking 30 years, is Saturday, April 19. But Bacharach knows as well as anyone who covered it that he can never totally put the bombing behind him. And that includes his memories of the man who engineered it.
In the original images to emerge after McVeigh’s capture, the bomber met the world’s prying eyes with an emotionless “thousand-yard stare,” Bacharach said. But in person, at El Reno, it was a night-and-day difference. “He was this gangly, skinny young guy, and he had a big smile on his face,” Bacharach recalled.
“He stuck out his hand and shook my hand.” A 27-year-old Buffalo, New York, native and Army veteran, McVeigh came across as surprisingly normal, he added. “I remember he was joking about Oklahoma radio and how it centered so much on high school basketball.
” Bacharach, a reporter for the alternative newspaper Oklahoma Gazette, later wrote a story based on the visit. It was that article that first prompted McVeigh to reach out. “I commend you for your excellent recall and absolute fairness,” McVeigh wrote in that initial 1996 letter addressed to “Mr.
Phil Bacharach.” But his main reason for writing, he added, was to correct a misquote. “I had written that he described the FBI as ‘wizards of PR,’” Bacharach recalled.
“And he said, ‘No, what I said was “wizards of propaganda.”’ McVeigh went on to explain why he put it that way, bringing up the agency’s handling of the federal law enforcement siege of a cult compound near Waco, Texas. Bacharach wrote back, but that was it for a while.
Then later, after his summer 1997 trial, McVeigh started writing again and would continue for about two years while imprisoned in the federal “Supermax” prison in Colorado. ‘The whole “banality of evil” idea definitely fits’ With each of the 17 letters he received from Inmate No. 12076-064, the picture Bacharach was forming in his mind evolved.
McVeigh “really comes across as smart with an analytical mind and a sense of humor,” he said. Many of the topics were mundane, ranging from daily prison life to pop culture. “He was a big science fiction fan.
He liked Star Trek. He loved ‘The Simpsons.’ “He watched ‘Seinfeld’ and told me he was disappointed in the series finale like everyone else.
” It was understood, Bacharach said, that McVeigh wouldn’t discuss the bombing or admit his guilt, but he did expound on other topics. McVeigh wrote at length on some of his anti-government political takes and issues with his defense team, which he thought had poorly represented him. In one letter, McVeigh described getting to know Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who was also imprisoned at the Supermax.
“Initially, he was really disgusted by Kaczynski because he was so dirty and filthy, evidently,” Bacharach said. “But he warmed up to him sometime afterward.” Taken as a whole, the letters offer a window into McVeigh’s mind.
“One of the most fascinating things to me was that he did not — in my visit with him or in the letters — ever seem like the monster that he obviously was,” Bacharach said. To this day, it’s impossible to reconcile the side of McVeigh he came to know, he said, with the crime he committed. “The whole ‘banality of evil’ idea definitely fits with him,” he said.
Bacharach met McVeigh’s parents and sister As the larger story of the bombing and McVeigh unfolded, Bacharach found himself drawn ever deeper in. Because of that original letter, he was even called to testify at McVeigh’s 1997 federal trial for the murders of eight federal agents who died in the blast. Subpoenaed for the last day of the sentencing phase, Bacharach met McVeigh’s family — his parents and sister — along with friends from his time in the Army.
Bacharach couldn’t help but feel for them. “That, as much as anything, really impacted how I thought about him,” he said. “You can’t spend the entire day with the parents of a horrifying killer and not understand the humanity of everyone else he’s impacting.
” The sentencing concluded with little surprise. McVeigh, pending appeals, was going to die. While he didn’t question that justice was served, McVeigh’s execution on June 11, 2001, left Bacharach feeling “ambivalent.
” “I’d known him at least in a limited way through correspondence, and so I just felt empty.” By that time, it had been almost two years since the two had last communicated. Up until the end, McVeigh had strung Bacharach along, hinting that he might choose him to tell his story to the world.
Ultimately, however, he went with reporters from his hometown of Buffalo. “He said he’d decided to go a different direction,” Bacharach recalled. McVeigh’s final letter to him concluded with his usual sign-off: “Later, Tim.
” Heading toward the smoke on April 19, 1995 Along with memories of McVeigh, Bacharach has others he’s been unable to block out completely. A whole string of them trace back to that fateful morning in April 1995. “I thought it was some sort of gas line explosion,” said Bacharach, who was getting ready to leave for work when the walls of his apartment started shaking.
The reporter, who lived about 10 miles from downtown Oklahoma City, quickly headed that way, sensing a “big story.” An ominous plume of black smoke hovered over the skyline, he said, and he arrived to find the streets “shimmering with broken glass.” That’s how it began: Bacharach’s coverage of the most important story of his journalism career.
He would write dozens of pieces related to the bombing over the coming months, while meeting many of the people directly affected. “I didn’t know anyone personally who died, but I did become pretty close with certain people who had lost loved ones or survivors,” he said. Trying to get close to the killer turned out to be less rewarding.
But in the end, an opportunity to interview McVeigh for a book wouldn’t have worked out anyway, he said. By that point, Bacharach was transitioning into a new career as deputy press secretary for Gov. Frank Keating.
After the final letter, he and McVeigh were never in contact again. McVeigh was ‘at core an evil human being’ Although Bacharach held onto the letters, it’s been years since he’s read them. And he has no desire to revisit them now.
The same goes for one other item McVeigh mailed to him. “It’s certainly the most unusual Christmas card I’ve ever received,” Bacharach said of the card McVeigh sent one holiday season from prison. Featuring a traditional Santa Claus with a bag of toys on the cover, it’s both unsettling and weirdly contradictory.
Did McVeigh, in acknowledging the season, stop to think what Christmas would be like now for the families of the 168 people he murdered? It’s a question that Bacharach, having long since given up trying to explain McVeigh, cannot answer. But there’s at least one thing about the killer that he feels, in the end, he can say with certainty. And that’s the “horrible waste of a life” that he represents.
“Because again, like all people, he had potential as a human being,” Bacharach said. “There were all these other facets to him.” And yet, “you don’t kill hundreds of people and wound 500-plus others without being, at core, an evil human being.
”.
