The deadly blast toppled American notions of safety, exposed anti-government rage and unified a grieving city. Its lingering impacts are mixed.
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Not all mass shootings or hate crimes in the U.S. are considered domestic terrorism. Here’s why.
USA TODAY
Just after 9 a.m. on April 19, 1995, Jason Williamson was on the phone, helping a customer work out the logistics of a complex cash withdrawal. At 24, his stint as a phone teller at the federal employees credit union in downtown Oklahoma City was his first real job since earning his college business degree.
His desk on the third floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building sat to the left of the teller windows serving in-person customers who had come in on a sunny Wednesday morning.
As he spoke into the receiver, Williamson briefly noticed the lights flickering before the world suddenly went pitch black and quiet – then, all at once, he was engulfed by a deafening roar and the feeling that he was in free fall, plummeting into the earth.
At 9:02 a.m. on that day 30 years ago, a 4,800-pound fertilizer bomb detonated in a Ryder truck parked outside the north entrance of Oklahoma City’s federal building. The blast killed 168 people, 19 of them children, and injured nearly 700 more. It destroyed or damaged more than 300 buildings.
“It remains the worst event ever of domestic terrorism in the U.S.,” said former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, who was barely a few months into his term at the time. “And I hope it stays that way.”
So far, it has.
But the event upended Americans’ sense of safety, lay bare the rage of anti-government sentiment and galvanized a grieving city determined to help survivors and ensure the memories of the lost lived on.
Three decades later, experts say its long-lasting impacts are complicated: From lessons learned about the power of a unified community to those less grasped about the grievances of growing right-wing extremism − all amid concerns the horrific event is slipping from memory.
“We thought terrorism would come from outside our country, and we couldn’t believe this was a homegrown individual,” said former Oklahoma radio host John Erling, whose “Erling in the Morning” aired on Tulsa’s KRMG from 1976 to 2005. “The fact that all these people were killed, and that it included babies and children – it was a horrific feeling for all of us.”
Anti-government extremists and white supremacists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were quickly apprehended and charged, then eventually tried and convicted of the crime. Both were enraged by federal actions during a 1992 standoff in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the 1993 siege of a religious sect’s compound in Waco, Texas, both of which had turned deadly and inflamed far-right fears about federal intrusion on freedoms around guns and religion.
McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran who planned the attack and detonated the bomb, intentionally triggered the blast two years to the day that the Waco siege ended with the deaths of 75 Branch Davidian members, seeing the act as part of a war against government oppression. He was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001. Nichols, who had helped prepare the device, was sentenced to life in prison.
“It shifted the dialogue about who the threat was and what they believed,” said Amy Cooter, author of “Nostalgia, Nationalism, and the U.S. Militia Movement.” “We did have this image of ourselves as being protected from geopolitical violence. It was jarring to see it happen on U.S. soil.”
Making sense of chaos
At first, Williamson thought he was dead. He remembered thinking that at least it was quick and he didn’t suffer. It seemed he was in a soundless void, “like outer space.”
The haze gradually began to clear. The bank of teller windows was gone altogether. Williamson began to comprehend that much of the building was a gaping hole yawning over a giant crater. He shut down; it was too much to process.
“What happened?” he finally heard someone scream. It was his colleague Bobbi, whose desk was around the corner.
“That’s what snapped me out of it,” Williamson said. Other colleagues began to emerge from the third-floor debris. He remembered one of them remarking that a nearby desk belonged to the Army recruiting office on the fourth floor. Where there should have been a door, a hallway and the northern set of third-floor offices, he said, was now open sky.
As Williamson and the others wondered what to do, two other building employees, cut and bleeding, appeared and said the building’s south stairwell offered a way out. They made their way down to ground level and eventually around to the side of the blast, where Williamson, numb with shock and missing a shoe, eyed the ruins and wondered what had become of the rest of his co-workers.
‘We’ve lost that innocence’
Cooter was a middle schooler in East Tennessee at the time of the bombing but recalled watching news coverage about the event, as well as Ruby Ridge and Waco. In the days that followed, she remembered how the nation’s social fabric suddenly seemed to have been ripped with the attack on America’s heartland.
As Cooter grew to understand the links between the bombing and the events that came before it, she became interested in more fully understanding the anti-government sentiment she had seen firsthand in her rural community. She’s now deputy director and co-founder of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism.
“I remember in the aftermath, people talked about driving down the interstate and seeing a moving truck and wondering if there was something harmful inside,” Cooter said. “We were worried about each other as potential threats and not seeing each other as neighbors.”
More than 40% of Americans after the bombing worried about becoming a victim of terrorism, according to a white paper published in 2021 by the Cato Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Marita Sturken, a professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, said the bombing was the most visible indication of growing populist forces that would have far-reaching political implications that linger today.
“The roots of much of the polarization in the U.S. can be seen in the 1990s,” Sturken said. “The anger at government overreach really has its roots in that era. … It was also the first stages of the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, so the sense of people being screwed over and left behind economically were very powerful then.”
The incident would also usher in a new era of homegrown violence that would gradually color American life. The Oklahoma City bombing would soon be overshadowed by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which had followed the massacre at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, in April 1999, the first major mass shooting at a school.
“Kids have to live in fear for their lives,” said Erling, the former radio host. “We didn’t have that before McVeigh. We’ve lost that innocence.”
But from anguish grew hope. The people of Oklahoma united in a powerful and therapeutic way to support survivors of the bombing and, ultimately, to create a memorial to those lost. Intercity rivalries gave way to state pride.
“We were all one,” Erling said. “There was a big separation between Oklahoma City and Tulsa, but the bond between the two became stronger. The whole world was watching.”
Oklahoma businesses and individuals rose to the occasion “without regard for who got credit for anything,” said Keating, the former governor. “There was not one act of looting. It was a transformative event.”
A downtown revitalization was accelerated after the bombing as the city tapped groundswells of pride and resilience. Among those efforts was the creation of a complex that would not only honor the victims of the blast but seek to unravel the reasons behind it.
“It was remarkable how soon survivors and others were intensely interested in being part of the project,” said Edward Linenthal, author of “The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory” and a professor emeritus of history at Indiana University Bloomington. “They needed to learn how to work together and to realize the memorial wasn’t really for them − it was for the future.”
How the event resonates today
The resulting memorial and museum – and the civic cooperation that went into their making – are among the bombing’s enduring legacies. So, too, is the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon, which has grown to become one of the nation’s best-known races since launching in 2001.
Meanwhile, nearly 200 children of bombing victims pursued college or vocational education with the help of scholarship fund programs, Keating said.
“We were able to take care of everyone who lost one or more parents and wanted to go to college,” Keating said. “It was the right thing to do.”
In 1999, a task force appointed by Oklahoma City Mayor Ron Norick soon after the bombing recommended creation of a monument dedicated to “those who were killed, those who survived and those changed forever.”
The Oklahoma City National Memorial, constructed on the site of the Alfred J. Murrah building, was dedicated on April 19, 2000. Among the site’s most notable features are the Field of Empty Chairs, each bearing the name of someone who died; an elm tree that survived the explosion; and a wall bearing the names of those who survived.
“The way in which they organized as a community to build the memorial and the thoughtfulness that went into that is exemplary,” said Sturken, author of several books about American memorialization. “There’s plenty of things one could criticize about how the museum ultimately presented the story, but the way in which that city came together was really powerful.”
Understanding and conveying the broader lessons behind mass violence are a harder lift and where such memorials typically fall short, Sturken said.
“It’s hard to step back and have a broader discussion about politics,” Sturken said. “I will give them credit in Oklahoma City; they created a whole institute about issues of security, research and policymaking. They were actually thinking more broadly about having something good come of that process.”
The National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, however, which included a training center and terrorism database, ultimately closed in 2014 for lack of funding.
Linenthal, who was a member of the Flight 93 Memorial Commission after 9/11, said the community’s thoughtfulness and cohesion nonetheless provided a blueprint for memorials that would follow.
“If we are going to memorialize these events and try to combat the toxins of violence through true educational programs and witness testimony, Oklahoma City was a model to begin from,” he said.
But Linenthal believes it’s important not to mischaracterize the attack or its victims.
“It’s far too easy to try to turn these horrific events into just stories of resilience and courage and bravery,” he said. “There’s nothing redemptive about what happened. These people did not consciously give their lives for their country. They were murdered while they were at work.”
‘I was one of the lucky ones’
Williamson said 18 of his co-workers were murdered that day. In a two-week span after the bombing, he went to 12 funerals.
The experience became a wake-up call, he said. He left banking to follow the path he really wanted, pursuing a doctorate in German. He now teaches online courses as a professor of ancient and modern languages at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee after a stint at the University of Oklahoma.
But the effects lingered. For years afterward, Williamson said, walks down long hallways conjured vivid images of massive explosions and thoughts about where the pieces would fall. Lightning, thunder, flickering lights – he’d find himself gripping the sides of his desk.
Thirty years later, he said, those things hardly ever happen anymore.
“It definitely hits me emotionally and unexpectedly at times,” Williamson said. “I try not to lose sight of the fact that in so many ways, I was one of the lucky ones.”
It occurred to him recently that all but one of his co-workers who died that day were younger than he is now.
Williamson doesn’t plan to return for this year’s ceremonies; milestone numbers are important, he said, but he prefers more intimate memories. He recalled the 11th anniversary, when the group that gathered was so modest they could all fit around the survivor tree at the site.
Some years ago, when he still lived in Oklahoma City, he recalled being kept awake one night by noisy neighbors. He found himself driving to the memorial site at 4 a.m. on a rainy night.
It was the first and only time he had ever walked into the Field of Chairs alone. Except it was as if he wasn’t.
At that moment, “I felt really connected to my 18 co-workers,” he said. “Like they were symbolically there in the chairs there with me. It was a really special moment.”
The lessons unlearned
The 30th anniversary of the bombing and the nation’s polarization highlight concerns that memories fade and lessons can be forgotten, some say.
Erling recalls speaking several years ago to a class of high school freshmen in small-town Oklahoma. He asked students to raise their hands if they had never heard of the bombing.
“Many hands went up,” he said. “I was shocked. … Life has moved on.”
Linenthal encountered similar experiences as he wound down his college teaching career. “When I would bring up Oklahoma City, students would often get this quizzical look on their face,” he said. “Many would say they’d heard of it but didn’t know much about it. I realized that for some people this was ancient modern history.”
Sturken said that rather than urgency about extremism, the bombing instead illustrated that such forces were just getting started. The villainization of Timothy McVeigh became the narrative rather than serious examination of societal forces prompting his radicalization.
“There was a lot of focus on him as an individual rather than asking how things in society are making people left behind in a way that’s fueling anger,” she said.
Ken Foote, a professor of geography, sustainability and community and urban studies at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, said that because the U.S. government never formally apologized for either Waco or Ruby Ridge, “some of the issues raised by these events have not really been addressed.”
Messaging about the lingering threat of domestic terrorism has in some respects “been drowned out by everything that’s happened since,” he said. “The message is still there, but it hasn’t taken hold more broadly. There is a need to keep reminding ourselves.”
Cooter said one population that hasn’t forgotten about the bombing is militia groups themselves. “It’s still very central to their identity and how they navigate their relationship with the government,” she said.
She worries federal cuts to national security efforts by President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency indicate monitoring such concerns are no longer a priority. Funding for many national security efforts have been stymied by budget cuts in Washington.
“A few months ago, I would have said the bombing was a key event that spurred us to invest more in understanding domestic terrorism from an academic and law enforcement perspective, trying to do more to stop it before it happens,” Cooter said. “But the progress we’ve made, especially after 9/11, has frankly been undone with the removal of federal funding. I’m not sure what that fight is going to look like in the next few years.”
Likewise, Linenthal said the anniversary poses larger questions about what society chooses to remember and what it consciously chooses to forget – an increasingly important concern, he said, given DOGE cuts to federal agencies that oversee or fund such historical narratives.
“It’s heartbreaking in the most profound sense that the federal government is seeing fit to do away with most grant funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities,” he said. “That’s the kind of insidious forgetfulness that to me is horrific and almost beyond words.”
Erling wonders what McVeigh would think about what’s happening today. The bombing, for all the death and destruction it caused, “didn’t accomplish a darn thing,” he said.
“If he thought that was oppressive then, the oppressiveness of what’s happening is more so now because a lot of people are waking up and thinking, ‘When am I going to get my notice?’ There’s this fear of the government taking their jobs and healthcare away from them. That oppressiveness is going on in a greater way.”
The memorial, he said, ensures that people will never forget what happened. Though the sense of solidarity that united Oklahomans after the bombing has dissipated, he doesn’t doubt that people would rise to the occasion again if needed.
“I believe it’s within our hearts and souls,” he said. “That commonality of kindness still rests in our hearts.”