blame people who played no role whatsoever in this tragedy.”
Now the Patriots’ chief talking point was that the president was trying to exploit the tragedy as a way of silencing his critics; eventually, the charge became an established part of conservative lore. Years later, in her 2002 bestseller, Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right, the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter would assert: “When impeached former president Bill Clinton identified Rush Limbaugh as the cause of the Oklahoma City bombing, he unleashed all the typical liberal curse words for conservatives. He blamed ‘loud and angry voices’ heard ‘over the airwaves in America’ that were making people ‘paranoid’ and spreading hate.”
Limbaugh and his fellow conservatives deployed this line of argument to limit serious discussion of Clinton’s subsequent anti-terrorism legislation, which included a proposal that would allow law enforcement to track large fertilizer purchases. The legislation was largely defanged in Congress. Limbaugh and Co. also shut off exploration of a deeper underlying issue: the increasing migration of ideas and agendas that originated on the racist far right into mainstream conservatism and the dynamic whereby rational anger and discontent with the federal government was being transformed into an irrational, visceral, and paranoid hatred of it.
This clampdown on rational discussion muddled the public’s understanding of the actual threat that the Patriot movement posed to democratic institutions, even as the movement kept producing a string of antigovernment radicals acting out violently.
In Roundup, Montana, following a series of confrontations with local law enforcement, LeRoy Schweitzer moved his cadre of Freemen out of their cabin, northward to a ranch a few miles outside the town of Jordan, owned by two fellow Freemen, Ralph and Emmett Clark. The Clark ranch was under foreclosure proceedings because the Clarks had refused to pay their taxes. At the ranch Schweitzer resumed his seminar sessions on “sovereign citizenship” and “common law courts,” even though he was wanted on a number of felony charges. People traveled from around the country to attend them. The Freemen also stepped up their “constitutional” actions against local law enforcement, threatening to hang a federal judge and the local prosecuting attorney. At this point the FBI stepped in.
On March 25, 1996, an FBI informant posing as an antenna installer convinced Schweitzer and one of his followers to check over the antenna installation a short distance from the cabin. The two Freemen soon found themselves surrounded by FBI agents and under arrest. FBI agents surrounded the Clark ranch and urged the Freemen remaining inside—about twenty people in all, including both Clark brothers and two children—to surrender. They refused, and another armed standoff had begun.
It lasted eighty-one days. The FBI—extremely sensitive to the criticism it had endured in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco—negotiated patiently with the Freemen. They enlisted the assistance of a number of third parties, even of some Patriot movement figures, Bo Gritz among them. They each negotiated for a few days, and then walked away in frustration, saying the Freemen were utterly unwilling to compromise, mendacious, and too paranoid to reason with.
The most successful negotiator turned out to be a moderate Republican legislator named Karl Ohs; his plainspoken style was the best bridge between the Freemen’s universe and the world waiting outside with guns. First he persuaded some of the people inside the ranch compound who were not facing arrest to come out of the house on their own. A few days later, on June 14, the remaining sixteen people came out. The Clarks and four others were slapped with federal charges, while eight others faced an array of other charges. Eventually, all of the participants were convicted, and some of those arrested on federal charges pled guilty and wound up serving a variety of sentences. Schweitzer received a twenty-two-year term and died in prison in September 2011.
The Freemen standoff demonstrated that the FBI had learned some lessons about dealing with Patriots and other similar groups. Those lessons would later be critical in its handling of the armed standoff on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in early 2016. It also demonstrated that the Patriot true believers were willing to spend prison time as the price of their beliefs.
Shortly after the Freemen standoff ended, on July 27, 1996, someone in Atlanta, Georgia, left a backpack bomb at the Centennial Park, the main gathering spot for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. When it detonated, it killed a spectator, Alice Hawthorne, and injured 111 people; one man died of a heart attack while rushing to the scene. Initial suspicion fell on a security guard at the scene, Richard Jewell, who had been the first to spot the backpack before it exploded and had begun clearing the area. After first being hailed as a hero, Jewell became the FBI’s prime suspect and was hounded by the media for weeks and even months afterward, until the investigating US attorney officially announced in October that Jewell had been exonerated. The investigation into the bombing remained officially open and unsolved, and the FBI admitted it had no other suspects.
On January 16, 1997, a bomb exploded outside an abortion clinic in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs. An hour later, another bomb hidden nearby detonated, injuring seven. FBI investigators noticed the devices’ similarity to that used in Centennial Park.
Then, on February 21, a bomb containing nails went off in a back room of the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian bar in downtown Atlanta, which was packed with about 150 people, though only four women were injured. More chillingly, the bomber left a second backpack bomb outside in a walkway, clearly intended to go off as the crowd exited the building in a panic. Fortunately it did not detonate, and investigators found it and promptly defused it.
By now, police figured one person might be responsible for all of the bombing incidents, but it took awhile before they were certain. Nearly a year later, on January 29, 1998, a security officer named Robert Sanderson was killed at a Birmingham, Alabama, abortion clinic, when he began examining a backpack bomb left outside the building, hidden beneath a shrub. Emily Lyons, a nurse standing nearby, was badly injured. A witness spotted a man sitting in a gray Nissan pickup near the bombing scene and, watching him drive away afterward, wrote down the license plate number. Soon the FBI had its first real suspect: Eric Robert Rudolph.
The day after the bombing the FBI announced it was seeking him as a person of interest in the case. A week later, Rudolph’s gray Nissan pickup was found abandoned in the woods near Murphy, North Carolina, one of his childhood stomping grounds. Immediately, hundreds of law-enforcement officers descended on the woods, but Rudolph successfully eluded them. By May, he was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List, with a $1 million reward on his head, where he stayed for the next five and a half years.
Rudolph was seen periodically by residents of the area around Murphy. Investigators began to suspect that some locals were harboring and assisting Rudolph. Finally, on May 31, 2003, he was captured by a rookie police officer in Murphy. Eventually he agreed to a plea bargain: life in prison with no chance of parole in exchange for a guilty plea. He then wrote an explicit confession detailing the bombings and his motivations for them.
Rudolph, thirty-nine at the time of his capture, was a religious fanatic who had been raised in rural North Carolina. When he was eighteen he had spent time with his mother in a Christian Identity community in rural Missouri and had converted to that belief system then, as his papers and writings indicate. He spent time in the Army in the 1980s but was discharged for marijuana use, and spent the next several years drifting around the South, gradually finding his calling as an anti-abortion and anti-gay zealot. He explained in a statement he issued after his arrest:
Because I believe that abortion is murder, I also believe that force is justified in an attempt to stop it. Because this government is committed to maintaining the policy of abortion, and protecting it, the agents of this government are the agents of mass murder, whether knowingly or unknowingly. And whether these agents of the government are armed or otherwise they are legitimate targets in the war to end this holocaust, especially those agents who carry arms in defense of this regime and the enforcement of its laws. This is the reason and the only reason for the targeting
