Flashback: Episode 1 "McVeigh’s Mentor" (Sneak Peek)

with new episodes dropping every Wednesday, whether to applications. April, just past nine in the morning, a meeting of the Water Resources Board had just begun inside the Alfred pie Mura Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Basically, there are four elements that I have to ask receive information regarding a massive car bomb exploded outside of a large federal building in downtown Oklahoma City, shattering that building, killing children,

killing federal employees, military men, and civilians. The bomb weigh nearly seven thousand pounds, nearly three quarters of the weight of the nuclear device dropped on Hiroshima. Most people were already inside at work here when the blast ripped the nine story federal office building apart, shattering floors and the offices inside. Most devastating of all the day care center on the second floor, destroying that was where most of

the children who were killed had been. The first clue as to those responsible for the bombing, the worst domestic terror attack ever on American soil, was an eight foot piece of twisted meadow. It landed nearly six hundred feet away from the blast site. It was the axle to the writer rental truck that had carried the homemade bomb. The truck nine Ford, had a vehicle identification number stamped on that axle. It was thanks to the vehicle i D that FBI agents were able to track down and

arrest to suspect. The U s. Attorney General Janet Reno reported his capture to the nation. Timothy McVeigh, aged twenty seven, was arrested by local authorities twenty five years ago. Timothy mcveigh's heinous act killed one hundred and sixty eight people, including nineteen children. But here's something they didn't tell you on the news or teach you in school about what

happened in Oklahoma City. A Ford truck may have delivered the fateful payload that terrible April morning, and but Timothy mcveigh's act was really the end of a chain of events that began long before that day, the legacy of a toxic package of lies and hate that began seventy five years earlier with another four Ward, one whose name we associate with mass production, not mass murder. Welcome to Flashback, a new podcast from AZZI that aims to bring the

pass back to life like never before. I'm Sean Braswell, and I'll be your visiting professor, taking you on a journey through history that will change how you look at the world today. Imagine Flashback is that history class you always wanted to take but can never find one where there are no textbooks, no exams, and no note taking, just the most compelling and surprising stories from the past,

told by those who know them most about them. We are all living in the ripple effects of history, and so in the first seasonal Flashback, We're going to connect the dots on some of the most incredible, unintended consequences from the past. We'll learn how the invention of air conditioning change the landscape of American politics, how Hitler's doctor changed the course of World War two and much more. Today's lesson is a cautionary tale about hate, free speech,

and giving a big platform to little men. Actually, I remember I was in the sixth grade. I was going to Sat Jane's classic school at the time. This is Latrese Sutton. She was thirteen at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing. I remember being in class and the whole class sending up and looking out the window and seeing the boat coming out from far away. We didn't know what it was at the time, but it shook our school building. That was free massive. That was not

the only sign that something was amiss. My mom was supposed to be lux with me that day and she didn't show up during a lunch period, and since she was a nursing assistant, I thought maybe she got called into the hospital to help with all the people that were injured. Um, so I'm thinking anything of it. Latrise ate lunch with her friends and went to recess as usual. When my aunt came to pick us up from school, Um, she was crying, and I think at that point we

kind of knew something was wrong. Sutton's mom, Teresa, had gone alone downtown to the Mura Federal Building to get a Social Security card for Sutton's eight month old brother. When mcveigh's homemade bomb exploded, she was thirty three. Four years before Oklahoma City, Timothy McVeigh made his first killing. He received the Army Commendation Medal for it. Just two hours ago, Allied air forces began an attack on military

targets in Iraq and Kuwait. In January, the U S went to war against Iraq and the first Persian Gulf War. One of the first American soldiers to enter the enemy nation was a twenty two year old infantryman from Buffalo, New York. In the Gulf, you saw combat. This is correspondent Ed Bradley in a two thousand interview that Sixty Minutes did with McVeigh in his Death Row prison cell, and McVeigh was particularly open with his past. I did you fired a weapon at Yes and killed soldiers? Yes.

McVeigh was a gunner in a Bradley fighting vehicle, and he was a damn good shot. One day, his crew spotted an enemy machine gun nest in the distance. It was more than a mile away, but poised a major threat to American troops. When one of the Iraqi gunners briefly came up from his position, McVeigh popped him right in the chest. The lethal shot, taken from more than nineteen football fields away, would help force the surrender of thirty other Iraqis from that position and become the stuff

of legend in the army. McVeigh had been using firearms since boyhood. Tim McVeigh was raised in a rural town outside of Buffalo, New York. This is lou Michelle. He and his colleague at the Buffalo News, Dan Herbeck, spent seventy three hours interviewing McVeigh after the bombing, and at a very young age, his grandpa Ed taught him how to shoot guns rifles along the erie canal. Ed taught to him about safety. You just don't shout a gun anywhere because you could hurt somebody. The son of a

factory worker, young Tim had a typical boyhood. He loved pro football, comic books, and battles between good and evil. He even made his own Star Wars lightsabers by attaching flashlights to cardboard tubes. He was known as Noodle McVeigh because he was very slender and he was a target for bullies. Thus his hatred for bullies, and he came to realize the American government was the ultimate bully. But he didn't come to that realization right away. And in

May he joined the Army. And one of the things he told Dan Herbeck and I was that the army had all the ammunition anyone could ever want. McVeigh loved guns, and he loved the Army. At first, other soldiers might have hated the early morning wake ups, the strenuous training, the uniform inspections, and the discipline McVeigh thrived in late nine, but they learned he was on the fast track to being in the U s Special Forces, the elite of the elite. Then, just before his Special Forces try out,

McVeigh learned the Army had a different plan for him. Iraq. I went over there, hyped up, just like everyone else. This is McVeigh again in that sixty minutes interview. Not only is Saddam evil, all Iraqis are evil. Uh. What I experienced, though, is an entirely different ballgame. Dan Herbert co authored mcveigh's authorized biography, American Terrorist, with lou Michelle, and he looked at the US involvement in the Persian Gulf War as a giant, cruel bully picking on the

people of Iraq. By the time he got out of the army, he literally hated the US government, the government he had worked for. By the end of the year, McVeigh quit the army, and without the discipline, paycheck, and authorized isolence that it afforded him. McVeigh, the bitter antigovernment gun lover, was a loose cannon just waiting for a spark to light him up. Henry Ford was a lot

like Timothy McVeigh in some ways. He came from a simple, working class home near Lake Erie, and he grew to hate war and those he believed to be behind it. This is Victoria Weisti, a legal historian and author of Henry Ford's War on Jews. Ford was a fierce, fierce pacifist and went on record publicly criticizing the way that World War One was being conducted. The eccentric tycoon may have made his fortune from the automobile, but in nineteen fifteen he decided to take a boat to Europe in

a bold effort to end the war through diplomacy. It proved to be a giant fiasco. Ford's reputation took a beating in the papers. The Chicago Tribune called him quote an ignorant, idealist and an anarchist, and Ford didn't particularly care for being called ignorant or an anarchist, so he sued for Liabel, which made Matters even worse. Unable to stop the press from criticizing him, Ford tried something else, so in nineteen he purchased a newspaper in his own hometown, Dearborn, Michigan.

It was about to go defunct, was called the Dearborn Independent, and he even purchased a printing press. He brought it to the Ford Motor Company factory and he retooled it himself. Ford may not have called the national media fake news, but he was tired of the newspapers spreading what he considered lies. He wanted to have a means for reaching ordinary Americans directly and unfiltered, and it wasn't just to

protect his own reputation or sell more cars. Ford was deeply concerned with where America was going as a nation, and he wanted to use The Dearborn Independent to reshape cultural practices, um people's leisure time activities, how immigrants were assimilated into American culture, and what kind of politics should prevail. Ford used every means at his disposal to bolster his newspapers readership. Free copies were sent to schools, libraries, and

universities across the country. Ford dealers were even required to fill quotas for newspaper subscriptions, just like they did for their car sales. And because they never took subscriptions and they never sold ads, it was a complete loss leader for Ford, but he didn't care even if it did not make him money. Ford realized the power that having

his own print media pedestal gave him. He had entered the newspaper business to counter the lies he believed were being spread about him, and it didn't take long for Henry Ford to start spreading his own. To listen to this episode and full click the link in the show notes or search your podcast app for Flashback History's Unintended Consequences, premiering today,