The Execution of Timothy McVeigh: Psychohistorical Clues Amidst Cultural Mystification (article)

In many respects, the execution by lethal injection of Timothy McVeigh at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, on June 11, 2001, was simultaneously an Oklahoma City, an Oklahoma, an United States, and a world event. His death was the first federal execution in 38 years. It marked the final official act in the cultural drama that publicly began on April 19, 1995, when his truckbomb blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. It killed 168 people, injured over 600 people, damaged or destroyed dozens of buildings in a wide radius of downtown Oklahoma City, and shattered the mythic invulnerability of the American “Heartland.” I shall argue that McVeigh’s execution is both a product of American fantasy interacting with his own fantasies, and grist for the production of further fantasy and historical action.

This paper explores what the execution might “mean” and “feel like” at many psychohistorical levels. It further explores many themes in McVeigh’s life and how they coalesce into his later identity. It contrasts psychohistorical efforts to understand, with cultural efforts to mystify — together with the cultural proscription against allowing a villain to be human. In particular, it explores the unconscious link between McVeigh and the national group — and the reciprocal conscious disavowal of any connection. More implicitly than explicitly, it explores the relation between units we often label as “culture” and “personality,” “group fantasy” and “individual psychology.” At best, this study will be incomplete — and perhaps incompletable. Still, one must go on such clues as one can find.

Public officials, media professionals, and

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interviewees from the American public quickly arrived at a vocabulary and discourse for the execution. It was “not vengeance, but justice.” McVeigh had died “unrepentant,” “unremorseful.” If McVeigh’s deed was itself dastardly enough, his calling the death of the children in the day care center “collateral damage” worsened its hurt. His impassive emotion and “defiant glare” during the execution were incomprehensible. There was mostly revulsion at so “monstrous” a being and relief that “he is no longer on this earth and can’t hurt anyone else.” There was little effort to further understand his action. I sensed that it was no longer a person being killed, but a vile “thing” being snuffed out — a very deviant, bizarre, alien thing. Nowhere did I hear the word “killed” used. The language was that of clinical and legal “procedure.” With his death, there is widespread demand for “closure” — the term that was also widely used for an ending to rumination, anxiety, and grief several months after the bombing. The quest for defensive finality often makes impossible the ability to learn from experience.

Throughout the trial, the sentencing, the life on death row, and the execution, Timothy McVeigh projected the demeanor of a soldier caught by enemy forces, tried, and condemned to death. From the time of the 1991 Gulf War to the moment of his death, his personal identity of soldier-patriot is essential to comprehending his public actions. At the same time, the public and media image of his identity is one of progression from “All American Boy” to “All American Monster,” from a “friendly small town boy” (in Pendleton, upstate New York) into a “mass murderer,” and from a “happy-go-lucky teen-ager” and “model soldier” to a “disillusioned veteran.” The “soldier”-persona who bombed the Murrah Building is part of the monstrosity. The two identities, and their discourses, collided. (See Brandon M. Stickney, All-American Monster: The Unauthorized Biography of Timothy McVeigh, 1996.) Part of the “collision” is an utter separation, within American cultural ideology, between “individual” psychology and “group” psychology — as a result of which any link between McVeigh and the national group is disavowed.

Recollected facts of Timothy McVeigh’s childhood and youth blur into cultural legend, one virtually identical with that of the assailants at the Columbine, Colorado, high school, in April, 1999. (See my paper, “Disposable Youth,” in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Fall 2000.) McVeigh was variously described as nice, happy, shy, talkative, and an ordinary kid. Psychohistory would need to become a stimulus-response enterprise if one were inclined to attempt to extrapolate to the bombing from the facts of, say, Timothy’s place in the sibling order (middle, between two sisters), his parents’ divorce during his teens, and his Roman Catholic upbringing.

What is clear, though, is that McVeigh’s search for identity congealed around being a soldier. He enlisted in the army at age 20. In basic training, he met Terry Nichols, with whom he found a mutual love of guns and resentment of any government interference with bearing arms. (One wonders about a folie à deux between them.) He was considered a top gun in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, in which he was in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He was often observed taking photographs of dead Iraqi soldiers. Sgt. McVeigh was awarded the Bronze Star with Distinction. He was reported to be disillusioned when his application for Special Forces was not accepted and he left the army in late 1991.

It should be remembered that the term “collateral damage” originated as a euphemism used by American government spokesmen to refer to the large numbers of civilian Iraqis killed during the technologically spectacular air war-by-computer waged against military targets. McVeigh later appropriated the term for his own purposes, suggesting an identification with the very aggressor he had come to hate.

During the Gulf War, he was already reading — and recommending — the Turner Diaries, a novel depicting revolution against the federal government and bombing of its buildings. Despite his misgivings, McVeigh still continued to fuse the images of fighting for his country with fighting for his government. At the same time, “there seemed to be two Tim McVeighs: The disciplined, super-efficient soldier … and the budding survivalist who believed some of doomsday was on the way and rented a storage locker to stockpile supplies.” (Sharon Cohen, “America’s Home Grown Terrorist,” <multihome.www.opus1com/ian/PRIVATE/2001/05/05/2001050519380274.html>) Soon, the army identity and the soldier identity parted ways. Defense of country increasingly merged with survivalism.

McVeigh regularly attended weekend gun shows, at which conspiracy theories abounded. One may infer that splitting, projection, and rationalization came to dominate his mental organization

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and guide his action. His new identity congealed into that of a “good” patriot at war with his “evil” government. (See David Levine, “Hatred of Government,” Administrative Theory and Praxis, 1998.) Any previous doubt resolved into resolute clarity.

With the FBI siege of and assault on the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993, McVeigh’s soldier-identity completed a radical ideological transformation — one akin to the kind of moral conversion that we commonly associate with religious fervor. What Erik Erikson called a “totalistic” identity emerged. At least consciously, McVeigh could not comprehend how women and children in the compound could be endangered by their own government. He gave little thought to the risk that was created within the compound by the religious leader. To his death, McVeigh continued to regard himself as a patriot, but now one engaged in fighting for his country by waging war against his government. Perhaps political reality came to match his growing paranoia, one now formulated into a personal ideology. There occurred a radical split between country and government.

The date of April 19 took on double symbolic significance for McVeigh: it was not only the date of the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound, but it was the anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which launched the American Revolutionary War in 1775. He had hoped that his assault on the Oklahoma City federal building would spark a second American Revolution. The Waco calamity became for McVeigh what Vamik Volkan (Blood Lines, 1997) terms a “chosen trauma,” that is, a public event that continues to reverberate with personal, often group, unconscious, symbolic significance for years if not for centuries. However, in this case, personal symbol did not serve as, or become, group symbol. There was, to be sure, widespread free-floating rage throughout American society, as can be evidenced by the numerous school and workplace shootings. There was not, however, the kind of focused group fantasy and rage such as had characterized the Cold War.

Public discourse has focused on the Oklahoma City bombing as revenge for the Waco attack. One may speculate that McVeigh unconsciously identified with Waco-as-victim, and government-as-aggressor, even as he consciously identified with the avenging soldier-patriot. Ultimately, as a soldier he not only wished to fight for his country, but — in his own way — to die for his country as well, even if at the hands of his own government. The identities of soldier-as-victim and soldier-as-martyr for his fantasized country help to explain much of McVeigh’s later actions, including those at his death. At least part of his inept escape plan can speculatively be ascribed to his need to provoke his own victimhood. With so little to go on about the interior of his childhood and of his unconscious in adulthood, one may nonetheless further speculate that the national outrage against him enacted the literal realization of his internal bad objects. His need to punish was inseparable from the need to be punished.

From his surrender to the police in Perry, Oklahoma, on the day of the bombing to his execution, he submitted utterly to the government he despised. He enlisted the government in his act of self-destruction. One may be forgiven for speculating that beneath the identity of patriot-martyr is that of masochist. Columnist Arthur Spiegelman writes that:

McVeigh had described his execution as a state-assisted suicide and he was a willing partner. He was cordial when prison Warden Harley Lappin spent a half-hour with him describing how he would die. He was cooperative when guards strapped him to a gurney and wrapped him so tight that he looked like a mummy. (http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010611/ts/mcveigh_-leadall_dc_dc_27.html)

For his final statement, McVeigh wrote out and recited the 1875 poem, “Invict–us” (“Undefeated”) by the crippled poet William Ernest Henley. The quotation — and the identification with Henley that underlies it — is significant in understanding McVeigh. Henley had been crippled in childhood by tuberculosis; one foot was later amputated; and he had a lengthy hospitalization at the end of his life. Henley’s lines, “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul,” make a clarion call for resolve in the face of great suffering. For McVeigh, final mastery is through death. It is as if in death he believes that he will still not be defeated, that he will not really die. He appeals, I think, to core American attitudes and values, but now used for idiosyncratic delusional purposes. His choice of poem and poet is a personal testimony. While he consciously identifies with mastery, he once again unconsciously identifies with passive victimhood.

His final, “defiant glare” from the gurney may derive from the same source: to see, to stare,

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while being watched — to die. One must wonder about the place occupied by the struggle between seeing and being seen in his early life, and in the dialectic between calmly observing chaos and inducing it in others. The quest to turn passive into active for himself, and active into passive for others, may be a life theme, not only one at the time of his death.

A letter from Dr. David Levine (June 25, 2001, quoted with permission) may shed further light on McVeigh’s seeming contradictions. McVeigh’s claim to master his fate seems more like McVeigh’s “wished for than actual self, more like the self he has lost than the one he has.” He had, after all, spent much of his adult life in total institutions such as the military and prison. Forces outside himself controlled him, forces he later may have internalized. The conflict between controlling one’s destiny and being controlled by others is a central theme in McVeigh’s identity and in his later life. In doing the bombing, “McVeigh attempts to, and succeeds in, transferring his own feelings of loss, deprivation, and associated rage, onto the families of the victims of the bombing.”

In the drama of the bombing, the trial, and the execution, everyone feels lost and out of control, and tries to diminish the anxiety and rage it unleashes. A prevailing means of doing this is to induce those same feelings in the others. Each will do anything to try to escape the experience, feelings, and role of victim. The self that McVeigh lost and laments is the “master” and “captain” he wishes he could still be. His lament is also a protest, via magical thinking, that this self can be reclaimed in his hour of death. One could claim that McVeigh’s, the survivors’, and Americans’ anxieties converged if not coalesced around the issue of control.

McVeigh’s self-ideal could not have been more at odds with his final reality. Hence the quality of lament to his resolute protest — an attempt to reverse what was all too real. There is yet another level of significance to the poem: if the active pursuit of martyrdom in fact characterized much of his later life, then in his execution he may well have been the master (or at least provocateur) of his fate. Such are the complexities of unconscious overdeterminism.

So many questions remain, among them: What early family life and unconscious structure prefigured his adolescent wandering in search of identity, and found it in that of the soldier — and later, the bomber? Of all the catastrophes that occur, “natural” and “social,” what underlay the psychological specificity in his choice of the Waco assault as core personal symbol? Are there echoes of his childhood in the betrayal and rage he felt at the federal raid on the Waco compound? What is the psychohistorical meaning of the utter disavowal and revulsion so many Americans have for McVeigh? Is reaction formation, and unconscious identification, in part at work? What can and will Americans learn from the bombing, the trial, and the execution of Timothy McVeigh? How will the survivalists, and the larger American society, use McVeigh’s death in the future? What will be the group cultural consequences of having destroyed potential new knowledge in the killing of McVeigh? That is, what will we do from having renounced wanting to know and to feel?

Permit me some speculation. We are clearly in a mood to act rather than to think, feel, or reflect. In refusing to try to understand McVeigh, we are via displacement also refusing to examine painful parts of ourselves. There have been increasing numbers of executions for heinous crimes. One may expect that, in times of increasing crossing and blurring of boundaries — including the equivocal 2000 Presidential election results — there will be increased persecutory anxiety and border vigilance. When a distinctive “other” (a “them”) can be found, the “us” are both vindictive and vindicated. In that sense, McVeigh is victim of the group fantasy he helped to unleash upon himself. One may conjecture that both government spokesmen and McVeigh used the term “collateral damage” to emotionally distance themselves from the deaths of those they had not consciously intended to kill — for instance, to diminish a sense of guilt. Even the word “kill” was virtually taboo in official accounts of the Gulf War, in McVeigh’s own discourse about the bombing, and in the procedural-clinical language of his execution. One may expect similar intellectualizations and rationalizations to help justify violent actions in the future. For instance, when adversaries engage in the same type of act, what “we” do will be called “good” and “right,” while what “they” do will be called “evil” and “wrong” — and will in turn be invoked to legitimate further action.

To great profit, psychohistorians and others have explored the lives and movements of successful leaders. Psychobiography and group psychohistory has examined the psychological fit between leaders and followers. With the life and death of Timothy McVeigh we encounter the phenomenon

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of what Weston La Barre termed the “failed prophet” (The Ghost Dance, 1972), that is, one whose message and redemptive plan failed to correspond to widely shared wish conveyed in symbolically acceptable guise or form. Far from sparking a new American Revolution, McVeigh succeeded in marshalling unforgiving retaliation — official and popular — upon a person who wrongly presumed to speak for his national group. Sgt. Timothy McVeigh gave his life for a country that could not recognize him as its devoted soldier.

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