FB 101: McVeigh’s Mentor: How Henry Ford Inspired the Oklahoma City Bombing

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
We all need a break from the constant cycle to
learn something new, to gain new perspectives. The Great Courses
Plus streaming service is an excellent resource to expand our
knowledge on a variety of subjects or pick up a
new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great Courses Plus while
researching this season of flashback lectures like Playball, the rise
of Baseball is America's pastime, History of the Supreme Court,

(00:25):
and Battlefield Europe have helped me connect the dots on
several stories from history. Right now, they're giving our listeners
a special limited time offer a free month of unlimited
access to their entire library. Sign up now through our
special U r L go to the Great Courses Plus
dot com slash aussy. That's the Great Courses Plus dot

(00:45):
Com slash o z y the Great Courses Plus dot
Com slash AUSSI application Whether to or Unity Application. April
nine teenth, just past nine in the morning, a meeting
of the Water Resources Board had just begun inside the

(01:07):
Alfred Piemura Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Basically, there
are four elements that I have to rast receive information
regarding a massive car bomb exploded outside of a large

(01:34):
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

(01:57):
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 metal. It landed nearly six hundred feet

(02:20):
away from the blast site. It was the axle to
the writer rental truck that had carried the homemade bomb.
The truck 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

(02:43):
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 new
or teach you in school about what happened in Oklahoma City.

(03:05):
A Ford truck may have delivered the fateful payload that
terrible April morning, 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 Ford,
one whose name we associate with mass production, not mass murder.

(03:31):
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

(03:53):
no note taking, just the most compelling and surprising stories
from the past, told by those who know them most
about them. We're 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 changed the landscape of American politics, how Hitler's

(04:17):
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. Now we're going

(04:38):
to sating games 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 been en up and looking out the window
and seeing the 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

(04:59):
the only s line that something was amiss. My mom
was supposed to 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 thing of it. Latrese
ate lunch with her friends and went to recess as usual. Well,

(05:19):
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

(05:45):
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

(06:06):
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,

(06:30):
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

(06:50):
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. MC They 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,

(07:11):
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 shoot a
gun anywhere because you could hurt somebody. The son of
a factory worker, young Tim had a typical boyhood. He

(07:33):
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

(07:57):
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

(08:18):
have hated the early morning wake ups, the strenuous training,
the uniform inspections, and the discipline McVeigh thrived in late
nineteen but they learned he was on the fast track
to being in the US Special Forces, the elite of
the elite. Then, just before his Special Forces tryout, McVeigh
learned the Army had a different plan for him. A rock.

(08:40):
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 US involvement in the Persian Gulf

(09:03):
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 violence

(09:23):
that it afforded him, McVeigh, the bitter anti government 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

(09:44):
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

(10:07):
made his fortune from the automobile, but in nineteen fifteen
he decided to take a boat to Europe in a
bold effort in 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

(10:30):
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 he
purchased a newspaper in his own hometown, Dearborn, Michigan. It
was about to go defunct. It was called the Dearborn Independent,

(10:52):
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

(11:13):
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.

(11:39):
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

(12:03):
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. Do you have

(12:31):
an interesting tale about unintended consequences from history or your
own life, Please share it with us by emailing flashback
at Aussie dot com. That's flashback at o z y
dot Com. Henry Ford learned to lean on his newspaper

(12:56):
to help make sense of the world and then spread
his own opinions. Timothy McVeigh leaned on his favorite book,
So McVeigh found out about The Turner Diaries through a
net and Soldier of Fortune magazine J. M. Burger is
the author of the book Extremism and an expert on
white supremacist groups in America. And it was, you know,
sort of nominally a magazine for mercenaries, so they published

(13:19):
a lot of conspiracy theories. They were very supportive of
the militia movements in the United States. McVeigh ordered the
book advertised and Soldier of Fortune. The Turner Diaries is
a dystopian novel by a white supremacist named William Luther Pierce.
Pierce describes the journey of a man named Earl Turner
who is involved in white supremacists organizations that were initially

(13:44):
kind of covert terrorist organizations, and eventually it becomes an
organized insurgency. Afraid that the liberal US government wants to
take guns away from honest citizens. Earl Turner and the
right wing insurgency fight back. In the course of this insurgency,
there nuclear exchanges on US soil, millions of people die,
and eventually the white supremacists when over most of the

(14:08):
country and they institute something that is called the Day
of the Rope, which is a day of revenge on
minorities and on people white people who are considered to
be race traders. The Turner Diaries is an epic racist
fantasy like porn for white nationalists, and Timothy McVeigh was hooked.
So he was a huge fan of this book, a

(14:29):
big evangelist for it. He would he would give it
to everybody he knew. Uh. He gave it to his
his army buddies. He passed around to his friends and family.
A lot of people were like, oh my god, what
are what are you doing? Get this away from me.
And after McVeigh left the Army, the Turner Diaries provided
a roadmap for what he had to do next. Timothy

(14:53):
McVeigh struggled to get his bearings after leaving military life.
He worked the graveyard shift at the Buffalo a Zoo.
He started gambling on football. He wrote long, handwritten letters
to local newspapers and Congress members that ranted about everything
from affirmative action to gun control, and then something occurred
that confirmed all of his worst fears about his own government.

(15:20):
Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us. A
fanatical scripture quoting religious leader who moved to Waco to
await the end of the world instead maybe to blame
tonight for the deaths of several federal agents. In February,
federal agents rated a compound near Waco, Texas that was
home to a religious cult known as the Brains Davidians.
The resulting shootout, caught on live television, resulted in the

(15:43):
deaths of four agents and six cult members. Timothy McVeigh
packed up his car and drove to Texas to join
those watching the events unfold. He left after a couple
of days and went to visit his army buddy Terry
Nichols and his brother James on their Michigan farm. The
Waco standoff continued. Loue Michelle again. McVeigh had been preparing

(16:06):
actually to make a second trip to Waco, and was
out in front of the Nichols brother's farmhouse in Decora, Michigan,
underneath the car working on the exhaust system, and Terry
Nichols came to the door and started shouting, Tim, Tim,
get in here. McVeigh ran inside and couldn't believe what

(16:26):
he was seeing on the old color television in the
living room. Armored federal tanks ran the walls of the
compound and Waco in an effort to drive out the
cult members. Then flames began to engulf the building. I
must tell you this is this is a horrible site.
From two miles away, this is really a horrible site.

(16:49):
Nearly everyone inside the compound was killed, including twenty children,
and that's what really drove McVeigh off the deep bend.
He stood in Terry nichols living room with tears in
his eyes as he watched on live TV the burning
of Waco. McVeigh resolved to do something about it. Dan Herbeck.

(17:12):
On the day of that incident, he had decided he
was going to take some drastic action of bombing a
federal building of some kind. He scouted probably six or
seven different cities and looked at federal office buildings as
possible targets. Why did McVeigh pick Oklahoma City, Well, for

(17:36):
one thing, it contains several of the U. S. Government
agencies like the FBI that he hated the most. But
there was another reason. McVeigh told us that when he
looked at the building in Oklahoma City, the Federal Office Building,
because of the way it was separated from other buildings,
he believed that it would make a very striking visual

(17:59):
in after it was bombed. It's disturbing to think that
a terrorist was thinking in terms of photo ops, but
that's one of the main reasons why he chose Oklahoma City.
So why did McVeigh choose to bomb a federal office
building to get back at the government. Well, that goes
back to his favorite book, The Turner Diaries, J and Burger. Again,

(18:24):
there's one key event in the book where Earl Turner
and his band of colleagues, who operate under the name
the Order, bomb the FBI headquarters in Washington, d C.
And when they do this, they use a truck bomb
that is a very similar construction to the one that
McVeigh used. And it wasn't just the idea for building

(18:45):
a bomb that McVeigh got from the book. The process
of making this bomb is described in some detail in
the book. Um the book has a very much a
how to kind of quality. It's a it's a guide
to revolution. McVeigh and Terry Nichols started to buy thousands
of hounds of ammonian nitrate to build their bomb, which
McVeigh planned to deliver by truck to the Mura Federal Building.

(19:06):
Just like our old Turner and the Turner Diaries, McVeigh
considered himself a martyr acting in the name of liberty.
He hoped someday he would be regarded as a hero.
Back in Henry, Ford had his own favorite book. It
was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Ford

(19:28):
historian Victoria Westi again a Russian mystic named Sergei Nihilis,
published an addition in nineteen o five that starts to
gain traction. People circulated it, they reprinted it um, and
Nihilis had thoughtfully supplied an introductory essay to his addition

(19:50):
that connected a lot of dots for conspiratorially minded anti semits.
The Protocols is written in the second person. There's an
omniscient narrator that speaks to an audience of Jewish elders,
the Elders of Zion, who are conspiring to take over
the world, but he also speaks directly to the reader,
who was drawn in as kind of a co conspirator,

(20:11):
And that was part of the great psychological brilliance of
the document is that it assumes that you're interested in
this conspiracy that explains everything that's wrong with the world.
Black or white, rich or poor, Protestant or Catholic. Most

(20:34):
Americans regarded Jews as alien and inferior, and the Protocols,
the fictional fabricated story, played to that mindset. For the
anti Semitic mind of the early twentieth century, and for
someone like Ford who thought who saw World War One
as entirely the product of Jewish war mongering and profiteering.

(20:56):
This was the explanatory document. This document meant laid it
all out. Henry Ford fell hook line and sinker for
the forgery. For Ford, this was confirmation of everything he believed.
So everything that Ford despised about nine twenties culture, everything

(21:16):
that undermined you know, wholesome values and you know, good
religious church going people on Sundays, Ford believed was attributable
to Jews, and the Protocols proved it. But of course
Henry Ford was not just your average anti Semitic reader.
He was a publisher. So beginning on May and running

(21:40):
for the better part of two years, The Deerbone Independent
published a weekly essay that was entitled The International Jew.
Over more than ninety installments, Ford's newspaper published the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion, adapting the anti Semitic propaganda
for an American audience. People wonder why someone can get

(22:01):
away with something like this, you know, why would anyone
let forward? And the answer is that when you acquire
the kind of wealth and attain the status of American
industrial royalty. You know, Ford was king. Ford was the
most wealthy American ever. And nobody says no to that person. Nobody.

(22:28):
It's estimated that Ford's newspaper spread the fallacious text and
nearly seven hundred thousand readers. When you go online today
and you search for The International Jew, Henry Ford's name
is all over it, and there is no erasing any
of that. That's that toothpaste is not going back into
the tube. You know, Ford is for all time associated

(22:52):
with the most heinous piece of anti Semitic propaganda that's
that's ever been written. If only it had just been
toothpaste that Ford let out of the tube. By April,
Timothy McVeigh had completed the Homemade truck bomb he had

(23:14):
designed with the help of the Turner Diaries the night
before the bombing, but they drove to a hotel in
Kansas Loue Michelle. Again, he stopped in a gravel parking
lot behind a hotel, parked his yellow Rider truck and
told Dan and I that he slept like a baby
that night with a seven thousand pound bomb in the

(23:39):
cargo bay. McVeigh chose April nine for his act because
it was both the second anniversary of the raid in
Waco and the two twentieth anniversary of the Battle of
Lexington and Concord, the first battle of the American Revolution.
He wakes up, gets out of the Rider truck, checks
the tires, gets back in, has his breakfast, a army

(24:05):
meal called an m r E Meals ready to eat,
and it was cold spaghetti. But they finished his breakfast
and started driving toward Oklahoma, careful to stay under the
speed limit. But if an observant highway patrol officer had noticed,
you would have seen that the back of that truck
was really sitting low the cargo bay. But nobody noticed that.

(24:29):
So he's driving on the highway and at one point
there's a patrol car behind him for the longest time,
and McVeigh is starting to sweat it out. Oh no,
am I gonna get caught. Finally the cop exited the highway.
Then McVeigh breathed the sigh of relief. He soon arrived
in Oklahoma City and he rolls up to the Murrah

(24:49):
Building and there's a little cut out in the sidewalk
and he gets calmly gets out of the truck, locks
it and starts walking away. McVey parked the rider truck
right below the windows of the daycare center located on
the building second floor. He didn't look back, and about

(25:11):
a minute later, mcvey's homemade bomb killed twenty more people
than the one forty eight Americans killed in combat during
the First Gulf War and injured hundreds more. But they
killed nineteen children who were five and younger. The children's

(25:33):
playground behind the building became a makeshift more as rescue
workers carried the bodies from the rubbel President Bill Clinton
addressed a shattered nation. Bombing in Oklahoma City was an
attack on innocent children and defenseless citizens. It was an
act of cowardice, and it was evil. But for McVeigh,

(25:56):
the loss of human life was not an act of evil,
was an exclamation point on his message for the American government.
McVeigh was expecting to be caught, maybe hoping for it.
Inside his getaway car, he had placed an envelope packed
with items he wanted law enforcement and the media to
find and publicize. Among them a quote from Earl Turner

(26:17):
and the Turner Diaries. Turner says, quote, the real value
of our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not
the immediate casualties. Today we are still living with the
psychological impact of mcveigh's own attack, and in more ways
than you might imagine, we all need a break from

(26:56):
the constant cycle to learn something new, to get new perspectives.
The Great Courses Plus streaming service is an excellent resource
to expand our knowledge on a variety of subjects or
pick up a new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great
Courses Plus while researching this season of flashback lectures like Playball,
the rise of Baseball is America's pastime, History of the

(27:18):
Supreme Court, and Battlefield Europe have helped me connect the
dots on several stories from history. Right now, they're giving
our listeners a special limited time offer the free month
of unlimited access to their entire library. Sign up now
through our special u r L go to the Great
Courses plus dot Com slash as. That's the Great Courses

(27:39):
plus dot Com slash o z y the Great Courses
plus dot Com slash auzy In Henry Ford starts to
promote the anti Semitic ideas contained in the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion. Seventy five years later, Timothy McVeigh
commits a horrific a crime based on another text, the

(28:02):
Turner Diaries. But how do we get from one to
the other. Well, if you look closely enough, Henry Ford's
fingerprints are all over Oklahoma City. And that tale starts
with the man some call the American Hitler. This is
George Lincoln Rockwell. Here on behalf of the white Christian
majority of Americans. George Lincoln Rockwell was tall, dark haired, handsome,

(28:24):
and Ivy League graduate and a decorated Navy veteran. He
was a gifted orator. He liked to carry a corn
cob pipe. Here he isn't. An interview with the radio
and television talk show host Joe Pine, who was sort
of the Howard stern of his day. What he meant
to say was he's a Nazi. Mr Rockwell, you are
a Nazi, aren't you? I am? And there's nothing American

(28:45):
about a Nazi. So why do you call yourself the
head of the American Nazi Party. That's a contradiction in term,
and Nazi is above all things are racist. A man
who believes in the white race as the people who
built white Western Christian civilization. There's nothing on American about that.
Rockwell may have fought the Germans in the Second World War,
but he was a proud racist and anti Semite. And
in nineteen one he read two books that lit a

(29:07):
fire under him. One was Adolph Hitler's Mind comp the
other the one that Henry Ford had helped spread all
across America. Rockwell took the Jewish conspiracies found in the Protocols,
mixed them with some generic quite supremacy, and added in
the big fear of his age Communists. Here he is
telling Joe Pine about how he would treat any treasonous

(29:27):
Americans with Communist sympathies. What you'll be expected to do
is shoot on juries and hear the evidence against the traders.
I think are running rifle all over this country and
convict them. And if they're convicted, we'll take care of
How are you going to take care of these people? Well,
I think they'll be so money we're gonna have to
gather him. Rockwell had a gift for the dramatic, for theatrics.
He was a racist showman. But here's the thing. Rockwell's

(29:51):
bombastic style didn't really work. It earned attention, but not
many converts. That all changed when Rockwell met an aspiring
white nationalist witer named William Luther Pierce jam Burger again.
So William Pierce was a uh grew up as a
kind of nerdy kid, reading a lot of sci fi
pulp magazines. Probably was exposed to kind of dystopian ideas

(30:13):
at a very early age, and he was very good
at math. He became a physicist working for the government.
Pierce was not just any old physicist. He worked at
the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the home of the Manhattan Project,
which developed the bombs dropped on Japan during the Second
World War. After the war ended, Pierce found he had
a new enemy. He was offended by the civil rights movement.

(30:36):
He was pro segregation, and over time his his feelings
about this moved in a more radical direction. He was
exposed to the writings and speeches of George Lincoln Rockwell.
Pierce first saw Rockwell on television. He was giving a
speech that was surrounded by protesters. Pierce was transfixed, and

(30:58):
he took up a correspondence with Rockwell and became active
in the American Nazi Party. Soon Pierce was driving from
his home in Connecticut down to the Washington, d c.
Area on weekends to meet with Rockwell. Then tragedy struck.
In August nineteen seven, Rockwell was shot dead outside of
laundromat in Arlington, Virginia, by one of his own followers.
And Rockwell's death left a big vacuum in the white

(31:20):
supremacist movement of the day, and Pierce was somebody who
was able to sort of rise up and fill that vacuum,
first within the American Nazi Party and then later by
forming his own group called the National Alliance. Pierce steered
the American Nazi Party in a less ostentatious direction. Pierce
was dismayed by the American Nazi parties tendency to march

(31:43):
around goose Stepping with swastika flags, he thought this was
bad press for for the white power movement. Then Pierce,
the wanna be sci fi novelist, took a shot at
improving American Nazi propaganda. He began writing a serialized novel
which was called The Turner Diaries, and he would write
one chapter in each installment of the newsletter, and it

(32:04):
played out over about a year and a half, and
it turned out to be extremely popular. This is Pierce
himself in rare footage uncovered by PBS. If one asked
what what was the purpose of the turn of Diaries,
it was to provide a fictional medium for certain ideas
that I think are very important. Fiction had always played

(32:27):
a part in white supremacy movements, but Pierce took it
to a new level. Jam Burger Pierce's approach was different
in some important ways. The first is that it was
it was much more focused on action. He understood that
you need to have a story to hook the reader along.
And I think the second one was that he really

(32:47):
was very light on ideology. So by taking that element out,
by making this a very generic white power movement, he
was able to have reached a much larger audience in
the white nationalists Pierce would lead the American Nazis until
his death in two thousand two, producing thousands of pages
of white nationalist publications over the course of decades and

(33:09):
influencing countless followers, followers like Timothy McVeigh. So this is
how we get from the industrialist Henry Ford to the
domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, and a few short steps in.
Ford takes a discredited anti Semitic forgery called The Protocols

(33:30):
of the Elders of Zion and elevates it. He publishes
its poisonous lies in both his newspaper and as a
book Victoria Westie. So, with Ford's name on the book
and Ford's endorsement of the theories of the Protocols, American
anti Semitism sort of came out of the closet during

(33:52):
the twenties. From then on, you know, it's been next
to impossible to eradicate those assumptions from the entirety of
American society. George Lincoln Rockwell was one man who had
his eyes opened by the Protocols that Henry Ford helped spread.
He would found the American Nazi Party, and his disciple,

(34:13):
William Luther Pierce would strike white nationalist Gold with his
dystopian novel The Turner Diaries. That book would give Timothy
McVeigh both the motive and a means for executing the
Oklahoma City bombing, and McVeigh followed Pierce's violent blueprint almost
to the letter. It could be that our story stops

(34:38):
there in Oklahoma City, but it doesn't. The Turner Diaries,
the Protocols, and Timothy McVeigh are all enjoying a deadly
resurgence today. Latrese Sutton, whose mother Teresa was killed in
Oklahoma City, can still remember life before the bombing. I

(34:59):
think the Steban when we lived there. Um my mom
worked two jobs. She um only ever got any sleep,
but she was always there, like she was across Scott Leader.
She was at all my sports avances that I can remember.
She never really missed any of those. Now a mother herself,
Sutton can reflect even more on losing her own mom.

(35:21):
I think that's the most tragic part of losing my
mom is that now that I'm in adulthood and I
see all my friends have their moms who are now grandparents.
My mom would be an awesome grandmother, you know, And
she didn't. I didn't get to see her in that role,
and I think that's one of the hardest things for
me now. Sutton recently took her children to the Oklahoma

(35:47):
City National Memorial, which stands where the Murror Federal Building
used to stand. The memorial includes a field with one
d and sixty eight empty chairs made from glass, bronze,
and stone bearing the names of each of the bombing's victims.
When we went and took standy photos at her chair
one year, I am kind of explained it to him
what had happened, and the little one still don't really

(36:10):
don't think fully understand, but my older girls are starting
to understand it now. Certain has come to better understand
it herself over the years too, including her feelings for
the man who killed her mother, Timothy McVeigh. I don't
have ill will towards him. I guess I have the
firm belief that everything happened for a reason. You know.
It's sad that I lost my mom at an early age,

(36:32):
but it still shaped me for who I am, so
I couldn't do myself hating someone for this crime, even
though it's very tragic and very sad. The death toll
notched by the White nationalist movement did not end with
Timothy McVeigh, who was executed by lethal injection in two
thousand one, Jay and Burger again. For a long time,

(36:56):
McVeigh was not very highly regarded in the annals of
white nationalism, or at least not openly. Um. What we
have seen in recent years is that there are people
who see him now more as an inspiration. Um. So
he's he's become a larger figure really, I think in
the last ten years, and the movement has also expanded

(37:18):
over that period. We're entering a much more heated cycle now. Um.
You know, white supremacy is becoming much more active in
the United States and internationally. Now, what we're seeing now
is that pseudo intellectual phase of of white nationalism is
kind of coming to a close, and we're they're entering

(37:40):
a much more violent phase. A shooting at a Pittsburgh
synagogue in October that killed eleven worshippers was the deadliest
attack on the Jewish community in the United States. Police
say the gunman told a SWAT officer that he wanted
all Jews to die and that they were committing genocide
against his people, and the hate helping to fuel such
Times has a familiar source. The Protocols and the International

(38:03):
jew are the twin you know, canonical texts of today's
resurgent anti Semitic movement worldwide. The copy of the Protocols
has been found in the possession or on the computers
of the men who have shot up synagogues, both in
the United States and also in New Zealand. But what's

(38:27):
even more scary is how much more easily such ideas
can now spread with the Internet and social media. Every
outspoken racist is a potential Henry Ford. The example of
Henry Ford is something that we're seeing play out today
Jay and Burger again. Specific kinds of bigotry, ideological racism. UH,
ideologies in general have to be communicated in order to spread.

(38:50):
They are a social disease in many ways. UH, someone
has to tell you about it. They have to give
you something to read, they have to post at you online.
There has to be some kind of human interaction to
spread these specific kinds of ideas. And now these ideas
are being transmitted its speeds previously unthinkable. Henry Ford had
to spend a lot of his fortune to publish this stuff.

(39:14):
You know, it was an expensive venture for him, and
even at the point that William Pierce was writing The
Turner Diaries, it was difficult to get this kind of
message out. One reason he wrote the Turner Diaries is
that it was hard to get people to subscribe to
a neo Nazi newsletter. Propagandists like Ford and Pierce had
to pay printing costs and postage. It was not cheap.

(39:35):
And what we have now is really almost frictionless environment
for this kind of propaganda. It is you do not
have to spend money to spread a text of any kind.
You can just post it on the line and any
number of online repositories for free. It took seventy five
years for Henry Ford's hate to result in something like
Oklahoma City. Today's Internet, hate speech and propaganda can explode

(39:59):
far more quickly to violent marches, synagogue bombings, school shootings
and more. What happens when those lies come knocking at
your children's door like they did in Oklahoma City. It's
a scary thought. Latrese Sutton again. Kids, all the time,
before you walk into school house, you need to say Lord,
protect me as I'm in here, or anything that saying

(40:19):
has come my way, protect me. Did you never know.
It's just crazy out there, so really, I don't think
we can change it at this point. I think at
this point it should pray in his way for the
times to pass and the Lord comes back. That's my
thought on it. Today's Flashback lesson was really about the
power of ideas, especially those that play on our prejudices

(40:42):
and fears, and we learned that hate and harm can
come from some unexpected directions, whether it's a millionaire tycoon
who has some fixed ideas about who is to blame
for society's problems, or an army hero who comes to
hate the very institution in which he once served. All
we can do some times is to be vigilant and
learn from the mistakes of the past. As Henry Ford

(41:05):
himself once said and one of his more enlightened moments,
the only real mistake is the one from which we
learned nothing. Flashback is written and hosted by me Sean Braswell,
senior writer and executive producer at Azzy. It was produced
by Robert Coulos, Tracy Moran, Theorio di Gizua, and Shannon Williamson.

(41:29):
Chris Hoff engineered our show special thanks to the crew
at I Heart Radio Podcast networks, especially Sophie Lichterman and
Jack O'Brien. Make sure to subscribe to Flashback on the
I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Flashback is the latest podcast from Azzi, a modern media
company producing original TV series, festivals, news and podcasts for

(41:50):
curious people. Azzi's unique storytelling focuses on the new and
the next, whether that's forward looking news and features bold
new perspectives on TV or ran new ways of looking
at history. For today's lecture notes a remarkable footnote from
History Loue Michelle. Again, well, I would just like to

(42:12):
mention that McVeigh also spoke to us many times about
a book called Unintended Consequences, which he read around the
same time as he read the Turner Diaries. That's right,
a book called Unintended Consequences. Like the Turner Diaries, it's
an anti government fantasy, and this one that heroes a

(42:32):
hunter who becomes a terrorist sniper after witnessing his government
cracked down on American gun culture. He later told us
that Unintended Consequences was actually the book he should have
followed in his protests against the US government. He told
us that he he wished that instead of a bomb,

(42:54):
he would have become a sniper and picked off individual
people in the government that he despised. McVeigh considered the
Turner Diaries his Bible and Unintended Consequences his new testament.
It just happened by chance that he came across the
Turner Diaries first. As McVeigh told Michelle and his colleague
Dan Herbeck, quote, I think Unintended Consequences is a better book.

(43:18):
It might have changed my whole plan of operation. If
I read that one first, then it might have changed
a great deal more than that. To dive deeper, head

(43:38):
to ausie dot com slash flashback. That's oz y dot
com slash flashback. There you can find more of my
lecture notes from today's episode, featuring extended interviews, links to
further reading and more information on Henry Ford and Timothy McVeigh,
as well as links to other hidden stories from history
uncovered by me and other reporters at Ausie. We all

(44:12):
need a break from the constant cycle to learn something new,
to gain new perspectives. The Great Courses Plus streaming service
is an excellent resource to expand our knowledge on a
variety of subjects or pick up a new hobby. I've
been enjoying the Great Courses Plus while researching this season
of flashback lectures like Playball, The Rise of Baseball is

(44:32):
America's Pastime, History of the Supreme Court, and Battlefield Europe
have helped me connect the dots on several stories from history.
Right now, they're giving our listeners a special, limited time
offer a free month of unlimited access to their entire library.
Sign up now through our special U r L go
to the Great Courses Plus dot Com Slash Aussie. That's

(44:55):
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