COLUMN ONE : Federal Workers Face New Foe: Fear : Even before Oklahoma City, anti-government hostility provoked scorn and sometimes violence. But the bombing is raising concerns that citizen anger may be at a perilous level.

On the night of the explosion in Oklahoma City, hours after his eighth-floor government office blew apart and 12 colleagues perished under a mountain of rubble, federal housing worker V. Z. Lawton tried to make sense of it all.

“How did we get to be the enemy?” he asked, his wounds still raw from the force of the blast.

It was a bloodied survivor’s natural outrage, but his angry bewilderment has resonated in government offices across the country in the month since the bombing that killed 167 people at the shattered Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

The fragile relationship between the federal government and the public it is supposed to serve has a long, volatile history. It is a troubled symbiosis marred at its lowest points by scorn, invective and occasional spasms of violence--shootings, bombings, even insurrection.

But the bombing in Oklahoma City--and the icy willingness among extremists to sanction thekilling of government employees--has not simply raised concerns about security in public buildings. It has kindled fears that bureaucrats’ relationship with citizens has frayed to a dangerous level.

In Western and farm belt states, federal employees have been subjected to threats, harassment and low-level violence in recent months--a growing occupational hazard for agents under fire from militant property rights activists embittered by the enforcement of environmental, wildlife and land management laws.

Some within the federal bureaucracy fear the problem is more pervasive. They worry that the sharpening anti-government rhetoric that has dominated American political discourse has begun to poison even the most basic dealings between citizens and federal workers. More and more, they say, angry citizens are channeling anti-federal anger into personalized hatred of specific agencies and officials.

“It’s the whole kill-the-messenger syndrome,” said John Sturdivant, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal workers union, with 700,000 members. “When you’re constantly fed this stereotype of faceless, incompetent, insensitive bureaucrats, it takes its toll.”

Few in government would make the case that federal offices everywhere are targets. But as officials prepare to detonate the remains of the Murrah building, the Clinton Administration and allies in public service unions are using the Oklahoma bombing to urge an end to anti-government posturing.

Federal employees, Vice President Al Gore said two weeks after the bombing, “are not enemies of the people as some on the fringe would have us believe.” A recent advertising campaign by the American Federation of State and County Municipal Employees showed photographs of Oklahoma City’s wounded, pleading: “Next time you hear someone viciously attack our government and the Americans who work in it, tell them--STOP IT. THIS IS OUR GOVERNMENT.”

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Republican leaders remain leery of defending a bureaucracy they have long criticized as bloated and oppressive, a reluctance apparent in House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s insistence that many in Western and farm belt states harbor a “genuine fear” of big government and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole’s recent comment that Clinton is waging “war on the West” through over-regulation and insensitivity to property rights.

Their rhetoric reflects voters’ ambivalence. Despite Americans’ overwhelming rejection of anti-government violence, 39% said in a Gallup poll taken after the bombing that the federal government poses an “immediate threat” to their “rights and freedoms.”

“It’s a tricky set of dynamics,” said political analyst Kevin Phillips. “I think in the last four years, we’ve seen that government doesn’t seem to be working for the average person. But it’s a mistake for people to single out government agencies and individual officials as architects of their problems instead of the power elites in Washington. That’s where the danger lies.”

That growing personalization of anti-government bitterness shows up in men such as Del Wasso, 50, a truck driver and co-founder of the Illinois Minutemen, a militia group that meets at a bowling alley in the Chicago suburb of Lombard.

“We’re not looking to overthrow the government,” Wasso said. “But we do feel a certain amount of hostility.” His group, like many anti-government organizations, is “not as opposed to the type of government that we have--just the people that are in it.”

Overt anti-government activity is rare outside the West, but in the wake of the April 19 Oklahoma City blast, even officials in urban government complexes are taking second looks at threats and heated encounters at their offices.

“Every office has its own dynamics but you can’t help but wonder if people under stress are feeding into the notion that government is the enemy,” said Stephen Ahlgren, regional chief judge in the Social Security Administration’s Chicago office.

As his agency’s caseload of disability claim applicants surged by 40% in two years--swelled mostly by drug addicts and alcoholics made eligible by court rulings--threats to judges and other officials have risen sharply.

“I don’t think you can draw a line to this anti-government attitude in every case,” Ahlgren said, “but it’s clear we’re seeing a lot more anger from the people we serve than we did two years ago.”

Determined not to let fear turn his office into an “armed camp,” Ahlgren held off asking for guards and locked offices. But after many of the 165 judges who work under him reported threats, he ordered metal detectors installed last year near hearing rooms.

In recent meetings with General Services Administration officials, public employee unions asked the government to hire 600 guards to augment the 400 who work in federal buildings. Several agencies have been issued “threat report cards” informing federal workers who take bomb threats to calmly note background noises while asking callers, “What does [the bomb] look like?” and “What is your name?”

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Some officials expect that agencies under the most direct fire may move toward adopting some of the extreme measures taken in recent years by Internal Revenue Service tax collectors and firearms agents, who work under pseudonyms, register their cars to offices, take unlisted phone numbers and refrain from handling cases in their hometowns.

At least twice in the past year, disgruntled citizens have taken employees hostage, at Social Security offices in San Francisco and Puerto Rico. Since the Oklahoma City bombing, union representatives have heard scores of anxious reports from stressed-out workers, said American Federation of Government Employees spokeswoman Magda Seymour.

Even as complaints poured in, federal buildings from Boston to Cleveland to Auburn, Wash., contended with a wave of bomb threats. In the first 10 days after the Murrah building blast, more than 140 bomb threats were called in to federal buildings, forcing evacuations. In Auburn, bomb squad members found a package resembling explosives several feet from a federal day-care center.

In the West, anti-government activity has spread like prairie fire. Property rights activists in Nevada, New Mexico, Montana and Idaho regularly drown out federal officials who speak at public hearings and brazenly herd cattle onto federal lands. Threats and shouting matches have become such a part of agents’ lives that some have begun requesting transfers or are mulling other careers.

Federal forestry agents in several Western states were given cards in March telling them to “cooperate, do not resist and contact” supervisors when detained by extremists or local officials.

“Doesn’t exactly make you feel secure, does it?” said Jeff DeBonis, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an organization of environmental officials.

Kurt Austermann, a spokesman for the Bureau of Land Management, in Medford, Ore., said the Oklahoma bombing was “a crushing blow” to office morale already dampened by confrontations with anti-government militants. It was a reminder of what could happen. In the past six months, smaller bombs damaged federal offices in Reno and Carson City, Nev.

Federal workers are “taking a good, hard look at their careers,” Austermann said. “They’re professionals and they believe in what they’re doing. But at the same time, when you hear of repeated incidents of violence and threats, you develop an attitude of looking over your shoulder.”

In Catron County, N. M., Gila National Forest Supervisor Abel Camarena brought in a psychologist to counsel jittery agents and their families. The region is the hub of the anti-federal “Sagebrush Rebellion,” the first of 30 counties in the West to pass local laws challenging federal dominion over government-run parklands.

“Employees have said it’s tough to go to the grocery store. Their children have been confronted at school,” Camarena said.

Weary government agents such as Tom Dwyer, a U.S. Forest Service official whose encounter with one New Mexico property rights leader ignited a court battle, welcome their impending reassignments.

“There were times when I was driving back from being out of town when I wondered if my house would still be there,” Dwyer said. “I think the transfer will help my peace of mind.”

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In perhaps the eeriest example of recent anti-government militancy, two radical tax protesters were convicted in Minneapolis last March for illegally harvesting ricin, a powerful toxin, as part of an alleged plot to kill IRS agents, deputy U.S. marshals and a local deputy sheriff.

The conspiracy to grow the beans that yield ricin, which one survivalist catalogue called a “silent tool of justice,” was “worrisome because of the potential for harm and the depth of these people’s anger,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Nate Petterson, the prosecutor in the case.

Similar tensions are being played out in Illinois and Indiana, where anti-government sympathies appear to be triggered neither by new laws nor by toughened enforcement of old ones. Instead, it is the militant talk whipped up in hunting and gun circles and sporting magazines that embolden hunters--who once quietly surrendered when agents charged them with illegal wildfowl baiting and other offenses--to lash back,

“It’s like a Cold War,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent Joseph E. Budzyn. “When we confront them out in the woods, they’ll say things like: ‘It’s just you and me out here,’ and ‘It would take a long time to find you if something happened.’ We’re concerned about next fall’s hunting season.”

Hunters’ complaints to local congressional offices about wildlife agents have more than doubled in two years, said Budzyn, who oversees wildlife agents in the two states. His officers were provided more defensive training and equipped with more powerful semiautomatic weapons after all reported threats.

Such harrowing encounters have a familiar cast to historians versed in the uneasy relationship between bureaucrat and citizen. In the long view of American history, scholars say, resentment against the government roils under the surface even in the best of times and erupts during economic hardship and other stresses.

“Even in its extremity, Oklahoma City is a demonstration of the profound suspicion of government that has always been a part of our history,” said constitutional scholar Kermit Hall.

That suspicion surfaced as early as 1794, when a federal excise tax on whiskey sparked the Whiskey Rebellion, a scattershot insurrection in four Pennsylvania counties highlighted by the tar and feathering of tax collectors and a gun battle between federal forces and a local militia that resulted in two deaths.

Anti-government turbulence reappeared during the tense period before the Civil War and the Reconstruction, said Princeton University historian James McPherson.

Draft riots and the murder of conscription officials plagued both sides in the Civil War. Afterward, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and its attacks on hated Republican legislators foreshadowed the current rise of extremist militias, he said.

There have been, as well, conspicuous examples of anti-government violence from the left, starting with the great labor strikes of the 19th Century and, later, bombings by Wobblies and anarchists in the first two decades of this century, among them the demolition of the house of U.S. Atty. Gen. A. Stewart Palmer.

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The New Left’s flirtation with bombs and street riots in its protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s “opened the door” for today’s right-wing extremists, suggests Michael Kazin, a historian at American University.

But the two generations of radicals differ--while ‘60s leftists became “disillusioned after looking to government for solutions,” anti-government extremists now “simply want the bureaucracy out of the way, whether it has good reasons or not,” Kazin said.

It is anger familiar to V. Z. Lawton. Before he joined the federal government eight years ago as an inspector of Native American homes for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Lawton, 64, was a private contractor with a deep streak of disdain for big government.

“I’m pretty conservative myself,” he said. “I used to believe in a lot of the tenets of the John Birch Society.”

Lawton’s suspicion began to soften when he lost his job during Oklahoma City’s oil bust and he found a position with HUD. Soon enough, he grew used to the bureaucratic life--the endless forms, the maze of regulations, the deadening hierarchy, the tendency to “throw money at problems.” But Lawton said he also began to see government’s “good side”--it’s ability to at least temporarily solve problems “when people are hard up.”

Before the explosion, Lawton rarely found himself on the receiving end of the sort of anti-government anger exploited by militias. “You might hear cracks now and then about how much money we’re giving away, but that doesn’t faze me much,” Lawton said. “Half the time, I agreed with them.”

But after attending 12 funerals in a week for colleagues killed in the blast, Lawton has no patience for those who rail against federal workers.

He expects to return to work as soon as supervisors can find a new office for the city’s HUD workers. Still spooked by the explosion, many survivors would prefer not to work in another multi-government high-rise like the Murrah building.

“We don’t want to be targets again,” Lawton said.

Times staff writer Judy Pasternak and researchers John Beckham in Chicago, Doug Conner in Seattle and Ann Rovin in Denver contributed to this story.

* EVIDENCE ASSAILED: Terry Nichols’ lawyers attack the government’s case. A20