Lawyers for Bomb Suspects May End Up Adversaries : Oklahoma City: Two leading defenders of the lost cause are separately representing McVeigh and Nichols.

Michael Tigar walks with a swagger. He tosses out lines from Shakespeare, John Milton and the Bible, then for good measure throws in a couple of “y’alls” and “aw shucks” for the judge.

Stephen Jones speaks with a twang. He warns the press that the law is sacred and he will not try his case in the media. Then he heads for the network TV talk shows.

Tigar and Jones, two of the Southwest’s leading sagebrush attorneys, friends to the martyr and defenders of the lost cause, have whooped up a frenzy of speculation over how they plan (and why they would ever want) to come to the rescue of two of the most hated criminal suspects in America. They are separately defending Terry L. Nichols and Timothy J. McVeigh in the April 19 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building here.

And though they are still months away from trial, their opening legal strategies are already shaping into a situation that could wind up pitting their clients against each other.

In a flurry of legal papers and court appearances, Tigar, an Austin, Tex., law school professor whose headline clients range from Angela Davis to John Demjanjuk, is suggesting that Nichols was wrongly incriminated because of his acquaintance with McVeigh.

He also insists that he has the perfect defense. “Terry Nichols didn’t do it,” he said recently.

Jones, meanwhile, has sat quietly by, slowly putting together his own defense team, preparing mental evaluations for his client and taking a personal tour of the burned-out Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex.--the flash point the FBI contends spurred McVeigh to action against his sworn enemy, the U.S. government.

Jones has also had his share of notable clients, ranging from a Viet Cong sympathizer during the Vietnam War to a mass murderer who is scheduled to meet the executioner at the end of this month.

“Let’s just suppose for a moment that McVeigh did what he’s accused of doing,” Jones said recently on one of those talk shows, this one ABC-TV’s “Nightline.”

“But let’s further say that he’s a foot soldier and that behind him is a very evil group of people.”

That is a clear reference to Nichols and other anti-government enthusiasts, and a clear sign that in order to save McVeigh from execution, Jones is willing to offer up Nichols.

It is a strategy that has worked before, most notably in the trials of four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating Rodney G. King. In that case, defendants blamed each other for the crime and two wound up going free.

While Tigar and Jones do have their differences, they face a common enemy. A special team of U.S. attorneys has encamped in Oklahoma City. A national FBI investigation holds no higher priority than bringing every bombing conspirator to justice. And public outrage here still swirls more fiercely than the spring winds.

When McVeigh was first arrested, a mob gathered outside his jail cell to jeer him. When Nichols was brought here a couple of weeks later, a woman hollered: “Baby killer!”

One hundred and sixty-eight people are dead. Five hundred more are injured. How do you convince their families and friends--and most important, a jury of their peers--that those eventually found guilty of involvement should be allowed to live?

And why take on such a task for $125 an hour, the fee set by the federal court, when lawyers of Tigar and Jones’ caliber command many times that rate?

“There are all sorts of pressures,” said Jack Zimmerman, a Texas attorney who helped defend Branch Davidian sect members charged in the Waco conflagration. “Some can lose their practice by representing this type of client. You have to have a real belief in the system to represent this type of client.”

It is that kind of burden that now rests on the shoulders of these two lawyers. Both of them, in their own way, in their own peculiar style, with their own saddlebags of experience, bring a totally different perspective to the counsel table in Oklahoma City.

Tigar, 54, began his professional life as a liberal but soon shifted to the right. He was schooled in the law at UC Berkeley, where he emerged as an activist, lecturing on campus that “genocide and imperialism be stopped in Vietnam and Mississippi and Georgia.”

It was the whirlwind of the 1960s. He represented famed radical Angela Davis, Weather Underground terrorists and the Chicago Seven, and, later in life, Nelson Mandela and his fight against apartheid in South Africa.

But he has also successfully represented John Demjanjuk, accused of being the Nazi death camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

So fervently will he throw himself into his causes that sometimes he cannot let go. Once, after losing a Death Row case before the U.S. Supreme Court, he swore off red meat forever. On the night before he argued a First Amendment case before the high court, he refused to imbibe anything--even to join his colleagues in a toast for good luck.

“Michael attended the party but would not touch even a sip of alcohol or whiskey or anything,” recalled Dominic Gentile, a Las Vegas attorney. “That was noteworthy because he is not a teetotaler.”

He is 6 foot 2. He parades into a courtroom with the thud of pounding feet and a bellowing voice. He fancies pin-striped suits and cowboy belts.

In a bail hearing for Nichols at the Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, Okla., he quoted the “good book” and then solemnly reminded the judge about the “sorrow and the anguish” of the those who died in the Revolutionary War to help create a nation where people like Nichols--despised as he might be--are innocent until proven guilty.

Once, trying to throw cold water on the fact that Nichols collected anti-government literature, Tigar told the judge: “I grew up in a small town as a Baptist. But then I went away to Berkeley and, your honor, this is pretty tame stuff as anti-government propaganda.”

Another time, in a detailed questioning of an FBI agent on the witness stand, Tigar went through a lengthy discourse on farming: when to plow fields; when to put in drainage ditches.

That kind of folksy approach has worked before, but it could backfire here, particularly in a case so grim and emotionally scarring, some legal observers say.

“That big swagger, that affected arrogance, falls flat real fast,” said one local attorney who asked not to be identified.

But Tigar has not been all bluster. Rather, he has met the government’s case head-on. He has come up with an alibi, an explanation, for everything the government has thrown against Nichols.

Some of it is a little hard to grasp. For example, he claims that Nichols met McVeigh in Oklahoma City only once, and that was merely to pick up a television set a few days before the bombing.

But some of it also seems plausible. He contends that Nichols used aliases and rented storage sheds not to hide the bomb but rather to shield his household goods from creditors because he was late on payments.

“We will cross-examine every witness that is tendered to us,” Tigar promised. “We will seek every item of evidence that is made available to us--or through the exercise of diligence--that we can uncover. At the end of the day, we will try to bring this matter to a fair resolution.”

Jones is likewise strongly committed. But while Tigar has been challenging the government’s every move in these days before the indictments, Jones has been busy weighing his client’s very fitness for trial.

He has ordered up two psychological examinations of McVeigh and is suggesting that McVeigh’s stint in the Persian Gulf War, his failure to make the Army’s elite Special Forces and his kindred spirits inside the anti-government militias may have combined to seriously undermine his mental stability.

Jones also hints that it is “true believers” like Nichols and the militia group he helped form that can put such ideas into a young man’s head.

“There may be forces at work in this case that are larger than any of us imagine,” he said. “Things don’t happen in a vacuum.”

Jones also points out that no one has positively placed McVeigh in the driver’s seat of the Ryder truck that contained the bomb. And the FBI now says the so-called John Doe No. 2, who supposedly helped McVeigh rent the truck, doesn’t exist. The composite drawing turned out to be of a soldier who happened to be at the truck rental office on the same day but who had no connection to McVeigh.

“If John Doe No. 2 doesn’t exist,” he said, “then what does that say about Timothy McVeigh? Maybe it says he wasn’t there either.”

Jones, also 54, was born in Louisiana. He moved to Enid, Okla., population 43,000, because he wanted to work as a young attorney under the wing of the legendary trial lawyer D. W. Otjen. Otjen, then at the end of his career, had been involved in a number of high-profile cases in the region. Jones was to follow his lead.

He represented Abbie Hoffman after the Yippie movement co-founder gave what authorities said was an inflammatory speech in Norman, Okla. He took on the case of another young man who carried a Viet Cong flag at the state university in the days after the Kent State University shootings in 1970.

Now he is handling some of the appellate work for Roger Dale Stafford. Until McVeigh came along, Stafford was tarred as the most despicable criminal in Oklahoma, convicted of robbing a local family steak restaurant after closing time and killing all the employees still on duty. Before that he had executed a family that had stopped to give him help along a highway.

Several things about Jones: He does not shy away from the tough cases. Nor does he run from the media. Nor can he always take the safest course or resist the urge to do the unlikely.

One of the state’s best-known civil liberties advocates, he often runs for office--but on the Republican ticket, in a place where that party is deeply conservative. Each time, including a recent run for the U.S. Senate, he has come up short--sometimes miserably so. In one election, he fell a vote short of even carrying his own precinct. “If my son had only remembered to vote,” he lamented, “at least it would have been a tie.”

The day he was appointed McVeigh’s lawyer, he called all the reporters in Enid and read a lengthy statement about his solemn duty. “I will seek, for my part, to avoid the circus atmosphere that has prevailed in certain other well-known judicial proceedings, which have included the self-promotion and self-aggrandizement of some individuals.”

That night, he was making the first of a series of guest appearances before the national television cameras.

Some critics said Jones will not hesitate to capitalize on his instant fame as the man who represents the man America hates most.

“You watch,” said one Oklahoma City lawyer, speaking anonymously. “You watch and see if in two years he doesn’t have a book on the bestseller list.”

But others consider him honest, hard-working and absolutely earnest in pursuit of a fair trial and his client’s interests. “Stephen Jones doesn’t covet a high profile,” said Randall Coyne, a University of Oklahoma associate law professor who is helping with the McVeigh defense. “It seems to come to his doorstep.”

Jones also occasionally likes to spin out a Shakespeare quote or two of his own. But unlike Tigar, it often lands with a thud in his Southwest drawl. And unlike Tigar, he often seems to enjoy telling the media what they want to hear most of all.

“This is the greatest news story here since 1889,” he said, referring to the great land rush that swept the prairie like the wild windstorms and eventually opened Oklahoma to statehood.

“Meteorologically,” he said, “this is a 200-year flood.”