Lawyer Seeks to Soften McVeigh’s Public Image

In a new book, Timothy J. McVeigh is portrayed as the “all-American monster.”

He has been lampooned in newspaper cartoons with pointed ears and Dracula fangs. A supermarket tabloid demonizes him as the “evil bomber” who, in his mid-20s, did not even know how to kiss a girl.

Even his friends have given him up. One said McVeigh was fixated on the movie character Rambo. Another said he was a devotee of Adolf Hitler.

To America, he is the man on the TV news in the bright orange prison suit, marched out of a tiny Midwestern jail to face trial in the killing of 168 people in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal office building.

Now, as his case moves toward trial, his legal defense team here is preparing a major media campaign to change his image.

They hope to highlight his past as a small-town boy and as an Army veteran of the Persian Gulf War. They hope to humanize their loner client, to soften his 1,000-yard stare, to turn a branded anti-government fanatic into a misjudged young man deserving of having the case for his innocence heard.

“I’m trying to show him as he really is,” said his lead counsel, Stephen Jones. “He’s a home-grown American boy.”

To get to that point, Jones has taken the extraordinary legal step of asking a U.S. district judge in Denver, where the trial will be held, to approve a series of six newspaper and television interviews that would allow McVeigh to explain himself and the events that brought him to the American consciousness in April 1995, after the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was left a smoldering ruin.

It is a key part of the defense strategy for getting a favorable jury pool and a chance at acquittal. But it has inflamed an already passionate criminal case and exposed growing bitterness between the case’s two lead attorneys.

So angry is Michael E. Tigar, chief attorney for co-defendant Terry L. Nichols, that he pointedly told Judge Richard P. Matsch that it is Jones himself who has engendered much of the hatred for his client by his own incessant courting of publicity.

“Hoist in part by his own media petard, Mr. McVeigh now seeks court approval for a bigger petard,” said Tigar, who fears the interviews could make Nichols look worse by comparison.

The request also has fueled an animated debate in the legal community over the best way to represent clients in highly publicized criminal cases.

Because Matsch has imposed a partial gag order in the case, precluding the principals from discussing any potential evidence, some note that McVeigh would be free in any interview to concentrate solely on rebuilding his public image.

But other legal experts see such jailhouse sessions as merely a tawdry sideshow with little meaningful effect.

“You’re playing on the margins,” said Norman Provizer, who teaches law and heads the political science department at the Metropolitan State College of Denver. “Because if the evidence is there against him, it’s not going to make any difference.”

Jones has come under sharp criticism during the past year for his aggressive wooing of the media. No small wrinkle has developed in the case without Jones appearing on a television screen or in a newspaper story.

But the Enid lawyer maintains that, faced with the avalanche of negative publicity, he must seize every opportunity to spin back the criticism.

“The public image of Mr. McVeigh is so grossly distorted that if you don’t show the other side, then the opinion stays fixed that he is guilty.

“I’m not trying to persuade them the other way. I’m trying to just persuade them not to make a judgment yet. To confuse it. To make it uncertain.

“Ideally, you want a jury that has a confused opinion,” Jones said.

Others in famous cases have gone public and eventually helped repair their reputations: John Z. DeLorean mounted a media effort and book tour in the midst of criminal charges arising out of the collapse of his car company; President Nixon made the long climb back after Watergate.

But the challenge facing McVeigh is clearly daunting. With the trial at least several months away, a steady stream of books, articles and broadcast reports continues to focus on him and the dark social threat he may represent.

Morris Dees, who runs the Southern Poverty Law Center and monitors hate groups, wrote a book this year, “Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat,” that devotes a chapter to McVeigh--despite McVeigh’s passing association with militia organizations.

Dees quotes an Army buddy of McVeigh as saying the bombing suspect hated his mother after his parents divorced. Dees also quotes a McVeigh co-worker at an upstate New York security company as saying he was known to carry a sawed-off shotgun and wear bandoleers over his chest “like Rambo.” Another friend was quoted as saying McVeigh believed Hitler “had the right plan” in trying to conquer the world.

Now comes a biography written by a reporter from McVeigh’s hometown outside Buffalo, N.Y. Calling his book “All-American Monster,” writer Brandon M. Stickney hopes to embark on a promotional tour that includes a stop in Denver.

Against this tide, Jones has fought with selected, carefully scripted interviews with McVeigh. Each time, Jones has allowed McVeigh to talk about himself--and very little else. Some of it has paid off.

Newsweek, in an exclusive interview two months after the bombing, began its story: “He doesn’t exactly come across as Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Jones also allowed Media Bypass, a magazine that caters to the far right, to interview McVeigh. The resulting three-part series led with a lengthy anecdote contending that McVeigh once played the Good Samaritan to a motorist hurt on the freeway.

But Jones now would like court permission to spread McVeigh’s spruced-up image to an even greater national audience.

“Tim McVeigh came to symbolize our nation’s worst fears, our own worst enemy,” the lawyer said. If he is to receive a fair trial, he said, this “process of demonization” must be undone.