Behind the Bombing

Stephen Jones, who spent more than two years and $10 million to $15 million in taxpayer money defending Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh--until the worst mass murderer in American history fired him for screwing up--has come home. To his books. Shelves, stacks, piles, cartons of books. They’re everywhere in his 80-year-old white two-story house with columns that make it look a bit like Mount Vernon transplanted to the Oklahoma prairie.

Even in the upstairs bathroom, books are stacked within reach of the whirlpool tub and wingback easy chair. More books spill into the anteroom of his law offices on the 11th floor of the tallest building in this tidy town of 50,000--a skyscraper and a big city by Oklahoma standards.

“It’s my greatest weakness,” said Jones, who “can’t walk past a bookstore.”

He figures he owns 20,000 to 25,000 books, a collection tilted toward biographies and thick histories. And, yes, he’s read every one. “You’ll find my notes on the margins,” he says. To reach the 20,000-mark, Jones, 57, must have read at least one book every day of his life.

Perhaps a little literary license is permitted, considering his new status in the literary world. He’s an author-at-work--with a fat advance. He’s writing what surely will be the most important book in his collection. Following his messy falling out with McVeigh in August, Jones signed with Doubleday to write the yet-untitled book revolving around this country’s deadliest crime ever.

Jones said he called New York literary agent Peter Matson of Sterling Lord Literistic last summer, the day after a Senate subcommittee abandoned plans for high-profile hearings on domestic terrorism, hearings at which Jones was to have been a star witness.

“They’re just going to keep this bottled up,” he quoted Capitol Hill sources.

Matson arranged for Jones to meet the next day with two top Doubleday executives. With neither an outline nor a sample chapter, usual prerequisites for an unpublished would-be author, the self-styled county-seat lawyer managed to land an advance reported variously as $600,000 or $750,000.

“It’s somewhere in that vicinity,” he confirmed in an interview--and he expects to deliver the manuscript within six months.

“This isn’t a book about what Timothy McVeigh told me,” Jones said. “This is a book about what the government didn’t tell the American people. . . . It will tell the truth about Oklahoma City and about Waco,” the latter a reference to the FBI’s assault on the Branch Davidian compound in central Texas precisely two years before the spring morning in April 1995 when a huge truck bomb shattered the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.

“It will be about what the media didn’t follow through on,” he added. “It will put domestic terrorism in a context. . . . This book will be a contribution to the truth.”

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Why should people believe Stephen Jones now when a jury of 12 sitting for weeks in a Denver courtroom didn’t accept what he told them?

He hopes “the American people will read what I say and look at the support I present, then make up their own minds.”

His court case was severely handicapped, he said, by the refusal of U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch to allow evidence suggesting three things: Involvement of foreign terrorists in the bombing, government fumbling of purported warnings from informants pointing toward plots to blow up government buildings, and how the FBI had become a corrupt, out-of-control agency that murdered the Branch Davidians.

His book will cover those points, he said, and personal things such as “the impact on my wife and my children, how my son had problems at school over me taking the case. . . . There were some drive-by shootings aimed at our home . . . threats against my life.”

But, he added, “I hope to write the book more as a historian than as a memoir of Stephen Jones. Of course, there will be a description of the trial, and more about domestic terrorism and how this case has affected the lives of the people of Oklahoma.”

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Jones, who fancies himself something of a history buff, bought a half-page ad in the Enid Daily Eagle, announcing he was closing his law office and moving to Denver for the trial, possibly never to return. His message to the people of Enid was almost identical to Abraham Lincoln’s farewell message to the people of Springfield, Ill., when Lincoln closed his law office and moved into the White House--but Jones offered no attribution.

It said, in part: “To this place, Enid, and to the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived more than a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young man to one whose life journey is more than half over. Here my children were born, and my father is buried.”

According to historians, Lincoln said this on Feb. 11, 1861, as he boarded the train in Springfield: “To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried.”

“Outrageous,” said University of Oklahoma history professor William Savage Jr. when the similarities were discovered in January. “Intellectual honesty demands that you acknowledge your source--unless you’re doing it as an enormous joke.”

Jones told the Dallas Morning News that he made a conscious decision not to credit Lincoln, explaining that people in Enid knew he was an amateur Lincoln scholar and to compare himself to Lincoln might seem pretentious. He added, “I wasn’t running for president. And I wasn’t writing a PhD thesis. And I wasn’t writing a book. So I didn’t see any reason to footnote everything I said.”

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That Jones would equate himself with Abraham Lincoln, or that he could recite Lincoln’s farewell message from memory, didn’t seem to surprise his friends or foes.

“A healthy ego,” one Oklahoma lawyer said politely.

“He’s always been full of himself,” an Enid businessman agreed.

U.S. Atty. Patrick Ryan of Oklahoma City, asked by law students last month to assess Jones, responded: “An extremely experienced lawyer, a brilliant scholar.” As for Jones’ handling of the McVeigh case, said Ryan, who was on the prosecution team, “He didn’t have much to work with. There’s a ton of evidence against McVeigh.”

Joseph Hartzler, who headed that prosecution team and has now returned to his post as a top Justice Department lawyer in Illinois, agreed that the evidence against McVeigh was “overwhelming” and Jones could have done little to change the outcome. In a telephone interview, he saluted Jones for accepting the assignment to head the team: “Because the bombing had such a wrenching emotional impact on the people of Oklahoma, I thought for any lawyer from Oklahoma to take on the appointment was an act of courage.”

Hartzler said he has no intention of joining Jones in writing a book about the case.

“Absolutely, positively not,” he said. He’d rather devote his spare time to something important, like coaching his son’s as-yet-undefeated flag football team.

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Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, a Republican, asked Jones to represent him in 1995--after his election but before taking office--in a court dispute over whether Keating or the lame-duck Democrat governor should appoint a new state commissioner.

“We won,” Keating said, praising Jones’ representation as outstanding. Keating said that Jones had sought his advice after being asked by a U.S. district judge to consider representing one of the two men arrested in connection with the Oklahoma City bombing and expressed concern about how the public and the state’s political powers might react.

Keating said, “I told him . . . there would be a lot of hard feelings over him representing anyone accused of the bombing.”

But Jones, who had represented major corporations in civil cases and a score of defendants in criminal cases carrying the death penalty, said he decided to accept the assignment without even knowing whom he would be representing.

“I would have been disappointed in myself if I hadn’t done it,” Jones said, adding that he has no regrets, even though he is somewhat bitter over the criticism some other well-known lawyers have heaped on him for his handling of McVeigh’s defense.

His critics include high-profile Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who said in a television interview that McVeigh’s lawyers “presented an awful, awful defense. They gave the jury very little to work with.”

Jones’ supporters include Keating, a former FBI agent, U.S. attorney and top-ranking Treasury Department law enforcement official, who believes Jones represented McVeigh “with intelligence and integrity. All of America saw him help us make certain our judicial system worked the way it should” and he deserves the nation’s gratitude.

Denver attorney Scott Robinson, at McVeigh’s trial daily as a media consultant and legal affairs analyst, said, “Jones and his crew should be commended for the courageous job they did in representing one of the most detested defendants in history. The prosecution did a superb job, but sometimes it’s easy to do a superb job when you have all of the strong evidence, all of the emotion and the resources of the U.S. government to help you.”

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In recent weeks, Jones has been speaking--without fees--tweaking interest in what his book might disclose. For example, he told a Kansas Bar Assn. meeting this month that, while preparing the case, he “met some of the most bizarre, paranoid and fanatical people on the face of the Earth.” He refused to elaborate. And in a recent speech in Denver to the Society of Professional Journalists, he blasted the media as having been “led by a ring through the nose by the FBI.”

The cost of McVeigh’s defense has generated strong criticism from Capitol Hill to the state capitol in Oklahoma City. Jones assembled a team of 14 lawyers and six investigators, plus more than a score of expert witnesses, who billed the government at rates of up to $125 an hour, plus expenses. Members of the defense team made at least nine trips to eight countries pursuing leads and interviewing potential witnesses.

“It’s obscene,” Richard Wintery, a deputy Oklahoma attorney general, told the Legal Times. “I really want to hear . . . Stephen Jones’ explanation for those trips to Europe.”

When Newsweek estimated that defense expenses had reached $10 million, Jones called the figure extremely inflated. But in an interview for this story, Jones put total defense costs at $10 million to $15 million, with bills still coming in. (Records relating to government payments for the defense have been sealed.)

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Jones said he worked 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, for much of the two-plus years he represented McVeigh--”even Christmas Day 1995, my birthday and my children’s birthdays.” Had he billed the government $125 for each hour, he added, he personally would have collected about $1.5 million.

That apparently is far more than the federal government has ever paid any lawyer for an indigent defendant in a death penalty case. According to U.S. courts records, the average cost of a death penalty defense rose from $62,128 in fiscal 1995 to $104,077 last year, with much of the increase due to the McVeigh case.

That led Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) to introduce legislation to stem public outrage by requiring court-appointed lawyers to obtain the presiding judge’s approval if they plan to spend more than $63,000 a year in a single case. Jones called it “a knee-jerk reaction to a hopefully once-in-a-lifetime case.”

The government has essentially underwritten most of the research about conspiracy theories and other themes for Jones’ book, which is sure to generate more controversy.

But Jones, dismissing any such criticism in advance, said it’s no different “than a president using White House files and documents to write his memoirs.”