Speaker 1: You're about to listen to a sneak peak of the
Speaker 1: first episode of my new podcast, Flashback from Ozzie, the
Speaker 1: creators of The Thread. Flashback is a journey through the
Speaker 1: hidden connections and ripple effects of history. In our premier episode,
Speaker 1: we hear a cautionary tale about hate, free speech, and
Speaker 1: giving a big platform to little men. Enjoy this sneak
Speaker 1: peak of our first episode, and don't forget to subscribe
Speaker 1: so you're the first to hear it in full, along
Speaker 1: with new episodes dropping every Wednesday, whether to applications. April,
Speaker 1: just past nine in the morning, a meeting of the
Speaker 1: Water Resources Board had just begun inside the Alfred pie
Speaker 1: Mura Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Basically, there are
Speaker 1: four elements that I have to ask receive information regarding
Speaker 1: a massive car bomb exploded outside of a large federal
Speaker 1: building in downtown Oklahoma City, shattering that building, killing children,
Speaker 1: killing federal employees, military men, and civilians. The bomb weigh
Speaker 1: nearly seven thousand pounds, nearly three quarters of the weight
Speaker 1: of the nuclear device dropped on Hiroshima. Most people were
Speaker 1: already inside at work here when the blast ripped the
Speaker 1: nine story federal office building apart, shattering floors and the
Speaker 1: offices inside. Most devastating of all the day care center
Speaker 1: on the second floor, destroying that was where most of
Speaker 1: the children who were killed had been. The first clue
Speaker 1: as to those responsible for the bombing, the worst domestic
Speaker 1: terror attack ever on American soil, was an eight foot
Speaker 1: piece of twisted meadow. It landed nearly six hundred feet
Speaker 1: away from the blast site. It was the axle to
Speaker 1: the writer rental truck that had carried the homemade bomb.
Speaker 1: The truck nine Ford, had a vehicle identification number stamped
Speaker 1: on that axle. It was thanks to the vehicle i
Speaker 1: D that FBI agents were able to track down and
Speaker 1: arrest to suspect. The U s. Attorney General Janet Reno
Speaker 1: reported his capture to the nation. Timothy McVeigh, aged twenty seven,
Speaker 1: was arrested by local authorities twenty five years ago. Timothy
Speaker 1: mcveigh's heinous act killed one hundred and sixty eight people,
Speaker 1: including nineteen children. But here's something they didn't tell you
Speaker 1: on the news or teach you in school about what
Speaker 1: happened in Oklahoma City. A Ford truck may have delivered
Speaker 1: the fateful payload that terrible April morning, and but Timothy
Speaker 1: mcveigh's act was really the end of a chain of
Speaker 1: events that began long before that day, the legacy of
Speaker 1: a toxic package of lies and hate that began seventy
Speaker 1: five years earlier with another four Ward, one whose name
Speaker 1: we associate with mass production, not mass murder. Welcome to Flashback,
Speaker 1: a new podcast from AZZI that aims to bring the
Speaker 1: pass back to life like never before. I'm Sean Braswell,
Speaker 1: and I'll be your visiting professor, taking you on a
Speaker 1: journey through history that will change how you look at
Speaker 1: the world today. Imagine Flashback is that history class you
Speaker 1: always wanted to take but can never find one where
Speaker 1: there are no textbooks, no exams, and no note taking,
Speaker 1: just the most compelling and surprising stories from the past,
Speaker 1: told by those who know them most about them. We
Speaker 1: are all living in the ripple effects of history, and
Speaker 1: so in the first seasonal Flashback, We're going to connect
Speaker 1: the dots on some of the most incredible, unintended consequences
Speaker 1: from the past. We'll learn how the invention of air
Speaker 1: conditioning change the landscape of American politics, how Hitler's doctor
Speaker 1: changed the course of World War two and much more.
Speaker 1: Today's lesson is a cautionary tale about hate, free speech,
Speaker 1: and giving a big platform to little men. Actually, I
Speaker 1: remember I was in the sixth grade. I was going
Speaker 1: to Sat Jane's classic school at the time. This is
Speaker 1: Latrese Sutton. She was thirteen at the time of the
Speaker 1: Oklahoma City bombing. I remember being in class and the
Speaker 1: whole class sending up and looking out the window and
Speaker 1: seeing the boat coming out from far away. We didn't
Speaker 1: know what it was at the time, but it shook
Speaker 1: our school building. That was free massive. That was not
Speaker 1: the only sign that something was amiss. My mom was
Speaker 1: supposed to be lux with me that day and she
Speaker 1: didn't show up during a lunch period, and since she
Speaker 1: was a nursing assistant, I thought maybe she got called
Speaker 1: into the hospital to help with all the people that
Speaker 1: were injured. Um, so I'm thinking anything of it. Latrise
Speaker 1: ate lunch with her friends and went to recess as usual.
Speaker 1: When my aunt came to pick us up from school, Um,
Speaker 1: she was crying, and I think at that point we
Speaker 1: kind of knew something was wrong. Sutton's mom, Teresa, had
Speaker 1: gone alone downtown to the Mura Federal Building to get
Speaker 1: a Social Security card for Sutton's eight month old brother.
Speaker 1: When mcveigh's homemade bomb exploded, she was thirty three. Four
Speaker 1: years before Oklahoma City, Timothy McVeigh made his first killing.
Speaker 1: He received the Army Commendation Medal for it. Just two
Speaker 1: hours ago, Allied air forces began an attack on military
Speaker 1: targets in Iraq and Kuwait. In January, the U S
Speaker 1: went to war against Iraq and the first Persian Gulf War.
Speaker 1: One of the first American soldiers to enter the enemy
Speaker 1: nation was a twenty two year old infantryman from Buffalo,
Speaker 1: New York. In the Gulf, you saw combat. This is
Speaker 1: correspondent Ed Bradley in a two thousand interview that Sixty
Speaker 1: Minutes did with McVeigh in his Death Row prison cell,
Speaker 1: and McVeigh was particularly open with his past. I did
Speaker 1: you fired a weapon at Yes and killed soldiers? Yes.
Speaker 1: McVeigh was a gunner in a Bradley fighting vehicle, and
Speaker 1: he was a damn good shot. One day, his crew
Speaker 1: spotted an enemy machine gun nest in the distance. It
Speaker 1: was more than a mile away, but poised a major
Speaker 1: threat to American troops. When one of the Iraqi gunners
Speaker 1: briefly came up from his position, McVeigh popped him right
Speaker 1: in the chest. The lethal shot, taken from more than
Speaker 1: nineteen football fields away, would help force the surrender of
Speaker 1: thirty other Iraqis from that position and become the stuff
Speaker 1: of legend in the army. McVeigh had been using firearms
Speaker 1: since boyhood. Tim McVeigh was raised in a rural town
Speaker 1: outside of Buffalo, New York. This is lou Michelle. He
Speaker 1: and his colleague at the Buffalo News, Dan Herbeck, spent
Speaker 1: seventy three hours interviewing McVeigh after the bombing, and at
Speaker 1: a very young age, his grandpa Ed taught him how
Speaker 1: to shoot guns rifles along the erie canal. Ed taught
Speaker 1: to him about safety. You just don't shout a gun
Speaker 1: anywhere because you could hurt somebody. The son of a
Speaker 1: factory worker, young Tim had a typical boyhood. He loved
Speaker 1: pro football, comic books, and battles between good and evil.
Speaker 1: He even made his own Star Wars lightsabers by attaching
Speaker 1: flashlights to cardboard tubes. He was known as Noodle McVeigh
Speaker 1: because he was very slender and he was a target
Speaker 1: for bullies. Thus his hatred for bullies, and he came
Speaker 1: to realize the American government was the ultimate bully. But
Speaker 1: he didn't come to that realization right away. And in
Speaker 1: May he joined the Army. And one of the things
Speaker 1: he told Dan Herbeck and I was that the army
Speaker 1: had all the ammunition anyone could ever want. McVeigh loved guns,
Speaker 1: and he loved the Army. At first, other soldiers might
Speaker 1: have hated the early morning wake ups, the strenuous training,
Speaker 1: the uniform inspections, and the discipline McVeigh thrived in late nine,
Speaker 1: but they learned he was on the fast track to
Speaker 1: being in the U s Special Forces, the elite of
Speaker 1: the elite. Then, just before his Special Forces try out,
Speaker 1: McVeigh learned the Army had a different plan for him. Iraq.
Speaker 1: I went over there, hyped up, just like everyone else.
Speaker 1: This is McVeigh again in that sixty minutes interview. Not
Speaker 1: only is Saddam evil, all Iraqis are evil. Uh. What
Speaker 1: I experienced, though, is an entirely different ballgame. Dan Herbert
Speaker 1: co authored mcveigh's authorized biography, American Terrorist, with lou Michelle,
Speaker 1: and he looked at the US involvement in the Persian
Speaker 1: Gulf War as a giant, cruel bully picking on the
Speaker 1: people of Iraq. By the time he got out of
Speaker 1: the army, he literally hated the US government, the government
Speaker 1: he had worked for. By the end of the year,
Speaker 1: McVeigh quit the army, and without the discipline, paycheck, and
Speaker 1: authorized isolence that it afforded him. McVeigh, the bitter antigovernment
Speaker 1: gun lover, was a loose cannon just waiting for a
Speaker 1: spark to light him up. Henry Ford was a lot
Speaker 1: like Timothy McVeigh in some ways. He came from a simple,
Speaker 1: working class home near Lake Erie, and he grew to
Speaker 1: hate war and those he believed to be behind it.
Speaker 1: This is Victoria Weisti, a legal historian and author of
Speaker 1: Henry Ford's War on Jews. Ford was a fierce, fierce
Speaker 1: pacifist and went on record publicly criticizing the way that
Speaker 1: World War One was being conducted. The eccentric tycoon may
Speaker 1: have made his fortune from the automobile, but in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifteen he decided to take a boat to Europe in
Speaker 1: a bold effort to end the war through diplomacy. It
Speaker 1: proved to be a giant fiasco. Ford's reputation took a
Speaker 1: beating in the papers. The Chicago Tribune called him quote
Speaker 1: an ignorant, idealist and an anarchist, and Ford didn't particularly
Speaker 1: care for being called ignorant or an anarchist, so he
Speaker 1: sued for Liabel, which made Matters even worse. Unable to
Speaker 1: stop the press from criticizing him, Ford tried something else,
Speaker 1: so in nineteen he purchased a newspaper in his own hometown, Dearborn, Michigan.
Speaker 1: It was about to go defunct, was called the Dearborn Independent,
Speaker 1: and he even purchased a printing press. He brought it
Speaker 1: to the Ford Motor Company factory and he retooled it himself.
Speaker 1: Ford may not have called the national media fake news,
Speaker 1: but he was tired of the newspapers spreading what he
Speaker 1: considered lies. He wanted to have a means for reaching
Speaker 1: ordinary Americans directly and unfiltered, and it wasn't just to
Speaker 1: protect his own reputation or sell more cars. Ford was
Speaker 1: deeply concerned with where America was going as a nation,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to use The Dearborn Independent to reshape
Speaker 1: cultural practices, um people's leisure time activities, how immigrants were
Speaker 1: assimilated into American culture, and what kind of politics should prevail.
Speaker 1: Ford used every means at his disposal to bolster his
Speaker 1: newspapers readership. Free copies were sent to schools, libraries, and
Speaker 1: universities across the country. Ford dealers were even required to
Speaker 1: fill quotas for newspaper subscriptions, just like they did for
Speaker 1: their car sales. And because they never took subscriptions and
Speaker 1: they never sold ads, it was a complete loss leader
Speaker 1: for Ford, but he didn't care even if it did
Speaker 1: not make him money. Ford realized the power that having
Speaker 1: his own print media pedestal gave him. He had entered
Speaker 1: the newspaper business to counter the lies he believed were
Speaker 1: being spread about him, and it didn't take long for
Speaker 1: Henry Ford to start spreading his own. To listen to
Speaker 1: this episode and full click the link in the show
Speaker 1: notes or search your podcast app for Flashback History's Unintended Consequences,
Speaker 1: premiering today,