'An American Bombing: The Road To April 19th' tells the too often-neglected story of the Oklahoma City bombing

Marc Levin's documentary, now streaming on HBO and Max, explores the background of the 1995 attack

The Oklahoma City bombing took place on April 19, 1995, 29 years ago tomorrow. And in the years since, it’s been underrated as a modern-day American calamity. The attack killed 168 people, including several children, and was the deadliest act of domestic terrorism against the government in U.S. history.

Timothy McVeigh, a war veteran with ties to the militia movement, was convicted of masterminding the bombing, which was seen as retribution against the government for the deadly end to the Waco siege in 1993.

A new documentary, An American Bombing: The Road To April 19th, looks at how that attack happened, covering the lead-up to the plans, the response, and the subsequent trials.

The film tries to draw a straight line from April 19 to January 6, which is a bit clumsy, but otherwise, it’s a first-rate film about a too-often-forgotten event.

Directed by Marc Levin, An American Bombing hears from lots of people, from the family members of the children and adults killed that day to involved law enforcement personnel to a reformed extremist named Kerry Noble to then-President Bill Clinton. Clinton, looking and sounding shockingly aged, claims that because he knew all about the militia movement from his time in Arkansas, he had a hunch it was a homegrown attack.

We’re reminded that it was assumed, by many on the morning of the attack, that it must have been foreign Islamic terrorism and that it was necessary to close the borders.

Yes, there’s some play-by-play of how the investigation worked and the crime was solved. But this is far from a law enforcement whitewash.

A big takeaway of the documentary is that the FBI screwed up with a series of missteps, which not only failed to see the attack coming but horrifically bundled past calamities like Waco and Ruby Ridge in a way that helped the militia movement grow. Timothy McVeigh specifically planned the attack for the second anniversary of the Waco fire.

The film also goes into McVeigh’s background while questioning the long-held notion that he was a “lone wolf.”

One thing that documentary does that will undoubtedly be controversial is how it tries to draw a straight line from McVeigh and the militias in the mid-1990s to Trumpism and January 6. There are some similarities — they were motivated, back then, by the mythical fear that the government was about to take away all their guns — but there are differences, too. The militia types had a particular worldview that was unique to that time.

The recent death of O.J. Simpson has led of late to a lot of re-examining of the mid-1990s period, as well as the natural second-order question of how everyone would react if it happened today. But it’s also worth re-examining Oklahoma City, which this documentary expertly does.