A MOMENT OF SILENCE

By Richard Lacayo

Sometimes talk is healing. sometimes silence works better. So at 9:02 a.m. on Wednesday, exactly one week from the moment of the explosion that tore apart hundreds of lives, Oklahoma City came to another halt. Gathered at what used to be the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, rescue teams briefly stopped picking through the wreckage and stood in quiet reflection. All over the city people bowed their heads. Outside of town, traffic stopped along Interstate 40. Beyond, in towns and cities around the country, in churches and offices and in the White House, the same pause was observed. For one minute, the unspeakable was commemorated by the unspoken.

It's too soon to tell whether the Oklahoma City bombing will also be a transforming moment in our national life, one of those episodes that make us take stock of ourselves and what it means to be an American. It's already plain that the explosion did more than just remind us that terrorism happens. In a nation that has entertained and appalled itself for years with hot talk on the radio and the campaign trail, the inflamed rhetoric of the '90s is suddenly an unindicted co-conspirator in the blast. As for antigovernment sentiment, so long as Americans are fretful about Washington-for that matter, so long as Americans are Americans-it won't go away. How it's expressed, however, is now subject to reconsideration. Then there's the gun lobby, which only a few weeks ago was basking in its renewed clout in Congress. For a while at least, it's once more on the defensive. And if high passion itself becomes less fashionable, the reverberations may even extend to single-issue politics on topics like abortion.

In their attempt to fathom the bombers' motives, many Americans discovered just how deep the paranoia runs among a small minority of their countrymen. It was easy to laugh at the wackier notions, uttered by the most normal-looking people speaking in reasoned tones: Russian troops are hidden in salt mines under Detroit waiting for their orders, the U.N. has a secret plan to disarm the public with the help of L.A. gangs. What was less easy to dismiss were those Americans who realize Janet Reno is not a paid agent of Jewish Colombian drug lords but who nonetheless are so deeply alienated from their government that they view it as their enemy. Most are not violent people, and many of them have understandable grievances about feeling left behind in the economic competition of the 1990s.

At various times of national stress the language of paranoid politics has been adopted by both left and right. It was the tone of McCarthyism in the '50s and of the most extreme segments of the radical left more than 10 years later. In the '90s you hear it in the rantings of the Nation of Islam about government laboratories spreading aids, and from the mouths of right-wing small-timers like Mark Koernke, the Michigan-based shortwave-radio personality who is the inspiration of many a militia. Koernke tells his audiences how to use nylon rope to hang legislators. To hear the antigovernment line at its most ungoverned, it isn't necessary to seek out the marginal characters. Last Monday G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate showman-convict and host of the nation's second most widely heard radio talk show, told his listeners that if federal agents invade their homes, they should shoot at their heads because of the agents' protective vests. On Tuesday he reconsidered. The head is too hard to hit. "So you shoot twice to the body . center of mass. And if that does not work, then shoot to the groin area."

When politicians and talk-show hosts promote the idea that the Federal Government is one step away from breaking down your door, they edge toward what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously termed the paranoid style in American politics. "Overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive," he called it. "Grandiose and apocalyptic in expression." When they argue in fervid terms that government is invalid, they invite extremists to conclude that terrorism is just one more form of noble resistance to tyranny. They also approach Koernke-talk. It's a language that sees conspiracy everywhere, defines the opposition as inhuman-meaning disposable-and goes as far as bloodlust will take it. Describing the paranoid spokesman in politics, Hofstadter wrote: "His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation." These days, it's an all too familiar sound.

Such white-hot rhetoric can be more than passionate; it can be dangerous. The discontents of middle Americans, who see their economic prospects declining by the year, have been too easily turned into a resentment focused almost entirely upon government. Last week two letters surfaced that Timothy McVeigh, the chief suspect in the Oklahoma bombing, sent in 1992 to the editors of the Union-Sun & Journal, a newspaper in Lockport, New York. "The 'American Dream' of the middle class has all but disappeared," he says in one of them, "substituted with people struggling just to buy next week's groceries . Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn't come to that. But it might." That's the middle-class fear of downward mobility shifting seamlessly into visions of apocalypse. It's an infernal logic that survives the best of times and thrives in the worst.

After President Clinton extemporized a critique of hate speech on the airwaves last week, there were signs that even the extremists were backing off from their own extremes. Koernke lost his five-day-a-week program on World Wide Christian Radio, a shortwave station that can be picked up throughout the nation. George McClintock, the station's general manager, said it was dropping Koernke's Intelligence Report because "we've got to get the gasoline off the fires." And the Michigan Militia ousted its leader, Norman Olson, for issuing an unauthorized press release pinning the Oklahoma bombing on "the Japanese." Their alleged motive: retaliation for the U.S. poison-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, which was itself part of America's subversive campaign against the overly strong yen.

Meanwhile, the Oklahoma senate voted 39 to 0 to ask broadcasters and sponsors of Liddy's show and "other broadcast talk shows that encourage hate and violence" to pull out their funding. Even before that, station KCKC-AM in San Bernardino, California, announced that it was canceling Liddy's show. (How many still carry it? At last count: 262.)

Though nobody expects it to back down for long, the National Rifle Association is also doing some rethinking. Recently the N.R.A. ran full-page ads in major newspapers that pictured helmeted Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents bursting through a door. N.R.A. executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, in fund-raising letters and articles published in the organization's magazine, has been warning of a "secret plan" under way in Washington to "crush your gun rights." the final war has begun, reads the banner headline over an article by LaPierre in the August issue of American Rifleman, the N.R.A.'s monthly magazine. LaPierre admits to some regrets about the ads, which he says will not be run again. "Some of the [N.R.A.] rhetoric is awful strong," he says. "To tell the truth, I wish it wasn't there." He also promises that the N.R.A.'s computer "Bullet-n-Board" on the Internet will be screened to prevent postings like one that recently taught how to make bombs with baby-food jars.

After conferring with N.R.A. officials, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate majority leader Bob Dole decided last week to postpone the vote on repealing the assault-weapons ban, which had been scheduled for next month. The official reason was to give priority to antiterrorism legislation requested by the White House. The real problem was the fear of voters' drawing a connection between the N.R.A. and the probable Oklahoma bombers, who may be affiliated with groups that ferociously oppose gun control.

Still, there was also a willingness to try to heal thorns in the flesh. Arizona Senator John McCain proposed that the Senate Judiciary Committee hold hearings into the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, a shared emblem of pain among antigovernment zealots. That disaster, said McCain, "fanned the flames of distrust." Indeed, the general perception that the federal action was justified may come in for serious revisionism. In an article in the May issue of the religious journal First Things, Dean Kelley, a respected legal scholar, reviews the records of the siege and questions the need for and the ferocity of the initial government raid. The government's actions at Waco's cataclysmic finale, Kelley notes, also raise problems.

In the first days after the bombing, a kind of informal truce held in Washington. For Republicans, an act of terror from the right, even if from its most extreme fringes, was not exactly an opportunity to go on the attack. For President Clinton, the avoidance of partisan advantage was essential. After his months on the sidelines, the tragedy provided him with a much needed opportunity to regain presidential stature by symbolizing the nation's united grief and resolve, a role that obliged him to remain above the fray. The polls show it paid off.

Aides hope his performance has earned Clinton a long-hoped-for second look from the skeptical voting public. "This tragic event, and how he has risen to the occasion, has given people pause," says one. Clinton's popularity has risen most when he clashed with his party's liberal orthodoxy. In responding to the Oklahoma bombing, he has been the one to advocate the toughest stand by asking Congress for more power to fight terrorism. In addition to more money for counterterrorist activities, he asked Congress last week to approve 1,000 new law-enforcement agents, to require explosive materials to carry chemical markers that make them easier to track and to permit U.S. military forces to take part in law enforcement. It says something that it fell to Dole to call for caution about infringements on civil liberties. The Senator was especially concerned about lending military experts to the counterterrorist effort. Even so, Dole talked about the likelihood of passage by the end of this month.

A few days earlier, however, Clinton had moved to draw from the bombing at least one lesson to his own advantage. During a speech in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to the American Association of Community Colleges, he pleaded for the nation to back away from hate speech on the airwaves. "We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other," Clinton said in a crescendo enhanced by the rhythmic taps of his fist on the lectern. "They spread hate; they leave the impression, by their very words, that violence is acceptable."

Though aides insisted that the President was not singling out radio-talk-show hosts, it was too late. For the next two days, the Rush Limbaughs big and small went to town on him. After an otherwise cordial meeting with Clinton and Dole about antiterrorist measures, Gingrich, who had been careful for days to check his tongue, complained, "It is grotesque to jump from the legitimate dialogue of a free society to somebody setting a bomb off to kill Americans."

Whether it was wise for Clinton to raise the issue, it was in the air the moment the bomb went off. Tough talk is a venerable part of American politics. Do you call your supporters "normal Americans"? Are we engaged in a "culture war"? That's hyperbolic and sometimes ugly, but in keeping with a long tradition of trashing the opposition. It has yet to fracture the republic.

In 1849 an outraged Henry David Thoreau wrote, "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answered that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." Angry rhetoric is not new. But neither is America's balm for it. Thoreau would vanish into the woods of Walden to deal quietly with despair. And in the moments of silence Americans devote to contemplating the probable causes of the horrors of Oklahoma, another venerable piece of Thoreau's advice should resurface: "It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things." --Reported by Sam Allis/Boston and Nina Burleigh, James Carney and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by SAM ALLIS/BOSTON AND NINA BURLEIGH, JAMES CARNEY AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON