The title of the documentary “Oklahoma City” is a little misleading. The movie isn’t just about the April morning in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder truck full of explosives next to a federal building and killed 168 people. It also tracks the events that prompted McVeigh’s homegrown terrorism.
The movie, which airs next Tuesday night on PBS, revisits the bloody siege at Ruby Ridge in 1992, not to mention the showdown the following year near Waco, Tex., that led to the deaths of David Koresh and his Branch Davidians.
“There’s a tendency to see these sorts of events as one-offs,” said the movie’s director, Barak Goodman, “these anomalous breaks from normality where some kind of crazy person takes it upon themselves to perform this terrorist act. But the fact is, much more often, there’s a movement behind these lone wolves.”
It didn’t just start with McVeigh. It also didn’t end with him.
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