The new attorney general, Janet Reno, then got tough. Apparently, he was making and selling crystal meth he was also-what else in these sick times?-not a Man of God but a Pedophile. Meanwhile, the Media were briefed regularly on the evils of David Koresh.

Followed by a 51-day siege in which loud music was played 24 hours a day outside the compound. When, afterįour minutes, hewas officially dead, his eyes were still open, staring Survivalist, he seemed to ration his remaining breaths. McVeigh died in character that is, in control. agents were shot dead, by friendly fire, it was thought. Six Branch Davidians were killed that day. helicopter fired at the roof of the main building. agents, without proper warrants, attacked the church’s compound while, overhead, at least one A.T.F. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, exercising its mandate to “regulate” firearms, refused all invitations from cult leader David Koresh to inspect his licensed firearms. The Branch Davidians, as the cultists called themselves, were a peaceful group of men, women, and children living and praying together in anticipation of the end of the world, which started to come their way on February 28, 1993. This was the greatest massacre of Americans by an American since two years earlier, when the federal government decided to take out the compound of a Seventh-Day Adventist cult near Waco, Texas. In a week’s time “the Oklahoma City Bomber,” a decorated hero of the Gulf War, one of Nature’s Eagle Scouts, Timothy McVeigh, was due to be executed by lethal injection in Terre Haute, Indiana, for being, as he himself insisted, the sole maker and detonator of a bomb that blew up a federal building in which died 168 men, women, and children.

Messias by Gore Vidal