Jill A. Edy

Only a few months before the 9/11 attacks leveled the World Trade Center, a monument recalling the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was dedicated. In the fall of 2002, a delegation came from New York City to learn what they could about memorializing a terrorist attack. The Oklahoma City National Memorial was a relevant model, not only because up until September 11 the 1995 Murrah Building bombing was the most deadly act of terrorism ever committed on American soil but because the memorial represents a central tension that modern memorial creation processes struggle to balance. Despite its name, in many ways the Oklahoma City National Memorial is a private space that the public is invited to visit. This tension between the public and the private permeates every aspect of the memorial, and it is likely to play an important role in any memorial to the events of 9/11 as well. In the emotional heat generated by the process of memorializing a traumatic event, it can be difficult to stand back and consider the implications of choices. Thus, now that we have ten years of historical distance from the Murrah Building bombing, it is useful to look at what was gained and what was lost in the balance that was struck in Oklahoma.

Early in the memorial creation process in Oklahoma City, it was decided that survivors of the bombing and the families of the victims should play a central role in designing a memorial. While this may seem like an obvious choice, it was in fact quite unusual at the time. Memorials typically are created in processes that involve political leaders and artistic consultants – that is, by processes that emphasize the public, political, and aesthetic, rather than the personal, aspects of the remembered past. In Oklahoma City, the first artistic consultant hired by the Memorial Foundation was fired because he put aesthetic concerns before the wishes of the families. The winning design team earned the commission in part because the families and survivors felt they could work effectively with the designers (Linenthal, 2001). Thus, those who had been most personally affected by the bombing, rather than the public or its representatives, had the most say in the creation of the memorial.

At the heart of the resulting outdoor memorial is a field of chairs laid out in the footprint of the Murrah Building, the ruined remains of which were imploded shortly after the search for human remains ended. Each chair represents an individual who died in the building, and the chairs are arranged in rows that represent the floor of the building in which each person died.

The construction of the memorial changed the map of downtown Oklahoma City as previously public space was incorporated into the memorial site. Memorial creators had always intended to build upon the site of the Murrah Building itself, but buildings across the street from the federal building had also been heavily damaged, and people had died in them. The Memorial Foundation lobbied the city to close the street for the length of the city block in front of the Murrah Building site and to include the street and the now-leveled buildings across the street as part of the memorial. The city resisted, for the street was a central and busy artery, but the Memorial Foundation won their fight, and the street became a reflecting pool bounded by gates that lead into and out of the memorial. The lots across the street from the Murrah Building now hold a grove of trees dedicated to the rescuers and what is known as the “Survivor Tree,” an American Elm that survived heavy damage it sustained in the explosion.

The tension between public and private continues in the day-to-day management of the memorial. Congressional legislation was required to create a unique relationship between the Oklahoma City National Memorial Foundation, which operates the memorial without any public monies, and the National Park Service, which provides staff to interpret the outdoor memorial for visitors. Although it is a “national memorial,” it is privately funded and controlled.

Other outcomes from the Murrah Building bombing exhibit similar kinds of tensions between public and private. In 2004, Terry Nichols, already convicted for his role in helping Timothy McVeigh bomb the building and sentenced to life in prison by a federal jury in Colorado, was retried by the state of Oklahoma at an estimated cost of $3 million. Some commentators speculated that the state trial was held in hopes that an Oklahoma jury might sentence him to death. However, at the conclusion of the trial, in which Nichols was again sentenced to life in prison, families of victims told reporters that they gained a sense of closure because someone had at last been convicted of killing their family members. The federal trial, although it had found Nichols guilty of the bombing, could only hold him accountable for the deaths of federal agents in the building. For these families, apparently, it was not enough that Nichols was found guilty of an act of terrorism against the nation. It was also important to them that he be held accountable for their individual losses. The admixture of public and private continued with memorial services marking the tenth anniversary of the bombing this spring. Speakers included Vice President Dick Cheney and former President Bill Clinton, as well as a variety of state officials; however, the services were not open to the public. Families, survivors, and rescuers attended the ceremonies, which were broadcast live by local television for other Oklahomans.

The important role that survivors, and particularly victims’ families, have played in memorializing the Oklahoma City bombing has significant advantages. National memorials created primarily through public and political processes often dote upon the famous or politically prominent and can easily wave away the contributions and sacrifices of individuals in favor of emphasizing duty to the nation (Bodnar, 1992). A totalizing, public perspective that considers the Murrah Building bombing an attack on the nation itself also abstracts from the very human tragedy that took place. Indeed, this perspective eerily dovetails with that of the bombers themselves. The memorial resists this interpretation in its insistence that visitors bear witness to the individual losses experienced by families and friends. It defies the paradox, sometimes attributed to Joseph Stalin, that “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic” by reminding visitors of the individuals, average people who were neither soldiers nor law enforcement officers, who lost their lives through an act of terrorism. Taking into account the wishes of families and survivors helps to ensure that the memorial does not sublimate human suffering to national interest. This emphasis on the importance of average people is reinforced in the preservation of the first, informal memorial to the Oklahoma City bombing: A section of the chain link fence that surrounded the Murrah Building site during rescue and recovery operations to which visitors tied emblems of remembrance remains a permanent part of the National Memorial.

At the same time, in order to represent the ways that the bombing affected individuals, the creators were obligated to decide which individuals were worthy of remembrance and on what scale. Linenthal (2001) observes that even though the Memorial Foundation sought to give all of those affected by the bombing a say in the creation of the memorial, families of the dead quickly came to dominate the process. The memorial, perhaps without intending to, creates a hierarchy of loss and suffering in which those who died in the Murrah Building itself are the most honored. Those who died in the Water Resources Building, across the street from the federal building, are memorialized in a separate row of chairs that, unlike the Murrah Building victims’ chairs, are not representative of where they were killed. Those who survived the blast are memorialized on a plaque tucked away on one side of the Murrah Building footprint on the building’s only surviving wall, overshadowed by the large entrance gate. Linenthal notes that there was serious debate over what qualified one as a survivor of the bombing worthy of recognition on the plaque. Many of these survivors have been left with debilitating and disfiguring injuries. The hierarchy is also captured in the memorial mission statement: “We come here to remember those who were killed, those who survived and those changed forever.”

This hierarchy, however unintentional, serves to privatize both the memorial and the event it remembers. Individuals become part owners of the past and its remembrance in such measure as they have suffered losses according to the memorial’s calculus. Although the Murrah Building bombing was intended as an attack on the federal government and, by extension, on the nation as a whole, visitors to the most public portion of the Oklahoma City National Memorial, the outdoor memorial, are invited to witness the suffering and loss of others more than to share it.
While it has advantages and disadvantages, the balance struck by the Oklahoma City National Memorial works for Oklahoma City. Because they were domestic terrorists, Nichols and McVeigh seem more like mass murderers than like enemies of the state waging war on Americans. Oklahoma City is, in many ways, a small town, and virtually everyone in the city was directly affected by the bombing. By some estimates, one in every seven residents attended at least one funeral for a bombing victim. Thus, the private qualities of the memorial can be embraced by local residents who visit because they, too, own this past and can see their losses written across the heart of their city. The gap between public and private is not all that noticeable in Oklahoma City.

Striking a balance between public and private will be much more difficult for those charged with memorializing the destruction of the World Trade Center. It is much easier to see the destruction of a national icon by foreign attackers as an assault on the nation, on all of us, than it is to define the bombing of an obscure federal building in middle America by homegrown extremists as such. However, the personal losses of 9/11 were also devastating – human tragedies that co-exist with the national tragedy. Any memorial to the events of 9/11 must recognize the impact of this past both on each of us and on all of us. It will not do this if those who lost loved ones in the attack become the dominant voice in the memorial creation process, for while they offer a vital counterpoint to the voices of public officials and the state and their personal pain is an important part of the tragedy of 9/11, they are not proxies for the public. Hard as it is to admit, human pain is incommensurable, and there is no way to speak effectively of who has lost the most, whose pain is more worthy of public recognition. We cannot enumerate our losses any more than we can place the interests of the state before the sacrifices of its citizens. If we can find a way to span this gap between public and private, between abstraction and ownership, we may find the way to honor our shared past.

References:

Bodnar, J. (1992) Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Linenthal, E. (2001). The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jill A. Edy is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Oklahoma.