30 Years Later, a New Look on the Oklahoma City Bombing | USAEMALL.com

David Glover holds up what looks like a pair of gray bricks. They were once part of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which was bombed by Timothy McVeigh on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people. It remains the deadliest domestic terror attack in U.S. history.

Glover, an executive producer of the new three-part docuseries “Oklahoma City Bombing: One Day in America,” explained in a video interview that he had received the rubble from Mike Shannon, a firefighter featured in the film. Shannon wanted the filmmaker to feel the weight of the project in his hands.

“It was almost like he was saying, ‘Don’t forget this is real,’” Glover said. “‘Don’t forget you’ve got a responsibility here.’ It is a physical artifact that has a lot of heft to it.”

Shannon needn’t have worried. The series, now streaming on Hulu and Disney+, follows a pattern set by the first two “One Day in America” installments, which covered the Sept. 11 attacks and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The stories are less interested in granules of policy and the sweep of history than in the experiences of individuals who were present for events that shook the country. (Glover is an executive producer on all of the “One Day in America” series, which were produced by 72 Films, the company he founded with Mark Raphael.)

This approach means that McVeigh, the violent anti-government extremist who bombed the Murrah building (and was executed in 2001), takes a back seat to the Oklahomans whose lives were shattered that day, many of whom appear here to give their accounts of the shock and its aftermath. This includes emergency medical workers, victims, family members, law enforcement officers and even McVeigh’s court-appointed attorney, who admits to fearing for his life when he learned the identity of his new client.

Even the more famous and consequential interview subjects approach the day’s events from a personal perspective. Bill Clinton, who was in the first term of his presidency when the attack occurred (and was in the middle of a White House news conference on terrorism when he was notified about it), lost one of his favorite Secret Service agents in the bombing.

“I wanted to scream,” Clinton says in the series. “Then I said, ‘No, you can’t do that. You don’t get to scream.’”

Ceri Isfryn, who directed the docuseries, was also struck by what happened after their interview. “He said at the end of it that we’d asked him questions he’d never been asked before, which was surprising to me,” she said, sitting beside Glover in a video interview. “There’s something about asking people to almost freeze time in really specific moments that gives for a different and more vulnerable interview.”

Clinton wasn’t the only person who gained new insight through interviews with the filmmaking team.

At the time of the bombing, Amy Downs was a 28-year-old staff member at Federal Employees Credit Union, which lost 18 of its 33 employees in the attack. As she recalls in the series, she was trapped upside down in her office chair as firefighters dug through the rubble for survivors.

Shannon, the same fireman who gave the filmmakers chunks of the building, heard her crying for help. In the series, Shannon recalls how bad he felt after another bomb scare forced an evacuation of the building and he had to leave Downs pleading for assistance (she was rescued when firefighters were allowed back in).

In an interview, Downs, who eventually became chief executive of the resurrected credit union (renamed Allegiance Credit Union), said she was never aware of Shannon’s internal conflict until she saw the documentary footage and Shannon’s interview.

“I had forgotten about begging Mike Shannon to stay, and I didn’t know about the battle that he had not wanting to leave,” Downs said. “I didn’t put myself in his shoes. I hate that I made him feel the way I did.”

She said she had weighed more at the time of the explosion and that fact, surprisingly, was probably what allowed her to stay in her chair as it hung upside down. The experience of surviving the trauma of the bombing inspired her to go back to school, first for a bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership, and then for an MBA.

Much of the footage in the series came from a single source: Oklahoma City-based KWTV News 9, which opened up its rushes to the “One Day in America” team. The startlingly immediate images are accompanied by newly recorded witness narration that describes what is onscreen.

The station also provided the series one of its most compelling interview subjects.

Robin Marsh had started working at KWTV just nine days before the bombing. At 9:01 a.m. that day she was in a meeting to prepare for her afternoon news anchor job when a colleague entered the news director’s office. The assistant fire chief had called to say there had been an explosion downtown.

“And then our building shook like there had been an earthquake,” Marsh said in an interview. “We were about 10 miles away. We knew immediately that something catastrophic had happened.”

The footage from that day provides an extraordinary look at a newsroom jolted into action. We see the moment when the station staff members realize the importance of the date: April 19, 1995, two years from the day when the siege on the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas, ended in a deadly inferno (which McVeigh identified as a primary source of his anti-government rage). Viewers see Marsh walk onto the set of the live newscast with handwritten updates. And we see her running for cover, again live on the air, when that second bomb scare is announced.

Marsh, who is still an anchor at the station — she also leads tours of the bombing memorial site — pointed out how differently big news was gathered and disseminated 30 years ago. The 24-hour news cycle was a fairly recent innovation. News 9 stayed on the air for 90 consecutive hours, from Wednesday to Sunday.

“Did I go home?” Marsh said. “Yes. Did I rest? I’m not sure.”

To Marsh, the “One Day in America” series was made in the same spirit as the effort her station made to tell the story as intimately as possible.

“It gives you a glimpse of heroism on a level that in some ways your mind can’t comprehend,” she said. “They let you hear from the people who were there. The spirit of the story is told so well.”