The road that led to the 2016 armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge can be traced back to a Northern Idaho mountaintop, according to “Ruby Ridge,” a new “American Experience” documentary that airs on PBS on Feb. 14.
The 1992 standoff at the remote cabin took the lives of three people, and inflamed simmering anti-government resentment among groups who were already becoming active in the Pacific Northwest, director Barak Goodman’s film suggests.
“Ruby Ridge” tells the story of how things went tragically wrong in a confrontation between Randy Weaver — who was wanted for failing to appear in court on a weapons charge — and federal agents, who knew from surveillance camera footage that the Weaver family had weapons.
Seen together with Goodman’s companion “American Experience” documentary, “Oklahoma City,” which aired Feb. 7, “Ruby Ridge” links the Idaho siege with the deadly 1993 standoff between the FBI and the Branch Davidian apocalyptic Christian cult. Both events played a significant role in convincing Timothy McVeigh that the government was his enemy, and contributed to McVeigh’s decision to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, a domestic terrorism attack that killed 168 people.
In “Ruby Ridge,” Goodman includes a detailed chronology of what led up to the 11-day standoff that became national news and, Goodman contends, formed the basis for the modern American militia movement.
Randy Weaver, a former Green Beret, and his wife, Vicki, moved from Iowa in the mid-1980s, leaving behind a farming economy that was on the ropes. The couple settled in a cabin on a Northern Idaho mountaintop they called Ruby Ridge.
Novelist Jess Walter (“Beautiful Ruins”) was a reporter for the Spokane Spokesman-Review at the time of the Ruby Ridge siege. In the film, Walter says that Vicki Weaver’s religious faith convinced her they were living in the Biblical “End Times.”
Her mother interpreted some things in the Bible “very literally,” says Sara Weaver, who is also interviewed in the film, and who was 16 when the Ruby Ridge standoff occurred.
Trying to get away from what they considered a corrupt world, the Weavers built a cabin that had no electricity, no indoor plumbing and no running water. They lived in near isolation with their children.
The Weavers’ story then intersected with the white supremacist movement, as the family began paying visits to the Aryan Nations compound, near Hayden Lake, Idaho, less than 20 miles south.
In the film, Walter, who wrote about Weaver and the siege in “Ruby Ridge: The Truth & Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family,” suggests Weaver may not have shared all the Aryan Nations’ racist beliefs, but he wanted to make friends in the region.
Law enforcement sources interviewed in the film are more ready to say Weaver also had white separatist leanings.
In any event, the activities of the Aryan Nations and other “white power” groups were spreading throughout the Northwest, and were being monitored by federal authorities.
One notorious example, a domestic terrorist group known as the Order, was founded in Washington state. It was influenced by an anti-Semitic, racist novel called “The Turner Diaries,” about a small group of white supremacists who violently overthrow the government.
“The Turner Diaries” was written by William Luther Pierce, a white nationalist who briefly taught physics at Oregon State University in the early 1960s.
As part of federal efforts to gather intelligence on white supremacist groups, an undercover informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms took note of Randy Weaver’s visits to the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho. The informant approached Weaver, and told him he’d pay Weaver for some sawed-off shotguns.
By providing the weapons, Weaver had committed a federal crime. But for a variety of reasons, Weaver failed to appear in court.
And so began the chain of events that ended in bloodshed. Weaver and his family had guns and ammunition, and refused to leave the cabin. The story got national press – the documentary shows stories from newspapers including the Oregonian – as people wondered if the U.S. Marshals Service would aggressively move in on the heavily armed family barricaded in their cabin.
The months dragged on. Then, on Aug. 21, 1992, marshals approached the cabin. Sara Weaver tearfully recalls hearing gunshots, and “more gunshots.”
There are “incredibly different narratives,” as Walter says of what followed. But by the time an 11-day standoff between the Weavers and the FBI ended, Vicki Weaver, 14-year-old Samuel Weaver, and Deputy U.S. Marshal William Degan were dead.
“Ruby Ridge” leaves us with a sense that there was plenty of blame to go around for the tragedy that occurred. And there are strange-but-true details, as in radio host Paul Harvey making a direct appeal over the air to Weaver, asking him to surrender, and former Green Beret-turned-hero-of-the radical-right Bo Gritz, coming in as a third-party negotiator for the FBI.
The film will also resonate with Oregonians who recall widespread frustration with the law enforcement response during the 41-day standoff between Ammon Bundy and his followers at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
Near the end of “Ruby Ridge,” Sara Weaver says that she takes some comfort from knowing that the FBI has used the response to the Ruby Ridge standoff as training for what not to do.
In a discussion of both “Ruby Ridge” and “Oklahoma City” during the recent Television Critics Association winter press tour, Bill Morlin, who worked for the Spokane Chronicle and the Spokesman-Review, said, “Right after Ruby Ridge, some prominent Klan leaders in the United States traveled to North Idaho and met with some of the locals up there that didn’t like what had occurred up there…that gathering is essentially viewed as the launching of what we now refer to as the modern militia movement.”
When a reporter asked if the government’s “restrained response to the Oregon siege will embolden other groups to similar acts,” Mark Potok, a former journalist who’s now a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said, “I think, actually, the government acted well at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation. The shame of it is that these people were acquitted and that that, I think, is truly emboldening.”
Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan Bundy and five others involved in the Oregon standoff were acquitted on federal conspiracy and weapons charges in October 2016.
Potok added, “The Bundys are all facing another trial in February, so it is very likely that they will go to prison in the end, and that, I think, will have the effect of tamping down some of what we’re seeing.”
For many members of self-styled militia groups, Goodman and others said, their core principles are the Constitution, the Bible and the Second Amendment.
“They’re people very, very married to guns,” Potok said. “It’s hard to overstate the importance of guns to this movement.”
The “American Experience” documentary “Ruby Ridge” airs at 10 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 14 on PBS/10.
— Kristi Turnquist
kturnquist@oregonian.com
503-221-8227
@Kristiturnquist
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