Someday, someone will make a good film, one with lots to say, about the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing. Richard Jewell, Clint Eastwood’s ugly attack on the media and the FBI disguised as a “true story,” is not it, however.
There’s plenty not to like about this film. Its most infamous flaw is that an attempt to help clear the name of an innocent man winds up being a vehicle for an ugly, harmful smear about women journalists generally, and a deceased Atlanta reporter in particular.
Even worse, the lessons drawn from the FBI’s outrageous and profoundly flawed investigation into Jewell—the security guard who first spotted the backpack containing the bomb, and heroically got people out of the way before it exploded—in Eastwood’s film are not only facile and useless (Federal investigations can be flawed! The mass media’s swarm behavior sucks!), but in fact utterly obliviate the very real lessons learned by everyone concerned with countering domestic terrorism as a result of the incident.
Namely: The FBI botched the Atlanta investigation in large part because its culture inclined it to seek out a mundane kind of motive for the bombing—such as a desk-jockey fantasist trying to make himself famous—rather than the far more ominous and complicated implications they already had in hand, pointing toward a radical-right terrorist. That, in fact, turned out to be exactly who the perpetrator was. Only a year removed from the Oklahoma City bombing, it reflected a cultural obtuseness about the nature of the far-right threat at all levels of federal law enforcement.
But that wasn’t the story Eastwood wanted to tell. It’s much easier and less complicated instead to depict an FBI special agent in charge (Jon Hamm) having sex with a revered cops-and-courts reporter based on a real person, now deceased and unable to defend herself from the smear, played with cartoonishly wanton relish by Olivia Wilde. That, according to Eastwood, is how Kathy Scruggs managed to get the nugget of information that Jewell was under investigation as a suspect in the July 27, 1996, bombing at Centennial Park, which in fact The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published, as any paper with confirmation would have back then. (Standards in the U.S. have changed since then, thanks in no small part to incidents such as the Jewell case.)
The plot of the film is uncomplicated and frankly dull: Jewell helps save lives from a backpack bomb at the Olympics; then, in a strange twist, he becomes the chief suspect for an increasingly desperate and clueless FBI, the media descends, it’s ugly for both Jewell and his family, especially his mother (Kathy Bates), and then gradually everyone figures out he’s innocent, and he gets an apology from the FBI.
It’s frankly baffling why Eastwood chose this particular story as the focus of a film about the Atlanta Olympics bombing. Jewell’s mistreatment is an interesting side note of a much bigger story, though.
Because the story of Eric Rudolph, the man who actually bombed the event, and then went on to kill other people before sending federal investigators on a five-year manhunt, is far more interesting and would have made a superb subject for someone with Eastwood’s well-established narrative gifts.
Rudolph was raised in a series of fundamentalist Christian sects, most notably the white-supremacist Christian Identity movement during his teenage years in Missouri. After an Army stint, he returned home to his old stomping grounds in North Carolina and became involved with radical anti-abortion groups such as the Army of God.
The Atlanta bombing, he would later explain, was intended “to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand.” He considered abortion a form of murder, a product of modern society’s “rotten feast of materialism and self-indulgence." The string of bombings he committed also were intended to combat “the concerted effort to legitimize the practice of homosexuality.”
After Atlanta, Rudolph went silent for six months, over the course of which Jewell had to endure his ordeal. He struck again on Jan. 16, 1997, when he bombed an abortion clinic in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs, mostly damaging the property there. However, a second bomb intended to detonate later injured six people at the scene, including detectives and reporters.
A month later, on Feb. 21, he set off a bomb comprised of the same components as those used at the Olympics and the abortion clinic at a lesbian bar called the Otherside Lounge. Five of the patrons there were injured, while the secondary bombs he had planted outside, intended to hit first responders, were discovered before they detonated.
Rudolph was finally identified after he set off another bomb nearly a year later—Jan. 29, 1998—at an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. That package killed a security guard and badly injured a nurse. Rudolph was spotted walking away from the scene by an alert witness who followed him and obtained both his license plate number and a physical description. With a genuine suspect in hand, the FBI issued bulletins naming Rudolph as the chief suspect in all of the bombings.
Rudolph, however, went to ground back in his old hometown North Carolina woods, where he had a web of survivalist caves and hiding places, not to mention more than a few friendly and helpful locals. For the next five years, he successfully eluded capture, though a procession of publicity-seekers such as Col. James “Bo” Gritz (made famous during the Ruby Ridge standoff of 1992) would appear on the scene and try to coax him out, unsuccessfully.
He more or less surrendered, finally, in 2002. Rudolph successfully bargained for a life sentence in the face of a likely capital prosecution, and is currently behind bars at the Florence Supermax facility in Colorado.
Now, that story is complex, interesting, and, more than anything, powerfully relevant to our times—especially in a world where white-nationalist terrorism is ascendant, and law enforcement and the courts and the media are all struggling with the means to confront it adequately. The Eric Rudolph story is an epic reminder that it’s always a mistake to underestimate both its reach and its potency.
Clint Eastwood, obviously, didn’t want to tell that story. I’ll leave it to others to speculate why.