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Success is built upon many pillars, including the ability to seize an opportunity and make it yours.
Mike Boettcher is a proven risk-taker with an enviable track record in broadcast journalism. From performing the first live satellite news report on June 1, 1980, for a fledgling Cable News Network, to earning armfuls of national awards for investigative reporting and war coverage, his four-decade career is built upon successfully owning opportunities.
The upcoming Katie Couric-produced documentary, “American Bomber,” is the latest accomplishment for the Ponca City High School Hall of Fame inductee. The documentary revisits the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and explores how America’s historic game changer is still very likely to happen today.
“American Bomber” will premier April 11 in L.A. and in New York City at the HBO Theater in Manhattan before the bombing’s 29th anniversary. Mike appealed to the documentary’s directors, Marc Levin and Daphne Pinkerson, of Blowback Productions, that those directly affected by the bombing should see the documentary first, “out of respect,” he described.
The families of the 168 victims, as well as the 600 injured survivors of convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh’s actions, will comprise its first large audience. A private, “sneak peek” on the University of Oklahoma campus will welcome Couric, Levin and Pinkerson to Norman to meet their audience members.
Boettcher states Ponca City Monthly is the only press coverage “American Bomber” is conducting before its premier. Ponca City Monthly Publisher Kelsey Wagner is experienced with how studios tightly control publicity’s timing. Staff writer Marlys Cervantes’ story about “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and its Ponca City screening, was barred from publication by Apple Studios and Paramount Pictures until after the movie’s national premier, more than a month’s delay.
He explains the documentary’s inspiration, “HBO wanted to reintroduce this bit of history that a new generation doesn’t know much about because there isn’t curriculum about it except it took place in Oklahoma.”
Boettcher continues, “The starting point is the mandate, ‘Give insight to a younger generation what happened here.’ But you have to have an end point, and our end point is the current day in the USA and the difficult headwinds we face in our current political climate.”
He adds this documentary “tells people watching this that this can happen again, and we need to be alert as a nation to violent extremism.”
This seasoned journalist had covered wars and revolutions across the globe and has been the victim of terrorist actions, including surviving a 1985 kidnapping in El Salvador. In 2006, Boettcher witnessed the detonation of a suicide bomber’s 1,000-pound bomb packed into a van. Boettcher was staying at the NBC bureau in Beirut and says everyone inside the news bureau survived. Those outside did not.
But here? This was conflict not only on American soil but in his Oklahoma backyard.
On April 19, 1995, Boettcher remembers, “… I was in Chicago at that moment, (working as) lead domestic correspondent for NBC News. Ask anyone, I was always bragging on my home state and being an Okie. At 9:15 a.m., I got a call from the vice president of NBC News. ‘There’s a Lear jet waiting for you at Midway Airport. Get on it.’”
He continues, “We were in OKC about 12:30 in the afternoon. I spent the next few weeks in OKC covering the aftermath and covering the trail of clues. For the next year, I went out talking to various people and groups and really, really, hard-core extremist groups.
“It was very hard because it was emotional for me. I’m trained as a journalist, for decades covered very difficult circumstances and I’m trained to keep that open mind and be fair, but really it was the most difficult thing in my professional life to go where the facts lead you and leave your biases out of it.”
The sights of the truck bomb’s aftermath proved to be a trigger for Boettcher, instantly taking him to other fresh bomb sites in South Africa, the Middle East and Central America. “I witnessed terrorist bombings around the world, and I remember it took a while to recover all the victims from the (Murrah Building’s) debris and that smell of death really triggered me. I used to think this could only happen in Beirut, Baghdad or El Salvador. But no, it happened right here. And I really took it personally.”
Following the investigation and subsequent arrest of Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, Boettcher was one of four journalists to interview McVeigh in prison. Defense attorney Steven Jones “wanted people to see McVeigh as someone other than the character in the orange jumpsuit being perp-walked out of the Perry Courthouse. One representative from the major networks (NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN) were allowed to speak to McVeigh,” he explains. “I covered Desert Storm, and he had served in Desert Storm. We initially covered that and then the conversation turned to ‘how do you feel about the government?’ and his eyes immediately turned cold, and I thought ‘This guy did it.’”
Boettcher is a visiting professor at Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at OU. He teaches several classes, including Advance Broadcast News and Multimedia News Gathering. “Every year I take my seniors up to the bombing site and I talk to them about that day (and) about the role that journalism played in that day.”
Katie Couric was with Boettcher at NBC during the1995 bombing. They have formed a deep friendship, so it was natural for Couric to approach him about being a character in her planned documentary.
“Couric is executive producer (of) ‘American Bomber.’ It seeks to remind a new generation about how pivotal a point in history this was, and the lessons learned that we could apply in today’s fractious society and the dangers of extremism from any side of the political spectrum.”
“American Bomber” is a production of HBO studios and will stream on the network at a date to be announced.
On Friday, May 17, Mike will return to Ponca City for “An Evening With Mike Boettcher,” a fund-raiser for the newly established Ponca City High School Hall of Fame Scholarship Endowment fund. Tickets will go on sale in April.
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