Q&A: Rep. Tom Cole on leadership and lessons from the Oklahoma City bombing

In 1995, the 4th District’s Tom Cole was serving as Oklahoma’s Secretary of State for Governor Frank Keating. While he would go on to be elected to Congress in 2002 and become Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in 2024, Cole played a pivotal role in the state’s moment of need, working closely, on behalf of Gov. Keating, with both Congress and the Clinton administration.

As Oklahoma and the nation prepare to mark 30 years since the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Cole is reflecting on how leaders responded in 1995—and how the tragedy shaped national policy in the years to follow.

Q: What example did Gov. Frank Keating set in the immediate aftermath of the bombing?

“As a matter of fact, when 9/11 happened, Karl Rove's a good friend of mine, I sent him a memo the very next morning: ‘Ten lessons from the Oklahoma City bombing.’ One of them was to go to the site. You'll have an argument over, ‘Should the president stay in the White House?’ We had the same argument: Should the governor stay here? Should he go?

“Keating said, ‘We're going to the front line. You guys can stay or run this place. I need to be—’ And he was exactly right. ‘We're going to go visit a mosque because we want to reassure Arab Americans,’ many of whom were accused wrongly in those early hours of somehow being involved.

“You know, was this an act of terrorism? No, it was a white nationalist... that was, you know, mad about Waco and killed a bunch of innocent people in Oklahoma City.”

Q: What support did the federal government provide Oklahoma City after the bombing?

“It’s one of the things that we were able to contribute. I remember talking, when we were trying to get the relief package for Oklahoma City—in a disaster, the normal spread is the state and locality covers a quarter of it, the federal government will do three quarters.

“And so we’re having this discussion about what the cost would be. I'd commissioned an audit from a leading Oklahoma City firm to help us figure it out, and they brought up the formula. And I said, ‘Look, guys, this wasn’t a natural disaster, this was an attack on the United States, on a federal facility.’

“And the Clinton people were incredibly helpful. I mean, very helpful. Bill Clinton and his whole team were helpful to Oklahoma City during the bombing. And they, literally—‘You know,’ he said, ‘that’s right, you really don’t have to pay anything.’ I saved the state of Oklahoma my salary that day, for sure. But that same precedent was then used in 9/11 for New York City.”

Q: What advice did then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich give you during that time?

“He’s a very shrewd man. He said, ‘I know right now this is the whole center of the universe, and every television camera of America is down there. And I know it’s going to be a big thing in Oklahoma for a long time to come. But let me give you a piece of advice: You got about 30 days, 30 days, and then the cameras will move on and people will begin to forget. You'll never forget in Oklahoma City. But, you know, the country will move on to other things. So, you need to move fast, you need to move hard. I'm going to do everything I can to help you.’”

Q: How did the audit of damages help Oklahoma City get the relief it needed?

“I remember coming up and participating in a congressional hearing, what the scope of the damage was. And the audit that we had done was really incred—I think it was Peat Marwick Mitchell, if I remember—they did a great job for us.

“I remember calling up one of their senior partners, Carlos Johnson, who was still very active, a very good friend of mine. And I said, ‘Carlos, I’ve talked to the governor. We need to figure out what the real damage here is, and it’s hard for us to know how to do it. He’s given me permission to spend $100,000 to do an audit. I have no idea what something like this would cost.’ And he said, ‘Tom, it’s probably going to cost a lot more than $100,000, but we’ll take the money and call it even. We’re going to do this for Oklahoma City.’ And they did.”

Q: How detailed was the final audit, and how was it received?

“When I came up to Congress, I’m armed with ‘this is the damage,’ you know, street by street, block by block. And it was so good. One of the participants in the hearing actually made a little fun of me for this.

“But he’d gone through [the audit], and he said, ‘Well, it says here that you lost a certain amount of money because the parking meters in downtown Oklahoma City didn’t work for about six weeks’… or several weeks or what have you, because the whole area was cordoned off, it was a disaster site, nobody’s down there. And he said, ‘Isn’t that a little extreme?’

“I said, ‘It’s a loss. It’s a loss to the city of Oklahoma.’ And guess what? They all got covered. They covered everything in that audit. They did everything we asked them to do, and so we secured, you know, literally hundreds of millions of dollars to help rebuild and compensate and do the things, under law, that we were permitted to do.”