Merrick Garland is not naive about political violence

America’s attorney-general has reason to be haunted by the country’s latent capacity for political violence. Merrick Garland was a senior official in the Justice Department on April 19th 1995, when a bomb exploded beneath a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. Mr Garland, who had young children himself, implored his boss to send him to Oklahoma. Eleven years later, sitting for an oral history about the bombing and the investigation into it that he led, he choked up when he recalled the “gaping hole” he saw when he reached the scene of what remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in America. “And the worst part was being told…[that’s] where the kids had been,” he said.