2 FEBRUARY 28, 2021 THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 3BY DAVID MONTGOMERYT
he Senate had been scheduled to work late on the night of Monday, Nov. 7, 1983, but was able to adjourn at
7:02 p.m. Now the 600 rooms and miles of corridors in the seat of American democracy were silent and
nearly empty. At 10:48 p.m., a Capitol switchboard operator fielded a call. “Listen carefully, I’m only going to
tell you one time,” said the caller in a recorded message. “There is a bomb in the Capitol building. It will go off
in five minutes. Evacuate the building.”
Shortly before 11 p.m., an explosion ripped through a hall outside the Senate chamber, blasting the door off the office of
the Democratic minority leader, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, and punching fist-size holes in the Republican cloakroom. It tore a
19th-century oil portrait of Daniel Webster from its frame and shredded Webster’s face into little pieces that became
strewn among the rubble of shattered tiles, pulverized plaster and broken glass. To some late-night joggers passing by, it
sounded like a “ sonic boom.” “It was loud enough to make my ears hurt,” said one. “It kept echoing and echoing — boom,
boom.’’
Sticks of dynamite packed with a timer had been planted under a bench in the corridor. If the Senate had still been in
session, someone probably would have been killed. As it happened, no one was hurt.
Today the 1983 U.S. Capitol bombing is almost forgotten. The radical left-wing perpetrators were prosecuted and given
long prison sentences. Yet in another sense, especially after the right-wing insurrectionist assault on the building on
Jan. 6, that blast echoes more loudly than ever. It marked the beginning of fear itself taking hold as an urban designHow terrorists became the unspoken architects of the Capitol and other public spaces
Opening
Lines
From top: Barbed wire o n fencing around the
U.S. Capitol in January; the aftermath of the 1983
bombing at the Capitol. Photographs from top by
Astrid Riecken and Ira Schwarz/Associated Press