LOOKING BACKWARD

"Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming;
We're finally on our own.
This summer, I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio."

--Neil Young, "Ohio," 1970

"Find the cost of freedom,
Buried in the ground.
Mother Earth will swallow you;
Lay your body down."

— Stephen Stills, "Find the Cost of Freedom," 1970

On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced on national television that American troops were being sent into Cambodia to destroy National Liberation Front (Vietcong) strongholds and thereby shorten the Vietnam War. Many Americans, especially students on college campuses, saw Nixon's decision not as a legitimate and necessary act to wind down a worthwhile, if awkward, war, but as an illegal invasion of a neutral country that would inevitably widen an illegitimate war. As a result, the campus-centered antiwar movement, which had been relatively inactive for the several months following its local and national marches and rallies of the previous fall, burst into action again by the next morning.

At Kent State University in Northeastern Ohio, a group of graduate students in history calling itself World Historians Opposed to Racism and Exploitation (WHORE) organized an anti-Nixon "bury the Constitution" rally for May Day. The students buried the document they said Nixon had murdered by his unilateral and illegal decision, demanded that the KSU administration condemn Nixon's behavior, and pledged to meet again in front of the Liberty Bell on the campus commons at noon on Monday, May 4, to discuss the administration's response.

That night, a combination of warm weather, visiting motorcycle gangs, and alcohol led to the decision of the Kent mayor to close all bars for fear of a raucous downtown crowd. The result of this was to add hundreds of drinkers and sports viewers to the already-large numbers of indignant and restless young people in the streets. This and continued student outrage over Nixon's Cambodia decision led to the confrontation of perhaps a thousand young campus and "street" people with local police and the breaking of windows throughout much of the business district of downtown Kent. By the afternoon of the following day, the Kent mayor was nervous enough about continued unrest to set a curfew in town and assent to the suggestion of Ohio governor James A. Rhodes that the Ohio National Guard be called in. The Guard arrived in Kent early on Saturday night, May 2, just as an old World War II barracks used as a campus ROTC building was set afire (and burned to the ground), apparently as an antiwar statement.

The following morning, an angry Governor Rhodes came to Kent to inspect the damage and hold a press conference, at which he delivered a strongly worded warning to student protestors. Later in the day, a group of Kent State faculty members met and drew up a resolution expressing distress with President Nixon's invasion announcement, condemning Rhodes's inflammatory statements, and questioning the morality of teaching as usual while the campus remained under armed occupation by an outside military force, the Ohio National Guard. That evening, Guardsmen dispersed a peaceful sit-in near campus with tear gas and bayonets. Governor Rhodes's comments and the Guard's behavior combined to produce growing hostility between students and Guardsmen, the latter already tired and tense from patrolling highways during a truckers' strike. The explosion came the next day, Monday, May 4.

Some students recalled that there was a rally scheduled for noon on the fourth. Others were reluctant to attend classes while the tanks and bayonets of the Guard remained on campus. Many had seen the "injunctions" banning all rallies, signed by the dean of students and the student body president and posted around campus overnight. Some students may have seen such a ban as an unconstitutional act. Others returning from weekends at home had neither seen the "injunctions" nor perhaps had even heard about them and the weekend's excitement. But all could see the Guard occupying the campus, and that sight apparently motivated many previously indifferent students to come to the planned rally. Therefore, the rally intended originally as a simple continuation of the protest of the Cambodian invasion decision became, by noon of May 4, a widespread and more immediate student protest against the presence of the Guard on campus. This protest only intensified when the troops tried to disperse the crowd gathered by noon on the campus commons.

When the students ignored dispersal orders delivered by megaphone by a Guard officer, the Guard moved in with tear gas and scattered the crowd, marching in the process over Blanket Hill and down to a football practice field behind Memorial Gym. This maneuver first resulted in a standoff, with the Guard backed up against a chain-link fence while some students screamed insults and threw rocks, many standing in Prentice Hall parking lot. At one point, some of the troops huddled; and at another, some actually half knelt facing the students with their rifles aimed. Neither activity altered the behavior either of those students in the parking lot engaged in harassing the Guard or of the main crowd of students regrouped on Blanket Hill to observe the confrontation. (A few students played "catch," picking up smoking tear gas canisters thrown at them by the troops, but against the wind, and throwing them back to the troops with the wind at their backs.)

Then perhaps twenty minutes after the start of the troop movements, the Guardsmen began to march back toward Blanket Hill, presumably returning to the commons. They climbed past their harassers in the parking lot and ignored the crowd of students on Blanket Hill itself. However, when they reached the crest of the hill near a structure known as the Pagoda, the troops suddenly swung around to form a line between the Pagoda and Taylor Hall, Kent State's journalism and architecture building, faced the students they had just passed, and raised their rifles to firing position. Some Guardsmen did not fire at all. Others fired into the air. Still others, however, particularly some members of Troop G, fired downhill in the direction of Prentice parking lot.

The fusillade lasted thirteen seconds. It ended when a Guard officer ran up and down the troop line, hitting the men over their shoulders to make them stop firing. The troops then turned again and marched back down to the commons. They left behind one dead, three dying, one paralyzed, and eight less seriously wounded students — almost all of them in the parking lot.

Shortly after the shootings, students regrouped on the commons, and the Guard commander threatened another attack if the students did not disperse. They finally did, but only after a tiny group of faculty, led by geology professor Glenn Frank, pleaded with them to do so, assuring the students that justice for the shootings would be sought. Frank risked his own life in front of the Guard, negotiating to gain dispersal time for the outraged students, many on the edge of hysteria. If the Guard fired into this dense crowd, many more than four students would die and Frank knew it. His courage and integrity were the lone bright spots in an otherwise-ghastly day.

The university closed within hours. There was massive confusion. There were traffic jams and overloaded phone lines. Some parents tried to pick up their children from dorms while others simply tried to ascertain their children's physical state.

Public and private investigations ensued. The FBI ran one; within a day of the event, at least a hundred FBI agents were in Kent gathering evidence for the Department of Justice. The Ohio State Highway Patrol and the Ohio Bureau of Investigation gathered evidence, as did the inspector general's office of the Ohio National Guard. The Akron Beacon Journal, the Special Kent State University Commission on Campus Violence, the Ohio Civil Liberties Union, the Ohio Council of Churches, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) did their own investigations.

A polarized Kent community got little sympathy from President Nixon in the wake of its tragedy. The president, when asked for his reaction to the shootings on the following day, blandly commented that "when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy." Writer Peter Davies believed that the combination of such official reactions (from Nixon on down) with the distorted, inaccurate, and often inflammatory media reports in the immediate aftermath of May 4 molded public perceptions and beliefs about what had happened at Kent State, why it had occurred, and what it all meant in a virtually irrevocable manner. On May 9, for instance, Victor Riesel claimed in a syndicated column that the clash with the Guard had been produced by the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), based on the fact that Bernardine Dohrn had spoken to students on campus in April 1969.

In only a few days, the public image of Kent State 1970 seemed to have become inextricably wedded to images of the ROTC building in flames and the rock throwing. Over 60 percent of the American population, according to a current Newsweek poll, approved of the Guard's behavior. The killing of two black students and the wounding of twelve others at Jackson State College in Mississippi ten days after Kent State, however, both added to the momentum of the national student strike over the invasion of Cambodia (and the killings at Kent) and persuaded Richard Nixon to create a President's Commission on Campus Unrest. The commission, headed by former Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, was to concentrate its investigation on the events at Kent State and Jackson State.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol finished its investigation in late July 1970, sending some three thousand pages of information to Ronald Kane, the Portage County prosecutor. Its contents remained confidential, although an Akron Beacon Journal story at the time suggested that it blamed students more than anyone else for the killings. At almost the same time, the Justice Department issued a 7,500-page document containing the results of the FBI investigation, including a ten-page summary of the FBI's findings. The bulk of the report was not released publicly; but the most important points made in the summary appeared immediately in the Akron Beacon Journal and later, in an expanded form, in the New York Times and the Congressional Record.

The Justice Department's summary of the FBI's report on Kent State turned out to be extremely important. The findings it contained were used by the Scranton Commission in its research. They were constantly cited by those trying to gain accountability and public reeducation about Kent State by means of a federal grand jury investigation, and they were pondered by a divided Justice Department as it tried to decide whether or not such a grand jury ought to be convened.

The summary asserted, on the authority of several Guardsmen, that no one's life had been in danger, that no warning had been given before the guns were fired, and that many Guardsmen did not seem to know why they had fired. All the Guardsmen admitting to having fired at students had had some experience in riot situations. There was no evidence of a sniper starting a chain reaction. No one had asked for more tear gas. No one had asked if he could fire his rifle.

Contrary to the claims made immediately following the shootings that the Guardsmen had fired into a crowd of students in close proximity to them, the summary placed the closest person shot at twenty yards away and others as far away as 245 or 250 yards. Seven of the thirteen students had been shot in the side; four had been hit from the rear — hardly positions one would expect aggressors to hold while challenging their victims. Most serious of all was the suggestion that the Guardsmen had fabricated their official story of having fired in self-defense after the fact. The admission made by some of the men to FBI agents that their lives had not in fact been in danger (contrary to what their public accounting of the event maintained) "gives rise," observed the report, to some suspicions.

Even though the FBI had found no evidence to back the Guard's claim of self-defense, the Nixon administration seems to have taken its cue from the public response to the shootings to seek no legal action. However, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which received the report, had difficulty explaining the event — not to speak of justifying it. This was to lead to a lengthy internal debate as to what, if anything, should be done in response to the report's implications.

Soon after the shootings, Portage County prosecutor Ronald Kane initiated the idea of convening a special county grand jury to look into the events of May 1–4. By August, Governor Rhodes had directed his own attorney general to lead such an investigation, writing to him on August 3 that "the people of Ohio are entitled to know what, if any criminal acts took place at Kent State and who should be charged with perpetrating them." Rhodes may also have been under pressure to act from the Justice Department. According to a newspaper story, US attorney general John Mitchell had threatened a federal investigation if there were none at the state level, saying that there were "apparent violations of federal law" involved.

During the summer and early fall of 1970, the nine survivors of the shootings, their families, and the parents of the four dead students reached out in several directions to try to clear their names, pin the responsibility for the bloodshed on the shoulders of officials and Guardsmen, and try somehow to change the public's perception of the event. They set up a special fund to raise money for medical expenses, and they went to Washington to lobby for a federal investigation. Arthur Krause, a Pittsburgh businessman whose daughter Allison had been killed on May 4, served as the families' spokesperson in these lobbying ventures as he had in statements made to the media immediately after the shootings. Krause was aided at times by such liberal politicians as Senators Edward Kennedy and George McGovern, but more consistently by British-born New York insurance agent Peter Davies and by the Reverend John P. Adams, the Washington DC-based director of Law, Justice, and Community Relations of the Board for Church and Society of the United Methodist Church.

Albert Canfora, a United Auto Workers official who worked at the Goodyear Aerospace plant in Akron, a fifteen-minute drive from Kent, vigorously supported the efforts made by Krause for a federal probe. Canfora's world had been shaken by these "days of death." A lifelong resident of the Akron industrial suburb of Barberton who had lost an eye fighting in the Philippines in World War II, Canfora had, at one time, considered himself to be the head of a typical "all-American family" but had already turned against the Vietnam War by 1970. He was influenced in what he called his political awakening by books like Charles Reich's The Greening of America and by what he heard from his athlete son, Alan, and his cheerleader daughter, Roseann (Chic), once they entered Kent State and became politicized. Alan, he later recalled, somewhat wryly, had been the first boy in Barberton with long hair.

And Vietnam was alerting Mr. Canfora to the presence of things besides the counterculture in the meantime. "It woke me up. That picture ... with the guy with the gun against the Vietnamese head." Then came the shootings at Kent.

The trauma of getting a phone call that your son was shot at Kent State. The trauma of driving to a hospital, when there ... [were] ... two males and two females [reported as fatalities] — when Alan and Chic were both there ... [at the May 4 rally] ... Waiting to get to that hospital. Getting to the hospital, finding that Alan was shot in the wrist. It gave you a feeling like ... [terror] ..., if there was a scream of a brake and you ran outside looking for your kid, and you saw a kid and you ran up and it wasn't yours. Then the feeling of "that kid that's hurt there is horrible" — and you're glad it's not yours ... But then, that wasn't the end of it ...

While angry, bewildered, and grief-stricken parents like Arthur Krause and Albert Canfora were trying to persuade federal officials to investigate the shootings, President Nixon withdrew American troops from Cambodia. On a local level, several mediators tried to bring together students, faculty, and townspeople at small informal sessions to reduce the level of hatred, mistrust, fear, and polarization engendered by the events of May 1–4 in the Kent area — at the same time that state special prosecutor Robert Balyeat was presenting evidence to the county grand jury. For three days in late August, his work schedule coincided with hearings held by the Scranton Commission in Kent.