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When we can’t see a reason, we make assumptions and force facts into preconceived patterns until a reason takes shape because we want to find sense in the senseless. It is a reminder that reality is tumultuous, disordered, and unpredictable and that learning the truth can be devastating.
On May 4, 1970, on the campus of Kent State University in northeastern Ohio, the cultural and political crosscurrents that had been building in the United States for years reached critical mass.
This was the day the Vietnam War came home and the sixties came to an end. American soldiers shot American students on American soil.
The Kent State shooting gave rise to two competing narratives that oversimplified the motives and characters of the people involved, lacked nuance, and ignored ambiguity, complexity, unpredictability, confusion, chaos, and cruel pathos. One narrative depicted the shooting as lethal violence in the name of the state directed against those who sought to defy its writ. The other narrative depicted the shooting as law enforcement giving troublemakers the comeuppance they deserved.
telling the story of the fatal encounter between Vietnam War protestors and the National Guard at Kent State through multiple perspectives, critically and with understanding, but without taking sides. It means searching out and piecing together the story in all its intimate, vivid, and painful detail from previously published accounts, untapped archival documents, and original interviews with participants.
Young Americans in 1970 came of age during a tumultuous era. They entered their teens when John F. Kennedy fell victim to an assassin amidst a bloody civil rights struggle in the South, which was followed by a succession of shocks: escalation of the Vietnam War, urban riots, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy.
The U.S. military always did right, it always overcame adversity, and it always prevailed in the end. The Cold War was widely seen as a Manichean struggle between American virtue and Communist evil. These idealized notions collided during the 1960s with the messy realities of Vietnam.
In 1961, President Kennedy began sending increasing numbers of American military advisors to South Vietnam to shore up the declining fortunes of its autocratic leader, Ngo Dinh Diem. The 1963 coup that resulted in Diem’s death worsened circumstances in the fragile, troubled country. This led JFK’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, to vastly expand U.S. involvement to avert South Vietnam’s collapse. In 1965, LBJ initiated the bombing of North Vietnam and committed American combat troops to South Vietnam—the first steps in what would become a massive and futile U.S. military effort.
Vietnam was America’s first—and last—uncensored war. Television brought its violent realities into living rooms, making the ugly, obscene truth of war—death and destruction—concrete and emotionally immediate. Young Americans saw U.S. soldiers dying in jungles and rice paddies and the American military unleashing a torrent of devastation on the people and countryside of Southeast Asia. The bloodshed shocked and angered those whose childhood had been sanitized and idyllic.
During 1964, not a single protest against the draft occurred. During 1965 and 1966, draft calls rose to forty thousand a month. During 1967 and 1968, antidraft demonstrations took place at nearly half of all universities.
During 1969, the Vietnam War raged on. The number of Americans killed rose to more than forty-two thousand; the number of Vietnamese to nearly two million.
Protests in 1969, meanwhile, became more frequent and aggressive. Demonstrators at airports, train stations, and bus terminals confronted soldiers returning from Vietnam with shouts of “Baby killers!” and spat on them.
In late June, Life, the largest-circulation magazine in the country, devoted an entire issue to photographs of every young American soldier, by name, killed in Vietnam the week before—more than two hundred. “We must pause to look at the faces,” said Life. The effect was tremendous, bringing home the pain and cost of the war in an emotionally powerful way.iii
By September, however, 57 percent of Americans opposed the war and only 35 percent supported it. A kind of tipping point had been reached.
“The only direction is insurrection / The only solution is revolution!”
“Some of the stuff was ridiculous. We made tremendous errors. Our sense of sparking something had really lost touch with both the moral vision and any kind of political base that might have been moved by that.” “You can catch the very disease you’re fighting—you want to stop war, you become warlike. You want to fight inhumanity, and you become inhumane.”
numerous moderate opponents of the war believed the best way to end the war was not to rampage through the streets but to win over Americans who disliked the war and the Weathermen. That meant appealing to the middle class so that, in the words of twenty-five-year-old former divinity student Sam Brown, “the heartland folks felt it belonged to them.” Brown and others organized a countrywide “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam” that included not just college students but ministers, teachers, businessmen, housewives, and other ordinary Americans (though the great majority of congressmen and
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In Washington, fifty thousand people wearing black armbands proceeded ten abreast from the Capitol to the White House holding white candles against the dark sky in silent witness to their opposition to the war. In Vietnam, more than a few soldiers went out on patrol that day wearing black armbands.
The far-right John Birch Society termed it an “act of treason.”
President Nixon could have sought calm and the middle ground. Instead, he chose to lump the moratorium and the Weathermen together. He viewed the entire antiwar movement as another enemy in a long line of political enemies out to get him
Nixon. He recognized the antiwar movement’s political impact—“the greatest social unrest in America in one hundred years,” he privately called it—and responded in a nationwide television address on November 3. Using his prime-time speech as a counterattack, Nixon belittled antiwar protestors as a “vocal minority” that threatened the country’s “future as a free society” and sought to “impose” its views on others “by mounting demonstrations in the street.” He then appealed to “the great silent majority” of Americans for their support. “Let us be united against defeat,” the president said,
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A poll taken shortly afterward showed that 69 percent of Americans considered antiwar protestors “harmful to public life.” And although a majority (58 percent) of the country now considered the war a huge mistake, a Gallup poll in November showed that an even greater majority (65 percent) supported Nixon’s strategy for getting out by gradually withdrawing U.S. troops and getting South Vietnam’s army to take over the fighting.
On November 12, freelance journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the American massacre of hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the hamlet of My Lai and the U.S. Army’s subsequent cover-up.x The story had an enormous impact, swelling the number of participants in a second and even bigger moratorium, known as the Mobilization (“the Mobe”), that began with a night-time “March Against Death” on November 13. Starting at Arlington National Cemetery, forty-six thousand people, each carrying a cardboard sign with the name of an American soldier killed in Vietnam, walked in silence
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Working-class ethnic people and middle-class conservatives were fed up with smirking, obnoxious, and destructive “Commie-hippie-freaks.” It made no sense to them that members of the most privileged group in the most privileged nation in the world would rise up against the society that had made them. They were trying to destroy Everything That Made This Country Great. “Everything I got, I worked for,” said one working-class stiff. “It gets me sore when I see these kids, who been handed everything, pissing it away, talking like bums.” They felt the America they had grown up in was being
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Conservatives were not waiting to be enlightened by a radical vanguard. What moved them, what their attitudes were, could not have been more different. They decorated their hard hats with flag decals and the motto, “FOR GOD AND COUNTRY.” They built the schools that protestors wanted to burn down. They felt deep antipathy toward elites, especially radical elites with college draft deferments. Many of them had served in World War II or Korea and viscerally despised antiwar protestors. They watched family, friends, and neighbors drafted to fight for America in a vicious and unpopular war, only to
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To conservatives, the Days of Rage and the Greenwich Village explosion revealed a movement that had degenerated into nihilistic violence.
By the spring of 1970, America was divided into warring camps that spoke the same language and shared the same nationality but could not—and would not try to—understand each other. Each side refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the other and believed that those who disagreed with them were acting in bad faith, if not part of a sinister conspiracy. It was a tense, suspicious, and combustible atmosphere that required only a spark to ignite a tragedy.
Kent State was no hotbed of campus unrest such as Berkeley, Columbia, or Wisconsin. Radicalism never gained much traction there. The school’s nickname throughout the Midwest was Apathy U, characterized by careerism and conformity. One Kent State student recalled talking with another while waiting in line at a campus cafeteria. “I remember one of us saying we were glad we were in Kent because [such extremism] wouldn’t happen here.” “This is a campus,” noted a visiting New York journalist, “where you meet activists who have never heard of The Nation or read the New Republic and students who
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watershed year of 1968. The events of that tumultuous year—the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, riots in America’s cities, violence in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, the death of seventeen thousand more American soldiers and countless more Vietnamese, the election of Richard Nixon as president—transformed campus opinion about the war as they did national opinion about the war.
By the end of 1968, fewer than one in four students still supported the war—a dramatic and telling reversal from the year before.
Our “feeling of powerlessness was very strong,” remembered a student. Eighteen-year-olds could be drafted to fight a war, but they couldn’t vote in or out the politicians who led it. The counterculture now permeated campus. Male students began sporting beards and growing their hair longer. Bruce Dzeda had the fourth pair of bell-bottom jeans at Kent State in the spring of 1969. “By the following autumn,” Dzeda recalled, “everybody had them, they were like navels.”
Del Corso had joined the guard at fifteen by lying about his age. During World War II, the guard had deployed to the Western Pacific theater, where Del Corso earned two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars, and a Purple Heart. By war’s end, he was a full colonel with considerable combat experience. In 1960, he served as a senior U.S. military advisor to the South Vietnamese Army.
He viewed anti–Vietnam War protestors as punks and intended to show them he meant business. He ordered guardsmen to carry loaded weapons while deployed on college campuses.
Kent State students began to question the Vietnam War and their own futures because they, like other college students, had lost their coveted 2-S draft-deferment status—“worth gold” to them—in 1969. Instead, a lottery system based on birth dates randomly drawn came into effect that year.
December 1, 1969. That night, millions of young men watched the proceedings on national television: blue plastic capsules containing slips of paper marked with numbers from 1 to 366 that represented birth dates (which included February 29) were drawn from a glass jar.
“When two young men would meet each other on campus, you wouldn’t say, ‘Hello’—you greeted each other by saying, ‘263’ and the other guy would say, ‘48,’ and then you would start your conversation from there.”
Mayor LeRoy Satrom, a conservative Democrat who looked like a bespectacled Don Knottsii and had a nervous temperament, had been elected the previous autumn on a get-tough platform against “long-haired students.” Satrom declared a state of emergency, ordered municipal police in riot gear into the streets, and closed all the downtown bars. He then phoned the governor’s office, said SDS members were rampaging through Kent, and asked the National Guard to be put on alert in the event of more trouble.
Some joined the Ohio National Guard because they wanted to serve their communities. Many others joined for the same reason that many students attended Kent State—to avoid the draft. Pentagon surveys confirmed that more than 80 percent enlisted in the National Guard to escape conscription.
guardsmen were also taught to use their rifles as lethal weapons, not as nonlethal control instruments, and that “in any instance where human life is endangered by the forcible, violent actions of a rioter, or when rioters to whom the Riot Act has been read cannot be dispersed by any other reasonable means, then shooting is justified.” One guardsman said in hindsight: “We didn’t have training in how to deal with student protests. We had training in how to kill people.”
The tension of the four-day Teamsters’ strike had worn down the National Guardsmen. Most had gotten only a few hours of sleep the previous four nights, and several were sick with the flu.
brass-jacketed, .30 caliber, 5½-inch high-velocity bullets could kill at a range of one thousand yards. At two hundred yards, they could pierce a steel helmet and pass straight through a human head.
Rhodes was in the final year of his second four-year term, barred by the state constitution from running again,xiii and was seeking the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in an election just forty-eight hours away. He was behind his rival Robert Taft, Jr., in the polls. He had positioned himself as the “law and order” candidate who would use “all the force that was necessary” to end campus disturbances throughout the state.
Rhodes changed the guard’s mission from protecting lives and property to using “whatever force necessary to break up a protest on the campus.” When someone asked Rhodes to define a protest, the governor replied, “Two students walking together.”
To those on the Right, the shooting represented a grimly satisfying, overdue “law and order” response to years of student unrest. They blamed the victims and believed the guardsmen had not reacted harshly enough. Four students dead in Ohio? More than a dozen young American servicemen who hadn’t dodged the draft died in Vietnam every day. A Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans blamed the students; only 11 percent blamed the National Guard.
“You can’t believe the atmosphere in this town right now—pure, unadulterated HATE,” observed a resident of Kent. “The general opinion is that they had it coming and it’s too bad there were only four.” One middle-aged woman interviewed at random on the street said, “I’m sorry they didn’t kill more. They were warned. They knew what was happening and they should have moved out.” Some townspeople raised four fingers when they passed each other, a silent signal that meant “At least we got four of them.”
Mr. and Mrs. Schroeder, There’s nothing better than a dead, destructive, riot-making communist, and that’s what your son was, if not he would have stayed away like a good American would do. Now you know what a goody-goody son you had. They should all be shot, then we’d have a better U.S.A. to live in. Be thankful he is gone. Just another communist.
Longshoremen and hard-hat workers at the nearby World Trade Center under construction had grown fed up with antiwar protests. Many had sons or their neighbors had sons who had been wounded or killed in Vietnam. They were short-tempered when it came to reverence for the American flag.
U.S. Army veteran Joe Kelly lived in a modest house on Staten Island and built elevators at the World Trade Center. During his lunch break, Kelly joined hundreds of others wearing steel-toed boots and hard hats decaled with American flags and waving hammers and wrenches. They marched in light rain over to Federal Hall chanting, “U-S-A, all the way! U-S-A, all the way!” “Love it or leave it! Love it or leave it!”
When the hard hats reached Federal Hall, they set upon protestors, who screamed, “Mother-fucking fascists!” Fists and lead pipes started to fly. Policemen in baby-blue helmets looked on impassively from Federal Hall’s marble steps as broad-shouldered tradesmen savagely punched and kicked student protestors.
Nixon later invited the riot’s organizer, construction trade union leader William Brennan, to the White House, where Brennan gifted the smiling president with a hard hat. Brennan was later appointed secretary of Labor.
