Kent State: An American Tragedy

by Brian VanDeMark

Major John Simons watched from the center of the Commons. A thirty-nine-year-old with an ash-colored crew cut, Simons was the rector of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights and a chaplain for the guard. The son of a retired career U.S. Army colonel, he had served three years as a military policeman at a U.S. Army base in West Germany. Simons was blunt and outspoken. He had had a run-in with top brass the year before, when Tough Tony Del Corso pressured guardsmen under his command to support Nixon’s Vietnam policy and sent them form letters to sign and send to the White House. Simons felt Del Corso had no right to do this and confronted the general. “I asked him why did he use guard stationery and guard letterheads? He said he wasn’t ordering anybody to do it, he was just giving the men an opportunity to show their support. Then why, I asked, weren’t the men given an opportunity to show their dislike for the war, too? Why weren’t antiwar forms provided as well? The general didn’t have much to say. Our dialogue had ended.” Now, Simons believed Canterbury was crossing a line, too. He thought, “That silly Canterbury; they’re supposed to disperse the crowd, the crowd is dispersed, where in the hell is he leading those men?” Simons would later say that Ohio National Guard leaders “apparently feel that every campus disorder is another Normandy invasion, so you go in with the weapons loaded with rounds.”