Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

Townspeople picketed memorial services. “The Kent State Four!” they chanted. “Should have studied more!” “Anyone who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes, or barefooted deserves to be shot,” a Kent resident told a researcher. “Have I your permission to quote that?” “You sure do. It would have been better if the Guard had shot the whole lot of them that morning.” “But you had three sons there.” “If they didn’t do what the Guards told them, they should have been mowed down.” A letter to Life later that summer read, “It was a valuable object lesson to homegrown advocates of anarchy and revolution, regardless of age.” Time had called the Silent Majority “not so much shrill as perplexed,” possessed of “a civics-book sense of decency.” Pity poor Time, whose America was but a memory.