The Unquiet Ghosts of Kent State

	The shooting in Ohio on 4 May 1970 of four students
	by national guardsmen resonates for a nation still
	embroiled in foreign wars

by Stewart J Lawrence

Guardian (UK)

May 4, 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/04/vietnam-us-military

It turns out there won't be an event at Kent State
University this year commemorating the killing of four
university students there during a campus protest against
the Vietnam war on 4 May 1970. The shootings, carried out by
Ohio national guardsmen 41 years ago this Wednesday, shocked
the national conscience - and probably helped force the
Nixon administration to wind down the Vietnam war more
quickly than it intended.

Even today, iconic images from the shooting - most notably,
the anguished face of 14-year-old runaway Mary Ann Vecchio,
as she leans over the body of one of the dead students,
which won a Pulitzer Prize that year - remain disturbingly
resonant. They remind us of a time when America was bitterly
divided along racial and regional lines, and experiencing
violent conflict almost daily. Mere words - and non-violent
protest - could get you killed.

The assassination in 1968 of Martin Luther King Jr and
Robert Kennedy had already disabused the nation of the idea
that only poor, disenfranchised blacks in the south could be
victims of violent prejudice and hatred. But now, the deaths
of Jeffrey Miller, William Knox Schroeder, Allison Krause
and Sandra Scheuer - barely 20, and all good students with
promising careers ahead of them, suggested that the Vietnam
war had finally "come home". After years of bombing and
burning South-east Asian villages in search of an elusive
and ill-defined "enemy", the nation's imperial war machine
had finally decided to turn its rifles and bayonets on its
own privileged children.

Absurdly, perhaps, two of the dead and several of the nine
wounded when a small troop of guardsmen suddenly, and
without warning, fired 67 shots in the direction of
dispersing demonstrators weren't even there to protest the
war. Scheuer was crossing the campus parking lot en route to
her next class. And Schroeder, a campus basketball star, was
actually a member of the campus ROTC recruitment centre,
which protesting students had burned to the ground just
three days earlier. He'd simply stopped by the protest, and
remained on the periphery, to see what all the fuss was
about.

The proximate cause of the Kent State protest was the Nixon
administration's announcement on 30 April 1970 that it was
authorising a military invasion of Cambodia to attack and
destroy North Vietnamese communist "sanctuaries". Nixon had
been elected largely on his promise to bring the Vietnam war
to a close quickly, in part by "Vietnamising" the conflict,
which meant bringing US troops home. But he'd never revealed
his secret plans to escalate the bombing of North Vietnam,
or to draw neighbouring countries into the conflict.
Democrats, of course, had long considered Nixon an anti-
communist hatchet man, beginning with his political smear
campaign against a Democratic opponent, Helen Gahagan
Douglas, that launched his political career, and helped earn
him the nickname "Tricky Dick".

Nixon also harboured a deep and paranoid animus towards
student protesters, whom he frequently called "bums" when he
wasn't labelling them "communists". That sentiment spread to
other political figures, including Ohio Governor James
Rhodes, who was widely viewed as a possible vice-
presidential running mate for Nixon in 1972. Four days
before the Kent State shootings, Nixon had concluded his
speech announcing the Cambodian invasion warning that "we
live in a time of anarchy, abroad and at home", and that he
would not tolerate attacks on the "great institutions which
have been created by free civilizations in the last 500
years", especially, he noted, universities.

And on Sunday 3 May, after a third day of protest at Kent
State in which guardsmen had already bayoneted several
students, Rhodes denounced the protesters as "unAmerican"
and said "they're worse than the brown shirts and the
communist element and also the night riders and the
vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbour
in America". He promised that the national guard would
"restore order". And with grisly results, that's what they
did.

Public reaction to the killings was swift. Students at some
900 universities and colleges launched a fresh wave of
protests, resulting in the first successful student strike
in US history. Kent State itself remained closed for six
weeks. But the country at large remained as divided over
Kent State as it was over the war. A Gallup poll found that
58% of Americans blamed the students for what happened; only
11% blamed the guardsmen, and nearly a third, 31%, remained
"undecided". For some, the burning down of the ROTC centre,
and the throwing of rocks by students constituted a
provocation, and guardsmen interviewed later said they'd
genuinely feared for their lives. The campus administration
had also banned further campus protests after 3 May, but the
students persisted in rallying anyway. And they repeatedly
refused to disperse after the guard fired tear gas and tried
to clear the area with a minimum of force.

But could anything, in fact, justify the guardsmen, without
warning, or apparent provocation, firing on unarmed
students?

Even vice-president Spiro Agnew, a former prosecutor, and no
friend of the protesters, stunned conservatives when he
admitted that while not premeditated, the guardsmen's
actions constituted "murder". Interestingly, though, no
court ever found the guardsmen, or their superiors, legally
culpable for their actions. Most civil lawsuits were also
dismissed. Allison Krause's parents, who sued the state of
Ohio, eventually received a token "apology", and $15,000 in
cash compensation.

The Kent State administration officially commemorated the
killings for five years, then withdrew its support, leaving
it to grieving families and supporters to sponsor the annual
event. But last year, on the 40th anniversary, the campus
administration, responding to continued protest, finally
agreed to spend the entire day educating the campus about
the events and their implications. To some, Kent State may
seem like a symbol from an era that has long passed. But
thanks to such commemorative events - and the monuments
erected in honour of the dead - it's also a testament to the
bitter social and political divisions that continue to
simmer in America, and a reminder of the dangers to civil
liberties and social peace that can arise when the nation
goes to war, and sends thousands of its own youth to die on
foreign battlefields for seemingly no good purpose.

No campus today is erupting over recent American
interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. But the memory
of campuses transformed into war zones is still fresh in the
minds of US military planners, as they seek to fashion
limited engagements relying on a strictly volunteer army.
With even the Tea Party movement now calling for an end to
wars that needlessly drain the nation's treasury, were Obama
or another US president to reinstitute a military draft to
put unwilling Americans, especially college students, on the
ground to fight and die, is there any doubt that a new
season of bitter protest could erupt, once again?

[Stewart J Lawrence is a Washington, DC-based public policy
analyst and writes frequently on immigration and Latino
affairs. He is also founder and managing director of Puentes
& Associates, Inc., a bilingual survey research and
communications firm.]

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