Beyond the Classroom (eBook)

Chapter FOUR

Kent State May 1970

“History can be found in textbooks, but it lives in the first-hand
stories of those who experienced it. When experiences are shared from one generation to the next, they resonate with the convictions and questions of the storyteller. The facial expression, the body language, the projection of the voice, and the look in the eye of the speaker—these are the cues, which form bonds between the speaker and the audience, and bring history into the present.”
Joe Rivers - Brattleboro Area Middle School 2019

When I graduated from high school in 1968, I was a political neophyte, virtually totally naive with little understanding of the political situation of the time.

Despite the fact that 1968 has been described as one of the most tumultuous years in American history, I was not as aware as I could or should have been. My formal education avoided the current-event items of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War - too controversial, I suppose. And, in those days, these were history classes that I was taking, not current events. Times have changed!

The North Vietnamese unleashed the Tet Offensive in January 1968 despite Lyndon Johnson’s announcing before the Tet Offensive that there was “light at the end of the tunnel” and the Vietnam War was nearly over. He was supported by, among others, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam at the time.

After anti-war candidates Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy declared their candidacies for the Democratic nomination, challenging President Johnson from within his own party, LBJ announced that he would neither seek nor accept the nomination of the Democratic Party for another term as President of the United States.

In March 1968, the My Lai Massacre, although it would not come to public attention until a year later, occurred in Vietnam during a ‘search and destroy’ mission. Over 400 Vietnamese villagers were murdered, raped, brutalized and buried in ditches that day. The lone American casualty resulted from a soldier accidentally shooting himself in the foot.

Supporting a sanitation workers strike while in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was gunned down, and racial violence permeated the United States.

In the early morning hours of June 5, 1968, after having won the California primary, the last-in-the-nation primary, Senator Robert Kennedy announced in his victory speech, “Now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there.” (Chicago in August 1968 was the site of the Democratic Party’s nominating convention).

Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. He died on June 6, 1968.

Then followed the debacle at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Mayor Richard J. Daly’s city had become a tinderbox of tension, and violence broke out as protesters attempted to exert their influence on the Democratic Convention to get the Democrats to adopt an anti-Vietnam war platform. Hundreds of demonstrators were brutalized as police and other military units dispersed the crowds amid chants of “The whole world is watching.” These events were recorded and played back on television during the evening news.

United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois exhibit
May 23, 2022

Back in high school I had put my life into the hands of my counselor, Bob Rounds, who guided me through my high school years. He suggested I should apply to and go to college. That is what I did. It was not an effort on my part to avoid the draft. I had registered with the Selective Service and had the card in my wallet (I still have it) classifying me as 2S, a student deferment. It made sense as I was still in high school and would be for the next six months. If I had been drafted, I’d have served my country.

I didn’t really have an idea, no focus on what I wanted to do in college or with a college education. My thought process was that something would materialize. I would find a job after college. I hoped I could use my mental skills rather than my experiences as a laborer, road tar crewman, cement pourer on industrial sites and security guard at a nuclear plant called Vermont Yankee in Vernon, Vermont.

History had become my passion in high school under the tutelage of two of my finest teachers, Tom O’Brien and Richard Sprague. Both were social studies teachers who had engaging styles and knowledge of history. I applied to a few colleges and was accepted at Windham College. It was small and that appealed to me. Some larger schools had sent me recruitment letters for basketball and football. But I was aware that coming from a small state I was not the caliber of athlete to play at a Division One school.

I was familiar with the basketball program at Windham and felt as though that was a place where I could play. Everything did work out on that front, and I had a successful career. But going to Windham landed me in an environment for which I was unprepared politically. I guess you would have considered me a moderate conservative coming out of high school, although I wouldn’t have been aware of what that was at the time. At Windham, there was a decidedly liberal population of students that I was unaccustomed to. It opened my eyes. Among my classmates was William Powell. You may know him as the author of the The Anarchist Cookbook. Powell was the class co-valedictorian in 1972. It was an eye-opener for me and put me certainly into a category as a political minority for the first time in my life. It gave me a much broader perspective. My eyes had been opened. Vietnam became a focal point. There was a pall, a pressure on everyone’s shoulders. It was palpable, omnipresent and constant, always minimally in the back of your mind and often in the forefront of conversation among college students.

Toward the end of my sophomore year, the news broke that there had been a shooting on May 4, 1970, in Kent, Ohio. As reports came out, it became apparent that Ohio Governor Rhodes had declared martial law and sent the Ohio National Guard to the campus of Kent State University, negating the Constitution’s guaranteed First Amendment rights.

President Nixon had been elected to end the war in Vietnam and bring ‘peace with honor’ and ‘law and order’ to the United States. So when he went on national television on Thursday night, April 30, 1970 and announced an invasion of Cambodia, widening the war to a neighboring country of Vietnam, it was a surprise to many.

During Nixon’s announcement, he proclaimed, “This is not an invasion of Cambodia.”

That would turn out to be a blatant lie. Records were falsified, bombing missions falsified, key members of bombing crews were called aside and given alternative course coordinates, and bombs that had been authorized to fall in Vietnam were actually being dropped in Cambodia. Nixon would later pay a price for this during his impeachment proceeding in 1974.

That speech sparked widespread dissent, especially on college campuses across the country. One of those was Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. On Friday night May 1, 1970 students and others gathered on Water Street in downtown Kent. There was a disturbance that some have called a riot and others have disputed. But clearly, the disturbance was a result of discontent over Nixon’s announcement that the war was moving into Cambodia.

On Saturday, May 2 a large gathering occurred on the campus of Kent State University. Members of the crowd set the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) building on the Kent State campus on fire. ROTC was seen as the rapacious arm of American imperialism reaching into college campuses to recruit the best and brightest minds in the country for the war effort in Vietnam. Thus, the ROTC programs in the United States had become a target at some universities.

When the fire department arrived to put out the fire, their hoses were cut and the building was completely destroyed. Ohio Governor Rhodes declared martial law and called in the National Guard to occupy the campus of Kent State University.

Many of the National Guardsmen were largely the same age as the students they found there. There was some resentment that students were privileged and the guardsmen were guardsmen because they did not have the assets to attend college.

Many students had left the campus to go home and to other places for the weekend. They would return on Sunday to prepare for classes on Monday, May 4, 1970. Not all of the students were aware that martial law had been imposed and they did not have the right to peaceably assemble. When an assembly of anti-war students and other interested bystanders had been called to the Victory Bell for a gathering on the Commons at Kent State University, hundreds of students decided to attend. And the National Guard was eventually called to disperse the students.

Victory Bell Kent State Commons

The Ohio National Guard read the Riot Act to the assembled on The Commons at Kent State. Two groups of guardsmen began to disperse students, forcing them up and over Blanket Hill and down the other side into a parking lot to where there was a practice football field. The guardsmen eventually made their way to the football field and then knelt in firing position, aiming their weapons at the students. One of those students was...