The massacre that we don't think much about
http://www.projo.com/news/bobkerr/kerr_column_05_05-05-10_8GIBM8S_v14.41b554c.html
May 5, 2010
by Bob Kerr
They are the enduring and defining images of that time when our
national sense of security and inherent goodness was stripped away
and we were left looking at a very different country from the one we
thought we knew.
There is a tiny "John-John" Kennedy saluting his father's passing
coffin, a young girl running naked down a Vietnamese road after being
burned by napalm, a black man being speared with an American flag
near Boston City Hall.
And there is the young woman kneeling over a fallen student at Kent
State University.
It was 40 years ago Tuesday that students were shot down by Ohio
National Guardsmen at Kent State during an antiwar protest. Four of
the students died. It was dissent suppressed in a way that we thought
happened only in brutal dictatorships.
But it happened in Ohio. American soldiers shot down American
students on an American campus. Even in a time of repeated body blows
to our self-image, it was obscenely incomprehensible. And no one was
ever held accountable.
People were horrified and angry, but there was a terrible confusion
over where that horror and anger should take us. People came together
to scream, but who or what they were screaming at was no easy thing
to pin down.
There was the administration at Kent State, and there was Ohio Gov.
James Rhodes, who ordered the troops onto campus after calling the
student demonstrators "worse than Brown Shirts." There was the
ill-trained National Guard that made the tragic decision to carry
live ammunition into a confrontation with unarmed protestors.
But the university administration, the governor, the jittery National
Guard, seemed only symptoms. The Kent State massacre was part of a
country coming undone, of people seeing once rock-solid underpinnings
breaking up and slipping away. And there was a frenzied, often
desperate, search for someone, anyone, to blame.
President Nixon was easy. So was the war he pledged to end, but
expanded instead. But Kent State confounded everybody. It went beyond
old divisions. It was more than just anger and resentment over a war
gone wrong. It was a frustrating sense that what used to work wasn't
working anymore and there was no way to fix it. There was no going back.
Just consider how the two sides that faced off that day 40 years ago
were in some ways very much alike. The students were in college. The
soldiers were in the National Guard. Both had found refuge from the
draft and the Vietnam War.
Yet they were drawn into this deadly faceoff. Kids who might have
chugged beers and howled at the Ohio sky together were pitted against
each other because people they didn't know had made a mess.
The site of the killings on the Kent State campus has been made into
a national historic site, but the event has strangely faded in our
history. It was Americans killing Americans in a place of higher
learning and yet we seem to have shut it out of serious study.
Perhaps it is too dark and depraved for current consumption.
Still, it would be nice to think we could learn something from it.
Perhaps we could visit that historic site and gain a new
determination not to let that kind of madness happen again.
As for those who are now building careers on the very things that
turned Kent State into an American aberration, they'll probably not
give it a thought.
--
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1970 Kent State shootings are an enduring history lesson
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-05-03-kent-state_N.htm
5/3/10
By Rick Hampson
KENT, Ohio Forty springs ago, on the day the Vietnam War came home
as it never had before, Mary Ann Vecchio was there. She's the girl in
the haunting photo crying, kneeling over the student's body.
That was Kent State University, May 4, 1970, a few days after Richard
Nixon, who'd campaigned for president on an implicit promise to end
the war, widened it by invading Cambodia.
Across the nation, students protested. At Kent State, where two days
earlier the ROTC building was burned down, National Guardsmen fired
into a crowd and killed four unarmed students, the closest of whom
was nearly a football field away.
Vecchio found Jeffrey Miller dead on the ground, a moment captured by
a student photographer.
Rarely has an American home front been so traumatized Yale
historian Jay Winter calls the Kent State shootings "a wound in the
nation's history" and for a time the school was so ashamed it
shortened its name to "Kent," changed its logo and ended its annual
May 4 observances.
But things have changed in 40 years, during which the United States
left Vietnam and entered Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, a campus that
unwillingly became synonymous with protest is more focused on
remembering opposition to that war than opposing the current ones.
Unlike Vietnam, the wars America now fights have never really come
home. Students don't worry about getting drafted. The campus anti-war
group is inactive. The big cause is Haiti, the big issue the cost and
availability of parking.
"There's no strong opposition to it," junior Kassandra Meholick says
of the fighting today, "and no strong support for it."
Although there's little of the real thing here, student anti-war
protest is studied in class, chronicled in archives and commemorated
on monuments, markers and even a postcard sold in the bookstore.
May 4 has become a teachable moment, part of what President Lester
Lefton calls Kent State's "brand." A documentary on the shootings is
shown at freshman orientation. "You feel like you're part of
history," says Meholick, of Harrisburg, Pa. "Something significant
happened on this campus."
This year Kent State has taken new steps to acknowledge and make
sense of the incident. An application to add the site of the
shootings to the National Register of Historic Places rare for an
event less than 50 years old was approved by the Interior
Department. A self-guided "May 4 Walking Tour," featuring trail
markers and audio narration by civil rights leader Julian Bond,
debuts next month. A visitors center is planned.
Speakers at 40th anniversary observances this week include Mark Rudd
and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of the anti-war group Students
for a Democratic Society, Black Panther Bobby Seale, singer Country
Joe McDonald and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a civil rights pioneer.
A trauma is turning into history, objectified for students and
visitors, some of whom walk the site of the shootings like a Civil
War battlefield. The campus is a sort of museum of protest, in which
something raw and wild has been stuffed for study and shelved for display.
There is the granite May 4 Memorial (when it was dedicated in 1990, a
daffodil was planted for every American killed in Vietnam). A May 4
archive contains artifacts such as a student's shirt with a bullet
hole through the back and spent M1 shell casings. Four spaces in a
parking lot are marked off with light posts to indicate where the
four students died.
Many students today are inspired by their example. Krista Napp, a
junior, sees May 4 as a precedent for courageous anti-war protest.
Meholick, president of the College Republicans, sees a connection
between anti-war protests back then and the current anti-tax "Tea
Party" movement. "Some people draw a relationship to the students who
stood up against the government in 1970," she says. "They're both
grass-roots movements."
Vecchio, who despite a broken foot will return to campus for May 4
observances, says Kent State had to face its legacy: "It's something
that happened that you have to respect. It was never going to go
away. You can't shove it under the rug."
She ought to know. She spent years, she says, "trying to outrun that
picture." But she could not forget the sight of Jeff Miller any more
than America can forget the sight of her.
'Eradicate the problem'
In 1970 the United States was in what the President's Commission on
Campus Unrest later would call its most divisive period since the
Civil War. The Vietnam War, stalemated after five years of intense
U.S. ground combat, was the target of increasingly aggressive,
sometimes violent protests.
When Nixon announced the Cambodia invasion on April 30, campuses erupted.
In Kent, some students rioted outside the bars downtown the following
night, a Friday. Saturday night, protesters set fire to the ROTC
building, and slashed firemen's hoses. Even before that, Gov. James
Rhodes, a Republican, called out the Ohio National Guard.
He called the protesters "the worst type of people that we harbor in
America," and said: "We are going to eradicate the problem. We are
not going to treat the symptoms."
On Monday several hundred students gathered on the campus commons to
rally against the war and the Guard's presence. The soldiers used
tear gas to move the students off the commons, followed them up and
over a small hill, and formed ranks in a practice football field.
A standoff ensued. Students kept their distance, chanting slogans
"Pigs off campus!" and hurling rocks and bottles, few of which
reached their targets. Then the Guardsmen retraced their steps up the
hill, heading back toward the commons.
The crowd had swelled to several thousand, including protest
supporters, observers and bystanders. Many of them now relaxed; the
confrontation seemed over.
"It was OK until they got up on that hill," Vecchio recalls.
Suddenly, about 12 Guardsmen turned 130 degrees, raised their rifles
and fired. "I heard the shots," Vecchio says, "and kissed the ground."
In 12.53 seconds, 28 Guardsmen got off 61 to 67 shots. (Some fired
into the ground or the air; 48 Guardsmen did not shoot at all,
according to the FBI.)
Vecchio found Jeff Miller, whom she'd gotten to know over the past
few days, bleeding to death. There was nothing she could do. She
screamed, "Oh my God!"
Also killed: protester Allison Krause; Bill Schroeder, an ROTC
student who'd been watching the protest and was shot in the back; and
Sandy Scheuer, who was walking to class.
Nine students were wounded. One, Dean Kahler, was shot in the back as
he lay on the ground. The bullet left him paralyzed for life.
Another, Alan Canfora, ducked behind an oak tree as a bullet passed
through his right wrist.
Canfora says today that after the Cambodia invasion, "We wanted to
bring the war home. But we never expected that."
The shootings provoked America's first national student strike,
closing hundreds of campuses, and inspired an anti-war anthem
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young'sOhio, which asked, "What if you knew
her/and found her dead on the ground?" Newsweek put the photo of
Vecchio on its cover under the headline "Nixon's Home Front."
A Gallup Poll found that only 11% of Americans faulted the Guard; 58%
thought the demonstrators were partly responsible for the carnage.
Based on an FBI investigation, the Justice Department concluded that
the Guardsmen were never in danger and that their explanation they
were surrounded, outnumbered and fired in self-defense was a
fabrication. Later that year, a presidential commission called the
shootings "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."
A state grand jury declined to indict any Guardsman, a federal judge
dismissed civil rights charges, and no one spent a day in jail. In
1979, the state paid $675,000 to the wounded students and the
families of the dead to settle a civil suit. The Guardsmen signed a
statement of regret, not apology.
Many felt there was nothing for which to apologize. Ron Snyder, a
Guard captain that day, says the shootings should not have occurred,
but were no massacre: "A massacre is something that's happening in the Sudan."
Kent State's enrollment declined almost 20% over the next decade and
did not pass the 1970 level for 17 years. Around Ohio it was known as
"Chaos U."
The shootings marked a turning point in the student anti-war
movement, radicalizing some and frightening off others; helped seal
the eventual demise of the military draft; and, in the opinion of his
aide Bob Haldeman, marked the beginning of Nixon's descent into the
political paranoia that led to the Watergate scandal.
Although it happened in broad daylight before thousands of witnesses
and was captured in hundreds of photographs and on film and
audiotape, Kent State remains what the writer William A. Gordon calls
"a murder mystery."
Many of the key figures are dead, including then-governor Rhodes. In
2000, a year before he died, Rhodes toldThe Columbus Dispatchthat
Kent State "was a terrible thing. ... But no one plans a train wreck,
either. It just happened. And life goes on."
So do the questions: Did the Guardsmen fire out of fear, or anger, or
on command? What explained their seemingly sudden and synchronized volley?
Jerry Lewis, a sociology professor, was in the parking lot when the
Guard opened fire. He's been studying the question ever since: "I
don't think we'll ever know why they fired. I don't think they know."
The survivor
The girl in the famous Kent State photo was not a Kent State student
but a 14-year-old runaway from Opa-locka, Fla., who hated the war.
After the shooting, Vecchio fled campus. Her father recognized her in
the newspaper and contacted the police. The FBI found her in
Indianapolis and sent her home.
She was infamous. Florida Gov. Claude Kirk, a Republican, criticized
her for being at the rally, and asked, "Is she part of the plot?" The
family got letters saying she was a communist and responsible for the
deaths. Years later, her mother would ask, "Can you imagine a
14-year-old girl having to deal with that?"
Vecchio's subsequent problems she ran away again, was arrested for
marijuana possession and loitering, wound up in a juvenile home
were well chronicled. When Kent State's May 4 Memorial was dedicated
in 1990, she told the Orlando Sentinel that the shootings "really
destroyed my life, and I don't want to talk about it." As for the
memorial, she said, "Big deal. It has nothing to do with my life."
Eventually, she made her peace with May 4. She came to feel that the
incident had helped shorten the war and given Americans "a little
more freedom."
Today Vecchio is 54, divorced, and living with her mother and dog on
a farm in Northern Florida she calls "my refuge." She works at a
hospital as a respiratory therapist.
She looks forward to going back to campus each May 4, when the
daffodils have bloomed, and talking with students. "They're nervous
when they come up," she says. "But I just talk to them, and before
long we're like long lost friends."
When they talk, she's realizes anew the importance of remembering
what happened that spring day.
"I tell them it shows what can happen if the evildoers get too much
power. They can take your freedom away. You could be walking to
school, and what happened back then could happen to you."
--------
Missouri Tigers coach Gary Pinkel recalls Kent State, 40 years later
BY VAHE GREGORIAN
OF THE POST-DISPATCH
05/04/2010
COLUMBIA, Mo. As Gary Pinkel sat in his Volkswagen Beetle eating
lunch with his girlfriend at a Dairy Queen in Akron, Ohio, 40 years
ago today, the music on the radio was interrupted by a chilling bulletin.
Thirty minutes away, four students had been shot and killed by
National Guardsmen during an anti-war protest at Kent State, which
that morning had sent Pinkel and its other football recruits their
national letters of intent to sign.
Back at Kenmore High for his next class, literature, Pinkel's teacher
stood at the chalkboard and wrote, "National Guard 4, KSU 0."
"He wasn't taking a liberal or conservative side," said Pinkel,
Missouri's football coach. "His point was that the aftermath of this
would last 15 years for the university.
"I'm thinking, 'Fifteen years are you kidding me? Even though this
is a tragedy, they'll just get up and get rolling.'"
By some measures, 15 years was an underestimation.
The school thrives today, with a main campus enrollment of about
25,000 and a ranking among the top 90 public U.S. universities by the
Carnegie Foundation. But the centennial of Kent State's founding this
year remains linked to the notorious anniversary.
Say "Kent State," and the likely word association of a generation or
more is "Ohio," the Neil Young song with the refrain of "Four dead in
Ohio" that became an anthem for those disillusioned by the Vietnam
War and its aftermath.
The incident that also left nine wounded and sent seismic national
ripples not only marked Pinkel's four years there but also shook a
belief system infused by his father, George, who served in the U.S.
Navy during World War II.
"I was always a G.I. Joe, Mr. USA guy," Gary Pinkel said, saluting as
he sat in his office. "That was just how I was brought up. But I was
a little less naive after the Vietnam War about trusting your
government about everything.
"After that, I kind of felt like you analyze, rather than (trusting)
somebody else to analyze."
While the episode challenged his outlook then, today it makes for
more of an added dimension than a contradiction to his foundation, as
his poignant recollection of his father's funeral in February attests.
As "Taps" played, two members of the U.S. Navy marched in, unfurled
and folded the flag "real tight" and presented it to Pinkel's sister.
"'On behalf of the president of the United States, I want to thank
your father for serving his country,'" Pinkel remembered one saying,
repeating the words to himself, "On behalf of the president of the
United States. …
"Every man or woman who's served our country should be honored like
that. Maybe that can be done. That was awesome."
George Pinkel, who served largely in the Pacific theater on a ship
and worked in a depot on Guam, had lied about his age to enlist.
"Back then, everybody joined," Pinkel said. "It was a completely
different deal a war of necessity."
Pinkel was consumed by a recent news special he watched comparing
wars of necessity and wars of convenience, with Vietnam representing
to him the essence of the latter.
"It was really cool, with a panel going through the Vietnam War, the
Korean War, World War I, World War II, the war in Iraq," he said.
"Sometimes, you can't evaluate (the type of war) until 10 or 15 years later."
Vietnam was an exception. Even before May 4, 1970, even with his
upbringing, Pinkel had no inclination to enlist.
He's still grateful he never had to serve in that war, recalling that
his draft lottery number was No. 134 and that the eligible numbers
were just above 100 before conscription was phased out months before
he graduated from Kent State in 1974.
"Whatever came out of it? Whatever came out of that war?" said
Pinkel, who called the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C.,
numbing. "I don't know what came out of the Vietnam War. Did anything
come out of it?"
At Kent State, only a legacy of sadness and chaos.
In the wake of President Richard Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia,
several days of intensifying unrest on campus and in the community
including the burning of an ROTC building that climaxed with the shooting.
When a group of several thousand demonstrators ignored Ohio National
Guard orders to disperse, tensions escalated as rocks and bottles
were hurled by protesters.
Then, 28 of the 70 Guardsmen fired between 61 and 67 shots in 13
seconds, according to a comprehensive report by the Kent State
sociology department. Some shot in the air, or the scene might have
been more catastrophic than it was.
A photo of student Jeff Miller, with Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling next
to his dead body, screaming, became iconic. One of the four killed,
William Schroeder, was shot in the back.
Another, Allison Krause, was the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
The fourth, Sandra Schreuer, was walking to a class.
"What if you knew her," Young sang, "and found her dead on the ground?"
In the wake of the shootings, hundreds of campuses closed or were
engulfed in protests. Much less publicized, 10 days later two
students were killed by police at Jackson State in Mississippi.
Kent State was shut down for the semester, leaving thousands of
students scrambling to finish their work through various forms of
correspondence.
From the Kent State football office over the few days after the
shooting, according to a 1970 Sports Illustrated story, coach Dave
Puddington called all his recruits to offer reassurance and perhaps
to also reassure himself that they still were coming.
Puddington reached Pinkel's parents and spoke to them, but it wasn't necessary.
"Bad things happen, and something very bad happened at Kent State,"
Pinkel said. "But there was never a doubt I was still going there."
Kent State still was simmering when Pinkel arrived that summer for
practice, with security still increased on campus.
"It was known that it was ramped up," he said, "but there wasn't any
National Guard running around."
But on the night before the first anniversary of the shooting, Pinkel
recalled being in the dorm room of his future wife, Vicki, a Kent
State cheerleader.
"We were sitting in there with some of her friends, and you could see
the National Guard running by," he said. "We had shirts on: 'Kent
State, Stay United.' So we anticipated it, and they kept it under
control. But there was just the animosity, the hate. It was volatile."
By then, Pinkel had just gone through his first spring practice with
new coach Don James, who replaced Puddington formerly of Washington
University who had announced his resignation in November citing
"the prevailing contagious negativity on campus and in the community."
James became a blessing for Pinkel, as his coach and later a mentor.
"My life changed pretty quickly when he walked in," Pinkel said.
"Pretty amazing."
Under James in 1972, the Golden Flashes won their first Mid-American
Conference title with All-MAC tight end Pinkel leading them in
receptions (34) and such notables as Jack Lambert at middle
linebacker and Nick Saban at safety.
"One of the greatest things that ever happened," Pinkel said. "I
always felt like we were part of a shining light for the university
after it had gone through so many emotions and adversities."
Still, every May 4, Pinkel is acutely conscious of the images of the
tragedy that taught him there is more gray than black and white in
the world, a tragedy that remains a symbol of an era.
"I believe power is a deterrent," he said. "I'm not one to sit here
and say I'm anti-war. I'm not saying that in any way.
"But in my opinion, if people are going to die, there better be some
results. In a profound way. For a significant length of time. Period."
--------
Soldiers' victims were once on our own soil
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10124/1055273-153.stm
May 04, 2010
By Tony Norman
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the architect of American military policy in
Afghanistan, recently conducted a video conference with his troops.
He said this about the routine killing of Afghan civilians at
military checkpoints by spooked American soldiers: "We have shot an
amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven
to be a threat."
It was a talk tinged with regret for the resentment the killings
engender among the Afghans. It was also a tacit acknowledgment that
100,000 young American soldiers spread over a vast territory
nicknamed "the graveyard of empires" are going to continue making
mistakes in the weeks, months and years our military occupies Afghanistan.
Gen. McChrystal encouraged his soldiers to keep the death count as
low as possible for the sake of America's ongoing mission to win the
hearts and minds of the Afghan people. The general's pep talk was
greeted with yawns back home, especially on college and university
campuses, where such banality and casual fatalism was once taken
personally by an earlier generation.
Forty years ago, President Richard Nixon told the American people
what had previously been classified information: American ground
troops had invaded Cambodia in an attempt to cut supply lines to
North Vietnam. Mr. Nixon had scarcely finished his speech on April
30, 1970, when protests broke out on university campuses across the
nation. You didn't have to be a Rhodes Scholar to understand what an
expansion of the war meant.
Forty years ago today, it took 13 seconds for the Ohio National Guard
to turn a non-violent protest at Kent State University into a turkey
shoot. When the smoke from the fusillade of 67 bullets cleared, four
students were dead and nine were injured. The Vietnam War had finally
arrived on the home front, spilling over into American life with a vengeance.
Allison B. Krause, 19, died from a chest wound. Jeffrey Glenn Miller
died instantly from a bullet through the mouth. Sandra Lee Scheuer,
20, died at the scene from a neck wound. William K. Schroeder, 19,
died of a chest wound at the hospital.
Ms. Scheuer and Mr. Schroeder weren't even participants in the
protest. Mr. Schroeder was a member of the campus chapter of the ROTC.
The day before the shooting, Ohio's Republican governor, James
Rhodes, described the student protesters as "worse than brown shirts
and the communist element and also the night riders and the
vigilantes." In language that will be familiar to fans of Glenn Beck,
Mr. Rhodes added: "They're the worst type of people we harbor in
America. I think we're up against the strongest, well-trained,
militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America."
With rhetoric like that emanating from the state's highest-elected
official, it was relatively easy for 29 of 77 guardsmen to fire their
weapons at defenseless students whose average distance was 345 feet away.
The guardsmen fired without orders to do so, according to subsequent
investigations. It has never been explained why they fired recklessly
into a crowd of hundreds of students peacefully exercising their
constitutional right to protest their government's actions. What was
it about their passionate denunciation of the war that posed a threat
to armed soldiers hundreds of feet away?
In the days that followed, more than 450 campuses across the country
were shut down by protesters in response to the brutality at Kent
State. Most protests were peaceful, but a few turned violent. An
estimated 900 American universities and colleges mounted sympathy
strikes. Many schools shut down temporarily as a sign of solidarity
with Kent State.
If the white middle-class students shot down 40 years ago today at
Kent State were considered "expendable," the students mowed down 10
days later at Mississippi's historically black Jackson State barely
registered as blips on the national radar.
State and local police in Jackson tried to disperse a crowd of angry
students protesting the war on May 14 and 15. In response to an
alleged sniper attack, law enforcement officers fired on a dormitory
building, blowing out every window and causing a shower of glass in
every direction. Thirty seconds and 140 shots later, Phillip
Lafayette Gibbs, 21, and high school student James Earl Green, 17,
were dead. Twelve other students were injured. No evidence of a
sniper was ever found.
Mr. Nixon's Commission on Campus Unrest described what happened at
Jackson State as an "unreasonable, unjustified overreaction" to an
unsubstantiated threat of sniper fire. The Ohio National Guard
shootings at Kent State also were found to be "unnecessary,
unwarranted and inexcusable."
In the comments section of a few websites, the anti-war protesters of
40 years ago are dismissed by many conservatives as "communist
agitators." As disrespectful as their tone is, at least the
detractors acknowledge the dead along with those who fought to change
America. Their slander is a rebuke to our indifference.
--
Tony Norman: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631.
.
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