The unquiet ghosts of Kent State
by Stewart J Lawrence, guardian.co.uk
May 4th 2011
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?
Original Page:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/04/vietnam-us-military
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