The Final 50th Anniversary Post: Remembering the Kent State Shootings of May 4, 1970

On this date in the year 2070, someone will be writing about how the Great Coronavirus Pandemic of fifty years earlier changed the world and why we are better off for it in some ways, worse off in others, and how mystifying it is that there are still those lingering issues that haven’t yet been settled. And, isn’t it about time we finished the job and stopped repeating history?

Anniversaries are important to make sure we ask those questions. It’s why, over the past two years, I’ve written posts about the anniversaries of so many events that shaped the world during the time frame of my novel The Fourteenth of September and still resonate today: the Bobby Kennedy Assassination, the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Moratoriums to End the War in Vietnam: October 15, 1969 & November 15, 1969, the First Draft Lottery and the Kent State Shootings.

This will be the last anniversary post on the history behind my novel; the cycle is done. The story takes place roughly between the first Vietnam Draft Lottery and the Kent State Shootings, two seminal events that book-ended a six-month period wherein I’ve always felt the character of my generation was formed, including its early feminism. The novel ends shortly after Kent State when the country fired on its children, the turning point incident in support of the war when the country went too far and knew it.

Fifty years sounds so long, but in many ways has gone by so fast. What we haven’t learned in that time frame is legion. Just this past December, the Washington Post published a report, “At War With The Truth,” about the war in Afghanistan, that sounded like the playbook for Vietnam: falsified data to show we were “winning,” admissions that the strategy wasn’t working, and the objective unclear. On the positive side, we learned to treat our vets with respect, to never have another draft, and we keep coming close to electing a woman president. Two steps back, one step forward, another we just can’t seem to get quite right.

We are still so in the thick of this pandemic that, yes, it’s difficult to focus on anything else. But it’s illustrative, on today’s anniversary, to consider how we might try to learn the lessons of how to be the admirable country we consider ourselves to be, the first—or the fifth—or the fiftieth—try instead of so often falling back into the hamster wheel of history.

A high school friend of my vintage found this recently among his late mother's things. He had no idea she'd been a protester.

"RIGHT ON, Mrs. Gustafson," It worked.

Following is a post I wrote on this day two years ago, that includes the story of what happened at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, and why it still matters today. In rereading it, I see that we were only thirteen months into the new administration, dealing acutely with school shootings and already hearing about alternative facts and incredible re-interpretations of reality. I asked readers to look ahead and think about what would be on the conscience of the country on this fiftieth-anniversary date to which we should also be saying “No, that’s not who we are.”

The issues have changed, but not the question. How we’re dealing with acceptable percentages of pandemic deaths and knee-jerk 180 turns in policy that impact lives and livelihoods. I ask again. Haven’t we learned how to be better than this. Are we ready again to stop and say, “No, that’s not who we are?”

The following published on May 4, 2018 under the title:

Remember Kent State, May 4, 1970: An Iconic Moment For A Generation... A Coming of Conscience for a Country

The Iconic Kent State Photo

Recently, while promoting the fall publication of my novel, The Fourteenth of September, which takes place during the pivotal 1969-1970 years of the Vietnam War, I was asked if—of the many iconic moments in American history that happened during that time period— one had impacted me more than any other.

I paused to consider the word iconic... icon — a symbol. No question. It was the Kent State Massacre, a symbol at the time of the total chasm between the government and the youth it was supposed to be protecting: the bridge too far that blew away most of the remaining support for the war, though it’s death throes dragged on another five years. 

48 Years and We Still Remember

Every May fourth since 1970 there has been media coverage of the shootings, always featuring the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio with arms outstretched in agony and disbelief, kneeling above the body of twenty-year-old Jeffrey Miller. An iconic image of how we felt. Agony and disbelief. This is America? How had it come to this?

We know the facts: The National Guard fired into a crowd of students protesting the war’s expansion into Cambodia. Sixty-seven rounds over thirteen seconds killing four, wounding nine, permanently paralyzing one. The massive national student strike after. A turning point in how the country viewed the war. It was just too much to kill kids. 

Early Alternative Facts

It all began with a lie—and it was bald-faced. Nixon was elected because he said he'd end the war—something his predecessor, Johnson, hadn't been able to do. His Administration said we were winding down. Hard as it may be to believe from the vantage point of today, media was limited. We only heard one side and assumed what we were told was true—though obviously that was disavowed later on many levels, most recently in the Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War.

But, suddenly, on April 30, 1970, it's announced we just bombed Cambodia. It was earth-shattering. The war was being accelerated, not contained. Of course, there were protests; of course, they were full of anger; of course, those protests would be on a campus where the populations of draft-age men were among the largest. We had just been through the roulette of the Draft Lottery and the news about My Lai. Nerves were raw, the rage was high.  Above all, trust was waning, and this Cambodia lie just wiped it out. How could we believe anything the government told us ever again?

And then, to top it off, unbelievably, students were shot dead at one of those protests. It was the very definition of a word we were just beginning to use to describe what we thought were mind-expanding experiences: surreal. 

The Memorial to Jeffrey Miller, Bordering Where He Fell, on the Kent State Campus

Where Were You When You Heard?

I think many people of my generation can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about Kent State, just like all the assassinations that punctuated that time—King, the two Kennedys. I remember walking into the Student Union with a few others and being shocked to hear my friend, Tommy Aubry, screaming from the top of the stairs, “They’re Shooting Us! They’re Shooting Us!” We didn’t know what he was talking about. He pointed to the only television set in the Union and ran past us to shout the news to others.

We didn’t believe it at first. Who would? They must have shot over their heads. It had to be an accident. Surely no one was actually dead. It was too fantastic to comprehend... until we had to. The truth of it was horrible. It wasn’t enough that we could be sent to Vietnam to die; we could die here.

They Could Shoot Us, Too!

I came across a quote by the survivor, Gerald Casale, that summed up a student’s point of view. “It completely and utterly changed my life. I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of people I knew...”

Abraham and Isaac Sculpture in Commemoration of the KENT STATE Shootings, at Princeton University

In an era of embryonic diversity awareness, it was astounding that supposedly the most cherished of us all were now being killed just outside a quiet Midwestern town. Anything could happen next. Casale founded the band Devo, creating music and a movement as a result of his experience.

I have a chapter in my book you can read here that’s based on what happened at the campus I was on. It was not something I had to research. I still remember every second.

Within days after the shootings, the National Guard actually did arrive on my campus, and we thought we were also going to be killed—another chapter, another iconic situation. We were still teenagers and most of us had been pretty sheltered, but now we understood what it must be like for those fighting for civil rights in the south, for anyone living day in and day out in any country at war. It was a sobering lesson. We were truly in what we called "the war at home."

According to the final report on the Kent State Massacre by the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest: “It was unnecessary, unwarranted, inexcusable”—an iconic symbol of the war that caused it.

A Coming of Conscience Moment. America Said No!

The subtitle of my novel is “A Coming of Conscience,” because it was a time when we weren’t just growing up and Coming of Age. In addition—by the way we chose or were forced to cope with the situations presented by the Vietnam War—we were each defining our own character. We were each faced with decisions where integrity could—or should—trump consequences (pun intended). Would I go to Vietnam or to Canada?  If I join ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps) am I being realistic or complicit? If I put my head in the sand and try to ignore it all am I being apathetic, cowardly or just understandably self-preserving?

We’re in a period now where we’re questioning our leadership and taking our positions on matters to the streets in massive marches. It’s our right and our privilege, and they don't fire on us—we feel safe. One reason is that on May 4, 1970, the country looked aghast at the bodies of those dead children and decided that this was not who we were. This was not our character. It was a coming-of-conscience moment for the country.

It all reminds me of watching Apocalypse Now, a brilliant film that I admired greatly but could never see a second time. Viewing it made me feel I’d personally been through the war. It told the Heart-of-Darkness story of Colonel Kurtz, who embodied "the horror," as he put it, of how we would actually have to behave to win such a war. In the movie, the government has sent an assassin to eliminate him, because as a people we couldn’t accept that Krutz is what we’d have to become to do what Washington considered so essential—continue as the country that had never lost a war.

With Kent State, the horror rang through every level of America. Is this what it’s come to? We answered, “No.”

 May 4, 2020, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre. Over the coming years, let’s remember and honor what happened at Kent State. And, in this current moment of dubious facts, incredible re-interpretations of truth and Never Again, let’s think of what else is on the conscience of the country to which we should also be saying, “No, that’s not who we are.”

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A Tale of Watergate: Straight From the Source and Still Spellbinding

The Watergate Girl, My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President

by Jill Wine-Banks

THE book to read as we shelter in place

My regular series of Literary Salons had been put on hold during my own book launch and I wanted to restart it with a flourish this spring. My “get” was MSNBC legal analyst and former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks introducing her new book. We held the salon on March 12, virtually on the cusp of having to sequester ourselves in the face of the coronavirus. The series is back on hold, just like the rest of life right now, but we went out with a big blockbuster of a bang, and I highly recommend the book.

I first wrote about Jill in this blog back in the summer of 2017 as part of a Re-Radicalized series, focusing on individuals newly recharged as activists. She’d just made her debut on MSNBC on the strength of an explosive op-ed comparing the current political environment to that of Watergate, “Comey’s Firing Is as Bad as the Saturday Night Massacre.” It turned out that this move was just the latest step in an amazing career, one that began with Richard Nixon and, as she put it, was “re-invented by Trump.”

At the time she’d also been working on a memoir about her role as the only woman prosecutor on the Watergate team, a story that would offer a different lens on the familiar tale, as well as how she was able to soar in a once-in-a-lifetime career spotlight, despite being routinely undermined as a “woman lawyer.” At the time, Jill had been worried that Watergate would no longer be of sufficient interest or relevance to support her book. Instead, events surrounding the current presidential administration have actually launched her back onto the national stage under a light as bright as it was in the Watergate courtroom. She’s become our interpreter for how history has been repeating itself, down to the astounding details.

The timing for her book launch is now perfect.  And, with the virus shut down, we can all use a spellbinding diversion.

At the salon, I had the honor of leading an “in conversation” interview with Jill. It was a thrill to listen as she gave us the skinny on behind-the-scenes intrigue and insights about what we may have thought we knew. Salon participants also peppered her with additional questions we’d always wanted to ask. Here are a few tidbits to whet your appetite for this amazing book.

The “Lady Lawyer”

the mini-skirted prosecutor

The challenge of taking on an entire presidential administration was formidable enough, yet as the only woman on the team, Jill also had to contend with 1973 attitudes, where she was regularly singled out and undermined. The daily scrutiny of her apparel and hairstyles led to some relatively benign monikers including “the mini-skirted prosecutor” and “the leggiest Watergate lawyer,” though she took umbrage at being called a “lady lawyer.” There’s no such thing, she said. “I was a lawyer, period.”

The condescension of the times also more seriously impacted her role as a trial lawyer in the case. Watergate Judge John Sirica would regularly interrupt with comments he thought would be useful, like telling a combative witness, “Now, you never gain arguing with a woman,” and stopping an interrogation of a female witness with “we can’t have two ladies getting into an argument in the courtroom.” 

“I couldn’t say anything in those days. I had to just stand and take it,” Jill said. Imagine what she would do today.

A Legal Version of All the President’s Men

During the interview, I admitted I had been a Watergate junkie, and had initially approached her book assuming it would be interesting, but not new. After all, we all know the story, right? I was so wrong. The page-turning book is both fascinating and revelatory. I offered up my layperson’s interpretation, comparing it to All the President’s Men. That book was the story of the journalists who found out what happened; The Watergate Girl is the story of the legal team who had to figure out how to prove it. Both stories are equally absorbing: Woodward and Bernstein may have had Deep Throat, but Jill had Nixon’s secret tapes. A few highlights:

• The team was very young. Instead of staffing up with seasoned specialists with decades of credentials, as you might expect, Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox “was looking for smart, talented lawyers with good judgment, who were young and vigorous enough to endure crushingly long days and high-stakes pressure.” Though Jill had a track record as a tough and winning trial lawyer at the Department of Justice, she was only still barely thirty. . . a kid.

• Jill may have been the only female on the legal team, but contrary to what some had thought she was not brought on strictly to interrogate Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, woman to woman. She was brought onto the team early, and assigned to Woods only as part of the regular witness rotation order.

• The team developed a road map for how to proceed with the investigation, but the trajectory was continuously changed by a series of “surprises,” some welcome and some not. One of the worst was the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon wanted Cox, Jill’s boss, removed. Both Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus refused and were fired on the spot. But Cox was ultimately out after Bork assumed the task. After that, the team knew Nixon could shut them down any second. They kept working furiously, sometimes squirreling away evidence so it wouldn’t be found, other times not knowing from day to day if they were even still officially employed.

• The best surprise was the discovery of the tapes. No one knew that Nixon had regularly, and secretly, taped Oval Office conversations, but John Dean had suspicions. Only when reluctant witness Alexander Butterfield, Haldeman’s assistant, felt compelled to answer a direct question and testified this was true, was this evidence revealed. The case broke wide open.

• The team had also been able to subpoena the calendars of the various White House officials involved in the suspected cover-up, including Nixon. By checking the calendars against witness testimony and the tapes, they were able to find out the truth. Haldeman, for example, had testified that Nixon had said  “it would be wrong” to pay off the Watergate burglars for their silence, but the tape of the meeting showed that was a lie. Nixon supported the crime. Game on.

• Without the tapes, Jill said, they would never have been able to convict Nixon.

The Perry Mason Moment

Arguably, the most famous moment of the entire impeachment trial was the dramatic exposure of the lie that proved that the missing eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape were intentionally erased.

The story was that when Nixon’s long-time devoted secretary, Rose Mary Woods, was transcribing the tapes, a telephone call caused her to perform a complicated combination of manoeuvers on a recording machine that included keeping her foot on a pedal while leaning back to answer the phone. This caused an accidental gap.

Woods Demonstrating the “Rose Mary” Stretch

Jill was suspicious about how that could physically happen, pressing a combative Woods during questioning to the point where she nearly incriminated the president right on the stand, but not quite. Jill was convinced Woods had been thrown under the bus by Nixon to cover up his own role in erasing the tapes. But how to prove it?  

In a brave and audacious move, Jill suggested they adjourn to Woods’s White House office, where Woods could demonstrate the actions she claimed had happened.

By performing what came to be called “The Rose Mary Stretch,” her foot came off the pedal, a moment memorialized in the famous photo. The lie was proved as Woods was caught in the act. As Jill put it, “it was the powerfully dramatic moment that is commonplace in trials on TV, but almost never happens in real courtrooms.”

It was the beginning of the end for Nixon.

The Hamster Wheel of History

As anyone who follows Jill on MSNBC knows, she has been very effective in pointing out the parallels between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump over the past three years, in an effort to help us better understand what is going on today and what can and should be done about it. She’s often discussed their similar personalities and ultimate impeachments. Our conversation dug in on the details.

• Each president referred to their impeachment as “a witch hunt” and “a hoax.”

• Both presidents had a similarly expansive view of executive privilege. They both refused to honor subpoenas. They both stalled on vital documents. Nixon refused to produce the tapes; Trump to allow either documents or witnesses.

• Nixon was forced to comply when the court ordered that “executive privilege did not exempt the president from honoring a subpoena. He had to obey the law like everyone else.”

• Despite that precedent, Trump was able to obstruct. Why? According to Jill, here’s where the parallel breaks down.

  • Nixon, as complicated as he was, still believed in the rule of law.

  • In 1973, the three branches of government operated more clearly as separate and independent checks and balances on the Executive Branch than they do today.

  • It was his own party that confronted Nixon and told him he had to resign. As one of the senators said during that fateful meeting in the White House, “There is a certain amount of immorality that almost all politicians will tolerate, but there is a threshold.” Nixon crossed it and his party turned against him. Today’s Republican-controlled Senate is a very different animal.

This was one of our best literary salons to date with a great speaker introducing a great book. I hope this recap will inspire you to get the book and relive or hear the story for the first time. You can purchase The Watergate Girl in all formats (paperback, eBook, and audiobook) through regular channels. However, in this shelter-in-place time, we ask you to consider supporting independent bookstores who are struggling. Volumes Books, who has been with Jill’s book tour, ships nationally. Also, BookShop supports all independent bookstores nationwide. Check out more about Jill at her website.

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Remember Kent State, May 4, 1970: An Iconic Moment for a Generation... A Coming of Conscience for a Country

The Iconic Kent State Photo

Recently, while promoting the fall publication of my novel, The Fourteenth of September, which takes place during the pivotal 1969-1970 years of the Vietnam War, I was asked if—of the many iconic moments in American history that happened during that time period— one had impacted me more than any other.

I paused to consider the word iconic... icon—a symbol. No question. It was the Kent State Massacre, a symbol at the time of the total chasm between the government and the youth it was supposed to be protecting: the bridge too far that blew away most of the remaining support for the war, though it’s death throes dragged on another five years.

48 Years and We Still Remember

Every May fourth since 1970 there has been media coverage of the shootings, always featuring the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio with arms outstretched in agony and disbelief, kneeling above the body of twenty-year-old Jeffrey Miller. An iconic image of how we felt. Agony and disbelief. This is America? How had it come to this?

We know the facts: The National Guard fired into a crowd of students protesting the war’s expansion into Cambodia. Sixty-seven rounds over thirteen seconds killing four, wounding nine, permanently paralyzing one. The massive national student strike after. A turning point in how the country viewed the war. It was just too much to kill kids.

Early Alternative Facts

It all began with a lie—and it was bald-faced. Nixon was elected because he said he'd end the war—something his predecessor, Johnson, hadn't been able to do. His Administration said we were winding down. Hard as it may be to believe from the vantage point of today, media was limited. We only heard one side and assumed what we were told was true—though obviously that was disavowed later on many levels, most recently in the Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War.

But, suddenly, on April 30, 1970 it's announced we just bombed Cambodia. It was earth-shattering. The war was being accelerated, not contained. Of course, there were protests; of course they were full of anger; of course those protests would be on campus where the populations of draft-age men were among the largest. We had just been through the roulette of the Draft Lottery and the news about My Lai. Nerves were raw, rage was high.  Above all, trust was waning, and this Cambodia lie just wiped it out. How could we believe anything the government told us ever again?

And then, to top it off, unbelievably, students were shot dead at one of those protests. It was the very definition of a word we were just beginning to use to describe what we thought were mind-expanding experiences: surreal.

Where Were You When You Heard?

The Memorial to Jeffrey Miller, Bordering Where He Fell, on the Kent State Campus

I think many people of my generation can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about Kent State, just like all the assassinations that punctuated that time—King, the two Kennedys. I remember walking into the Student Union with a few others and being shocked to hear my friend, Tommy Aubry, screaming from the top of the stairs, “They’re Shooting Us! They’re Shooting Us!” We didn’t know what he was talking about. He pointed to the only television set in the Union and ran past us to shout the news to others.

We didn’t believe it at first. Who would? They must have shot over their heads. It had to be an accident. Surely no one was actually dead. It was too fantastic to comprehend... until we had to. The truth of it was horrible. It wasn’t enough that we could be sent to Vietnam to die; we could die here.

They Could Shoot Us, Too!

I came across a quote by the survivor, Gerald Casale, that summed up a student’s point of view. “It completely and utterly changed my life. I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of people I knew...”

Abraham and Isaac Sculpture in Commemoration of the KENT STATE Shootings, at Princeton University

In an era of embryonic diversity awareness, it was astounding that supposedly the most cherished of us all were now being killed just outside a quiet Midwestern town. Anything could happen next. Casale founded the band Devo, creating music and a movement as a result of his experience.

I have a chapter in my book you can read here that’s based on what happened at the campus I was on. It was not something I had to research. I still remember every second.

Within days after the shootings, the National Guard actually did arrive on my campus, and we thought we were also going to be killed—another chapter, another iconic situation. We were still teenagers and most of us had been pretty sheltered, but now we understood what it must be like for those fighting for civil rights in the south, for anyone living day in and day out in any country at war. It was a sobering lesson. We were truly in what we called "the war at home."

According to the final report on the Kent State Massacre by the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest: “It was unnecessary, unwarranted, inexcusable”—an iconic symbol of the war that caused it.

 

A Coming of Conscience Moment. America Said No!

The subtitle of my novel is “A Coming of Conscience,” because it was a time when we weren’t just growing up and Coming of Age. In addition—by the way we chose or were forced to cope with the situations presented by the Vietnam War—we were each defining our own character. We were each faced with decisions where integrity could—or should—trump consequences (pun intended). Would I go to Vietnam or to Canada?  If I join ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps) am I being realistic or complicit? If I put my head in the sand and try to ignore it all am I being apathetic, cowardly or just understandably self-preserving?

We’re in a period now where we’re questioning our leadership and taking our positions to the streets with massive marches more than ever before. It’s our right and our privilege, and they don't fire on us—we feel safe. One reason is that on May 4, 1970, the country looked aghast at the bodies of those dead children and decided that this was not who we were. This was not our character. It was a coming-of-conscience moment for the country.

It all reminds me of watching Apocalypse Now, a brilliant film that I admired greatly but could never see a second time. Viewing it made me feel I’d personally been through the war. It told the Heart-of-Darkness story of Colonel Kurtz, who embodied "the horror," as he put it, of how we would actually have to behave to win such a war. In the movie, the government has sent an assassin to eliminate him, because as a people we couldn’t accept that Krutz is what we’d have to become to do what Washington considered so essential—continue as the country that had never lost a war.

With Kent State, the horror rang through every level of America. Is this what it’s come to? We answered, “No.”

 May 4, 2020, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre. Over the coming years, let’s remember and honor what happened at Kent State. And, in this current moment of dubious facts, incredible re-interpretations of truth and Never Again, let’s think of what else is on the conscience of the country to which we should also be saying, “No, that’s not who we are.”

Publication Date: September 18, 2018

Now available for pre-order.

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