Remembering Kent State

FOUR YEARS AGO Saturday, National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio. Trouble had been building at the university for about a week, beginning when students set up roadblocks during a strike for admissions of more black students and an end to on-campus ROTC. Ohio governor James J. Rhodes was hard-pressed in his campaign for the Republican nomination to be senator. He was running against a Taft, his administration had run into some financial scandal, and he was pushing "law and order" issues hard, brandishing the National Guard at campus demonstrations like a new, improved version of a baton belonging to the OSU marching band. With the university president out of town, he sent the Guard to Kent State to restore order.

Then, with students' tension at the National Guard's roughness starting to recede, President Nixon sent American troops into Cambodia. Spiritually, he explained, he was maintaining his "scrupulous" respect for "the neutrality of the Cambodian people." Most Americans didn't know that their planes had been bombing Cambodia for over a year. But some Kent State students got angry enough to burn down their ROTC building, anyway. The next day, about 20 National Guardsmen marching up a hill away from an antiwar demonstration wheeled and fired at the crowds. They said a sniper had started it, but no one else ever found any evidence of that, and an FBI report later found that the Guard's claim "that their lives were endangered by the students was fabricated subsequent to the event."

When the shooting stopped, four students were dead. William K. Schroeder, 19, of Lorain, Ohio, had been second in his ROTC class. Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, of Youngstown, Ohio, had been walking to a speech therapy class with a friend. Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20, of Plainview, N.Y., had written on one of his notebooks: Rocky for President in '72. Allison Krause, 19, of Pittsburgh, had come the closest of the four to threatening a Guardsman: a few days before, she'd put a flower in his rifle and told him that flowers were better than bullets.

"When dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy," Nixon--who had labeled student demonstrators "bums" the week before--remarked the next day, in a prepared statement read by Ron Ziegler.

It is my hope that the tragic and unfortunate incident will strengthen the determination of all the nation's campuses, administrators, faculty, and students alike, to stand firmly for the right which exists in this country of peaceful dissent and just as strongly against the resort to violence as a means of such expression.

When a newsman asked Ziegler if Nixon's resort to violence in Cambodia might have had something to do with the students' anger, Ziegler took offense. "The president made clear in his speech Thursday that the objective of the action along the Cambodia--South Vietnamese border is to bring a peaceful conclusion to the conflict," he explained.

A little over a year later, attorney-general John N. Mitchell ordered the Justice Department to stop its investigation of the killings--a state grand jury had returned indictments, mostly later dropped, against some student leaders, and written a report, later thrown out by a court, exonerating the Guard. Not until last year, with the high feelings of 1970 down considerably, did the Justice Department reopen the case--a federal grand jury recently returned indictments against a number of Guardsmen.

THAT THE CASE was reopened at all testifies to the hold it continues to exert on people's minds--along with a continuing stream of magazine articles and books on the subject, which some people presumably read. There are limits, naturally. Associated Press releases generally say that four students "were killed" after National Guardsmen "were sent" on campus, suggesting that both events were acts of God which no one else could possibly be held responsible for. Similarly, the new grand jury naturally investigated the individual Guardsmen who fired shots, not the people--President Nixon, Spiro T. Agnew, Governor Rhodes--who made the shootings possible.

But there was that investigation--something not even thought of for most of the other confrontations of the '60s, not even for the Jackson State University killings with which Kent State used to be paired. The continuing fascination with Kent State is comprehensible because Kent State was unique, the only time the forces of order forthrightly killed middle-class white American students in order to stop a challenge to their legitimacy.

There's a saying current in some parts of the world: scratch a liberal and find a fascist. The saying finds support in the activities of people like Premier Marcos of the Philippines, elected with the help of a liberal American advertising firm only to clamp down a rigid dictatorship when democracy threatened to mean social change. But it's not supposed to find support in the United States itself.

IT'S NOT DIFFICULT to see that American liberal protections--the rule of law and civil liberties--don't extend to everyone. That's why Jackson State was less surprising than Kent State, or why no one paid much attention when Justice Douglas tried to stay the bombing of Cambodia so the Supreme Court could rule on it first. If he'd stayed an order to National Guardsmen to shoot down student demonstrators, presumably he'd have been upheld.

Except that Kent State, and reactions to it like those of the state jurymen who exonerated the Guard and indicted the students, suggest that the presumption isn't correct. It suggests that comparatively well-off people, even in the United States, are willing to discard the restraints of law when they think the dissent it makes possible threatens them enough. And that suggests that some radicals' rhetoric was right all along, that you can't divide freedom, that as long as this country's rulers are willing to kill black demonstrators or Cambodian peasants they'll necessarily be willing to kill white middle-class students--their own children, if necessary, their own non-political children, if necessary--to stop them from exercising their freedom to object. It suggests that if they thought it necessary, some time, they'd kill us, too.