Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  ROGER MORRIS

  People on the Hill knew very little about Vietnam. They knew enough to be against it. The casualty list was too high. The draft protest was huge and there were political reasons for opposing the war, but my view is that much of the opposition was simply uninformed and highly partisan, and there was a lot of sheer Nixon hatred. They didn’t always know why they hated him, or for that matter, why they should. And, of course, they should’ve in ways they didn’t even imagine.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG

  Roger Morris said to me—he said I could quote him—the greatest regret and shame of his life was that they had not spoken out at the time of Cambodia about where this was going, and taken documents. He said, quote, “We should’ve thrown open the safes and screamed bloody murder, because that’s exactly what it was.”

  * * *

  *1 These statistics come from Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1984), p. 65.

  *2 Between February and April of 1970, Kissinger held clandestine meetings in a small house in the Paris suburbs with North Vietnamese Communist Party leader Le Duc Tho. Meanwhile, a public peace conference between the two countries was taking place in Paris proper. The meetings between Kissinger and Tho were so secret that Secretary of State William Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird didn’t find out about them until a year later. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983), pp. 623–24.

  *3 On March 18, 1970, the Cambodian General Assembly unseated Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was in Paris at the time, and placed Prime Minister Lon Nol, an anticommunist and U.S. sympathizer, in power. Sihanouk, who had been in power since 1955, had kept Cambodia’s neutrality in the war by tolerating the North Vietnamese use of its territory along the Vietnam border and not responding to U.S. air strikes inside the country. Lon Nol tried to kick the North Vietnamese out of Cambodia and his actions ultimately led to the Cambodian Civil War and the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975.

  *4 From 1970 to 1975, Cambodia devolved into a civil war, with the American-backed Lon Nol fighting the communist North Vietnam–backed Khmer Rouge, who prevailed in April 1975. Pol Pot, the Khmer general, became one of the world’s most vicious dictators, engineering the massacre of two million Cambodian people, many of whom died from sickness or execution while working as forced labor on rice paddies later known as “the Killing Fields.” Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were forced out of power in 1979.

  *5 Alexander Butterfield, a personal aide to Nixon who would publicly reveal Nixon’s secret taping system during the Watergate investigation, wrote daily memos to White House staffers of Nixon’s directives and wishes, which the National Security Council staffers called “Butterfieldgrams.”

  *6 John Ehrlichman, the White House chief domestic advisor, and H. R. Haldeman, White House chief of staff, were part of Nixon’s inner circle. The two men were called the “Berlin Wall” by other White House staffers because of their German-sounding last names, and their success in isolating Nixon from other staffers.

  *7 Buses were placed in a ring around the White House for protection during antiwar protests.

  *8 The September Group was a study group Kissinger convened of ten of his NSC staffers, including Roger Morris and Tony Lake, to explore different military options for the war, including the invasion of Cambodia.

  *9 Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff were German generals in World War I who together commanded the nation’s war effort. Hindenburg later became president of the Weimar Republic.

  *10 Maine senator Edmund Muskie ran for the Democratic nomination for president in the 1972 campaign but lost in the primaries to South Dakota senator George McGovern.

  CHAPTER 19

  KENT STATE

  (April–May 1970)

  Next time a mob of students waving their nonnegotiable demands starts pitching bricks and rocks at the student union, just imagine they’re wearing brown shirts or white sheets and act accordingly.

  —VICE PRESIDENT SPIRO AGNEW, April 28, 1970

  In reaction to the announcement by president Nixon on April 30, 1970, that American troops would move across the border to fight North Vietnamese strongholds in Cambodia, America’s peace movement reacted with new levels of intensity. High school and college campuses, already tinderboxes of antiwar sentiment, ignited and the largest student strike in the nation’s history followed. The political disconnect between the Silent Majority and the peace movement presented an unbreachable chasm. On two college campuses, Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi, violent clashes produced tragic results.

  PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON

  Televised Announcement, Thursday, April 30, 1970

  I have concluded that the actions of the enemy in the last ten days clearly endanger the lives of Americans who are in Vietnam now and would constitute an unacceptable risk to those who will be there after withdrawal of another 150,000. To protect our men who are in Vietnam, and to guarantee the continued success of our withdrawal and Vietnamization program, I have concluded that the time has come for action….We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we all desire.

  LAUREL KRAUSE

  (sister of Kent State student Allison Krause)

  On April 30 Nixon goes on TV—you can watch the speech on YouTube—and he’s pointing to the map of Vietnam and all of Indochina. Prior to this, he told everyone that he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. And, instead, he announced that they were expanding the war in Vietnam, into Cambodia, and Laos, and they had actually been bombing there for over a year.

  DEAN KAHLER (Kent State student)

  I saw Nixon speak in 1968 at University of Akron, and he talked about ending the war—he had a secret plan. He wasn’t going to tell anybody about it because it was secret. So that was my first thought on April 30, 1970, that he had this plan to end the war, and he was going to tell us all about it.

  I went to the Robin Hood, a little tavern right off the edge of the Kent State campus, and the place was packed, and quiet. There were people drinking and talking, but people were sitting at the tables with notebooks out, and there were three or four televisions. They were all on, volumes were turned up, and Nixon comes on and gives a speech, and everybody starts booing, and everybody was saying, “Shh, shh, shh, shh.”

  So then everybody shut up, and we started listening to it, and when it was over it was like, “That lying sack of shit! That lying son of a bitch!” People were pissed. And I remember talking with a couple of my friends as we walked back to the dormitories, and it was like, what does this mean? Are we expanding the war? He said cut off supply lines. But hell, that could go on for three or four more years.

  So it made people upset, and we found out the next morning that people all over the country were pissed about it. There were riots and student demonstrations happening all over the country. Here at Kent nothing was happening. It was Friday afternoon. Kent is a large commuter campus. Lots of people went home on the weekends because they lived close. I was going home that weekend because my twentieth birthday was Friday.

  JOHN FILO

  (Kent State student, photographer for The Valley Daily News)

  By this time it’s my senior year, I’m really against the war. I just felt it was unwinnable. I just felt it was the wrong thing, and what triggered the whole May 4 thing was Nixon saying, my favorite quote is “We’re expanding the war to shorten it.” There was this whole semantic thing going on, and everyone was saying, “No, this is an invasion of Cambodia. This is a major expansion of the war.”

  From my high school, within a grade or two above and below me, five people were dead. I mean, you’d be at school and you’d say “Oh, you know, Jerry Vokish died.” “Geez, Jerry, wow.” You get a letter from home, and Mom would say, “I was talking to so-and-so, and Robert Ringler got killed in Vietnam.” The list kept mounting. And you just saw
that there was no end to this. Just more meat for the grinder, I thought.

  FRIDAY, MAY 1, 1970

  BOB GILES

  I was managing editor of the Akron Beacon Journal in 1970. Kent State was a local story; the campus is only twelve miles from our newsroom, and we covered the university. Leading into that weekend in early May, we knew there was going to be trouble, and it began Thursday night after President Nixon announced the U.S. was going to be bombing Cambodia. Friday afternoon there was an informal gathering and we reported that students ripped some pages out of a textbook Constitution and buried it.

  Kent was a typical college town, where there were the town-gown tensions. There’s a place in the city called North Water Street, where there are a lot of bars, so that night, Friday night, the kids started to gather. And because there was all this tension over the Nixon order to go into Cambodia, things got a little bit out of hand, and there were some windows broken. The police came and tried to settle it down. And the mayor, LeRoy Satrom, called the governor and said, “Can you send the National Guard to keep peace on the campus?” One of the odd things that has never been satisfactorily explained to me was that the president of the university, Robert White, had gone to Iowa to make a speech, and he never appeared during the weekend, so there was no senior leader of the university administration present when all of this started to unfold.

  SATURDAY, MAY 2, 1970

  JOE LEWIS (Kent State student)

  I watched as the ROTC building was burned down on Saturday night. I lived in the dormitory called Johnson Hall, that was right across the commons from the ROTC building. ROTC buildings across the country had been targeted for demonstrations, because of their connection to the military, obviously.

  I observed from afar as a crowd gathered around the ROTC building and attempted to set it on fire. There were some futile attempts. They burned the drapes. They threw a flare on the roof, but they weren’t successful. Then someone in the midst of the crowd suggested that we go around campus and get more people to support us. I fell along behind as this crowd walked around the front part of the campus for maybe an hour, and I saw people leave the campus and walk out onto the main street. Some people were disrupting traffic with construction compressors and barricades, piling them in the middle of the road. And then, as we were walking along the street, the National Guard began to arrive from Ravenna, which was to the east on State Route 59. They came in with trucks and jeeps and half-tracks. Everyone took off and headed back towards campus. By the time we got back to the area of my dorm, the ROTC building was fully engulfed in flames.

  Governor [James A.] Rhodes was running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, and he was a law-and-order guy. He was talking about quashing demonstrators, and I believe there was some communication between him and the White House—Spiro Agnew. So I blame Nixon and Agnew and Rhodes for what happened later, because I think they set the tone. And because of the media manipulation, people thought antiwar demonstrators were communist inspired. I think it was a widely held belief that the demonstrators were unsavory people not worth protecting. They didn’t have the right to object to what our government was doing in Vietnam. That was the general feeling of the time.

  That Saturday night my parents called me, because it was all over the news that the ROTC building had been burned to the ground. They wanted to make sure that I was okay, and not doing anything that I shouldn’t be. I assured them that I wasn’t. But I remember a poignant moment, standing in my buddy’s dorm room watching the building burn, and Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” was playing. That connection is just forever linked in my brain. I know it seems trite, but not to me. In my friend’s room, while the building was burning, we heard the song on the radio.

  SUNDAY, MAY 3, 1970

  DEAN KAHLER

  On Sunday, the governor gave a press conference and made it pretty clear that he was going to keep the school open, and that’s the day that he called us the worst element that we harbor in our society. That we, as college students, were worse than the brownshirts, the night riders, and the vigilantes. Those are all quotes from Governor Rhodes. It felt terrible.

  GOVERNOR RHODES

  These people just move from one campus to the other and terrorize the community. They’re worse than the brownshirts and the communist elements and also the night riders and vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.

  DEAN KAHLER

  I mean, just look where Kent is—it’s surrounded by Akron, Canton, Cleveland, and Youngstown. Not exactly a hotbed for liberal thought. Maybe it was a hotbed for liberal, union thought because everybody worked in the steel industry, the auto industry, or auto-related industries in those towns. And it was in Ohio. It’s not Berkeley. It’s not Boston. It’s not New York City. It’s not Los Angeles. It’s not San Francisco. This is Ohio. So it really, I thought, the Rhodes comment was a slap in the face.

  I looked like Opie. I had the short haircut, comb-over, a little part in the left-hand side, full of freckles, horn-rimmed glasses. So I did not look like a hippie. I had a dress shirt on most times, or a T-shirt. I was a bit of a jock. I played football. I grew up in a rural, agricultural community called East Canton, Ohio, near my family’s farm.

  BOB GILES

  On Sunday night, tensions started to rise again. By this time, the governor had arrived on campus, and took over, without asking the board of trustees. Jim Rhodes was in charge of what was going to happen on the campus. He issued an order saying there would be no gatherings of any kind, peaceful or otherwise. The National Guard’s instructions were to break them up.

  DEAN KAHLER

  When I got home from celebrating my twentieth birthday with my friends Saturday evening my mom told me that they burned down the ROTC building on campus. And I thought, What? Although I understood the symbolism of the whole thing, it just didn’t seem proper, at all. So I went to bed. The next day my parents and I talked about it, and we decided I wasn’t going to do anything stupid. I wasn’t going to get close to anything that was going to be violent or destructive.

  They took me back to campus, and as we were driving in, we had to stop several times for ID checks. My father, being a truck driver during World War II in the Philippines and Okinawa, and eventually in Korea, knew how to handle it. He knew everybody’s stars and stripes. He knew how to address them properly.

  When I got to campus I was surprised at the number of National Guard troops that were around. Everywhere you went, there they were. National Guard troops lined up in long lines, guarding buildings, carrying rifles, helmets, green uniforms, armored personnel carriers driving around with people riding in the back of the beds with canvas-top covers. Everywhere you went they were about a parking meter away from each other.

  I was looking for a friend of mine who was in the National Guard, who was four or five years older than I was. I actually found somebody who knew who he was, believe it or not. He said, “Oh, his unit were just being called up today from guarding the truckers.” He was on the truckers strike. He was on his way back to the armory today, and he was to come to campus the next day, on Monday.

  JOE LEWIS

  Sunday, when people got up, it was a spring day and the university was occupied by nine hundred Ohio National Guardsmen. They set a bivouac up on the practice soccer field, and they were positioned around the administration buildings and other major buildings on campus. There were half-tracks, and guardsmen with helmets and bayonets on their M-1 Garands. But they were visiting with students who were walking around and chatting with them, particularly the coeds.

  LAUREL KRAUSE

  That Sunday afternoon was a very nice day on campus. It was gorgeous, and there was a lot of interaction with the National Guard, who were the same age as a lot of the students. My sister noticed a flower in one of the National Guardsmen’s guns, and his superior came out and said, “Soldier, what are you doing with a flower in your rifle?” My sister said, “What’s the matter with
peace? Flowers are better than bullets.”

  Credit 19.1

  Kent State student Allison Krause (age nineteen) was a popular campus political activist. Here she is in April 1970 collecting money at a campus rally where Jerry Rubin spoke.

  BEN POST (Kent State student, reporter for the Record-Courier)

  I was out of town on Friday and Saturday, so I was not there for the burning of the ROTC building. But I got a call from my editor, and I got back late Saturday night. That Sunday I immediately went to the office and was sent by the paper up to what’s called Prentice Gate, which is the entrance to the university where a group of students sat down in the middle of the intersection, blocking traffic. They were protesting the National Guard’s presence on campus and the war. And they wanted to speak to the university president, Robert White. I got there at about seven o’clock at night, and things built over the evening into the late hours—ten, eleven o’clock.

  So I’m standing there as a reporter trying to take in everything that’s happening. There were two groups of authorities there—the city police and the National Guard units. At one point one of the local policemen said to the students, “Just break it up and go and we’ll let you go.” But at that point, a National Guard officer came over and said, “No, this is an illegal assembly,” or something to that effect, and “We’re going to act now.” I’m standing by this telephone pole right on the corner, and I can see the university in the background and the gates and all these students in the street.