I remember my picture finally went out over the wire, and I turned up the volume, and finally, the guy who I’d been fighting with for an hour said, “Wow, kid, that’s a good picture. Do you have any more?” I said, “I only have a few more.” He said, “All right, we’ll take them.”
DEAN KAHLER
They put me into a coma, and broke three ribs to get into me. They took out one of the lobes of my lung. They sewed up the holes in my diaphragm. They manhandled all my organs, looking for shrapnel that was in the organs. Fortunately, the only organs that were damaged were the lungs, the diaphragm, and the spinal cord. There was no shrapnel in my heart or my liver or those kinds of things. So I was real lucky in that sense. But this is 1970. We don’t have the technology we have today. When I started becoming aware of my surroundings, Thursday, all I could hear were machines, and I could start to feel a little pain. I was in and out of consciousness. They were obviously dripping morphine into me, but they were slowly taking me off of it, and slowly taking me out of the coma. It was a very tough reawakening. There was a lot of pain, and I noticed that the bed was moving underneath me, and it was one of the early beds designed to make people who were paraplegics comfortable because it had inflatable and deflatable cells in it. You could hear the air compressor running.
When I came to, the doctor says, “You know what’s going on?” I said, “Yeah, I’m probably not going to walk for the rest of my life.” He goes, “I think you’re right. Why are you so cavalier about it?” I said, “Well, thank God. I’m just happy to be alive. I’m opening my eyes, I’m in a lot of pain, but I can talk, and I can breathe, and what you told me is I could live a very full life for the rest of my life.” He says, “Yes, you can, and yes, you will.” So that’s where I come from.
I’m only a paraplegic. I’m not a quadriplegic. My thoracic 9, 10, and 11 were shattered. There are twelve bones in the thoracic region. It’s just below the cervical region of your neck, that run down your back, and they get increasingly larger. So, T9, 10, and 11 were shattered. My feeling stops about an inch below my navel.
I woke up, and I remember my parents bringing over my mail. You know, my name was in papers everywhere. I remember opening up the first letter; it was a card, a very lovely card that looked like a lot of thought was put into it. I opened it up, and on the left-hand side there was a whole page full of writing, and it said, “Dear Communist, hippie, radical, I hope by the time you read this you are dead.”*1
LAUREL KRAUSE
My father was radicalized, and he became the voice for Kent State. He became known as Crazy Krause. He would not let it go. He gave a speech in the backyard the day after Allison was killed and he said, “I’m not going to take this sitting down. My daughter’s death will not be in vain. I’m going to be launching an investigation into this. I want our government to find out for what reason they used live ammunition and guns against young people?”*2
BOB GILES
Arthur Krause emerged very quickly as someone who wanted to sue the government, bring lawsuits and so on. He and Allison had been somewhat estranged; he thought she was just a radical hippie student. He started to call me at home, and we had many long conversations in the evening. He was a deeply sad man, and troubled about what had happened to his daughter and what his relationship with her had and had not been. I would listen to him, and we became frequent conversationalists on the phone.
At that time we were getting so much hate mail that the newspaper put a guard at my house for a couple days. “You’re a communist, and you’re communist-lovers, these students should have been shot, the newspaper has one-sided coverage,” you know, that sort of stuff. There was no personal threat to me, but it was very viciously worded criticism of the paper.
DEAN KAHLER
My father lost fifty pounds. My mom gained fifty pounds. They were shocked and in terror. They couldn’t believe it. They were a mixed couple, mother was a Republican, father was a member of the Democratic Party, and they believed in their government. My father fought in World War II. My mother was a housewife from the fifties, but she had already started taking a job by the time I was sixteen. They just couldn’t believe that the government would shoot their kid, when he really wasn’t doing anything.
STEPHEN STILLS (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
When Kent State happened, it was a visceral thing. Those were our peers. It’s like, “Are you out of your mind?” It became a contest, to see who could write the song the quickest. I was just starting to process it, and Neil Young already had a song that I thought was a verse short. Putting the word “Nixon” in it kind of put a time frame on it that wouldn’t make it last—it would be hard to sing, hard to sing now.
GREIL MARCUS (Rolling Stone music critic)
After Kent State, Neil Young writes “Ohio.” He writes it very, very quickly. They record it practically overnight. They release it within days and get it on the radio. So it’s just incredibly fast, and it’s a tremendously powerful song. And that’s an intervention. That’s pop music as, not just a story appearing in a newspaper, but actually creating a newspaper, and getting it on the streets in response to an event. The only other time I can think of when something like that happened was when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were arrested on a drug charge in England, and the Who went into the studio, recorded two Rolling Stones songs, and released them as a single the next day as a protest against their arrest. I just thought what a remarkable thing to do, to intervene in the story—seize the narrative. And it always helps that it was a good song.
JOHN HARTMANN (Crosby, Stills & Nash manager)
So, when “Ohio” happened, we—already in a state of rebellion—were infuriated, and Neil Young, who was the Shakespeare of our time, goes out and he writes a song about this travesty, this horror, that National Guard troops shot down college kids on a campus for objecting to a war. You piss off Neil, he’s gonna write something good. The more emotion he can get into a song, the better the song is. So, “Ohio” is the direct result of what was on the news that night: four dead in Ohio, that’s the truth.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, they wrote the songs that were the political commentaries of their day. They were describing the historical events in their music, and the public was buying it. It was hugely commercially successful, yet heavily critical of the culture that we lived in, and there was a definite schism. We interpreted their lyrics as our advice and direction on how to be and live. It changed a generation.*3
JOE LEWIS
Every time the song “Ohio” came on, I’d cry. I cried every time I heard it, for fifteen years.
JULIUS LESTER (author, civil rights activist)
I was pretty horrified when I heard about what happened at Kent State. Kent State was the first time that whites had been killed. It was the first time that they’d been confronted with violence. That was it. They didn’t want to take that risk anymore. In the civil rights movement, you had to ask yourself that question, “Am I willing to die?” Okay. “I don’t want to die, but am I willing—if that’s a consequence, am I willing to do that?” You had to answer that question, and whites hadn’t been confronted with that. Not many. Some had in the summer of ’64, but after that, not many. So, when the National Guard turns on white people, whoa. That’s different. That’s why it got the headlines, and Jackson State didn’t.
DEAN KAHLER
I just couldn’t believe it. I was shocked. I mean, after the shootings at Kent, I thought, What are they doing, declaring war on students? And then as I learned more about Jackson State, which happened ten days later, I found out that it was more related to race than it was related to antiwar.*4 I made the correlation that law enforcement, if they didn’t get their way, they were going to shoot you. Black people knew this, but us white people really didn’t know that. This was something new for us to deal with, as white folks.
Credit 19.5
On May 7, 1970, three thousand mourners gathered along New York’s Amsterdam Avenue to salute sl
ain Kent State student Jeffrey Miller’s body as it made its way in a hearse to a funeral chapel on Seventy-sixth Street.
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHAMES.
JOHN FILO
Papers all around the world ran my pictures, like Asahi Shimbun, you name it, all the great papers. Once again, you have no idea the power of journalism, photography, the written word, or the picture; there’s no way you can learn that. But what immediately started, within forty-eight hours, was the hate mail. I got tons of hate mail and tons of calls. We had to disconnect the phone.
“It never happened, you set up the photos.” “You’re part of the conspiracy to bring down America.” I mean, just crazy—you don’t realize there’s a crazy element out there; it went on for almost a month. It was coming from all directions. It was even coming from the National Press Photographers Association, like someone needs to get that guy to sign an affidavit that these are true photos. You’re like, What? This really happened. Are you serious?
I had to stay at Kent another year. As a matter of fact, I took a job at the AP. I am still working in that same place, Taylor Hall, when the Pulitzers are announced, the next year; it was almost to the day. I read that I had won over an AP teletype machine, maybe two hundred feet from where I shot the picture.
A day or two later I received a letter. It was from Eddie Adams, who had won the Pulitzer in 1969. The letter said: “Congratulations, kid. Let’s see what you can do tomorrow.”
* * *
*1 A Gallup poll taken soon after May 4, 1970, showed that 58 percent of Americans blamed the demonstrating students and only 11 percent blamed the National Guard for the four deaths at Kent State.
*2 Four Kent State students, Allison Krause (age nineteen), Jeffrey Miller (twenty), William Schroeder (nineteen), and Sandra Scheuer (twenty), were killed on May 4, 1970, and nine other students were shot and wounded by the National Guard. One of those wounded students, Dean Kahler, was permanently paralyzed from the waist down.
*3 The band recorded the single “Ohio” in just two or three takes at the Record Plant studio in Los Angeles, and then recorded Stephen Stills’s “Find the Cost of Freedom” for the B-side. Many AM stations refused to play the politically controversial cut, but it became an instant hit on FM stations and climbed to number fourteen on the charts. Neil Young wrote in the liner notes of Decade, his 1977 anthology, “It’s still hard to believe I had to write this song….My best CSNY cut. Recorded totally live in Los Angeles. David Crosby cried after this take.”
*4 On May 15, at Jackson State College, an African American college in Jackson, Mississippi, state police shot randomly at the windows of a dorm (where they claimed a sniper was shooting at them, which was never verified), killing Phillip Gibbs and James Earl Green and wounding twelve others. The students had been protesting the invasion of Cambodia, and other issues around race, including rumors that turned out later to be false that the mayor of Fayette, Charles Evers, brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers and the first African American to be elected mayor of a town in Mississippi since Reconstruction, had been shot and killed.
CHAPTER 20
STRIKE
(May 1970)
The crisis on American campuses has no parallel in the history of the nation….[I]t is as deep as any since the Civil War.
—SCRANTON COMMISSION REPORT, June 1970
In the immediate aftermath of the Kent State shootings, the largest student strike in United States history spread across the country. Two and a half million students, on seven hundred campuses, protested, rioted, and refused to go to classes or take final exams. Thirty ROTC buildings were firebombed and governors ordered the National Guard to occupy 21 campuses in 16 states. President Nixon made a surprise appearance at the Lincoln Memorial at dawn on May 9 to talk to young protesters who were pouring into Washington, D.C., to demonstrate against the invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State. The next day, the Weather Underground bombed the National Guard building in Washington, D.C., and a student at the University of California, San Diego killed himself by self-immolation, emulating Buddhist priests who had done so in Vietnam. Meanwhile, tensions at Yale were high as the Black Panthers’ New Haven Nine began pretrial proceedings.
Nationwide student unrest led Nixon to believe that the revolutionary youth movement was “determined to destroy our society,” and he ordered the FBI and other agencies to expand counterintelligence operations. Opposition to the war also plagued Nixon from inside his administration. Two hundred State Department employees signed a petition objecting to the invasion of Cambodia, and Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel wrote a letter to Nixon criticizing him for failing to understand the student movement. When his letter was leaked to the press, Hickel received three thousand notes of congratulation. Nixon fired Hickel in December 1970.
BUD KROGH (Nixon administration aide)
On Monday, May 4, I was having lunch in Washington at the Ritz-Carlton, and one of my staff people came running over to tell me about what had happened at Kent State. One of my responsibilities at the time was to deal with demonstrations, so I ran back to the White House and went to see Pat Moynihan [counselor to the president for urban affairs]. I said, “We’ve got to be very careful about how we respond.” Pat worked out a statement that I thought was balanced and fair, and we went up to Ron Ziegler’s office. By the time we got to the press office, they had already put out a statement that I think was unfair in the way that it placed the responsibility on the demonstrators at Kent State.
NIXON STATEMENT, MAY 4, 1970
This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy. It is my hope that this tragic and unfortunate incident will strengthen the determination of all the campuses, administrations, 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.
BUD KROGH
I was saddened that it had not been a more balanced statement. Once you get past what’s actually happening on the ground and into the politics, a statement out of the White House is obviously going to be informed by what the political folks feel is important to communicate. Moynihan and I believed that if you’re shifting blame to people that don’t feel that they’re at fault, it’s going to exacerbate what we are going to be dealing with in terms of demonstrations. So, to me, the politics would have been, let’s really low-key this. Let’s not try to place blame. This was not just Kent State. We had campuses erupting all over the country.
That was one of the saddest days that I had at the White House, because there are so many ways that you can handle demonstrations without harming people. It was just one of the great tragedies of that period of time.
HARVARD CRIMSON, MAY 6, 1970
STRIKE HITS 166 COLLEGES;
ADMINISTRATORS CLOSE B.U.
By J. W. Stillman
Boston University administrators voted yesterday to cancel exams and commencement and to send all students home as the national university strike reached tremendous proportions with at least 166 colleges reported generally on strike.
The killing of four Kent State University students by National Guardsmen Monday lent a sense of crisis to student protests against the American invasion of Cambodia.
MARK RUDD (Weathermen member)
I’m sitting on a park bench on May 6 in [Philadelphia’s] Rittenhouse Square, reading a New York Times and hearing about the shootings at Kent State and the mass demonstrations that were breaking out in colleges all over the country, and suddenly I had this realization: What a waste. I couldn’t even walk over to the University of Pennsylvania. I had been a very successful student organizer, and now I was doing nothing. I was so depressed. That was the beginning of my realization. By the end of 1970 I separated myself from the Weather Underground.
Credit 20.1
On May 5, 1970, students strike at Amherst College in Massachusetts in reaction to th
e U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent State. Amherst was one of seven hundred campuses to shut down during the national student strike.
TOM HAYDEN (founder, SDS)
The May Day rally with about fifteen thousand people protesting the murder trial of the New Haven Nine took place the weekend of May 1–3, 1970, on the New Haven Green.*1 I don’t think Nixon timed the invasion of Cambodia to be the day before the Panther rally, but that’s how it happened.
ERICKA HUGGINS
(leader of the New Haven Black Panther chapter)
After John [Huggins] was killed, I traveled to New Haven with my baby daughter to be with his family and at his funeral with the thought that after a while, I would go back to California. That didn’t happen because some of the Yale students and members of the New Haven black community invited me to stay and start a New Haven chapter of the [Black Panther] party. So with permission from the party’s leadership, I did.
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