To those of us who attended college in the late sixties and early seventies, the killings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 remain indelibly fixed in memory. They came at a particularly turbulent time in the country’s history, following the annus horribilis of 1968 and the murders of Martin and Bobby; the student strikes and uprisings, not only in the U.S. but in Europe, particularly France; the Cuban airplane hijackings, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism and the tumult of the Nixon Administration.
For years, the media narrative has been fixed: that a skittish and undisciplined National Guard fired unprovoked into a crowd of student protesters, killing four. Now comes Fox News’s James Rosen with a revisionist take:
Previously undisclosed FBI documents suggest that the Kent State antiwar protests were more meticulously planned than originally thought and that one or more gunshots may have been fired at embattled Ohio National Guardsmen before their killings of four students and woundings of at least nine others on that searing day in May 1970.
As the nation marks the 40th anniversary of the Kent State antiwar protests Tuesday, a review of hundreds of previously unpublished investigative reports sheds a new — and very different — light on the tragic episode.
As Rosen correctly notes, lost in the “narrative” has been the three days of campus and civil unrest preceding the shootings, in protest over Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia, during which the university’s ROTC center was attacked and burned.
The upheaval that enveloped the northeastern Ohio campus actually began three days earlier, in downtown Kent. Stirred to action by President Nixon’s expansion of U.S. military operations in Cambodia, a roving mob of earnest antiwar activists, hard-core radicals, curious students and others smashed 50 bank and store windows, looted a jewelry store and hurled bricks and bottles at police.
Four officers suffered injuries, and the mayor declared a civil emergency. Only tear gas dispersed the mob…
Now largely forgotten, the torching of the ROTC building was the true precursor to the killings at Kent State because it triggered the deployment of the National Guard to the fevered campus.
That deployment climaxed in bloodshed on the afternoon of May 4, 1970, with the guardsmen, clad in gas masks and confronted by angry, rock-throwing students, firing their M-1 rifles 67 times in 13 seconds, killing Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder.
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For years, the question has been whether the Guardsmen were actually fired upon before loosing their fatal volley. Official investigations said no. Rosen says:
Yet the declassified FBI files show the FBI already had developed credible evidence suggesting that there was indeed a sniper and that one or more shots may have been fired at the guardsmen first.
Rumors of a sniper had circulated for at least a day before the fatal confrontation, the documents show. And a memorandum sent to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on May 19, 1970, referred to bullet holes found in a tree and a statue — evidence, the report stated, that “indicated that at least two shots had been fired at the National Guard.”
Another interviewee told agents that a guardsman had spoken of “a confirmed report of a sniper.”
Rosen concludes:
At a minimum, the FBI documents strongly challenge the received narrative that the rioting in downtown Kent was spontaneous and unplanned, that the burning of the ROTC headquarters was similarly impulsive and that the guardsmen’s fatal shootings were explicable only as unprovoked acts.
The FBI files provide, in short, a hidden history of the killings at Kent State. They show that the “four dead in Ohio” more properly belong, in the grand sweep of history, to four days in May, an angry, chaotic and violent interlude when a controversial foreign war came home to American soil.
In the wake of the arrest of Faisal Shahzad in connection with the attempted bombing in Times Square over the weekend, suddenly everything old is new again.
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