Darkest Hours: The Kent State Shootings

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Students chanting, shouting, waving, hands-scrawled placards, many more merely standing around. But something feels different today. Across the commons, a group of soldiers, members of the Ohio National Guard, have formed a skirmish line. Bayonets fixed onto the barrels of their M1 rifles. Some are wearing masks to protect against the tear gas now deployed. The Acrid Stinging Smoke spreads low and fast across the ground. Some of the students scatter in fear. A few others pick up the gas canisters and toss them back towards the troops. Rocks are hurled. A noisy tension builds. But for the moment, matters seem contained. That is, until the line of guardsmen halt, level their rifles at the students. And fire. It is American History Hit, and I'm your host, Don Wildman. Nice to be with you. What defines a darkest hour? Well, it's when a crisis has reached its native, when all hope seems lost. In that moment of trepidation, we face disaster, destruction, and the real possibility that what we value most in life may disappear. Paradoxically, though, with life so much in the balance, it is a prime opportunity for profound and lasting change, though it's hard to see it at the time, it being the darkest before the dawn. But some of our most distressing moments have led to the most redemptive transformations, one of the enduring hallmarks of American history. In May of 1970, four undergrads were shot dead with nine others injured on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio. A nation already at a contentious low fell further. What caused this tragedy, how it played out, and what changes came to pass as a result, is what we'll discuss today with historian Brian Van De Mark. Recently retired from teaching history at the United States Naval Academy. He is the author of a number of books on US history. He co-authored In Retrospect, Robert McNarres, number one best selling Vietnam memoir. His latest book is Kent State, an American tragedy long listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hello, Professor. Nice to meet you. Greetings. Thank you, Don. I enjoyed me on your program. Now, while we are most certainly not a current events series recording here in late January 26 on Kent State, it's impossible not to ignore the echoes of history. Big differences, of course, from then to now, but shootings of American citizens in the act of protest by government forces is such a rarity, you can't help it. But for this conversation, we are steeped in 1970 in a brand new decade at the time. Take us to that time. What is going on in US and in the world? This is a period when American involvement in the Vietnam War has been going on for several years. The American casualties as well as far larger than the Chinese casualties of skyrocketed. And the American military effort in Vietnam is clearly bogged down. Progress is not being made in American people's frustration with the effort and the costs both in blood and treasure that result from that is intensifying dramatically. And it has a deeply polarizing effect on the American public and public opinion toward the war. Roughly, it's interesting, this is, you know, baby boom generation. Roughly half of that population is in college at that time. And, you know, after high school, the first major anti-war rally was in April 1965, 20,000 people went to DC and they continued ever since the March of the Pentagon October 1967. There's a nationwide moratorium October 1969. The Meal Eye Massacre has happened in 1968, 16th March. Details were published in the New York Times in 1969. I'm just sort of ratcheting up what's happening in the society of America and the media, especially. Why does about of protests begin in May on Kent State campus? Well, I want to make a general point in the more specific one. Vietnam War was fought in an era of the draft. Yeah. And that is a qualitatively profound difference between today and yesterday, so to speak. The draft essentially granted deferments and our exemptions to college Americans up until 1969, when the manifest injustice of that system, which effectively, prejudiced working class Americans whose families couldn't afford to send them to college, they were exposed to draft, whereas college students were not. That deferment slash exemption was lifted in 1969, which now exposed college of Americans to the draft. Another specific point is that Richard Nixon had been elected president in 1968 in part on a quote secret plan on quote end the Vietnam War. And the center of gravity politically in the United States, particularly beginning in 1968 and 1969, was to move away from continued support to the American military commitment because of the rising costs and the failure to achieve qualitative progress. And in the spring of 1970, an estimated decision to send American military forces into Cambodia to attempt to interdict communist sanctuaries. He had been urged to do this by the committing American general in Vietnam, create neighborhoods because in order to speed up the withdrawal of American forces, which he had begun to do. Abrams said you need to protect such withdrawal by removing these sanctuaries. The problem with that was that it directly contradicted the impression he had created when he saw it and won the presidency in 1962 with draw America from the war. It looked to a lot of college Americans, so the war was being expanded or intensified, which inflamed their already pre-existing opposition to war rather dramatically. I was a young guy at the time. I was probably less than 10 years old, certainly. And yet I remember how frequently we heard about protests. It was a long several years of various kinds of protests going on from civil rights, onward into Vietnam. It was just become a way of American life and almost like, here we go again, kind of feeling. But there was even more substantial theme to this in that many people, you know, the silent majority was awakened by Virgin Nixon's election. There was pushback in a big way happening in America against this at the time, right? Yes, I mean, this is a theme which we see operative today as well, which is the American public was deeply divided. The polarization in the American body politic was profound to simplify things a bit in order to make my point. Opponents of the war who tended to be young grew increasingly frustrated, resentful, and angry about the persistent American involvement. And let us not forget the 1968 and 1969 where the bloodiest years of the war in terms of the massive casualties. For example, in 1968, 45 Americans were dying a day in Vietnam and much the same remained the case through 1969. So you have rising American casualties of protracting American conflict, which is intensifying the polarization in American society between those who oppose the war. And more traditional socially politically conservative Americans who want to maintain the commitment and view the growing voices of protest and dissent and criticism of the war in a more broad level with the American system, quote, unquote, angered them. So the center is collapsing effectively, right in America in 1970. And that sounds troublingly similar to what's happened here in the last few years. Yeah, speaking of center, I mean, this will take place geographically in the relatively center of the country in the Midwest. Where is Kent State University exactly is northeastern Ohio, right? It's in northeastern Ohio. It's about an hour southeast of Cleveland near Akron. Conservative part of the world, very Mr. very Midwestern traditional manufacturing base, working class jobs and so forth. A lot of those people are not going to be agreeing with those students who you know they see as privileged people and youngsters without responsibility who are, you know, taking upon themselves to essentially protest their now involvement in the war directly because suddenly the draft deferment has gone. What is specifically at hand here at Kent State University? Are they protesting Cambodia specifically the involvement in Cambodia? Yes, I think Kent State in many respects is a very typical American university then and now by 1970 as I said, college students have lost their deferment slash exemptions status. So they're now fully exposed to the draft. Many of them have brothers or cousins or friends who have been to Vietnam and have reported back the frustrations and hardships and lack of success in terms of America's military effort there and there are increasing numbers of Vietnam veterans on the GI bill who are enrolled at Kent State now. Yeah, and this is in a mix with a residential population of the town of Kent Ohio, which is very traditional and very conservative. And I think that created a very volatile mixture, which is part of the broader setting for the tragedy. Exactly. And place it against the backdrop that I mentioned before, which is we've been going through these cycles of protest for a long time now has been on the news, been covered a lot. And it's not just the war, it's women's liberation coming up. It's all sorts of things that are happening along the way. And so Americans have a knee jerk reaction to it of either support or rejection, but it's really a part of life. What happens at Kent State is unique for many reasons. But one of them is it wakes us up to oh my gosh, you know, something much more serious than had begun to be the norm as far as these protests goes happens here. Yes, and I think I think another important point to recognize is that by 1970 what had begun back in the mid 60s as protests against segregation and the Vietnam war had metastasized by 1970 into a much broader deeper and more vocal cultural critique. Yes. Right. Of traditional America on the part of many college opponents of the war and that was very unattractive in the minds of the more conservative elements on campus in the town. It's now worked its way deep into the culture, music and writing and so forth. All of these things are reflecting this general discontent in the country from whichever side you're coming. And that has kind of infected the whole feeling of the country. I'm not the historical part of this, but it's worth the lens. I do remember how much that had become, you know, as you're becoming aware of things at that age and that really, you know, not long after this meaning five years or so there's going to be op-ech. There's going to be recession. It's a tough period in American history that sort of one thing led to the X but really off the bat it was the is the protest against Vietnam as far as the domestic side of things. What happens in Kent State is really the beginning of May of 1970, the first few days leading up to the fourth when the event happens. But there were a lot of these maneuverings going on politically and locally really of different people saying things about how they're going to handle this stuff had the protest been announced. Was this a big, was there a lot of awareness of what was happening on the campus? Well, I think that one of the distinguishing features of the student body at Kent State in 1970 is that most of those students were the first members of their families to ever attended college. Many of them had blue collar working class backgrounds. And there was this is more of a blue collar middle class, socio economic cohort than a middle or upper middle class one. Yes. And many of them were the children of those who had been a crown of age politically during the year of the Depression, the new deal who came from fairly strong democratic capital D families with the tradition of protest. So they were predisposed to vocalize and articulate their opposition in particular policies. And when you put that in contrast to a very conservative social composition of the town in the county surrounding the town of Kenden, the university, it's a very combustible potential mixture. Right. I mentioned this in the opening how many of these protests are the vocal few are what people are seeing. And then life is going on around this situation. Usually you have a lot of people observing what's happening. You have people who are going about their own life, sometimes in the city streets, but this is on a college campus. Still the same sort of scene is going on where you'll see this as it's happening. And of course these were not designed to be what we now know they can stay killing. This is a peaceful rally. This is a non violent protest. They're out and about on the campus doing this thing. But anyway, it's all talked about as it comes up. And here as far as my reading could tell me was that local authorities had said we guys we see what's coming. We're going to do this that and the other thing while this is happening the local mayor, et cetera. Outside of this community, of course, America isn't hearing about this at the time. Was this a typical situation with these campuses and how local communities reacted. Well, I think it depends largely on location, for example, if you're talking about the residential population of Berkeley, California or Manhattan. It's a different dynamic. The residential population of Kento, Ohio was classically midwestern, classically traditional, socially quite conservative. And amid all of this is a student body is becoming more and more frustrated, angry and vocal in their office to the war and the American system, which they view is producing this unhappy result in in the end of China. So it's a situation where both sides are going further further apart. The capacity to put yourself in the other person's shoes is diminishing to the vanishing point. The willing is to communicate or give someone else the benefit of the doubt, at least in terms of their intentions is also rapidly eroding and that's going to create a dangerous chasm of breakdown and communication and empathy, which I think is a crucial piece to all of this. And again, when I say these things, I think about today. Right. Exactly. Let's go through the chronology of these days. May 1st, two peaceful rallies are held on the campus, followed by unrest downtown in the town of Kent fires or lit windows smashed. The National Guard is called in and a state of emergency is declared who calls out emergency, the governor. Jim Rhodes was a very popular Republican governor of Ohio who was because of term limits, his services governor was about to expire and he was seeking nomination on the Republican ticket for a Senate seat that was open. He had positioned himself as a long-worder candidate and that primary election was going to be held on Tuesday, May 5th, 1970. And I think part of his processing and reaction to these student protests downtown on Friday evening and the burning, the ROTC building on Saturday was he's going to project this image of being the tough long order guy who's not going to put up with a radical fringe that is disrupting the campus in the town of Kent. The important thing to recognize is local officials, both the University administrators in the county prosecutor named Ron Cain privately implored him not to send the National Guard because they understood the mood on campus how volatile it was, how unstable it was and how angry the students were and their fear was in this environment sending uniform soldiers onto campus is just going to put aviation fuel on the fire. That's right. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. And relax. On booking.com, finding a holiday home is easy. Booking.com, booking.com, here. 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Was this an intended mission of that group or did it sort of happen in a random kind of way? Oh, I can't give you an utterly conclusive answer to that. It's generally speaking, I would say that the Senate gravity in terms of student opinion on the war had sourd dramatically over the last year to year and a half. So in a sense that I would say to generalize that the majority of students opposed the war by that point. I think it doesn't take a large number of fervent, impassioned, angry people to take that a step or two further. And it was putting the ROTC going to the torch that in a sense for the conservative population of Kent and the Republican governor of Ohio, they look at this and they say this is out of control and we're going to have to deal with this by dropping the hammer. But again, University administrators who were not asked what they would do in response would have said the last thing to do in terms of coping with this is to send in the National Guard gets the county sheriff's to deal with this. If you're going to go up the ladder in terms of response and turn to the state highway patrol because they understood that those entities had been trained to cope with student protests in a way that the National Guard had not. That's a big question for me in this because nowadays we are so conditioned to see these this news video of forces in answer, you know, they all have their constant, they all have their uniforms, they all have their helmets, everybody around the world is now ready to control a riot somehow with big plexiglass shields and so forth. Back then it wasn't really like that and I wonder although of course we see riots being controlled by everybody but you know that's what I always wondered about this situation whether it was a matter of training and understanding the circumstances as much as it was the intentional desire to control these things in a different way. Well, when I reflect on the tragedy, I think that the three most fundamental points to convey here are poor leadership, poor training and a volatile emotional atmosphere on both sides and in descending order of priority from first to last. The leaders have to meet a moral responsibility to be thoughtful and restrained in the words that come out of their mouth when it comes to dealing with highly volatile situations, the military leadership of the National Guard at Kent State on May 4 under assistant action general Robert Kendrick was abysmally inappropriate unwise and consequences of that were horrific. And the National Guards themselves had almost no training whatsoever in dealing with student protests just to make my point they were armed with tear gas and high velocity rifles with live bullets nothing in between nothing else. And they had no experience dealing with student press they hadn't been conditioned in terms of how to de-escalate a situation had to minimize the use of force. In fact, I think quite frankly a lot of them had joined the National Guard to avoid the draft and as a result of that didn't want to be there to begin with. Yeah, exactly. May 3rd, 3rd day of these events unfolding 1200 National Guard are on the Kent State campus. This is when governor of Ohio Jim Rhodes. He promises at a press conference that he's going to use law enforcement against the students declares that the protests are caused by a group of agitators going to campus to campus. This is language we hear even today, but nonetheless the room the university remains open with classes going ahead. Those demonstrators then block traffic and become dispersed with tear gas and importantly bayonets right. This is always a startling thing to me that you would fix bayonets when dealing with what is essentially a bunch of unarmed, you know rather peaceful in most cases protestors. Why the bayonets? Well, again, think about how they are trained or not trained at all and how they're equipped. And as I said, it's so difficult and frankly often dangerous to generalize about this, but if you pressed me, I would say that the typical National Guardsman in Kent over that weekend before May 4th was probably a working class guy whose parents could not afford to send him to college and at some level resented the fact that these quote unquote privileged kids who had become radicals who are disrupting law and order. And they're operating an increasingly emotional atmosphere too. And I think that it's a dangerous mixture. It's a volatile mixture. But another irony of this is on that Sunday May 3rd during the day, the National Guardsman had fraternized with the Kent State College students on campus. There was actually a mood of Concord and dialogue. Things got worse that night because protests had re-adnited and confrontations occurred between guardsmen and students which re-restarted this friction and animosity, which is going to carry over until the next morning of May 4th. Let us go there. May 4th, the demonstrations have been banned. That's announced by a distribution of leaflets that seemed interesting to me. What are the leaflets saying? Well, it basically said the governor has said that a simply of more than two people are prohibited. The schedule rally against the war of the morning May 4th is prohibited. And yet approximately 2,500 students showed up on the commons of the campus to assert their constitutional right to freeze speech and dissent. And that's is the setting to what will occur later that morning. The guard is deployed and it's led by Robert Candaberry who is he and his forces are outnumbered 30 to 1. 30 to 1. So if you're one of those roughly 100 guardsmen confronting 2,500 students, you can see how they must feel insecure anxious and vulnerable. And then he tells them to load live ammunition into their rifles and then fails to inform the students who are assembled there that that's been done directly contradicting a national guard regulations to do so. I mean the recklessness of that to me is absolutely pollen to tell the guardsman to load the rifles with live initiatives bad enough, but then not to inform the crowd of students who are there that that's been done is inexcusable. Right, and you say that the amount of guardsmen on the campus is about 100 I previously mentioned 1200. It's a whole bunch of deployment going on here in the area right well they were deployed throughout the town of Kent and surrounding areas of portage county as well as on campus. It's important to realize that at this point you're talking about a massive group of people you know thousands of students against what is essentially a hundred national guardsmen right. Correct. How does that unfold? Well, these students had assembled in the comments which was an open area in the center of campus and canterbury who's the ranking national guard officer on the scene that morning as I'm remission order the guardsman to load the rifles with live ammunition which to me was unwise and reckless and then he failed to inform the students that that had been done. And then he sends out I believe it's a Kent University police official to use a bullhorn to tell the students to disperse which they don't because in their opinion and the justice department of the next administration later said they has a constitutional right to express their opinions about the war. And there that escalates the emotional level the atmosphere there dramatically the students become more vocal in terms of the epithets that they hurl vocally the guardsmen and some start beginning throwing stones in rocks. And then the canterbury orders the guardsman in the line to disperse the crowd. Okay. At that point you had the students pretty well dispersed across what is blanket hill at the top of blanket hill is that right. Well, it's the common which is a lower area below blanket hill a little dice west of blanket hill in front of table hall which was a very large university building that lay essentially at the conjunction of the comments and blanket hill. And what would be have perceived as the threat that the students were presenting were they going to burn a building down I mean what was the what were they being I think the the rationale the justification at that moment was the governor has prohibited assemblies. And we are enforcing the governor's edict prohibiting assemblies I see and once the guard has moved out that's when things escalate even further it's at that point the students well in the sense that the students become more confrontational they begin throwing projectiles toward the guardsman and the guardsmen fire tear gas as they move across the comments up blanket hill yeah. And I don't know I don't want to get into microscopic detail but the fundamental point is they're coming into close physical proximity with with one another now yeah these guardsmen have live bullets and high-vacier rifles that the students don't realize. And the students are becoming more aggressive in terms of their resistance to the dispersal order to be clear the National guardsman are retreating in effect right moving backwards well eventually they'll go over blanket hill down to a playing field area and adjacent to that is a parking lot where from which a lot of students will grow rocks and stones and other projectiles at the guardsman in the guardsmen are effectively their corner because that playing field had a wire fence around it which meant they couldn't go any further and they felt that the students were beginning to surround them which I think increased their anxiety and their insecurity. And it is from that vantage point from that parking lot that these shots are fired is that girl the guardsman while they're on the playing field are ordered by can you point their rifles toward the students in the parking lot but only as a deterrent symbolic deterrent they were ordered to fire they were just basically trying to scare these people back to get distance greater distance created between them in the students who are. They were locally harassing them and taking in some cases more aggressive steps by throwing things at them yeah it's at that point to can very then orders the guards and to retreat effectively back up back at hill down the other side across the comments back to where they had initially proceeded from. And as the guardsman retreat back up playing the students who were in the parking lot in the lower slope of playing could he'll start moving toward them first at a walk and then a pretty rapid walking clip in some cases run. And there's a tremendous amount of noise there's a campus bell that's clanging there's a lot of shouting there was an action audio recording of the event which has been preserved and it's just chaotically loud and that again is one of these factors that contribute to the tragedy. Because as the guardsman crested blanket hill in a small group of students got relatively close to them that's when some of the guardsman were feeling eminently threatened and basically stopped turned and pointed their rifles down hill again initially as a deterrent as they had done when they were down on the practice field to effectively get these people to back off. And it was at that point that a platoon sergeant named Matthew McManus issued an order to fire in the air. Okay. In an effort to prevent bloodshed let me reiterate heads. Yeah. Over the heads of the students as an effort to prevent bloodshed. The problem was they had not been trained in firing warning shots and the the ambient noise was so loud in their level of anxiety and the tension there was so tremendous that what effectively happened was some guardsman singular or guardsman plural either heard or reacted to just the first word. Not firing the air but fire. Yeah. Right. And the best estimates are that about 35 guardsmen fired their rifles which is about a third of those on the hill so a minority fired and of those roughly 35 fired the vast majority of them either fired toward the ground or in the air. But there were probably about 10 to 12 who fired into the crowd. Wow. And that's what precipitated what followed. Which is when we get the tragedy and the images that come from that tragedy the most famous of which is Mary and Vecchio over Jeffrey Miller which goes on to win a Pulitzer prize. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. 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About 100 feet away from the soldiers. Allison Kraus. 300 feet. I mean this is sound. They're all different places that these are these people are being hit. William Schroeder. 400 feet away. Sandy Shoeyer. Who was just a person on her way to class apparently. And that's why we've gone out of my way to ask you about you know what was happening there because you're from the of lots of people doing other things on this. We're physically injured. Including one person who was fully paralyzed. And you know you're pretty darn pretty. You know you're pretty darn pretty. You know you're pretty darn pretty. And that the closest of that route was only 20 feet away from those people. So it's just one of those situations where so many factors are involved in creating a moment of chaos and mayhem and nothing ever goes well in those situations. It's a perfect storm of tragedy, Tom. Exactly. Multiplicity of factors, long term, intermediate term, short term, coalesce to create this tragedy. Yeah. But the unprecedented quality of the situation calls for a big, you know, outcry nationally. And the troops argue some of them that they were threatened by snipers. Where did that even come from? Well, there was no merit to that after the fact based on investigations that occurred following the shooting. But the broader point is at the time there had been reports submitted to the National Guard Intelligence Officer on Kent State's campus that morning that there were reports of snipers either on campus or in town, which were retrospectively proven false. But at the time it ratcheted up the fear anxiety on the part of the National Guardsman who were there. What was the Scranton report which came out of this, a president's commission? President Nixon after the tragedy appointed a ribbon commission to investigate what has occurred and why it had occurred. These are very responsible, thoughtful, experienced people across the spectrum of occupation that were really top drawer. And the commission's basic judgment was that the shooting itself was unnecessary and warranted and unjustified. I'm going to read a quote from that report. Even if the guardsman faced danger, it was not a danger they called for lethal force. The 61 shots by 28 guardsmen certainly cannot be justified. Apparently no order was fired to fire was given and there was inadequate fire controlled discipline on blanket hill. The Kent State tragedy marks the last time that as a matter of course loaded wife rifles are issued to guardsman confronting student demonstrations. Everything you've spoken of very closely wrapped up there right in that thing. Kent State was processed pretty quickly as a nation, wasn't it? I mean, it was seen as wrong right off the bat, wasn't it? Well, again, it depends on who and where you focus. But for example, most opinion pulling in Ohio in the days, weeks and months after the shooting effectively defended the guardsman and playing the students. Though nationally, majority of the American people thought there was excessive reckless and inappropriate. And the America's college campuses just erupted exactly of that shooting. I mean, they literally, OTC buildings went up across the continents of this big campuses were shut down. I mean, it had a massively radicalizing effect on student opinion about toward the war and the quote unquote American system. It's moved to student opinion even further to the left. And further divided on other lines. I mean, now you have the generational thing happening, which is, you know, no just no one under 30 years and over 30. Liberals and curved services are no longer talking to each other. We have to talk to each other. Yeah. And the patriotism of each other and the intentions of one another. And that's to me what's so sobering and frightening in terms of the resonances between then and now America and the wake of Kin State. You have two different Americans who are just unwilling to try to understand the others point. Yeah. And that's certainly true today. Just to put a number to your point, four million students took part in the nationwide protests. I mean, my goodness. To talk about the wrong result of something you were trying to accomplish may 10,000 thousand American citizens demonstrate in front of the White House. And we were right back to LBJ at that point, you know. And everything that Nixon was trying to accomplish kind of backfires, doesn't it? But I mean, the often in politics is ruled by the law of unanticipated and unintended consequences. Yes. It also adds fuel to the fire nationally in terms of these demonstrations. There are other shootings on other campuses. May 15th Jackson State University in Mississippi as a shooting that kills two injuries 12. Much of this was not national guardsman anymore. It was local authorities, but you know, steps were taken. There were shootings at Cal State Fresno by police, Augusta College in Georgia. The message was clear. The tenor has completely changed as far as how these campuses were viewed. I mean, part of the reason that there was such a lot of protests is that those students felt protected there, right? Yes. And again, it's another tragic unanticipated consequence of what occurred on that tragic day, which is it moved students further to the left, whereas conservative traditional Americans further to the right. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that the center utterly collapses. Yeah. But the center is the locus where you have communication dialogue and at least the possibility of mutual understanding and some kind of functional reconciliation. And that's the thing about 1970 that troubles me the most in terms of its parallels to today. We've reached a point now where there are two Americas that are they caricature and stereotype the other to a degree which essentially obvites the capacity to reach out and attempt to communicate. And if you don't communicate, you can't understand it. You can't understand you can't find any common ground. In today's climate, I feel so lucky to be the age I am to have been born in the early 60s so that I have some perspective over that time. I mean, the parents of these students were all people who had lots of people had taken part in World War II. I mean, or the Green World. You know, in this generation. Yeah. These unified efforts nationally to fight for the national identity together. And so whether they were from different stripes or different backgrounds, there was still a sense of a oneness of America, a center that you're talking about that had really been profound throughout the previous decades. Many things contribute to their, you know, not to mention people getting older, you know, changes that whole situation culturally but politically may, may forest 1970, Ken State Killing's has a lot to do with marking a moment when the division really started to happen. One that we're still living with today. Yes. I would add to that. In my judgment, the strength of America lies in the unity of its people. Exactly. I do want to point one thing. How does this all play out in the long run? There are lawsuits and such, right? I mean, when does the things really kind of resolve? Well, I think one of the frustrations that were felt particularly by the student victims, both the family members who lost loved ones and those who were injured, one of them spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, is that there seemed to be no judicial accountability. There was a criminal trial in which the National Guard defendants were acquitted, and then the families of the victims sued in civil court, and that too led ultimately to acquittal. But there was eventually further litigation that concluded in a settlement where there were financial damages of rather modest scope that were provided to many of the shooting victims. But I think they create a certain frustration and cynicism and resentment on the part of a lot of the student victims that you can't get justice under the current system. And it's frustrating and regrettable, but there it is. That governor actually does write a letter of regret, correct? Well, he doesn't sign the statement of regret, but the guardsmen who settle the civil suit against them eventually will issue a statement of regret. And Rhodes, who lives into his early 90s, I think, for decades refused to discuss this issue at all and toward the very end of his life. He basically, in a very laconic defensive way, said that it was a tragedy, it was the worst day of my life, but I did what I thought I needed to do. If you will allow me to editorialize for just a moment. When I look back in terms of responsibility, I prefer to use that word over blame. I think that the fundamental responsibility for this debacle lay in the hands of the political military leadership of the state of Ohio and the utterly calling lack of training of those national guardsmen to send the National Guard onto a college campus, which was already emotionally heated in their opposition to the war and sending soldiers with rifles to that was paddling on wise. Can a very lacked good judgment, a commanding officer on the scene? The utter absence of control of his men in terms of fire control discipline is completely inexcusable. What's even worse is that he laid your claim that he wasn't command that day. There was a subordinate officers underneath him that day who were in command, which is an application of mature responsibility to the worst kind to me. What lessons can you draw from all of this that speak to us today? As I said before, I think that political leaders, both at the local level, the state level and the national level, have a moral responsibility to be thoughtful and restrained in the words that come out of their mouth when it comes to dealing with highly volatile issues. I think those who were assigned to deal with protests ought to be very well trained in minimizing news of force, de-escalating tensions and trying to act with restraint rather than excessive force. Sage words, but we live in an imperfect world full of imperfect people and leaders who don't always do the right thing. Would you and me too, Don? That's the reality of life, isn't it? Brian DeMarque is an historian who has formerly taught at the United States Naval Academy Annapolis, recently moved to California. I envy him for that. He is the author of several books in American history, and I invite you to look at the number one bestseller from the past Robert McManera's Vietnam memoir, which Brian collaborated upon. Eventually became a very famous film, Fog of War. His latest book that we've been discussing is Kent State and American Tragedy published in 2024. Thank you, sir. It's been a great pleasure to meet you. I've enjoyed our conversation. I hope that your audience finds it useful as well. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. 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