May flowers reminiscent of May powers’
By Bill Knight | 7th May 2008
To many, May means Mayday and May flowers – violets in baskets left at doorsteps where bells are rung and visitors flee, laughing. May means Mother’s Day, too, of course, but more, too.
Personally, May is when my son was born – 21 years ago this month. And it’s when my own youthful innocence died – at Kent State 38 years ago.
Then, I thought that government would listen to its people; that it would care what demonstrators thought – about the Vietnam War, women’s rights, poverty and a whole host of issues.
But the government didn’t hear, and a detachment of National Guardsmen accidentally fired on peaceful protestors, Americans were told, killing four and wounding nine.
It turns out, however, that the government did hear, and that the shooting of unarmed protestors was no accident.
Tape-recorded evidence has surfaced, and a man is heard giving the order to fire.
The tape – made by a bystander, Terry Strubbe, who dropped a microphone from the window of his Kent State dorm window that day – had been held by the FBI for decades. A copy was retrieved from the Yale University library archives by Alan Canfora.
Canfora, an eyewitness to the 1970 shooting, for almost a year has been presenting this proof that an officer issued a shouted command: “Right here! Get set. Point. Fire!”
Following the order is a recording of the 13 seconds of gunfire.
Today, Canfora, 59 – who also was wounded in the volley of gunfire that day – is director of the Kent May 4 Center, which seeks to keep what became known as the “Kent State Massacre” in people’s minds.
“Four hundred Ohio National Guardsmen were in the city of Kent, and 800 were on the campus,” he says. “We assumed we still could exercise our Constitutional rights of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to dissent.”
The Guard was called out by Gov. James A. Rhodes of Ohio – in his second consecutive term and in the heat of a primary campaign for the U.S. Senate against popular Robert Taft Jr., which Rhodes lost two days later.
“Rhodes was a devoted admirer of Nixon, and of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,” write historians Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis on freepress.org.
At the heights of anti-war protests, Rhodes reportedly called out the Guard more than 40 times, and threatened to use “all the force that’s necessary” to end campus disturbances throughout Ohio.
It’s unknown whether – contrary to law – Rhodes’ Guardsmen were supplied with live ammunition before May 4, 1970. But they were armed that day. Besides their rifles, some testified to seeing Guardsmen club a student with his rifle butt and bayonet another.
Ten days later, at another demonstration, police fired into a dorm at Jackson State University in Mississippi, killing two more students.
The suppression of the Kent State tape was part of a long cover-up that stymied three separate investigations and the prosecution of eight Guardsmen. The “official story” was that some unknown gunman fired a shot somewhere, provoking the young troopers to panic and fire on people they thought were threatening them.
Probes by the Ohio State Patrol (for Portage County’s grand jury), the U.S. Justice Department and the Presidential Commission on Campus Unrest, plus exhaustive research for books by the likes of Joe Eszterhas (13 Seconds) and James Michener (Kent State: What Happened and Why) brought up questions and featured comments from witnesses, but there were never any real consequences for any politician or military officer.
Kent State electrician Jack Albrecht is quoted in Michener’s 1971 book:
“When the Guard retreated, I followed them,” Albrecht said. “I was the closest person to the Guard and I heard an officer give the order, ‘Turn around and fire three rounds.’ I could hear it plainly. The story has never appeared in any public record. Could it be that investigators haven’t wanted to believe that an order was given?’”
Maybe. Certainly, for months, the news about an apparently premeditated and unprovoked attack on U.S. citizens by U.S. soldiers has been mostly missing from the mainstream press, which seems increasingly filled not just when Presidential politics or shady lenders, but with yarns about Britney Spears, American Idol and other junk journalism.
At the time, though, Americans of all political stripes were shocked.
I was one of thousands of students who marched through a college town. We also seized an ROTC building in an unthinking spasm of rage, occupying it for days. We didn’t really know why, except that it was a handy symbol.
Conservative newsman William Safire, Nixon’s speechwriter in 1970, later wrote that even the White House’s inner circle suspected wrongdoing.
“I remember sitting with [then Secretary of State] George Schultz in 1970 watching and listening to the film of the shooting at Kent State,” Safire wrote. “Stunned, the former Marine said, ‘That was a salvo.’ From the sound, he knew that an order had been given to fire at the students, and – a good administration soldier, but not one to march over cliffs – he would not accept explanation that the shooting had been sporadic.”
Each May, thoughts return about Americans Powers That Be brutally striking back at peaceful protestors, irate but idealistic, hopeful but naïve, and about uniformed pawns ordered to shoot and blamed for being as young and out of control as the demonstrators they shot.
“Only the truth can free these triggermen from the awesome burden of history while the blood of our martyrs remains on their hands,” Canfora said.
Last year, an Ohio state historical marker was set in memory of the incident. This month, Kent State is holding its annual commemoration, its yearly candlelight march augmented by an appearance by Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic introducing the film based on his riveting book, Born On the Fourth of July.
The memory is a permanent part of thousands of people affected then.
And now.
Check out Canfora’s simple web site at
http://alancanfora.com/
Bill Knight is an award-winning journalist who teaches at Western Illinois University. Contact him at: bill.knight@hotmail.com.