Headquarters for the entire communist military operation. This control center has been occupied by the north vietnamese and viet cong for five years in blatant violation of cambodias neutrality. This is not an invasion of cambodia. The areas in which these attacks will be launched are completely occupied and controlled by north vietnamese forces. Our purpose is not to occupy the areas. When enemy forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and win their military supplies are destroyed, we will withdraw. These actions are in no way directed to the security interests of any nation. Any government that chooses to use these as a pretext for harming relations with the United States will be doing so on its own responsibility and initiative and we will draw the appropriate conclusions. And now, let me give you the reasons for my decision. A majority of the American People, a majority of you listening to me, are for the withdrawal of our forces from vietnam. The action i have taken tonight is indispensable for the continuing success of that withdrawal program. A majority of the american end this waro rather than have it drag on intermittently. The action ive taken tonight will serve that purpose. A majority of American People want to keep the casualties at an absolute minimum. The action i take tonight is essential if we are to accomplish that goal. Not for the action 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. My fellow americans, we live in an age of anarchy both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed. All over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without. Down, thehe chips are worlds most powerful nation, the United States of america, ask like a beautiful, helpless , forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world. That speech from april of 1975 president nixon that led to the escalation of conflict in cambodia and Southeast Asia and led to demonstrations on College Campuses around country, including Kent State University. Four students were killed and nine others were injured. One of the students who 1970ssed what happened in reflected on what she saw and heard in this oral history. All of the people i was friends with that year had been at the demonstration. Virtually all of us had witnessed the shootings take place. We heard the campus was to be evacuated in three hours. I had a friend who had a car, which was unusual at that time. Hardly anybody had cars, but my friend jeff did. We drove home. I remember seeing a line of hundreds and hundreds of cars trying to get into kent. Trying to get into kent because they were filled with parents. My mother was in one of those cars. The news was broadcast on the radio immediately. A lot of students were from out of state, but a lot of students were from the immediate area. My mother did not own a car herself, but she was with her friend that day, and they jumped into her car and she was trying to get into kent to find out what had happened to me and pick me up. They had blockaded the city at that point, at least coming into kent down route 43. O, i went home i was home before my mother got back home. Around 6 00, my father walked in the back door. I was sitting at the kitchen table. He saw me and the first words out of his mouth were, they should have sought all of them. Him, dont you know that one of those people would have been me . And he backed into the other room. I relate that part of my experience because it was very representative of the times. His attitude was the attitude of many people, the attitude of some people even today. It was a shift in Public Opinion for sure. One of the things i have been doing, because of the design were going on for the may 4 Visitors Center planned and also the creation of the panels and other elements of the walking tour that will be unveiled and i knowed on may 3, specifically the ways in which that change took place. One of the important ways that may 4 was the day the war came home was that Congress Really rallied and came together and began withdrawing in very real war its support for nixons in Southeast Asia. The troops were withdrawn from cambodia within weeks after nixons announcement on april 30, which was set off the demonstrations at kent state and other universities around the country. And it did take a while for enoughs to fully pass special provisions so that funding was eventually completely cut off for the war. But that process began specifically in response to may 4. And also, there was an unprecedented pushing through the constitutional amendments that lowered the voting age to 18, which was a very strong point of contention among College Students and other youth oldad chanted the slogan, enough to fight, old enough to vote. On the cap isre of Kent State University, there is now a Museum Dedicated to what happened 50 years ago on may 4, 1970. To give you a sense of what life was like 50 years ago and what the campus went through. Shots k is titled 67 kent state and the end of american innocence. Joining us from his home is the author, howard means. Thank you for being with us. What happened and why did four students die and nine others injured . Guest that is a big question. In a large sense, all of the toxic orders of the 1960s came together at Kent State University that first weekend in may of 1970. It was an age of hate. It was an age of distrust. There was a generational divide. Aboutseum she was talking does a wonderful job of capturing all this. Of a museum. It has a wonderful walk you can take that is narrated. If youre anywhere near kent, stop and do it. In the more immediate sense, you speech tod nixons thursday inn that which he announced the extension of the war into cambodia after saying he was going to bring home 150,000 troops. That was a time bomb waiting to erupt, and it did the next offcampus. That demonstration, there were some windows broken, some trash can set on fire, but the real problem with that demonstration was it convinced the mayor of kent that outside agitators had taken over campus. The whole thrust of the dog whistling from the white house, from Richard Nixon, and from the was outsidension, agitators. The 1 30 call made to the Governors Office by the mayor saying they are outside agitators and asking for help, that is how the guard came in. The guard changed with the demonstrations were about. Host did governor rose issue any shoot to kill by the National Guard . Was there any directive from the state capital . Where did that come from . Guest i dont think there was ever a directive. The guard consisted of a bunch of untrained guys. Many of them about the same age as the students, the same age as the people fighting in vietnam. They were carrying a sniper rifle lethal to 1000 feet to do crowd control. Ive witnessed the wounds. The next day in a vulnerable spot was dead. There was no question when the m1 hit you. You have young people carrying guns they had never used. No one on campus new that they were carrying live ammunition. The president of the campus never ask. Nobody ever asked. There was never a shoot to kill order that i know of. There is a lot of debate about that, what happened in the heat of things just before shots were fired. What jim rhodes did was call in the guard. The guard happened to be in so they were away, easy to get there. But it also meant the guard were tired. They had done for five days in akron. So they were tired. There was a running protest. The guard took over the campus without asking administration if they could take over the campus. The Administration Never protected the campus as they should have. They never protected the students as they should have. It was a combination of volatile circumstances all happening at once. The students had no leadership. The University Leadership went awol at the moment they were needed the most. The guard was terribly directed by general canterbury. While notors office, having issued a shoot kill order, was present very hard to make this a crackdown on outside educators and crime because jim rhodes was running for senate at the time. He had used up his terms as governor. Tuesday, the day after the shootings, was the republican primary. Robertin contention with jr. , the son of a senator. The day nixon made his speech, a taft winning by 68,000 votes in the primary. Des needed the more conservative part of the state to come on strong for him. Tuesday, the day after the shooting, he lost by 5000 votes. Host at the end of the day, four students died. Tell us about those students. Writing the book was heartbreaking for all sorts of the reasons and no more heartbreaking than the four that died. Allison crouse and Jeffrey Miller rafted in the demonstrations that weekend. You have toer assume was targeted specifically. Allison was further back but had been prominent in the weekend demonstrations. She was easy to pick out in the crowd. She was an attractive, tall woman. She was beautiful in a 1970s way. I feel fairly certain she had to have been targeted. Schroeder had transferred in. He was in the rotc. He stopped by. He had his books in his arms. He stopped by because he was curious. He was not a demonstrator. He was 65, 180, he was hit by bulletne bullet m1 and thrown back. The most heartbreaking of all was a Speech Therapy major if memory serves me. She was just passing between classes. She was doing what students are supposed to do on a campus when class should probably not have des did notut rho want classes to shut down because that would have been buckling to the demonstrators. The shooting starts. Ellis says to get down on the ground. He falls down with her. The shooting only lasts 13 seconds. He looks over. Le in her ho throat and is bleeding out almost immediately. The People Killed our heartbreaking. The people wounded are heartbreaking. He was not radical. To be there he called his teachers to let them know he would not be in class that day. He has been without the use of his legs ever since. Host we want to thank kent state for providing as many of the pictures you are looking at as we look back at what happened 50 years ago on the campus of Kent State University may 4, 1970. Four students killed, nine others injured. We have a line set aside for those who remember what happened. In thewere in college 1960s or 1970s, please give us a call. The other phone lines are divided regionally. The obvious question is, why did they have live ammunition . Guest a really good question. Absolutely terrible judgment. The mitigating fact for the , they get their armament from the armories. They get the rifles from the armories. Everything else was in use in vietnam. Things would have been so much better if they had shot guns loaded with birdshot. That would have been so much better. Had rubber bullets about the same time. Instead, we have world war ii sniper rifles with ammunition. They tried to do crowd control with tear gas. They fired a lot of tear gas, but they misjudged their stock of tear gas. On monday after the demonstration moves out over this hill with regard pursuing gas, theng off tear guard runs out of tear gas. As they are coming back up the hill just before they turn to do the shooting, they have no tear gas left. And they are getting hit with a certain amount of debris. You know, stones, pieces of wood. Initially, the guard had pushed them down over the hill into a construction site. I am sorry. I take it back. The guard had marched themselves culdesacll into a next to a practice field. The students are there and have stuff they control. A certain amount of debris. No one is injured. It is interesting to look at the depositions of the guardsmen the next day. They answered exactly what their commanders told them to say. 1973 as a result of court action, and again in 1975. As you read these depositions one after another from the same guardsmen, you can see how they are rearranging events in their mind to justify their actions. These are the guardsmen correctly shot rifles. Did not necessarily hit anybody, but they shot their rifles. The debris gets more and more lethal. They are seeing the world from inside a gas mask, which is a very strange way to look at the world when youre under assault and when you are hot and tired. You have to have some sympathy for the guard i think. Host was anyone charged as a result of the killings . Guest no. A number of students were charged and had to appear in the local court. No guardsmen charged. There was civil action taken against the guard. Ask was fororiginal Something Like 40 million. The settlement, i dont have the exact figure in my mind, was about 650,000, which worked out n, half of that went to dea the most severely injured, and the rest was distributed among however many. 50,000 aout to about person. It all got paid by the taxpayers of ohio. Host this is the headline and one of the iconic photographs from the cleveland plain dealer. How big of a story was this nationally in 1970 . Guest it was absolutely huge. The story unfolded in such a complicated way. The first accounts had the guardsmen being shot, not the students being shot. It was chaotic the way information flowed. There is a wonderful scene in my sitting inpeople are a backyard in kent and somebody is working on the roof, and he shouts down to them, hes listening to the radio, he says, oh, my god, they shot the guardsmen. The guardsmen were more terrified initially than the parents of the students. Is photo youre looking at one of the iconic photos of the entire Antiwar Movement. Of domestic american photos, it might be the most powerful one. She was a 14yearold runaway from florida who just happened to be there at that moment at that time standing next to Jeffrey Miller when he was hit. That photo always reminds me of painting, the screen. That frozen moment. Happened to be next to her and tells about it in her oral history. She says she put her arms around her to try to comfort her. She says she was frozen and bone cold. It was an emotional book to work on. Host the book by our guest, s, 67 shots. Our first call from orlando, florida. Good morning. Taking my call. I was a freshman at university of missouri in the spring of 1970. I remember all of those unfortunate days. What i wanted to ask your guest, my understanding at the time was that cooler heads did not prevail on either side. That if thepossible students had not continued with demonstrations things may have been different . The story is there was a professor who helped to herald students out of the line of fire , and because of his efforts many students did live, that was the story. Thank you so much. Host mr. Means . Howard you are right on on all the subjects. Cooler heads did not prevail. Nobody had a plan b. They were all heading towards this disaster. The students for democratic society, the most radical element on campus had been ned they knew how to run demonstrations. Makesnamed ken hammond this point very powerfully. They knew how to run they wereions derless in reacting to they were open to react if they wanted it because University Leadership did not do what they should have done at the time. Everyone knew there was going to be a demonstration at noon on monday. There was no question about it. They sent their president and all of his top people, at noon that day they were having lunch at a place called the ground derby restaurant well 1000 students were gathering at the commons and the guard was moving in. That was a failure of leadership. Had no alternative to doing what they did. From a Strategic Point of view it was bone stupid. One thing you dont do is march into a culdesac. The guy you are talking about is glenn frank, he was a geology professor. He is the absolute hero of this story. After the shootings the students go back to the common side, to the other side of this hill. There are several thousand students there. The guard is at the end of the commons, they regroup and are rearmed. Are insane with anger, testosterone. Some of them are painting axes on their chest. They are talking about charging the guard. Guardy charge the hundreds would have been killed. They would have been mowed down. Back fromalking them the brink. Glenn frank finally becomes deeply emotional. Glenn frank look like a marine, he was an ex marine. He looked like drew carey who was ache penn state student. He pleads and he is crying. Dont, you will be slaughtered wholesale. He students finally back off that bursts the bubble. The experience of alan frank, glenn franks son who still lives in kent, it broke glenn frank. It broke him physically and psychologically. He was never the same again. To me it has always been a mystery why there is no statue of glenn frank on the penn state kent state campus. Host we have a photograph of what it looked like when the students were fleeing the area where they were shot on the day of may 4, 1970. The followup on your point on what has happened, laura davis was a student at kent state and she reflects in an oral history she did on the moments you just described. Over the scene and saw what seemed like dozens of clusters of people standing in groups looking down at the ground. I realized that what i was seeing was this huge scene, people standing over bodies on the ground. What people did was, go over to the slope and stage a sit in. It was like being in a class. People were sitting in rows and what made it more like a class for me was that my geology instructor, glenn frank, was pacing back and forth in front and as he didple on the stage in cartwright hall, when i was taking his geology class. The difference was, this time he was crying, he was pleading with us to leave because he was convinced that if he convinced the students stating the sit in if we did not leave than the guards would engage in further violence with the students. We did what he asked us to do. Witheople i was sitting made a plan and we decided we would follow glenn frank quietly across the commons but when we got to the other side we chose a direction we would run in and we figured that if we ran in different directions, that if the guard started shooting again they would not be able to kill everybody and somebody would be alive to tell the story. Int she was a freshman back 1970 and that oral history was put together by Kent State University to remember what happened and learn from that. Nancy is on the phone from redondo beach, california. Caller good morning, thank you. Myas young, i was 12 and brother was in college at the university of texas. My parents were against the war. Laura davis said when her father walked in and saw her and said they should have killed them all because i thought her father would say thank god you are all right. I feel so fortunate that my parents were against the war and that made them more against the war. Means, did this turn the country against the war even guest it is a good question. Had. Thursday there is another side to that. I think the war was winding down. Nixon would have liked to have brought the troops home. He just did not know had to do it and still be dick nixon. After the tet offensive, things started sliding backwards. But it definitely polarized, further polarized, a very polarized nation at that point. Withnk it had a lot to do 18yearolds finally getting the vote. Energized a fading movement. The democratic 1972,so much that, in they nominated george mcgovern, who did not have a snowballs chance of winning when they could have nominated someone who might have given nixon a run for his money. They almost guaranteed a second term for dick nixon, although he blew the opportunity. Thing,ind of a twosided at i was myself at the Time High School teacher in washington, d. C. I was 25. My students were juniors and seniors. One of the reasons it affected be so strongly them was it could have been my students. Y were just a euro removed just a year removed from the students i was teaching. The story the caller just referred to was repeated time and again. Students going home from kent and being told they wished they shot them all. There an art teacher there talked about a student coming back. Two days later, the student shows up and is crying and broken. This student had gone home. He knocked on the door, the front door was locked. , mom,cked harder and said dad, where are you . Open,e mailslot pushes and he hears his parents voices saying we never went to see you again. That broke my heart, too. Phone. Tephanie is on the good morning. Caller this is very painful for me in many ways. There was so many disappointments and so much hope at the same time. The injustice of sending boys off to war that could not even vote was something that was clearly demotivating to the students. I was 20 years old back then. I was in school at nyu. The fact that the authorities, whoever they were, were willing to let their own children to to kill children die, their own children and this came after the assassination. There was so much hope to change the world for the better end than all of these things just crushed that hope. Lying and resigning before he could be impeached and then pardoned, it was like that was the end of hope for so many of us. After that, i retreated to a pig i was going tod go back to teaching because the politics i was so active in was crushing. Activist all my life and still am, but it was so emotional at the time and nobody feels those emotions like a 20yearold. It was just crushing. Host thank you. Let me add to her point. What the generations of the parents had witnessed with world war ii and the korean conflict, the assassination of president kennedy and also dr. Martin did all of this in 1970 resolve into the mood of the students, parents, and country . Guest there was this toxic flow from out of the 60s that just happen to come together it can state together at kent state. Dish events had happened at berkeley, columbia, at the university of wisconsin, where there was an entrenched and where theship university had some experience with serious protests, i think the result would have been different. Kent state was a 21,000 person school. It was very laissezfaire. And with students and i do mean this is an insult but who were naive, a lot of them. They were studying to be high school teachers, a lot of them. That is why kent state originally came to exist. As a teacher myself i had a sense of how naive teachers were. I think the students believed that the guardsmen, at least initially, were there to help them, protect them. They could not imagine for the life of them that the guard would actually shoot them. I think students at a place like 1970,ey, like in may 4, would not have had that attitude or expectation. That played into this a bit too. Naivete, allon of these horrible float horrible forces flowing forward, the generational divide, it was just a timebomb that was going to explode somewhere and unfortunately it exploded at kent. It killed four students who should not have been killed. Host a man on the faculty in 1970 reflected on what he saw. Inclination that the guns were loaded, which of course they were. As we were beginning to walk down the hill from taylor hall to where the activists were, the National Guard started coming across the commons and began to teargas the demonstrators, observers, and faculty marshals. I went past taylor hall and went down into the parking lot. I saw a student some distance off laying on the ground. I went over to the student. It turned out to be a blind student who had been tear gassed. I walked back to the edge of the parking lot and just standing there. The guardsmen came up the hill towards the pagoda. When they got to the pagoda, the right rear echelon of guardsmen turned and fired. I have been in the army, so i knew those were real bullets. I dove for cover behind a bush and was on the ground quickly enough that the guard finished their firing and 13 seconds. I remember saying, what should i do . A student rushed up and said, dr. Lewis, those were blanks birthday . Blanks, werent they . I said no. Here are the photographs of the four students that were killed as we listen to ron from michigan. Good morning. Caller i was a 21yearold soldier in vietnam when can state happened. I was an antiwar activist. Happened, i was receiving antiwar literature. Vietnam up and i joined veterans against the war at that time. A short time later, after kids after kent state, there was a fracking instant incident. I cannot say if it was revenge or had any relation to the massacre, but for my talking to the soldiers at that time because that what i was doing, talking to soldiers and most of them just did not care or else they were kind of glad it happened. Veteranslater, vietnam against the war to go to kent state to participate in a memorial service. You had a question earlier, professor, in which somebody asked were there any incidents like this . Blackth carolina, 10 students were killed by state troopers for protesting peacefully. Host how do you answer that . Jerry lewis, just quickly. Did youer asking jerry, have any sense they were using live ammunition . He told me that he had been a guard at fort knox when he was in the army, protecting the gold supply. He carried a rifle that never had live ammunition. They gives you a sense of how insane it was for these people out there. Book withi open my many stories of the 24 americans on may 4,n vietnam 1970. Half of them were 20 years or younger. You have to keep that perspective in mind. Third, the event you are talking about, ron, was at jackson State University in mississippi. Later on the0 days 14th of may. Two killed, 10 wounded. The students have begun to protest because there was a rumor that Charles Evers had been murdered. The Mississippi State troopers showed up and basically sprayed the dormitory with gunfire. 100 50 rounds fired in 28 seconds as i remember. That story just disappeared. It disappeared in the Scranton Commission report, which devoted three quarters to kent state, one quarter to jackson state. State was a man bites dog story. Civilians being killed by american soldiers. Jack and state jackson state was a dog bites man story. Firingpers filing on black citizens of mississippi was not unheard of. I was a seventh term junior at penn State University when we got word of the kent state situation. The made me more unique was fact that i was a vietnam veteran. I was a medic with Alpha Company h med, first air calvary cavalry decision. Anyway, we did have widespread writing on the campus. There were a number of fires set. Although there were no National Guard troops on campus, we did have a rather large detachment of Pennsylvania State troopers. This is to say that i am always going to remember. I remember walking past atherton hall. There was a state trooper injured by flying debris. My instinct was, having been a medic, to run over to him and render assistance, but i had long hair. If i have moved toward the head and toward the gentleman, his other comrades probably would have caught me, so i kept moving. Wanted to render aid to the state trooper, but there was some good advice a man gave me in vietnam. He said keep your head down, your powder dry, be good. To that i added be a man of few words. Thank you for your book. I am going to read it because that is an important part of my life and history. Host thank you for your call. You mentioned the report. This is what the cover looks like. Howard means, your response . Guest it is a wonderful story. It is a sad story when you have to file your instincts. That goes to how riven the nation was. The absence of trust. Was a huge demonstration in washington. I remember walking down to that from the corner of wisconsin in massachusetts avenue and massachusetts avenue. You had to go through Sheridan Circle in Dupont Circle down to the mall. At every radius on those circles there was a jeep with four soldiers, i think army, all of them with semiautomatics just staring at you through their sunglasses. It was scary. At the white house, they had done what they did at other times. They surrounded the white house to make a kind of wall. They had got the 82nd airborne in. They were staying in the basement of the executive office building. The white house was an armed encampment at that point. That was the same as when Richard Nixon takes an ocean at 3 30 in the morning takes an ocean at 3 30 in the morning to someone the washington monument. There are tens of thousands of people sleeping in the mall. Nixon starts waking up the guard so we can talk to them. These hippielooking people are looking at him thinking what drug could have caused the operation the apparition in front of them. Way, halderman, nixons chief of staff, argued that kent state broke nixon. It was the end of his presidency in this regard he charged jay acker hoover with finding him proof that kent state have been caused by outside agitators. It was not. It was students at the school. Hoover uld not get when hoover was unable to produce this evidence, nixon lost his faith in the fbi, eventually formed his own unit called the plumbers, who eventually broke into the dnc headquarters. I think it is a legitimate point. Halderman was in a position to know. Host if you travel to kent state, there is a memorial that reflects on exactly what happened on may 4, 1970. A scene inside the museum. We will listen to gary in washington, d. C. Good morning. You. R thank mr. Nixons speech was incendiary to those of us on the left in those years. It was complaining about students destroying civilization, destroying universities. People on the left and i was on the left we just did not believe him. I was teaching in michigan at the time. We knew kent state very well. Kent state could have happened anywhere because these demonstrations across the country were spontaneous. Young men did not want to go and fight in this war. That was probably a critical factor. I agree with the caller from penn state, that you could tell which side you are on by how you dressed. This is a question i want to put to mr. Means is the country divided more today or then . My own view is it is more divided today because you cannot tell who people are by the way they dress. It is the absence of a credible news media. People retreat into their own poles. I think the division is deeper. What do you think, mr. Means . Host let me add that we did have a draft in the 1970s. That is a question i have spent a lot of time thinking about lately, especially with this anniversary coming up. I do not know the answer. It was that in 1970 divided more radically by age. I think in our own time, it is divided horizontally. Electorate on the republican side is an older and wider audience whiter audience. It is not that we have a do newsave a credible media. It is that you can hibernate with whatever news view you want. Kent state was reported by three networks and a handful of magazines you trusted. Time, newsweek, life. Cronkite and one other person i guess. I forget who is a abc. Who was at abc at the time. You could not truly live in your own news world. You can now, which makes it possible which gives you a support system for whatever you want to believe. It was much harder to do that in 1970. A good point about there was a draft in 1970. If the vietnam war was the end of that draft. We can argue whether National Service should be reinstated. Another oral history from a student at kent state. What he saw, heard, and what he remembers. [video clip] we were not posing a threat. I thought to myself, i am sure they are not firing live ammunition. They are firing blanks to disperse the crowd. Or fiveobably four seconds of firing, i realized that, even if they are firing blanks, i could be injured. It was at that point that i dove to the ground. They continued to fire another seven or eight seconds. When they stopped firing is when i stood up, looked around, and saw that, clearly, they had been firing live ammunition because there were students who were wounded. Base ofary was at the that sculpture. He was the first person i saw who was not getting up when the rest of us were. I went to him and lifted his shirt and saw that he had a bullet wound in his chest. Host reflecting on what happened 50 years ago. Back to your phone calls. Bill in waynesboro, pennsylvania, good morning. In 1970, i was 19 years old. I was a student at the university of Maryland College park. Iwant to read a paragraph wrote about the kent state killings. I wrote this several years ago. A little background. 1970, 1971, there were huge demonstrations against the vietnam war. Theashington dc, one of demonstrations, the Washington Post estimated there were more than one Million People there. They were getting larger and larger. At the university of maryland and many other colleges, there were demonstrations across the country. At the university of maryland, the National Guard was called in. I was covering some of those demonstrations for the student newspaper, as was the entire staff of the newspaper at the time. That is just some background. Heres what i wrote about kent state. On may 4, 1970, four students were shot dead by ohio National Guardsmen at ohios Kent State University. I remember that day vividly. Prior to that day, it was a heady time for young people and students. It seemed like older people and some politicians were paying attention to the protests and their messages. But when i heard about the four students who were killed, it was chilling. I was stunned. It stopped me cold. Is aember thinking, this war, and the guns are aimed at us. Host thank you for the call. I will add to that because we have another student on the phone. Betty is joining us from austin, texas. Betty, what do you remember . I was a late call lake hall, which had a view of the hillside. I saw a pop of smoke after the shots went off. Something made me go to the doors of the hall and opened the doors. And it was a good thing because they were stampeding, trying to get away from the shots. It is nice to see mr. Means recollection or research of what he has done. It was accurate. There were so many things that were so inaccurate for years. Robert mitchum wrote a bestseller called kent state that was totally inaccurate. He was not there. His descriptions were 180 degrees different from what actually transpired. Abouten to have known 9 10 of the people he interviewed for his book, and they give very different recollections. So thank you to mr. Means for being accurate. It certainly changed many peoples lives, including my own. I moved to texas. It changed any peoples lives. Many peoples lives. Can you recall what you were thinking later in the day, into the evening . Hair standing had up on the backs of our next. Had ae all horrified and journaling going more than ever before, more than we had ever experienced. We did not know how to take anything. We heard all points of view, but they will all they were all consistent and accurate. So it is nice to hear mr. Means saying accurate things about what actually went on. For decades afterwards, the whole point of view was so inaccurate. I did something very bizarre that day. I actually went to the site where the killings took place and i picked up some of the bullet shells. I dont know why i did, but i just did. The bullet shells were so hot they burned my hands. I dropped them. But i picked up several at the time. There was a big controversy over who it was that was doing the shootings, the students are the guardsmen. Or the guardsmen. I called the kent paper, the police, the fbi, the cleveland police, the cleveland plain dealer. Nobody wanted to hear my call to try to tell them this information that i knew what the shells looked like, that i could describe them. No one ever took my statement. And so usinteresting against them. That was our point of view at the time. Host thank you for the call. Betty, now living in austin, texas. A student at kent state in 1970. Robert means, your final thoughts. Means, your final thoughts. Guest when i started this book, i did not know there were 100 25 oral histories sitting in the library at kent state. Every one of them tells a story. It is an amazing cache of documentation. The university is to be congratulated for the care they have taken. They did not do this initially. Initially, they wanted to obliterate the memory of what happened there. But lauren davis and some other others,jerry lewis and have goaded them into doing this the right way. Those oral histories are a treasure and a heartbreak. They are deeply emotional reading. Book is titled 67 shots kent state and the end of american innocence. How did it end our innocence . Guest and the most immediate sense, it ended our innocence and thinking that the military would not fire on american citizens. It had a profound effect on the Antiwar Movement generally. The innocence of the 60s you could go to these things, smoke all the pot you wanted. You are protesting. The grownups were afraid of you. Hink this was reasserting especially for people like jim rose the authority of the state over its citizens in a very unattractive way. Host howard means joining us from his home in millwood, virginia. We this is American History tv on cspan three, were each weekend we feature 48 hours of programs exploring our nations past. War, authorhe civil Jonathan White talks about how Abraham Lincoln interacted with African Americans he met during his time in office. He explains how lincolns willingness to have African American guests at the white house and shake their hands was considered very liberal, even radical, at that time