Antiwar protest. First, president nixon in a televised white house address a few days earlier. Tonight, units will attack the headquarters for the entire communist military operation in south vietnam. This key 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. Once enemy forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will withdraw. These actions are in no way directed to the security interest of any nation. Any government that chooses to use these actions as a pretext for harming relationships with the u. S. Will be doing so on its own responsibility and initiative and we will draw the appropriate conclusions. 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 People want to end this war rather than have it drag on interminably. The action i have taken tonight will serve that purpose. A majority of the American People want to keep the casualties of our brave men in vietnam at an absolute minimum. The action i am taking tonight is essential if we are to accomplish that goal. We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in vietnam and winning the just peace that we all desire. My fellow americans, we live in an age of anarchy, abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions that have being created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed. Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without. If, when the chips are down the worlds most powerful nation, the United States of america , acts like a pitiful, helpless ofld, the forces totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and institutions throughout the world. That speech from april of 1970 by president Richard Nixon that led to the escalation of conflict in cambodia and southeast asia. It led to tensions on College Campuses around the country including Kent State University. Four students were killed and nine were injured. One of those students who witnessed what happened was laura davis back in 1970. She reflected on what she saw and heard in this oral history. Laura all of the people i was friends with that year had been at the demonstration. Virtually all of us had witnessed the shooting take place. We heard of the campus was to be evacuated in i had a friend with three hours. 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 of cars trying to get into kent. 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. They jumped into her car and she was trying to get into campus 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 i went home, i was home 43. Before my mother got back home. Around 6 00, my father walked in the back door and i was sitting at the kitchen table. He saw me and the first words out of his mouth were, they should have shot all of them. I said to him, dont you know them that of those people would one have been me . And he passed 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 not just a Public Opinion for sure. One of the things i have been doing because of the design work that is going on for the may 4 Visitor Center that is planned, and the creation of the panels and other elements of the walking tour that will be unveiled and dedicated on may 3, i know specifically the ways in which that change took place. One of the important ways that may 4 came home was that Congress Really rallied and came together and began withdrawing in very documentable and real ways its support for nixons war in southeast asia. The troops were withdrawn from cambodia within weeks after nixons announcement on april 30, which is what set off the demonstrations at kent state and other universities around the country. It did take a while for congress to fully pass enough special provisions so that funding was eventually completely cut off for the war. That process began specifically in response to may 4. Also, there was an unprecedented pushing through of the constitutional amendment that lowered the voting age to 18, which was a very strong point of contention among college who had and other youth chanted the slogan, old enough to fight, old enough to vote. Host from laura davis back in 2010. If you are on the campus of Kent State University, there is now a Museum Dedicated to what happened 50 years ago on may 4, 1970, giving you a sense of what life was like 50 years ago and what the campus went through. The book is titled 67 shots kent state and the end of american innocence and joining us from his home in virginia is the author of that book, howard means. Thank you for being with us. Howard thank you for having me. Host what happened, why did four students die and nine others injured . Howard thats a big question. And the ultimate large sense of this, all of the toxic orders of the 1960s sewed together at can Kent State University that weekend in 1970. It was an age of hate. An age of distrust, there was a generational divide. As i can say as an aside, the museum that laura davis was talking about does a wonderful job of capturing all this. It is a gem of a museum. It has a wonderful walk you can take narrated by julian bond. If you are anywhere near the university, stop and do it. In a more immediate sense, you had Richard Nixons speech on the thursday, he announced the extension of the war into cambodia. After saying he was going to bring home 50,000 troops. That was a time bomb waiting to erupt and it did the next evening on the streets of kent. That demonstration there were windows broken and trash cans set on fire. The real problem with that demonstration was is it convinced the mayor of kent that outside agitators had taken over the campus. The whole thrust of the dog whistling from the white house under Richard Nixon and the governors under jim rose, it was outside agitators, outside agitators. There was a 1 30 call made to the Governors Office by the mayor saying there were outside agitators and asking for help and that is how the guard ended up there. The guard changed the equation, and then you can guess what the demonstrations were about. About jim rose. Did the governor issue any shoot to kill by the National Guard, was that a directive from the state capital . Where did that come from . Howard i dont think there was ever an issue directed. The guard consisted of a bunch of untrained guys about the same age as the students and people fighting in vietnam. Korans, a carrying mi sniper rifle, lethal to 1000 feet m1 garand, a, a sniper rifle lethal to 1000 feet for crowd control. Anyone who was paid that next day in a vulnerable spot was dead. There is no question when one hit you. You had untrained people carrying guns they never used. Armed the guns. Knew they hadus live ammunition. The president of the campus never asked. Nobody asked. It was not there was never a shoot to kill order that i know of. There is a lot of debate about that and what happened in the heat of things before the shots were fired. What he did was to call the guard. The guard happened to be in akron, not far away, trying to control things during a teamster strike, so it was easy for them to get there. It also meant the guard was tired. They had been doing for days or five days. I forget the exact number. There was a running protest. The guard took over the campus without asking the administration if they could take over the campus. The Administration Never protected the campus as they should have or their students as they should have. It was this combination of volatile circumstances all happening at once. University leadership went awol at the moment they were needed the most. The guard was terribly directed by general canterbury, and the Governors Office, while not having issued a shoot to kill order, pressed very hard to make this a crackdown on outside agitators and crime. Jim rhodes was running for the senate at the time, he had used up his term as governor and he was in contention the day after the shooting was the republican primary. He was in contention with robert taft junior, a longtime senator, senators son, and on the thursday before all this began, the day nixon made his speech, a poll had taft winning by 68,000 votes in the primary. Rhodes said he needed southern ohio to come on strong for him, a more conservative part of the state, and the day after the shooting, he lost by almost 5000 votes. Host at the end of the day four students died, tell us about those students. Howard writing the book was heartbreaking for all sorts of reasons, none of them more heartbreaking than the four that died. Alison krauss and Jeffrey Miller were two who were active in the demonstrations that weekend. Jeffrey miller was fairly near to the guard when all of this happened. He happened to be shooting them the bird the moment he was shot so you have to assume he was targeted specifically. Alison krauss was further back but she had been prominent in the weekend demonstrations. She was very easy to pick out in the crowd. She was a very attractive, tall ish woman. She was beautiful in a 1970s way. I feel fairly certain she had to have been targeted. Bill schroeder, who had just transferred. He was a freshman transfer. He transferred after one year at Colorado School of mines and he was in the rotc and on the basketball team. He had stopped by and had books in his arm. He had stopped by because he was curious, he was not a demonstrator. He was six foot, 180, hit by an m1 bullet and the person next to him remembered him being picked up off the ground and thrown back. That is how strong an m1 bullet is. Then there was sandy sure, a speech or a music and Speech Therapy major, just passing between classes, doing what students are supposed to do on a campus where the classes should not have been open. But rhodes did not want the campus to close down classes because that would be buckling to demonstrators. She was standing next to a friend of her, ellis burns. He says to her, sandy, get down on the ground. He falls down with her, the shooting stops, and he looks over and she has a hole in her throat. He tries to stick his fist in the hole in her throat, but of course, she is bleeding out almost immediately. Even people who are wounded are heartbreaking. Dean keller is one of the most heartbreaking stories i know. A guy who was not radical at all and just happened to be there he called all his teachers to tell him he would not be in class because he was that kind of guy. He was hit in the spine and has not been able to use his legs ever since. Host we want to thank Kent State University for providing the pictures we are seeing to take a look back at exactly what happened 50 years ago on the campus of Kent State University on may 4, 1970. Four students killed, nine others injured. Howard means is joining us from his home in virginia. We have a line set aside for those who remember what happened. If you were in college in the late 1960s or early 1970s, please give us a call at 202 7488002. The other phone lines are divided regionally. Howard, the other question and an obvious one is why did they have live ammunition . Howard thats a good question. Terrible judgment, frankly. Absolutely terrible judgment. The mitigating factor for the guard is they get their armaments from the armory. They get their rifles from the armory. Everything else was used in vietnam. The armory was empty except for world war ii m1s. Thats all that was there. Still, things would have been so much better if they had had shotguns loaded with birdshot. It would have been so much better. Israelis began using rubber bullets. It would have been better if they had rubber bullets. But they had world war ii sniper rifles had live ammunition. They tried to do crowd control with tear gas, but they misjudged their stock of tear gas. On monday, after the demonstration moves out over this hill and the guard pursued them and herded them down the hill firing tear gas, the guard ran out of teargas. As they are coming back up the hill before they turned to do the shooting, they have no teargas left. They are getting hit with a certain amount of debris. Stones, pieces of wood. Initially, the guard had pushed them down over the hill into a construction site. Im sorry, i take this back. The guard had marched themselves down the hill over to a culdesac next to a construction site. A practice field. The students had stuff they could pick up and throw. So there is a certain amount of debris, but no one is injured badly enough to justify this in any way, shape, or form. It is interesting to look at the depositions of the guardsmen, i think the next day they were deposed quickly and answered what their commanders told them to say. They were deposed as a result of court action and again in 1975. As you are reading these depositions one after another from the same guardsmen, you can see how they are rearranging events in their mind to justify their actions in a way, these are the guards who actually shot rifles and did not necessarily hit anybody, but they shot their rifles. The debris gets more lethal and they are seeing the world from inside a gas mask which is a very strange way to look at the world when you are under assault and when you are tired. You have to have some sympathy for the guard because they were terribly led. Host was anyone charged as a result of these killings . Howard no. A number of students were charged and had to appear in the local court. No guardsmen charged. There was a civil action taking against the guard. I think the original ask was for 40 million. The settlement, i dont have the exact figure in mind, was about 650,000 which worked out to and about half of that went to the most severely injured and the rest was other ed among the it worked out to about 30,000 or 50,000 a person paid by the taxpayers of ohio. Host before we get to calls, this is one of the headlines and the iconic photographs from the cleveland plain dealer. Was thisf a story nationally in 1970 . Howard it was huge, absolutely huge. The story unfolded in a complicated way because the first accounts had the guards it was chaotic the way this information flowed. There was a wonderful scene i picked up from somewhere else where some people were sitting kente backyard in tent and someone is working on the roof and he shouts down to them, he said, oh my god they shot the , guardsmen. The parents of guardsmen were more terrified initially than the parents of students. The photo you are looking at is one of the iconic photos of the entire Antiwar Movement. Of the domestic american photos it might be the most powerful one. She wasnt a student. 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 the edward munch painting, the scream. That frozen moment. A woman happened to be next to her. She talks about this in her oral history. She said she put her arms around her to try to comfort her. She said like a block of ice, she was simply frozen. It was an emotional book to work on. Host the book by our guest 67 shots kent state and the end of american innocence we have your phone calls. Marcus is up from orlando, florida. Good morning. Caller thank you for taking my call. I was a freshman at university of missouri in columbia, missouri in the spring of 1970. Unfortunately i remember all of , those unfortunate days. What i wanted to ask your guest, my understanding at the time was the thinking that cooler heads did not prevail on either side. A couple of items, what it be possible had the 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. God bless you, sir. Means . R. Guest you are right on, on all the subjects. Cooler heads did not prevail. Nobody had a plan b. They were all sort of heading towards this disaster. The students didnt have particularly good leadership which is ironic in a way because the students for democratic society, the most radical element on campus had been year becauseevious of some actions in 1969. They knew how to run demonstrations. A guy named ken hammond makes this point very powerfully. They knew how to run demonstrations, but they werent there so in a sense, the students were leaderless 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. Everybody knew there was going to be a demonstration at noon on monday. There was no question about it. The administration likes to say they werent sure about it, so they sent their president , robert white, and all of his top people, at noon that day they were having lunch at a place called the ground derby restaurant while 1000 students were gathering at the commons the guard was moving in to do crowd control. That was a failure of leadership. That was a failure of cooler heads, no doubt about it. The guard had no alternative to doing what they did. 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 to the extent that there can be a hero of a story like this. After the shootings the students , go back to the common side, to the other side of this hill where the shootings are taking place. There are several thousand students there. The guard is back at the far end of the commons, they regroup and are rearmed. They filled their clips again. The students are insane with anger, testosterone, whatever it is. Some of them are painting xs on their chest. They are talking about charging the guard. If they charge the guard hundreds would have been killed. They would have been mowed down. Three teachers, including glenn frank talked them back from 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 a penn state student too. Pleads, hejust and is crying. Voice, hear it in your in his voice, dont, you will be slaughtered wholesale, murdered. The students finally back off. That sort of burst 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. And to me, frankly it has always been a mystery why there is no statue of glenn frank on the kent state campus. There should be. 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. To follow up 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. I looked 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 in this huge scene, was people standing over bodies on the ground. What people did was, go over to johnsone by stauffer 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 of the rows of people and as he did on the stage in cartwright hall, when i was taking his geology class. But the difference of course was that this time he was crying, he was pleading with us to leave because he was convinced, and he convinced the students staging the sit in if we did not leave then the guards would engage in further violence with the students. We did what he asked us to do. We followed him to the commons. The people i was sitting with made a plan and we decided we would follow glenn frank quietly across the commons but when we got to the other side, we each 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. Host laura davis was a freshman back in 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. Good morning, thank you. Caller good morning and thank you so much, mr. Means. I was young, i was 12 and my brother was in college at the university of texas. My parents were against the war. When laura davis said when her father walked in and saw her and said they should have killed them all, i just gasped 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 even more against the war, so my question to mr. Means, maybe you covered this and i did not hear it, did this turn the country against the war even more . Guest it is a very good question. Laura davis made the point earlier that it had. It was a threat, twosided, another side to that or several more sides. 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 just sort of started sliding backwards. But it definitely polarized, it further polarized, a very polarized nation at that point. Yes, i think it had a lot to do with 18yearolds finally getting the vote. I think it energized what had been a fading movement. It radicalized the Democratic Party so much that, in 1972, they nominated george mcgovern, who did not have a snowballs chance of winning when they could have nominated someone who might have actually given nixon a run for his money. In a way, they almost guaranteed a second term for dick nixon, although of course he blew the opportunity. It is kind of a twosided thing, but i was myself at the time a High School Teacher in washington, d. C. I was 25. My students were seniors, most of them juniors and seniors. One of the reasons it affected be so strongly them was it could have been my students. They were just a year removed from the students i was teaching. I was not not that far from being far removed from being a guardsman 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. An art teacher there talked about a student coming back. Campus was cleared, and about two days later, the student shows up and is crying and broken. He says, what is wrong . This student had gone home. He knocked on the door, the front door was locked. He knocked harder and said, mom, dad, where are you . And the mail slot pushes open, and he hears his parents voices saying we never went to see you again. And he turns around and leaves. That broke my heart, too. How can you say that . Host stephanie is on the boat on the phone from long beach, california. Caller good morning. 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 something that was clearly motivating to the students. I was 20yearsold back then. Nyu and activet the fact that the authorities, whoever they were, were willing to let their own children to let their own children die, kill their own children and this , came after the assassination. There was so much hope to change better andor the then all of these things just crushed that hope. To see nixon 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 farm and decided i was going to go back to nature because the politics i was so active in was crushing. I have been an 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 stephanie, thank you. Thank you for adding to the conversation. 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 luther king, how did all of this 1970,n 19 see bundy resolve into the mood of the students, parents, and country . Guest as i said earlier, there was all this toxic flow that came from out of the 1960s that just happened to come together at kent state. If these events had happened at berkeley, columbia, at the university of wisconsin, where there was an entrenched Student Leadership and where the university had some experience with serious protests, i think the result would have been different. Kent state was a 21,000 person school. The president was very laissezfaire. And with students, and i do not mean this is an insult, but who were naive, a lot of them. They were studying, a lot of them to be High School Teachers. That is why kent state originally came to exist. Myselfyearold teacher 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 leave, could not imagine for the life of them that the guard would actually shoot them. I think students at a place like berkeley, like in may 4, 1970, would not have had that naivete or expectation. That played into this a bit too. The combination of naivete, all these horrible forces flowing forward, the generational divide, the america love it or leave it movement, it was just a timebomb that was going to explode somewhere and unfortunately it exploded at kent. It killed four students who never should have been killed. Host jerry lewis was on the faculty in 1970 and reflected on what he saw. We were worried about the bayonets. We had no 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. So i went up past taylor hall, turned left, and went down into the parking lot. When i got to 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 gave him a little first aid. 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 because light travels faster than sound, so i dove for cover behind a bush and was on the ground quickly enough that the guard finished their firing and finish their firing in 13 seconds. I remember saying, what should i do . A student rushed up and said, dr. Lewis, those were blanks, werent they . I said no. Here are the photographs of the 4 students that were killed as we listen to ron from michigan. Good morning. Caller good morning, gentlemen. I was a 21yearold soldier in happenedhen kent state i was an antiwar activist. activist. To beed the military antiwar. When that happened, i was receiving antiwar literature. I signed up and i joined Vietnam Veterans against the war at that time. A short time later after kent , state, there was a fracking incident. I cannot say if it was revenge or had any relation to the kent state 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. But 25 years later, Vietnam Veterans against the war did go to kent state to participate in a memorial service. You had a question earlier, professor, in which somebody asked, werther any other incidents like this . In my recollection in south , carolina, 10 black students were killed by state troopers protesting the war peacefully on their campus. Thank you for your book. Host howard means how do you , answer that . Guest number one, jerry lewis, just quickly. I remember asking jerry, did you any sense these were 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 in it. They gives you a sense of how insane it was for these people out there. Secondly, i open my book with many stories of the 24 americans who died in vietnam on may 4, 1970. Half of them were 20 years or younger. You have to keep that perspective in mind. There, 24 there. Third, the event you are talking about, ron, was at jackson State University in mississippi. It happened 10 days later on the 14th of may. Two killed, 10 wounded. The students have begun to protest because there was a rumor that charles evers, medgar evers brother had been murdered. The Mississippi State troopers showed up and basically sprayed the dormitory with gunfire. 150 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. As i say in the book, kent state was a man bites dog story. It turned to civilians being killed by american soldiers. Unfortunately jackson state was , a dog bites man story. White troopers firing on black in wass of mississippi 1970 not unheard of. Next,frank, you are norristown, pennsylvania. Caller i was a seventh term junior at penn State University when we got word of the kent state situation. What made me a little bit more unique was the fact that i was a vietnam veteran. I was a medic with Alpha Company 15th med, first air calvary, division. I spent much of my time at the dispensary. Anyway, we did have widespread rioting 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 the thing i am always going to remember. As i was walking up rutledge road past atherton hall, i noticed 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 gentleman, his other comrades , at least three or four others eight troops other state troopers who came to his aid probably would have caught me, so i kept moving. I really wanted to render aid to the state trooper, but there was some good advice by a man named joan gave me in vietnam. He said, look keep your head , down, your powder dry, be good. Two 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 frank, thanks for the call from pennsylvania. You mentioned the president s report on the campus. This is what the cover looks 1970s. M howard means, your response . Guest it is a wonderful story. It is a sad story when you cannot render hope that help, when you have to fight all your instincts. That goes to how riven the nation was. The absence of trust there was a huge demonstration in washington. I remember walking down to that from and massachusetts avenue. You had to go through Sheridan Circle and Dupont Circle to get down to the mall. At every radius on those circles there was a jeep with 4 soldiers, i think army, all of them with semiautomatics just sitting there staring at you through their sunglasses. It was scary. At the white house, they had done what they did at other times. They had taken d. C. Transit buses and surrounded the white house to make a kind of wall. More than that, they had got the 82nd airborne in. They were staying in the basement of the executive office building, along with elements of the third army. The white house was an armed encampment at that point. Moment whenfamous athard nixon takes a notion 3 30 in the morning to show someone the washington monument. And the secret service is with them. There are tens of thousands of people sleeping in the mall. Nixon starts waking up the guard so we can talk to them. You can see nixon with his ski nose. These hippielooking people are looking at him thinking what drug could have caused the apparition in front of them. It was a very strange moment. It goes to the point, in a way, halderman, nixons chief of that ingued afterwards a way, kent state broke nixon. It was the end of his presidency in this regard he had charged J Edgar Hoover with finding him proof that kent state have been caused by outside agitators. It was not. It was students at the school. When he could not get hoover, when hoover was unable to produce this evidence, nixon lost his faith in the fbi, eventually formed his own unit called the plumbers. The plumbers broke into the dnc Headquarters Office and watergate followed. I think it is a legitimate point. Halderman was in a position to know. Host if you travel to the campus of Kent State University there is a memorial that , reflects on exactly what happened on may 4, 1970. 50 years ago. We will look at a scene inside his em and listen to gary in washington, d. C. Good morning. Are you with us . Caller yes, i am, and thank you, mr. Means. 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 tasting teaching at Western Michigan University at the time in kalamazoo, and 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 in those years 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 really the absence of a news media people retreat into their own poles. They go to the left or the right and i think the division is deeper. What do you think, esther means . Means . Host let me add that we did have a draft in the 1970s. Guest 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. I think that in 1970 it was divided more vertically by age. I think in our own time, it is divided horizontally. It is to some extent. Obviously the electorate on the , republican side is an older and whiter audience. It is not that we do not have a credible news media. I think we have credible news medias 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. Newsweek and life or fe. Li there was cronkite and one other person i guess. I forget 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. Obviously, the vietnam war was the end of that draft. We can argue whether National Service should be reinstated. But i doubt the draft will. Host another oral history from 2013, from joe column who was a student at kent state. What he saw, heard, and what he remembers. [video clip] i thought, why are they firing . 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. After probably four or five seconds of firing, i realized that, even if they are firing blank, i am close enough that i could be injured so 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 around me. Cleary, who i did know did not know at the time, was at the base of 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. Caller good morning. In 1970, i was 19yearsold. I was a student at the university of Maryland College park. I wanted to read a paragraph i wrote about the kent state killings. I wrote this some several years ago. A little background. In 1969, 1970, 1971, there were huge demonstrations against the vietnam war. In washington, d. C. , one of the demonstrations, the Washington Post estimated there were more than one Million People there. These demonstrations were just 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 4 students who were killed, it was chilling. I was stunned. It stopped me cold. I remember thinking, this is a war, and the guns are aimed at us. Host bill, thanks to the call from pennsylvania. 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 50 years ago . Aller i was having lunch i was at lake hall, which had a view of the hillside. I saw a puff 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 there were stampeding students, running and trying to get away from the shots and danger. 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 stateler called kent that was totally inaccurate. He said he was there. He was not there. His descriptions were 180 degrees different from what actually transpired. I happen to have known about 9 10 of the people he interviewed for his book, and they gave very different recollections from what they were quoted, so thank you to mr. Means for being accurate. It certainly changed many peoples lives, including my own. I moved to texas. Mom and dad were not paying for school anymore after that. It changed many peoples lives. Host before we let you go, as that day unfolded and you had a chance to reflect on what you saw at Kent State University can , you recall what you were thinking later in the day, into the evening . Caller we all had hair standing up on the backs of our next. We were all horrified and had a adrenaline going more than ever before, more than we had ever experienced in our very young lives. We did not know how to take anything. We heard all points of view, but 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 around and 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 shooting, the students or the guardsmen. I wanted to get the word out. I called the kent paper, the kent 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. It was so interesting and so us against them. The youth against the adults, the establishment, and 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. , as you heard her that,and the one before your final thoughts . Guest when i started this book, i did not know that there were 125 oral histories sitting in the library at kent state. Everyone one of them tells a story and half of them are heartbreaking stories. It is an amazing cache of documentation. The university is really 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 laura davis and some other people, jerry lewis and others, have goaded them into doing this the right way. Those oral histories are a treasure and a heartbreak. They are just deep emotional to. Ead them host the book is titled 67 shots kent state and the end of american innocence. 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 you could 1960s, go to these things, smoke all the pot you wanted. You are protesting. The grownups were afraid of you. I think this was reasserting, especially for people like jim rhodes, reasserting 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 thank you for being with us on the 50th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University. Guest thank you for having me. Kent State University planned commemorateive to the may 4, 1970 National Guard shootings. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, they produced a Virtual Program for their youtube. Between ohioootage National Guardsmen and students protesting the vietnam war, and recollections from survivors and eyewitnesses. Located located right beside taylor hall is the parking lot where for students event unfortunately passed away. I have parked in that parking lot. I have walked across it. Ive talked to my friends while walking across it. Theres something incredibly powerful about something that people encounter daily, having such a