After words at nine pm eastern, Mitch Mcconnell on his memoir, the long game with senator lamar alexander. Then they talk about the Energy Crisis of the 1970s and the ban of oil to the u. S. In 1973. We wrap. We wrap up at prime time in 11 with 60 minutes correspondent leslie stahl. So talk about how baby boomers are changing the role of grand parents. That all happens on cspan2 book tv. Next up, howard means. Good evening. Welcome to the Hudson Library and historical society. We are so happy you are here for this event. I am on the reference librarian here and tonight we are honored to work welcome howard means to discuss his new book 76 shots at kent state university. It is only 10 miles from here and he decided to have this program of national and local interest. He is a biographer and former editor at the washingtonian. He is the author and coauthor of ten books and some of his other works include the avenger takes its place Andrew Johnson and the 45 days that change the nation. Johnny appleseed, the man the myth and an american story. And he also wrote the first biography on colin powell. Please join me in welcoming mr. Means. [applause] im going to talk about that. Thank you amanda. Amanda is also herself a very accomplished novelist and she has won awards as well. Ive talked to a number of people here who were at kent state in 1970. I was can ask, everybody who went to kent state in 1970, stand up, stand up and raise your hand. Wow. This is scary. This is really scary. Feel free to correct as i go. No, wait till the end to correct phil be a lot of corrections im sure. I want to point out jerry lewis. Would you please stand up back there . He was a big help to me in getting contacts and writing the book and as some of you are probably taking a course here for over 55 on kent state on may 4. What im going to do is start this talk with the slideshow to sort of get us all on the same page about the time and what happen on may 4 so the people who werent at kent state can envision what the situation looked like. It all begins, you can say it begins april 30, 1970, the evening Richard Nixon addresses the nation. He previously two weeks earlier announces theres going to be a draw with 250 troops and on april 30 he announces instead that the war is going to be expanded in cambodia. Any of you who were in vietnam and mightve been surprised the war was expanded in cambodia, it shocked the nation and nixon expected blowback on american campuses and he got it. Not very dramatic all at kent state. Heres nixon addressing the nation and right there is a part that he particularly talked about and thats as close. It was a very strange talk. He was a geography teacher and he walked over and he sat back down. It was just very strange. At the next day, friday may 1 there are two demonstrations, one at midday. This this is a group that called itself world exploitation. It was a very strange acronym and that was one of him. I got ahead of myself. They are bearing the constitution right there. Theres a second demonstration about two hours later and it looks to be fairly tame so they decide to honor a previous commitment and go off to mason city iowa for a Testing Group in which he is the unpaid board chairman. That night things fall apart. Heres what it looks like on the streets about 1130 at night. Lets set the stage. First warm day of spring. Campus day. He told me that earlier. Also, for those of you who can remember, they sold 32 beer. I drank a lot of 32 beer beer and there was a bartender, it was a bar owners dream and he had to drink just as much beer and you felt bloated and nasty by the time you got there. There are a lot of factors involved, that at around midnight or a little bit before midnight some kids come out and they light a fire in the street. They start stocking some cars and talking about vietnam or they eventually raced down water street and throw some rocks and other things and the mayor declares the bars have to be closed. So now youve got all these kids coming out of the bars. They been drinking and a lot of them were there to watch bands. The headliners go on about midnight when they close the bars. A lot of them are also there to see this man perform. Anybody recognize this guy . Thats will chamber and it was game four of the title series and mind you this is game for a not the quarterfinals. The quarterfinals will be held until august sometime. Now will chamberlain, jerry jerry west, willis reed, et cetera, it was a great game. This game starts on the west coast at midnight. Five minutes after it starts kids are heading down to the bar and they close the bar and there on the street. Ugliness ensues. The other problem here is that the city of kent had been affected by the times and the fbi to assume the worst of any demonstration. One of the reasons they had been prepped was this man. Does anyone recognized him . Jerry rubin had a talk at kent two weeks before. It was a talk sanctioned by the university. One of the things he said at that talk was, he was a street theater. He was street theater and if any of you were there you might remember. He said to start the revolution, yet the first kill your parents. Now jerry lewis told me that his students said he was speaking metaphorically. And another student said no, you have to kill your parents. Understandably this upset the residence of kent that students were being told to kill their parents. So you have all that. He goes around, after he gets everybody and estimates 50000 worth of damage. It turns out to be 10000 or the chamber of commerce which is even lower. In the wee hours, he calls the Governors Office and said theres been trouble in the streets of kent. Students were involved and he makes his first inquiry about bringing the National Guard to kent. To the best of my knowledge and the best of anybodys knowledge, the fbi presents along the streets of kent, on friday night, if it existed at all was absolutely minimal. You might remember the dean of student activities. I asked him and he said i thought when i looked at the photographs that i would see all this but it had nothing to do with the kent campus. When i looked at it they were our students, we just didnt know who they were. I said how many were involved. He said said i wouldnt argue if you said zero. At any rate there now at the Governors Office and they hear that sts is coming into kent on saturday. Does anyone know who that is with sean connery . I had to look this up. She was ms. France in 1988 and for darn good reason as far as im concerned. So the close the bar. They cant go and they cant leave cut campus so the university does a great job. They bring in dancers and movies and they forget about one thing. They dont protect their pc building. If one thing was predictable saturday night in kent it was that they were were going to come under assault. There is a big sign on the commons about why is the rtc building still standing. Those of you who remember that time, its the most ready symbol of a military power on campus. They leave unprotected and when the guard rolled in, the sky lit up and read and thats what it look like and they finally disembark. It looks like it was caught on fire. It looked like it was in flames. This is the first time they come on campus. Thats what they say. This is what it looks like when theyre looking east. This is there building looking south. This is an important shot in a way because it sets the stage for monday. Nuts taylor hall where the students live. This is a prime piece of real estate. Every academic department, the Campus Police stood aside and let it burn down basically. They didnt help the fire department. This was prime real estate. The problem is, if you let people burn down a building, what do they do. They they take it as an okay sign. Burn the building down. Were not going to do anything. Thats a terrible message to send to the students. So this is saturday. Sunday jim rhodes comes and roads by one trail was trailing by one vote. He comes down and this is a chance for him to energize and hes not point to mess it up. He comes in has a press conference. He talks to people who have been doing the demonstration. He said we are no longer going to treat the symptoms, we are going to eradicate the problem. Hes being incredibly provocative and irresponsible language, but he could see that hes rallying any loses. Heres what the camps look like on sunday. I like this shot. I love this one because you have this campus scene. Everything looked altogether. This is all a little more questionable. Theres a lot of that going on. Then at night it all falls apart again. Students want to go to the main gate. They want to march on the town and they say no, the confrontation and it gets ugly and thats the situation right there. This is how sunday night ands, except, except this. These are scenes of equipment, this is the kind of equipment they brought with them. They have a campus and you have five of these fully armored and Medium Weight helicopters and of course there carrying m ones. Theres teargas flying everywhere, dropping pellets and chasing people back to the dormitory. By monday morning, when people wake up, this is not a confrontation about kent state. Its a confrontation about the guard having taken over the campus. They talk to person after person after person and they all say the same thing. Its at that point that it fell apart. It was us against the guard. So they wake up monday and they havent occupied campus. Thats the music and Speech Therapy building. I think thats what it is. Then Everybody Knows theres going to be a confrontation on the mall. On the commons, im sorry. Its no secret that professors are talking about it in class. Theyve scribbled it on blackboard and Everybody Knows its going to happen. This is what the scene looks like. This is the taylor hall and of it. Thats a close up. What are they holding in their arms . M ones. There could be not be a worse weapon to do crowd control. It is lethal to a half a mile. In m1, if you line them up 250 yards out, the m1 will hit an engine block with it unless its sitting inside a car. It has incredible speed and power. Its in the terrifying instrument. All you can do within m1 and a bayonet with the crowd is let them get close enough to you to stab them, slice them or blow holes in them. When i look back and the more i thought about this, i think i spent months and months thinking about this, i kept kept coming back to the images from 1965 in birmingham alabama. You will remember them doing crowd control in the streets of birmingham. In retrospect, it was humanitarian crowd control. I never thought i would think of them as a humanitarian, but by comparison it was. The other thing they had to do can crowd control was, one more thing. This is also on monday may fourth. This is the restaurant about a half mile north of campus. Members of them brown derby restaurant had all the administers having lunch discussing what they would do after the guard left the campus. There is a crisis Communication Center. Its a windowless room in the Administration Building and there was a 23 or 24yearold graduate assistant and he was the guy in charge representing the administration interests at the moment that all this happened. He couldnt see anything. He told me he was talking to people with crackly walkietalkies. He has no idea who hes talking to and thats the state of communication between the Senior Administration officials at the restaurant and the campus. Its pretty inexcusable. Okay the guard moves out. Teargas. Now what theyre saying about the teargas. Theres a 70mile an hour wind. Again, the stop of kit teargas, you knew there was 70mile an hour wind. You know who much loss are going to get if you fire teargas at 70mile an hour wind. But this was their bases for crowd control other than the m1s and bayonet. So, i have a little schematic here. For those of you who dont no, this is where the building burned. This is where the National Guard starts out at noon. This is where the kids are on the hillside in front of taylor howell. Its kind of a natural, if it was kind of a baseball stadium. Deep centerfield ray here for the victory bellows. The guard is gonna come up and push the people over the hill and theyre going to go to company a and the troop goes this way. Theres a group that goes off here and company see, this is company see. They go over this way and they just stay at the top of the hill one of the students says oh im sorry, there can be no crowds gathered on the campus. What do crowd summary asked them the garment runs off and sets three people. So some and he said to them, if two students are talking and i, and join the conversation, its an illegal crowd. They said yeah. So its an insane mandate. They take off, there appear, they get up to the top of the hill. The Mission Commander says he hoped with all of his heart when he got to the top of the hill that the students would have dissipated. What are the students chances of students dissipating. Theyve come down to the parking lot down here, the guard will then chase them down and they will march, will you will see in a second, they will march into a culdesac and one thing you never do as much your troops into a culdesac. They turn around the come back here and theres a concrete structure and thats where they turn and fire. Thats sort of the basic movement of things. This is the practice fields. This is the first time that day that they kneeled in a line. They will repeat this gesture. This is the situation. They dont fire and they naturally think theyve won. This is where they first turn and start firing. On the field command, he was not as anybody know how, he was there. They did wonderful work. This is another closeup. This is the moment he turns and hes about 30 feet up the hill. So theyre at this point, the students start diving and parking lots, dashing for protection. I dont want to harp on anybody, but this is what happens. This is john cleary. Let me go back one second, im sorry. The most distant person shot is a guy named douglas mckenzie. He is 250 yards away. He is walking away when he is shot john cleary was 37 yards away. He was advancing the film and shot in the chest. He survived, but barely. He spent three days in intensive care. Youll recognize these photos. Very distinctive looking. You know the story of Bill Schroeder. He won an army rotc scholarship. He went to Colorado College and decided he didnt like his major there. He transferred so he could be a psychology major. He was number two in his class in his rotc class and was on the freshman basketball team. He stopped by to have a look at what was happening. Theres one photograph, you see him sort of holding his books like this. He was going to classes and looking and saying what is this all about. This is the one that breaks my heart every time i try to talk about it. He was a speech major and by every indication didnt have a political bone in her body. She was walking from one class to another which is exactly what they are supposed to do. This was jeffrey miller. He was probably one of the most active. He was a short guy, he darted around a lot. He probably shouted at first and he was shot in the mouth. These are the photos from the yearbook. It sort of exaggerated that sense of innocence. This is not the famous photograph. You can see she has her hands up like this. This is one taken just before that when she realized what happened to the person sitting next to them. For some reason to me, thats a more more powerful photo. That moment of first realization before the shock where shes raising her arms. Then, back to this one time, here you can see the wounded. Thats Doug Mckenzie over there. The guard goes back to its original spot back here. There are group of students that have never left over here. Now the students start filtering back and theyre telling them what happened. The anger and i dont know how many of you were on that side but this is really, and away the most volatile time of the whole incident. The guard is now facing the crowd. Guard knows knows only one thing to do. The students are not going to disperse. Trump 20 of them have stripped to the waist and they have exes on their chest and four head. They felt it. They were so angry that they didnt respect the consequences. This confrontation is largely due to one man. I think glenn frank, when you read the record. How many had him for a course. So you know his story. Hes a former marine, he still looked like a marine. Have you ever seen this. The geology professor who had been a lifer at kent. He has a double which i realized as i was doing this. Do you recognize drew carey . The funny part is that drew carey went to kent state. He was there in 1975. He flunked out after a year or dropped out after year. I thought if anybodys going to make this movie, it should be drew carey. So anyway, glenn frank froze himself between the two groups. Is that him with the beard and the megaphone . Can you tell . I couldnt get confirmation. They had this confrontation and you can see, theres film footage of this. He starts begging and crying and he finally has tears in his voice and at some point he falls to the ground and one of the reason is the emotion but the other reason is that hes looking behind these kids and he sees that theyve had a struggle by National Guardsmen. Now there absolutely ducks in a pond. Finally the moment breaks and the kids disperse. The event has ended. There were 80 guardsmen left. 640 rounds and it wouldve been absolutely horrible if they had done that. Then, one quick thing, so go back to the white house. The chief of staff on monday afternoon, they wake nixon up from a nap and tells him what has happened. Hes immediately horrified. Hes afraid his buddy has done this. Then he immediately sets out, he demands basically to find out that outsiders are responsible for this. So this man, if you recognize, he was theater too. His first goal is to shut him up three days later, he says i think it was murder. It just horrified the white house. It was sort of excusable murder too. You can read more about that. Then, the next night, friday night is the night of the weary and you might remember this photograph, Richard Nixon gives a press conference anything thats very successful. He goes back to his bedroom and he cant sleep. He makes 57 calls in three hours finally at 330 he goes and says have you ever been to the lincoln memorial. You have to understand that the Airborne Division is sleeping in the white house basement. There are demonstrators at the mall to demonstrate and Richard Nixon decides it would be a great time to go to the lincoln memorial. So they go down, these are demonstrators who were sleeping down there, i love the expressions. You know theyre saying to themselves, what themselves, what drug did i take . So this goes on. After this he finally leaves and says ive never seen the secret service so petrified of my life. You can imagine theres only a few secret Service People there. Theres only one of him and they dont look very happy. They leave there and say have you ever seen the house of representative where the Union Directors are. The says no so they go there to the house of representatives. He wakes up security there and puts him up there with the state of Union Addresses are given and he goes back and sits down and starts to Say Something and its just nuts. Its at its Richard Nixon at his absolute weirdest. Theres one thing even more horrible at kent state and it happened more recently and thats my last lie. I dont know if you ever saw this sweatshirt. Urban outfitters put this sweatshirt for sale. They said, when they they were questioned, it was just natural wear and tear and random colorization. Well among other things, thats almost exactly are the person was shot and is just appalling they would do this. Its one of the things that prompted me to write this book. Because, i guess i can just. The university had changed the logo by 1977. I graduated and 67. In 67 they they were transitioning from that logo. And how to turn this thing off. Same buddy know how to turn this off . So i apologize for that image im sorry forgot to get one book out will i was doing this. So thats basically the facts to the book and the story i start to tell and the question was how my going to tell it and i didnt know. I knew i wanted to tell it and i knew after i saw this what should i have to tell it in a way, and then i discovered what i shouldve discovered earlier that the university had 130 oral histories that they had collected. The archival people at the library deserve metals, every one of them. The Public Library and, theyve done a spectacular job collecting information. So what i had to tell that story was basically 140 memories and then i sorted them out to my own interviewing. Let me give you a sense of that from a writing point of view. So every time there is some moment in the story, i had a memory. For example friday night. A woman named Diane Gallagher was working in a pizza joint when, it was just the spirit of the time when someone comes bursting through the door and they started a little ride out there on this streets and they said the revolution has begun, the revolution has begun. Naturally she took off her apron and went out and join the revolution. There was a guy named Denny Bennett benedict. He tells the story, the resident advisor stops the projector and says to the students, the rotc building is on fire, the National Guard has come to campus, you cant leave the building. What are the kids going to do. Theyre going to go as fast as they can. He jumps through the window and starts right out towards the man maingate and he turns a corner and theres a truck coming out of it lined with m ones and turned around and runs back as fast as he can. The talk about getting ready for the confrontation on monday but it mustve been a heck of a big dorm room. He said they were all doing marijuana and it turns out there was a fair amount of marijuana involved in the whole thing. A man talked about being in the parking lot,s ending next to Bill Schroeder when he was hit. He said, he was just sort of caring them through the air and it tore me apart. I told you he was sitting in their in the Communication Center describing it trying to make sense of chaos below and communicate that somehow to the people in the administration in the restaurant, chuck ayres is pretty well known. He told the story, he had been out photographing and thought when the guard started met archie back up the hill that he rushes back and he gets in their and hes just starting to get his film out and he holds the dog and start crying. There was a vietnam veteran and a student and he told another student. He sat down and said theres a lot of crying in the story. He didnt get to the demonstration because she and a friend were late. They went back to the dormitory and she sees people running toward her dormitory and sees her boyfriend. There are stories like this all over the place. The guardsmen are under representative but there was a core action that went on for 11 years. If you try to make sense of what was going on in their heads, at first they all started along the same party line. Then as they get further out, you listen to, you get a deeper sense of whats going on in their head. Inside the gas mask, what this this look like to them. There was one guy, a private first class who said that in the last deposition, within 25 feet from my end, i was being hit from every point in my body in such a manner. He tried to be poetic there. Hes trying to be literary, but i read enough accounts like that but i think for a majority of the guardsmen, there was that sense that there was a riot going on in their head. They werent 25 feet from it. I think in their head, a woman named roseanne who lived in downtown kent was in the backyard with a bunch of mothers and babies. She had an 11 monthold and theyre working next door listening to the radio. Also he shuts down, oh my gosh they shot the guardsmen, they shot the guardsmen. For those of you here, the story went out that way. This is a communication, the miscommunication was nationwide and it traveled around the country. Like i said, i find myself, if we had social media like we did then, i think there wouldve been crowds and it wouldve been horrible after words but at least the story mightve gotten out. There were too many people who were too harmed by fear who didnt know what had happened. Then a woman named Barbara Holland who is not there at all, she she was one of the 19000 kent eight students who is nowhere near when this happened. She was working on a neuroanatomy paper. She was a senior. I thought, didnt have any effect on your life and she said for the next five years she was having posttraumatic stress syndrome. Maybe maybe in a way because she hadnt been there. I said this was obviously a dramatic effect. So you can understand how motional they get. They tell me the book is an intense read and i forget probably is, but a lot of this was very intense when i was writing it. I probably shouldve taken a walk between chapters or paragraph but i just felt like i was channeling memories of people while i was doing this. Then when i saw a back road grotesque urban outfitter or just made me determined to get it right. Then i had the question of how to frame it. How to start it and how to end it. I wrestled with a long time and i dont want to give any spoilers, but i finally decided that the only way i could do it was to be true to what i thought was important and start the book in vietnam on may 4, 1970 in vietnam. I needed to tear out the abbreviated form of the people who died that day in vietnam. Seventeen people died in 1970, but there was a midair collision between two helicopters just about exactly the time the penn state shooting took place. Then, as as i got to this point, i realized the antiwar had this binary, but it wasnt binary. It wasnt here and there in them and us. They were really connected and all sorts of way and i realize that theres a guy named timothy to france and its one of the more moving stories in the whole interview. He is, his brother had been killed 19 days in the first tour of duty in vietnam. He was a sent in Senior Education major and he was student teaching. I forget exactly where but he heard about the shootings and rushed to the hospital where his father was dying of prostate cancer. He gets there and theyre bringing in the wounded and his mother is standing there in his father dies at about the exact moment they bring the wounded. The story just broke my heart. They told a story about how protesters, one time had thrown a bottle over their head and antiwar protesters come down over her but she was very sympathetic to the cause. He was shot on his first tour of duty getting out of the helicopter. He never even hit the ground. There is another veteran and i try to tell the story and if i could, i just want to read the final page and a half of the book. Again, this doesnt give anything away. Dont let it ditch are you from buying the book, or reading it. Then i will take some questions and comments. I have this marked, but of course i messed that up. In the legal sense, what happened at blanket hill, murder in the Second Degree as they told david frost, i dont know if it was manslaughter, voluntary or otherwise, but finding a jury that will convict them seems unlikely. Trial juries both respect the law and theyre called on to treat them with a heavy dose of common sense. Common sense would tell us that the guardsmen were poorly trained and crowd control and had the wrong tools to handle the mission. Calls were made that never shouldve been made. Students behaved poorly in downtown kent. There was way too much beer was probably as much of another reason. Windows should not have been smashed. This was a charge moment in history. Whatever happened, overreacted by the mayor in the wee hours the morning. He sawn opening he could run through all the way to the u. S. Senate. All that is background noise ultimately to the kent state shooting in the larger four of vietnam. People died who should not have on both fronts. Everyone can count the ways in which both experience has have lifetime scars. The best thing that could happen for those who still carry the shootings or the vietnam war close to their heart is to get beyond who did what and when. They talked about an earlier speaker she vowed she would never forget. It tore my heart up she said. Ill never forget and i think there are important lessons with this. But if there is no forgiveness, there is no feeling the murder goes on forever. Thats my talk. Thank you for listening. [applause] [inaudible] i also mentioned in the book emma they had about three hours sleep. How much sleep to do have the day before is there any truth to that . He was taken as a sniper once at johnston hall. It didnt materialize. There was a guy who had a tape recorder sitting on his windowsill. That is now the famous truck scene. If you listen to a certain way you can pick up for bang bang bang bang before the actual shooting. Hes the second man on the grassy knolls. I dont think, i think it precedes the shooting by so much that it doesnt relate to what anybody says. I think it was not caused by sniper fire. I had two children in the Elementary School at the Old University school. I went to pick them up and was told i couldnt take them out because there were snipers on the roof. I took them anyway and we literally ran out like this. We got in the car to go home. There are a couple of cases in the interview where they tell story about getting on the bus. This is an Elementary School bus and they said a guy has a baseball bat and they say to lay on the floor. There are a lot of terrifying stories like that. Again, there are a lot of rumors sweeping through. You mightve heard some that the students were to come through the sewers. There are all these stories. I have a few places, they were afraid of the water being contaminated so i guarded that. I spent all night at the president s home. There was a neighbor who came out to get his coffee. I also guarded, i forget, but we were all over. Yes so people forget that there were over 1000 guardsmen. 1350 and a lot of those never got on campus. They were under martial law too. He reminded me of the story, this was a very prominent room in her that they were going to spike the water supply. There wouldve been a hell of a lot of casualties at lst. Just a couple comments. Terry norman we know was an fbi informant. One of the things i was wondering about in your research, if you look at House Committee investigations at kent state in 1969, would they be willing to talk about, many of these rumors are similar to tactics that were used, i wonder what you think about the government involvement and leading to an atmosphere of distrust in the Community Prior to that. Talk a lot about growth factor. The government in the time, they all help to set the table for this. When they got in a rampage rampage on friday night, instead of storylines that were not without some support. They were blowing up the Research Labs and theres a lot of bad stuff going on. In a way what happened, it was a inevitable and preventable. It was inevitable because all that stuff you were just talking about, at every step of the way, and i go into this and every step the book, it was preventable. They couldve all all made a different set of decisions. In terms of one of the storylines, there was this nixon hoover plot this whole thing. They thought it unhinged nixon sufficiently that it led to the plumbers because hoover couldnt sign for him the outside agitators that he was sure it was a gunman. They lost faith in hoover at that point so he formed his own. Anymore questions . He said he thought can state, the thing friday night, and i wasnt there, you can almost replicate that most state universities. The police were there with a bunch of drunken College Students and at the time make it all by beer. They just drove out of the bars. Thats a recipe for disaster. Because they saw them everywhere. There were four students who had been released from the county jail just a couple days earlier. Now they were back on the loose. The National Guard kind of admitted they messed up because two days later they testified that there was a sniper on the roof which was really insane. So use to people on the ground. They backed away from that one pretty quickly. It made no sense. The last . It was problems encountered and lessons learned. He said none. It just did me and when i read it. I was struck by the fact that there were 67 shots fired, for students killed, how many wounded . Nine. So thats only 13. You would think with the crowd being as close as there were there would be a lot more fatalities. There were a fair number shot in the air shot in the ground. There was a guy who emailed me about four days ago who had been in the guard. I cant think of his name off the top of my head. Two weeks later they were doing target practice and they came in and the major who was in charge of it said emma if you guys had been that good at kent state, we could have killed 40. It was horrible. All of them who were students to know what the say they just looked at the floor. You hear these things. Its a heartbreaking story. There were generational divides. Theres a professor that still teaches and five days later the kid came back to his house. Everybody had been sent away and he came back and he said what you doing. He said i went home and my parents were waiting on the other side of the door and they shouted we never want to see you again. There were a lot of stories like that. Its just a generational divide and it was such a horrible thing. Please. You think this sets the stage for a general disdainful look and victimizing of the students that were protesting authority that has trickled down to our domestic forces today do you know if there was an actual student shot by Campus Police dad because he got smart mouth . They wanted him to change his parking spot or something . He started to lip off to them . Its a very recent occurrence. Did you happen to hear about the one who was tased by Campus Police while he attended a lecture of, whos the guy whos president now, joe biden was parking on campus and a student got up and started to ask him some hard questions to keep us older generation aware of whats going on and Campus Police tried to approach him and he of refused . What i do think is i think the militarization of response is one of the lessons, there is too much firepower and the firepower itself, i know you have to protect yourself, but theres too much firepower and the power then turn the demonstration from the vietnam war to the purveyor themselves. Do you think Campus Police should be armed . Thank you very much. If you wrote a followup, this is a commercial for the Visitors Center in taylor hall. Its open from nine to five monday through friday in a very son saturdays print i strongly recommend, you can do it in about an hour and its a terrific telling of the may 4 story. One last one . I graduated in 1967 so i was long gone by then but i do remember, i lived lived in johnson hall in 1964, the fraternities and sororities, they had stuff going on there was a guy in my dorm by the name of doc edwards who was an organizer of a group called the Kent Committee to end the war in vietnam. They marched in the campus day parade, right down to what is now called 59 but was then route five on e. Main st. It was a prayed that when all the way downtown. It was a big festival. I also knew tony walsh. These guys were there before this confrontation so this was the original concerns about the escalation of vietnam. When johnson took over, he suddenly escalated and by 66, we had 500,000, we had, we had half a million men in vietnam. The events of vietnam in that period from 65 until 70 dramatically framed what led up to this. It was a loss of innocence. We lost kennedy and 63 and Martin Luther king in 68. We mentioned this already. They had a wonderful description of jim rhodes. He said he looked like a football player