amanda: good evening. welcome to the hudson library historical society. we are so happy you are here for the event. i am amanda flower, one of the here, andlibrarians tonight we are honored to welcome howard means to discuss kentew book " 67 shots: state and the end of american innocence." campus,state's main only 10 miles from here, where the shooting took place. we are very excited to have this program of national and local interest. mr. means is a editor at the washingtonian, author and co-author of 10 books, including "andrew johnson and the 45 days that changed the nation," "johnny appleseed: the man, the myth, an american story," and the first biography on colin powell. please join me in welcoming mr. means. [applause] means: i also wrote "67 shots." [laughter] thank you, amanda. veryaa herself is also a accomplished novelist in detective, mystery stories, won an agatha christie award. but you are stuck with me instead. i talked with a number of people who were at kent state, in 1970. can you hear me? everyone who was at kent state in 1970, stand up, raise your hand. let me see you. ok. wow. this is scary. this is really scary. [laughter] feel free to correct as i go. no, wait until the end to correct. i want to point out gary, can you stand up back there? jerry was a great help to me in getting contacts, writing the book. some of you taking this course on kent state. i will start the talk with a slideshow just to get us all on the same page about the time, what the background noise was to what happened on may 4, so people who were not at kent state can envision what the situation would look like. itall begins, you could say begins anywhere, but it begins april 30, 1970, the evening richard nixon addresses the nation. two weeks earlier he announced they would be a drawdown in vietnam of 150,000 troops on , and on april 30 he announces instead the war will expand into cambodia. vietnamyou who were in in 1970 would not be surprised, because the war was already in cambodia across the border. it shocked the nation. nixon expected blowback on american campuses, and he got it. here is nixon addressing the nation. what het, right there, particularly talked about, a part of cambodia that he said is closer to saigon than baltimore is to washington. a very strange talk, actually. there is a second demonstration about two hours later. both of them look fairly tame, so the president robert white decides to honor a previous commitment and go to mason city, iowa. that night, things fall apart. here's what it looked like in the streets at kent about 11:30 at night. let's set the stage. the first warm day of spring. campus day. you told me that earlier, campus day. for those of you who were there, remember, they sold beers in kent. 3-2 beers,lot of and it was a bar owner's dream because you had to drink twice as much beer as if it was 6.4% beer and you felt bloated and nasty. . there were a lot of factors involved. a little before midnight, some kids come out and light a fire cars, street, stopping talking about vietnam. they eventually race down, throw some rocks and other things through windows. timeayor about this declared bars have to be closed. so now you have all these kids coming out of bars. they had been drinking. a lot of them were there to watch bands. as you know, headliners go on around midnight. a a lot of them were also there to see this man perform. anybody recognize this guy? one of the most prolific scorers in nba history, will chamberlain. game four of the nba titles series, not the wu quarterfinals. wilt chamberlain, jerry west, willis reed, etc. a great game. this game starts on the west coast at midnight, and five minutes after it starts, they close the bars, spilling out onto the street. ugliness ensues. the other problem here is that the city of kent had been prepped by the times and the fbi to assume the worst in any demonstrations. one of the reasons was this man. anybody recognize him? jerry rubin had a talk at kent two weeks before, a talk sanctioned by the university. one of the things he said at that talk, jerry rubin was in street theater, worked with abbie hoffman for the youth international party, the yipp ies. jerry like to provoke. if any of you were there, he said, in order to start the revolution, you have to first kill your parents. hisy told me he said to students the next day, he was speaking metaphorically, right? no, he meant it! understandably, this upset the residents of kent somewhat that a bunch of kids were being counseled to kill parents. you have all that. around after he gets everyone cleared off the streets, estimates $50,000 of damage. turns out to be $10,000 or $5,000, depending on what you take as the revised chamber of commerce estimate. nonetheless, in the wee hours of the morning he called the governor's office and said there had been trouble in the streets sds students were involved and he makes his first inquiry about bringing the national guard to kent. to the best of my knowledge or anybody's knowledge, the sds presence on the streets of kent on friday night if it existed at all was absolutely minimal. the dean of student activity, i asked about it, he said, i felt when i looked at the photographs when this was over i would see sds and weathermen all over, and when i looked at them, they were our students, we just didn't know who they were. sds were how many involved and he said i wouldn't argue if you said zero. but it is now in the ear of the governor that sds is coming to kent. anyone know who that is with sean connery? [laughter] claudine auger. she was miss france in 1958, and for darn good reason as far as i'm concerned. [laughter] saturday, they close the bars. kids can't leave campus, restricted to campus. the university does a great job. they bring in movies like "thunderball" to show. but they forget about one thing. they don't protect the rotc building. if one thing was predicable on saturday night in kent, that the rotc building would come under assault. there was a big sign in the commons on friday when the demonstrations went on, why is the rotc building still standing? those who lived through that time, rotc buildings were attacked nationwide, as the most ready symbol of the military presence on campus is. kent state administration leaves the building essentially unprotected. when the guard rolled in from akron, the skies lit up red, and that's what it looked like when they disembarked. they said it looked like it caught on fire, like it was put out, and then it burst into flames. this is the first time the guard comes on campus and that's what they see, what it looked like. rotc building looking east, and rotc building looking south. this is important, because it sets the stage for monday. the commons behind the rotc building and taylor hall, where a prime -- this is a prime piece of real estate and every academic department wanted this property, one reason perhaps why nobody defended the building. [laughter] why the campus police stood aside and let it earn down, basic -- burn down, basically, did not help the fire department when they came out, because this was prime real estate. letbody explained, if you people burn down a building, they take it as a green light, an ok sign. it was a terrible message to send to the students. so, this is saturday. jim comes to, kent. he's in a debate the night before with robert taft jr., senatorial primary. friday,by one poll on was trailing by 70,000 votes, and the primary is on tuesday. town ands comes to this is a chance to energize his law & order base and he's not going to pass it up. he has a press conference, calls with people doing these demonstrations wore than brownshirts, worse than night riders, and he says memorably, we are no longer going to treat the symptoms, we are going to eradicate the problem. one, is incredibly provocative, irresponsible language. jim rhodes was rallying his base. i will give it away, he loses by closes to on tuesday, within that margin in the days before the shootings. here's what campus looked like. i like this shot, so regular. and i love this one, the campus scene. guards. have the but everything altogether. this is more questionable, but there was a lot of that going on. at night, it all falls apart again. students mass at the main gate, lincoln street. for those who were there, they want to march on the town and the guard says no. there is a confrontation. it gets ugly. that's the situation right there. this was how sunday night ends, except these are scenes, the kind of equipment the guards brought with them to kent. five fullycampus, armored personal carriers and eight of these light and medium helicopters, four heavy helicopters, and of course are carrying m1's. those who were there remember, that is the night of the helicopters, teargas flying everywhere, chasing people back to dormitories. by monday morning when people woke up, it's not a confrontation about vietnam anymore, but a confrontation about the guard having taken over the campus. when you talk to person after person after person, they all say it is the same thing. at that point, it was us against the guard. and so, kids wake up monday, have an occupied campus, guards at the gate. the parking lot of the music and speech therapy building, i think that is what it is. there'srybody knows going to be a confrontation at noon on the commons. there's no secret. professors are talking about it in class. it is scribbled on blackboards. everybody knows it's going to happen. this is what it looks like at noon on the commons. kids massed. a close-up. that's jeffrey lewis. [laughter] sorry, jeff. that's jeffrey miller right there, and he has 24 minutes to live at this point. this is the guard, and what are they holding their arms? m1's. there could not be a worse weapon to do crowd control with. those of you who have been in military duty, m1's, an m1, if 3 people up at 250 yards out, the round will pass through all three of them. an m1, if you hit an engine block with it, it will move the engine block sitting inside a car. m1 has incredible speed, power, energy, a terrifying instrument. all you can do with an m1 and a bayonet for crowd control is let people get close enough slice to stab them, slive -- them. the more i thought about this, the images from 1965, from rememberm, alabama, doing crowd control in the streets of birmingham with dob ermans, water cannons. in retrospect, absolutely humanitarian crowd control. i never thought i would think of him as a humanitarian, but by that comparison. this is what they had to do crowd control with. the other thing, excuse me, sorry, one more thing. -- also monday, may 4, the brown derby restaurant. who was at the brown derby? the president, the vice president, all the senior administrators. every senior administrator was at the brown derby restaurant having lunch to talk about what they were going to do when the guard left the campus. the president came back sunday at midday, was there, too. there is a crisis communications center, a windowless room in the administration building. 24uy named ray was 23, years old, a graduate assistant detailed to president white's office. he was resenting the administration's interest on the kent state campus at the moment all this happened. he couldn't see anything. he told me he was talking to people with walkie-talkies, no idea who he is talking to. that's the state of to munication between the senior administration officials at the brown derby restaurant and the campus. pretty inexcusable. ok. the guard moves out. teargas. notice anything about the teargas? it is dissipating, because there's a 70 mile-per-hour wind. gas wask of tear quantifiable. you knew you had x amount of canisters, you knew you had 70 mile-per-hour wind and you know how much loss you will get firing into the wind, yet this is their principal means for crowd control other than m1's and bayonests. i have a little schematic here. rotcis where the building burned. this is where the national guard starts at noon. this is where the kids are. it's kind of like a baseball stadium, the right-field line, the left-field line, deep centerfield where the bell is. the guard will come up and push people over the hill. the bulk will go over company a, troop g this way. a group of students that goes here. this is company c. they go over here and stay at the top of the hill. they run up, get to the top of the hill, and what have the students down? their mandate is the ohio riot act, there can be no crowds on the campus. a guardsman runs you off, says, three people. i think jerry was telling me that. so if two students are talking, i join them, it's an illegal crowd? yeah. it's an insane mandate. they take off. they are up here. the mission commander and assistant adjutant general of the ohio national guard says he hoped with all his heart when they got to the top of the hill the students would have dissipated. what are the chances of students dissipating? come on. they've been run down here, down to the parking lot here. the guards will chase them down, marchescally canterbury his troops into a cul-de-sac down there. on two sides. one thing you never do is march your troops into a cul-de-sac. company c stays here, turns around. this concrete structure, that's where they turn and fire. so that's the basic movement of the thing. this is the practice field they march them down. you can see there. this is the first time that day line.orm a skirmish this is allen, as some of you may know. he will be shot in the wrist about 10 minutes from now. they repeat this gesture when they get to the pagoda, on one knee in a skirmish line. this is the situation. they go back, start retreating up the hill, and the students think they are retreating and we have won, start taunting them. that gets to the pagoda. this is where they first turn and start firing. who was, oncolonel the field command. these close-ups, a guy named howard, any of you know him, a photographer? he did wonderful work. the was another close-up, moment robert canterbury basically turns, about 30 feet further up the hill, when he turns and first season firing. so, they're firing at this point. students start diving in the parking lot, dashing for protection. then we get to, and i don't want to harp on it, but this is what happened. this is john cleary. let me go back, one second. the first person, the most distant person shot was a guy named douglas mckenzie. douglas mckenzie is 250 yards away, 2.5 football fields, walking away, when he is shot through the neck and the back. the bullet misses his spine by an inch and exits through his jaw. 250 yards away. that gives you some sense of the power of an 1. john cleary was 37 yards away. he brought an instamatic, and was shot in the chest from 37 yards away. he survived but barely, spent three days in intensive care. then the dead. you'll recognize these photos. very distinctive looking, very baez whenink of joan so lat t her, looks e-1960's antiwar movement. phil schroeder. you know the story. he won an army rotc scholarship. he went to colorado college of mines, didn't like his major there and transferred to kent state to be a psychology major. was number two in his rotc class, freshman rotc. was on the basketball team, when they had freshman teams. he stopped by to have a look at what was happening. one photograph, you see him sort of holding his books like this going between classes, looking like, what is this all about? just curiosity. this was the one that breaks my heart every time i try to talk about it. pathology major and by every indication did not have a political bone in her body. she was walking from one class to another, exactly what kids are supposed to do on a college campus. more about her in a second. and this is jeffrey miller. jeffrey miller was probably of the group the most active. you saw, he darted around a lot, probably shouting and other things could he was shot in the things he wasther shot in the mouth, suggesting intentionality in a horrible sort. it sortere photos, and of exaggerated the sense of innocence loss. look at these innocent faces. just horrifying. and this is not the famous photograph of the hands up like this, looking like edvard m unch's "scream," but this is just before it. when she just realize what is happening to the person, lying next to her. for some reason to me, that is a more powerful photo. i don't know why. the moment of realization before the shock, raising the arms. then, back to this one time. doing that. there we go. [laughter] killed down here, the k's, and the wounded back there. the guard goes back to its original formation. a group of students who never left our over here. now, students start filtering back, and they're telling them what happened. the anger. i don't know how many of you were on that side, but this is really in a way the most volatile time of the whole incident. the guard is now facing a crowd, and the guard knows only one thing to do when it faces a crowd, march forward and disperse it. the students are not going to disperse. 20 of them roughly have stripped to the waist and painted x's on their chest adnd forehead. i talked to people who said they were ready to charge. they were so angry, damn the consequences. thisthey didn't, that confrontation did not take place, is largely due to one man named glenn frank. when you read the record. how many of you had glenn frank for a course? you know his story. former marine. geologist. he still looked like a marine. if you've ever seen a marine in mufti. geology professor. had a double, i realized when i was doing this. [laughter] you recognize drew carey? the fun part about this, drew carey went to kent state, as you may know. he was there in 1975. he dropped out after a year. if anyone makes the movie, drew carey should play glenn frank. so, glenn frank throws himself between the two groups. with the beard and the megaphone, can you tell? [laughter] confirmation.t ok. thanks. but they had this confrontation. theren see, glenn frank, is film footage that i could not use here, but if any of you were there, he starts basically begging, crying, and at some point he falls to the ground. the reason, one is the emotion he, two, he's ex-marine, sees that they have been encircled by national guardsmen. so now the position is ducks in a pond. finally, the moment breaks, the kids disperse and the event is ended. but it would have been, there were 80 guardsmen left back there who'd never fired anything, eight rounds in the 640 rounds and bayonets. and one quick thing. back to the white house. the chief of staff on monday afternoon wakes nixon from a nap, tells him what's happened. nixon is immediately horrified, afraid his cambodia speech has done this, but then immediately j. edgars basically hoover find evidence outside agitators were responsible for this, and that becomes the storyline. spiro agnew, who you will recognize, he was t kind of the jerry rubin of the right, was theater, too. one of nixon's first orders is don'tt agnew up and let him talk. you can't shut spiro agnew up. three days after, he goes and says it is murder two, just horrifies the white house. he went on to say it was murder two, but sort of excusable murder two. you can read more about that. the next the next night, friday night is what i call the night of the weird. richard nixon gives a press conference. he goes back to his bedroom. he can't sleep. he makes 87 calls in three hours. 30 of them to henry kissinger. at 3:30, he shakes his valet and says have you ever been to the lincoln memorial? the white house at this point is ringed by d.c. transit buses. a fleet is sleeping in the executive office basement. there are tens of thousands of demonstrators in the mall to protest the can state shootings. nixon thought it would be a great time to show the lincoln memorial. they go down. these are demonstrators sleeping down there. i love the expressions. they are saying to themselves, what drug did i take? [laughter] >> this goes on horribly. seen thei have never secret service so petrified in my life. you can imagine there are only two secret service people there. he says have you ever seen the well of the house of representatives? he says no. they go from there to the house of representatives. he wakes up security and puts unionere the state of the addresses are given. it was richard nixon at his absolute weirdest. there is one more thing that is horrible that happened at kent state more recently, and that is my last slide. i don't know if you ever saw this sweatshirt. urban outfitters put this sweatshirt on sale. they said when they were questioned, oh, it is natural wear and tear and coloration. among other things, that is wher e alison krauss was shot. it is appalling they would do this. it is one of the things that drove me to write this book. ent that straight off -- scre off. that is too ugly to show. i guess i could -- >> the university changed the logo by 1970. >> was that not it? yeah. >> i graduated in 1967. changed thatthey logo, which was basically the seal of the state of ohio. >> anybody know how to turn this thing off? ge.pologize for that ima thanks. sorry, i forgot to get my book out while i was doing this. that is the backdrop to the book. the question was, how am i going to tell it? i didn't know, frankly. i knew after i saw the sweatshirt i had to tell it in a way. i discovered that the university had 130 oral histories they collected. the archival people at the kent state library deserve medals, every one of them. -- thelic library att public library and there -- li brarian there did a fantastic job. i had 130 memories and supplemented that with my own interviewing. let me give a sense of what that meant from a rating point of view. -- writing point of view. every time i came to some moment in the story, i had somebody's memory. friday night, a woman named diane was working at a pizza joint on water street. somebody comes bursting in the door and her friend says the revolution has begun. so naturally she took her apron off and joined the revolution, gave up her pizza career job. dormitorya guy in the . a tells the story that resident advisor stops the projector, says to the students the rotc building is on fire, the national guard came to campus, you can't leave this building. what is a kid going to do? door, itut the front is locked. gate andut the main there is a truck coming to him with people lined with m1's. he races back to the dorm as fast as he can. one was talking about the competition on monday with 50 other people in his dorm room. he said they were all doing marijuana. henry talked about -- he was in the parking lot standing next to bill schroeder when he was hit. he happened to be looking at him. a 195 pound guy. he said he carried him through the air back, which tore me apart. ray, who was in the communications center, trying to make sense of chaos down below and communicate that to the people and administration. for a pretty well known comic strip. he tells the story. he had been out photographing. he decides when the guards start marching up the hill that the excitement is over. the kids have won, the retreat is on, so he rushes back to the kent stater to turn in his film. he is starting to get his film out and a kid comes rushing in. a freshman. he goes under a desk and holds his dog and starts crying. guy who was a vietnam veteran and a student told another story. he knew what it looked like when somebody bled out. he saw jeff miller on the street lying there. the treee sat under and started crying. another did not get to the demonstrations because she and her friend were late, so they went back to the dormitory. she doesn't know what has happened. she sees people running toward her dormitory. she sees her boyfriend. she runs to him and breaks down in tears. she thought he might have been hurt. stories like this all over the place. even the guardsmen in the oral histories are underrepresented, however they were deposed. there court action went on for 11 years. if you read the guardsmen in that position and try to make sense of what was going on in they hewed at first the same party line. later you get a sense of what was going on in their heads. there was a private fourth class lastaid this in his deposition, within 25 feet from my end i was being hit from every point of my body in such a daysr that in roman they would be put to death. he is trying to be poetic. i read enough accounts like that that i think for a majority of the guardsmen, there was that sense that there was a riot going on in their heads. there was nobody 25 feet from them. the closest person was three times that distance. in their heads, they thought those kids -- another woman who lived in downtown kent was in the backyard with a bunch of mothers and babies. there is a roofer working next door listening to the radio. all of a sudden he shouts down, my god, they have shot the guardsmen. for those of you who are here, the story went out that way initially. the miscommunication was nationwide. it traveled around the country. i find myself wondering what social media would have been today. i think there would have been/crowds -- flash crowds. it would have been horrible afterwards. there were too many people too harmed by fear. a woman named barbara who was not there at all. she was one of the kent state students nowhere near the commons when this happened. she was a senior. i talked to her. did it have any effect on your life? she said for the next five years it felt like she had posttraumatic stress syndrome, dean away because she hadn't been -- in a way because she hadn't been there. people tell me it is an intense read. i think it is. i felt a lot of this very intensely as i was writing it. i should have gone out and walked the dog longer between paragraphs or something. i felt like i was channeling the memories of 330 or more people when i was doing it. when i saw that grotesque urban outfitters ad, it made me determined to get it right. finally the question of how to frame the book. i wrestled with that for a long time. i don't want to give a spoiler alert about it. i finally decided the only way i could do it and be true to what i thought was important was start the book with vietnam in in abbreviatedl form the stories of the 24 people who died that day. 17 people died a day in vietnam in 1970. there was a midair collision between two helicopters just at the same time the kent state shootings took place that killed another seven people. when i got to that point, i also realized -- you think of the war as binary, but they are not binary. it wasn't there and here, them and us, they were interconnected in all sorts of ways. timothy,a guy named one of the more moving stories in the oral interviews. killed 19r had been days into his tour of duty in vietnam. senior education major, was student teaching. i forget exactly where. he heard about the shootings, rushed to the hospital where his father was dying of prostate cancer. he gets there and they are bringing in the wounded. his mother is standing there. his father died at the exact moment they started bringing the wounded in. it broke my heart. someone in the grocers office told a story about how protesters threw a bottle over her head and the glass had come down over her, but she was pathetic to the cause -- was sympathetic to the cause. william, who i mentioned earlier, another veteran. tried to tell the afterward through there -- their eyes. i wanted to read the final page and a half of the book. this doesn't give anything away, so don't let it discourage you from buying the book or reading it. [laughter] i have to get my glasses on. excuse me. then i will take questions and comments. i had this marked, but i messed that up. in the exact legal sense, what happened on blanket hill might have been murder in the second degree, spiro agnew told david frost. more likely it was manslaughter, voluntary or otherwise. finding a jury that would have convicted the guardsmen seemed unlikely, even without procedural roadblocks. trial juries respected the laws and treat them with a heavy dose of common sense. common sense would tell anyone that the guardsmen called the duty at penn state -- at kent state miserably led over the proceedings and completed a nearly impossible mission. the guard was there at all as a result of a morning call that should not have been made. tsudent performers -- studen performed horribly. way too much beer was a bigger reason. windows never should have been smashed. this was a charged moment in american history. there were rumors of what is to come. man overreacted when he found the offices of ohio governor jim rose. rose when he saw an opening could run all the way to the u.s. senate, a deus ex machina for a man with the primary looming. all of that is background noise to the kent state shootings and the larger horrors of vietnam. people died who should not have on both fronts. the permanent ones in southeast asia and the one in northeast ohio. the ways in count which both experiences etched lifetime scars. the best thing that could happen for those who still carry the kent state shootings or vietnam war close to their hearts is to get beyond who did what when. in an interview during the 20th person talkedne about an earlier speaker she would never forget. it tore my heart out, she said. i think there are real important lessons within this, but if there is no forgiveness, there is no healing, and murder goes on forever. to which i add amen. thank you for listening. [applause] i need to listen to you, please. >> [indiscernible] i am sorry, it is in the book. they were at akron. teamster strike. i also mentioned in the book they had about three hours' sleep. [indiscernible] >> he shot a gun. is there any truth to that? >> there was a photographer on top of johnson hall that was taken as a sniper. there was a guy who had a tape recorder sitting on his windowsill, now a famous tape. if you listen to it a certain way, can pick up four bang bang bangs 70 seconds before the actual shooting. that could be a guy who is -- i don't know what you call him -- the second man on the grassy knoll in this story. i think it proceeds the shooting edes thech -- prec shoot and by so much that it doesn't conform with what anybody says. i don't think the shooting was caused by sniper fire. >> i had two children in elementary school at the old university school. i went to pick them up and was told i couldn't take them out because there were snipers on the roof. i took them anyway. we literally ran out like this to get in the car to go home. >> isn't it amazing? there are a couple kids in oral interviews. one girl tells of getting on her bus. this is an elementary school bus. a big guy gets on with a baseball bat and tells them to lie on the floor. there are a lot of stories like that, terrifying stories. there are a lot of rumors sweeping through kent that the students were going to come through the sewers and attack the kmart of today. we were afraid of the water being contaminated, so i guarded that. i spent all night at the president's home with a couple guards with me. a neighbor came out in the morning and gave us coffee. forget, buted -- i we were all over. >> people forget that. there were over 1000 guardsmen. a lot of those never got on campus. kent was under martial law too. thanks for that. you reminded me of this story. this was a prominent rumor that they were going to spike the water supply at brady lake with lsd. that would have been a hell of a lot of tabs. >> just a couple comments. we know terry norman was an fbi informant. in terms of that, one of the things i was wondering about in your research, if you look at the house committee investigations at kent state in 1969 and would be willing to talk about many of these rumors -- many of these rumors you talk about are similar to tactics used in coinintelpro. i wonder what you think about the government involvement and leading to an atmosphere of distrust in the community prior to that. you talk about the protesters. >> let's remember the times. they helped to set the table for this. when kids rampage on a friday night, it fit a storyline that was not without some support. people had blown up the research labs in wisconsin. there was a lot of bad stuff going on. way, what happened at kent state was inevitable and utterly preventable. it was inevitable because all of the stuff you were just talking about all comes together in this one spot in northeast ohio in may of 1970. but at every step of the way it is utterly preventable. every party could have made a different set of decisions. that ithe storylines is keeps getting back to nixon, that there was some sort of nixon-hoover plot. said he thought kent state unhinged nixon eventually that it led to the creation of the plumbers. hoover could not find for him the outside agitators that he was sure had done this, and they had lost faith in hoover so he formed his own cointelpro in a way. good point. over here? anybody else? said hedean in his book thought kent state was the end of the nixon administration. -- young friday night could almost replicate that at most state university towns. the state -- a bunch of college students at the time they could all bite b -- all buy beer. they threw them out of the bars, which i thought was stupidity. students had been released from the county jail just a couple days earlier. back on thewas loose and all of this stuff. guard admitted they messed up because i think two days later one person testified in washington that there was a sniper on the roof, which was really insane. someone shooting on the roof, so you shoot people on the ground. they backed away from that one pretty quick. >> it made no sense. one of the most heartbreaking documents, an after action report by a general. the last question on it was, problems encountered and lessons learned. he says none. know.ust -- i don't it did me in when i read it. >> there were 67 shots fired. four students killed. how many wounded? >> none. >> so that is only 13. you would think there would have been more fatalities. >> there was a fair number shot in the air or on the ground. a guy emailed me four days ago who had been in the guard there. he eat mailed to me and said -- said two weeks later they were doing target practice. the guy said if you guys were that good at kent state, we could have killed 40. all the guardsmen who were students were horrified. they did not know what to say. they looked at the floor. the other heartbreaking stories from this are the people -- generational divides. a guy who still teaches art at kent state told me that five days afterwards, a kid came back to his house. the campus was closed. kid came back to his house. he said what are you doing? i went home and my parents shouted through the mail slot we never want to see you again. the generational divide was such a horrible time. >> do you think this sets the stage for a general disdainful look and victimizing of the students that were protesting authority that have trickled down to our domestic forces today? do you know there was an actual student shot by campus police dead because he got smart mouthed? the campus wanted him to change his parking space or something. he started to lip off to him. you can look it up on the internet. it is a very recent occurrence. did you happen to hear about the by campuss tased police while he attended a tased by campus police while he attended a lecture by joe biden? a student got up and started to ask him hard questions, as our young people are supposed to do to keep us older generation aware of what is going on. the campus police started to approach him and told him to leave and he refused, whipped out a taser. >> i think the militarization of response is one of the lessons -- one of the lessons from kent state's there was too much firepower brought from the job. there is too much firepower. the firepower turned the demonstration from the vietnam war to the purveyors of the firepower. >> do you think campus police should be armed? >> i can't answer -- i am no expert in that subject. >> thank you very much. if you want to follow up, this is a commercial for the visitors center. it is open from 9:00 until 5:00 monday through friday, varies on saturday. i strongly recommend. you can do it in an hour. it is a terrific telling of the may 4 story. >> extraordinarily well done. one last thing? >> i graduated 1967, so i was long gone by may 1970, but i do remember, because i lived in johnson hall -- the campus day parade, which was always the first weekend in may, all the dormitories, the fraternities, sororities had stuff going on. etc., song fast. there was a guy in my dorm who was an organizer of a group called the kent committee to end the war in vietnam. they marched in the campus day parade down what is now called 59 but was then route 5, east main street. that parade went all the way downtown. it was a big festival. i also knew tony. these guys were there before this confrontation. the original concerns about the escalation of vietnam. when johnson took over, he suddenly escalated. had half a million men in vietnam. vietnam and that period from 19 625 to 19 -- 19 65 to 1970 framed this. we lost martin luther king in 1968. robert kennedy -- my brother was called out for the glenville riot in 1968 when cleveland burned because of those events. this in theframe context of a bigger -- >> which i do in the book. a mayor had a wonderful description of jim rhodes, a football player that looked like he turned mortician. you have been a wonderful audience. i would be glad to sign books. i appreciate it. [applause] >> the book signing is out in the rotunda. [indistinct chatter] bookshelf features the country's best-known american history writers of the past decade talking about their books. you can watch our weekly series every wednesday at 4:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span3. on may 4, 1970, agitation over the vietnam war on the kent state diversity campus erupted into a deadly confront tatian. four students were dead and nine wounded. sunday on american history tv and washington journal, we are joined by the author of "67 shots: can state and the end of american -- kent state and the end of american innocence." he talked about the events that set the stage for the national guard firing on students during an antiwar protest. that is sunday at 9:00 a.m. eastern. >> the national council for history education moved their conference online due to the coronavirus outbreak. the session next involves high school teacher chris bunin. he shows how geographic information systems can be used to trace the source and

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