But that provoked visits from the fbi. My father who was a republican had his taxes audited so it really didnt take much. They were all over the place. Lets not forget j. Edgar hoover was in power. It was his own secret police. It infiltrated a lot of womens groups and they were considered dangerous to the country. Thank you all for coming i would love to sign books. [applause] between the author of the newly released from action book and the interviewer who is a journalist, policymaker or legislator familiar and also with the opposing viewpoint. It airs every saturday at 10 p. M. Eastern and we will take you across the country visiting book festivals offer even and look parties to talk about the latest books. The National Network devoted exclusively to nonfiction books. Book tv on cspan2, television for serious readers. Booktv and primetime continues with books on global politics. At 8 p. M. On the less you know the better you sleep looking for russia. Politics and mexico and 9 30 on choosing a hero looking at Ellen Johnson rise to the liberian presidency. Iand 67 shots the National Guard shooting at Penn State University on may 4, 1970 which resulted in the death of four students in the wounding of nine others. He spoke about it at the Hudson Library and historicalibrarian d hudson ohio [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] good evening. Welcome to the Hudson Library historical society. We are so happy that you are here for this event. Im one of the reference librarians here and tonight we are honored to welcome howard means to discuss his book, 67 shots. At the main campus where they may for the shooting took place we are very excited to have this program of national and local interest. Mr. Means is a biographer and editor of the washingtonian. Hes the author and coauthor of ten books and some of his other works include the adventure takes its place, Andrew Johnson and the 45 days that changed the nation. The Johnny Appleseed the man, the myth and the american story and he wrote the first biography on colin powell. Please join me in welcoming mr. Means. [applause] thank you, amanda. Amanda is also herself a very accomplished novelist and she should be giving this talk instead of me that you are stuck with me today. I talked to a number of people here that were at penn state. Can you hear me . Standup, raise your hand, let me see you. Okay. This is a scary. I want to point out jerry gary lewis. Some of you were taking the course for over 55 and it is. Or im going to do is start this talk with a slideshow to get us on the same page of the times antimesand what the noise was o4 and so the people who were not bear can envision what the situation looked like. It all began it begins april 30, 1970. The evening Richard Nixon addresses the nation previously two weeks earlier announced it was going to be a drawdown in vietnam with 150,000 troops and on april 30 he announces instead of the war is going to be expanded into cambodia. Any of you that were in vietnam or that would have been surprised at th the war would be expanded since it was already in cambodia and over the border. But it shocked the nation and nixon expected blowback on american campuses and he got it. Not very dramatically at penn state. Heres mixing addressing the nation. And you might right there is but he particularly talked about and that is a part of cambodia but its closer to saigon as the tour is to washington. It was a strange talk. He got up and a geography teacher he got up behind the desk pointed to the map and sat back down very strange looking. Well, the next day, friday, may 1, there were two demonstrations. This is a group that called itself the whor. Dont get excited yet. They are bearing the constitution right there. Theres a second constitution about the students that looked to be fairly tame and for president robert wyatt offers a previous commitment t to go to mason city iowa for a meeting at the testing group. That night, things fall apart. Heres what it looked like at tt about 11 30 at night. Lets set the stage. Cant they campus. I dont know about you but it was a bar owners dream an as he felt bloated and nasty by the time you got there so there were a lot of factors involved. But around midnight, they come out and light a fire in the street, Start Talking about vietnam and eventually race down the street and throw some rocks and other things. The mayor declares they have to be closed so now theyve been drinking and a lot of them were there to watch College Campuses tthat go on at about midnight. A lot of them are also there to see this man perform. Anybody recognize this guy . Dot will chamberlain in the nba title series and this was not the quarterfinals. It would be held until august sometime. Will chamberlain, gary west etc. This starts on the west coast at midnight, five minutes after, they closed the bar down the street. Okay, so ugliness ensues. The problem here is the city had already been prompted by the times and the fbi to assume the worst of any demonstration. One of the reason was to stand. Anybody recognize him . He had the talk two weeks before sanctioned by the universit unid one of the things he said was he was the founder and youth party and they took the vote. Those of you that were there in order to start the revolution you have to first tell your parents. Jerry lewis told me that the next day not even speaking metaphorically so you have all that and theres 50,000 worth of damage and it turns out to be 10,000 depending on the revised estimate of the chamber of commerce estimates which is even lower and nonetheless in the hours i cant remember he calls governor jim rhodes office. He makes his first inquiry about bringing the National Guard to attend. To the best of my knowledge if it existed at all it was minimal. Some of you make a member he was the dean of student activities. I asked him about it and it had nothing to do with the campus and when i looked there were all these students we just didnt know who they were. He said i wouldnt argue if you sit zero. Said zero. So any rate its now the year of the Governors Office the governor is coming. Anybody know who that is, colleen was ms. France for darned good reason as far as im concerned. [laughter] so they close the bars and the university does a great job. They bring in movies like thunderbolt and forget about one thing though. They dont protect the rotc building. If one thing was predictable is that the building was going to come under assault. When the demonstrations were going on why were the buildings still standing, those of you that lived at that time you know that they were the most ready symbol of their military power on campus. They leave the building unprotected and when doug are defined the role it is lit up in red and thats what it looks like when they finally disembark it looks like it is caught on fire and burst into flames. This is the first time it comes on campus and this is what the y see. This is what it looked like. This is an important shot because it sets the stage for monday. Thats where the students will run up and this is a prime piece of real estate. Thats one reason why perhaps nobody defended the building. It didnt help when they came out and started attacking the hoses because this was prime real estate but if you let people burn down the building, they take it as an okay sign. It was a terrible message to send to the students. So this is saturday. Sunday, may 3. He then asked a debate the night before with the Senate Republican primary and he was trailing by 70,000 votes and the primarin theprimary is on tuesdt day. This is a chance for him to energize and hes not going to pass it up. He has a press conference and he calls the people that have been doing these demonstration adhesives memorably we are no longer going to treat the symptoms we are going to eradicate the problem. He said strangely provocative language but he could see, and i will give this away and he loses 5,000 votes on tuesday. He closes the 65,000 o 65,000 oe 70,000 vote margin before the shootings. Heres what they look like on sunday. I like this one because you have this sort of campus scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Everything looked altogether. Thats the situation there and this is how a accepts this. Youve got a campus. They are chasing people back to the dormitories and by monday morning its not a confrontation but about the vietnam anymore. When you talk to person after person they all say the same thing. Its at that point it fell apart anit was us against the guard. So theyve got an occupied campus, guards at the gate, but the music and Speech Therapy building if anybody can confirm that, i think thats what it is. And Everybody Knows theres going to be a confrontation afternoon on the commons. Its no secret professors are talking about it, Everybody Knows whats going to happen. And this is what this team looks like. This is the whole end of it. That is a closeup. Thats jeffrey lewis, sorry, and he has 24 minutes to live at this point. What are they holding in their arms, and m1. There could be worse whether to do crowd control with. It is evil to half a mile. If you line 250 people and three people at 250 yards out the round will pass through all and if you hit an engine block it will move the engine block unless it is sitting inside the car and they have incredible speed and power and it is a terrifying instrument. You can let people get close enough to you and when i look back at this and the more i thought about it and i spent months and months thinking about it i kept coming back to the images from 1965 in birmingham alabama you remember crowd control in the streets in a virtuosic absolutely humanitarian crowd control. I never thought i would think of him as a humanitarian but in that comparison this is what they had to do crowd control with. One more thing also monday may 4 who was at the restaurant at noon, the president of the Vice President , all the senior administrators they started to talk about what they were going to do once the guard left the campus. The president had come back sunday midday. He was a 23yearold or 24yearold graduate assistant detailed to the office he was in charge representing the interest on the campus at th of the momel this happened. He couldnt see anything, he has no idea who hes talking to. The communication between the Senior Administration and the restaurant and the campuses. Its pretty inexcusable. Okay, now they are saying about the tear gas is a 17mile per hour wind. You knew there was a 17mile per hour wind and how much loss you are going to get and yet this was the basic need for the crowd control. So i have a little schematic. This is where the National Guard starts out and this is where the kids are in the hillside of taylor hall and its kind of a natural. They will push the people over the hill and go over the company there is a group of students here. There is a man that was in the company that day. They go this way and stay at the top of the hill. What have the students done. There can be no crowds on the campus. They run back and say three people. I come up and join in the conversation. He said he hoped with all of his heart when he got to the top of the hill but the students could have dissipated. Dissipated. Without the chance of a student dissipating. The guard will then chase them down and they will march for a second. One thing you never do is march your troops into a culdesac. This is where they turn into fires of it as a sort of basic movement. This is the product this field yocontains the defense behind them. This is the first time that today they kneeledaythey kneeleh line and about ten or five minutes right now they wont repeat this gesture when they get up to go down to the skirmish line. They go back up the hill into the students naturally think they are retrieving. They start chasing after them and taunting them. This is where they turn and start firing. These closeups do any of you know him when he is there, the photographer. They are about 30 feet further up the hill. They start diving in the parking lot for protection and then we get to i dont want to horrify anybody but this is what happened. This is john cleary. The first person is Douglas Mckenzie who is 250 yards away, two and a half football fields walking away when he shot through the neck from the back, if mrs. His spine and 250 yards away. John cleary was 37 yards away. He was shot in the test from 37 yards away. Very distinctive looking. He was an army rotc scholarship. He decided he didnt like his major and transferred over. He was a freshman at the rotc class on the freshman basketball team. They stopped to have a look at what was happening and theres one photograph you see in sort of holding like this between classes looking and saying whats this all about, just curiosity. This is the photo that appeared in all the newspapers, High School Yearbook photos and it sort of, i think it exaggerated that sense of innocence lost to these, look at these innocent faces. Its horrifying. And this is not the famous photograph which shows her hands up like this. This is one taken just before that i think when she is just realize what happened david person sitting next to her lying in the gutter next to her. Thats jeff miller. For some reason thats a more powerful moment and i dont know why, that first realization before she was raising her arms. And then so, stop doing that. Okay here at the killed and you can see here at the wounded in that stud mckenzie there. The guard goes back to its original formation back here. There are group of students that it never left over here and now the students start filtering back and they are telling them what happened and the anger and i dont know how many people were on that side on blanket hill at that point but this is really in away the most ball pulled time of the whole incident. The card is now facing the crowd and the guard goes only one thing to do when its facing a crowd launch forward and disperse it. The students are not going to disperse. 20 of them i think roughly have excess on their chest and therefore heads and a lot of people i talked to said they were ready to charge. They felt so angry that dam the consequences. And they didnt. This confrontation taking place is largely due to one man i think, Glenn Franklin every director. How many of you have done frank reports that you know Clinton Franks story. Former marine. He still looked like a marine. And geology professor. He has been a life or practically i cant and he has a double which i realize after doing this. [laughter] do you recognize true kerry . The funny part about this is true kerry went to kent state. He was there in 1975. He flunked out after year and dropped out of after year. I thought if anybody was going to ever make this movie kerry should play glenn frank. Glenn frank throws himself between two groups. Okay, thanks. They had this confrontation and you can see the glenn frank there was film footage and the so i could music here but many people were there and he starts basically begging and crying and he has tears in his voice in his poisonous some pointy ball down to the ground and i think to receive falls down to the ground is the ground this one is a motion and two hes an exmarine and he has looked at these kids and he said they have saw that they had been assembled and now they were all ducks in a pond. Finally the moment breaks in the kids disperse and the event has ended but it would have been, there were 80 guardsmen left down there. 640 rounds and if they had a annex it would have been horrible. And then, im sorry one big thing. So the white house, go back to the white house. H. R. Bob haldeman chief of staff on monday afternoon wakes nixon up from a nap and tells him what is happening. Nixon come he says immediately horrified, he is afraid his buddy has done this but then he immediately sets out in demands basically haldeman and jake or hoover to find out if outside agitators were responsible for this and that becomes a the story at the white house. Spiro agnew to you recognize. Spiro agnew was the jerry rubin of the right. One of nixons first order is to shut agnew up and dont let him talk. You cant shut spiro agnew off. He goes on the david fall shawnee says that think it was murder too andys horrified the white house but he went on to say come he went on to sort of say well it was murder to but it was inexcusable murder to. You can. More about that and then the next night, friday night what i call the night of the and you might remember this photograph. Richard nixon gets a press conference and he thinks its very successful. He goes back to his bedroom and he cant sleep. He makes 87 calls in three hours , 30 of them to Henry Kissinger and finally it 3 30 he shakes his ballet and he said have you ever been to the Lincoln Memorial . You have to understand the white house at this point is ringed by d. C. Transit buses. The 82nd airborne are sleeping in the executive Office Building basement. There are tens of thousands of demonstrators at the mall to protest especially the kent state shootings in Richard Nixon decides it would be a great time to show manila the Lincoln Memorial so they go down. These are demonstrators are respecting down there and i love the expressions. You know hes saying to himself, what drug did i take . [laughter] after this he says i have never seen that the secret service are petrified of my life city can imagine only to search to secret Service People there. He says to manila have ever seen the well of the house of representatives where the state of the Union Directors arent he says no. They go from there to the house of representatives and the wakes up security there and puts manila up there and goes back and sits down and comes to Say Something and its just. Richard nixon at his absolute weirdest but theres one thing even more horrible and what happened at kent state in happened more recently and this is my last flight. I dont know if you saw this pressure. Urban outfitters put the sweatshirt on for sale and they said when they were questioned zero company its natural wear and tear and random coloration. Well among other things thats almost exactly where Alison Krause was shot and its just appalling that they would do this. Its one of the reasons, its one of the things that made me me in a way write this book. I have come to the end. I just like. The University Change the logo. I graduated in 67 and 67 was when they were transitioning the steel of this the seal of the state of ohio. Does anybody know how to turn this thing off . So i apologize for that image. Thanks. Im sorry i forgot to get my book while i was doing this. So thats basically the book and its a story i started to tell and i didnt know frankly. I knew i wanted to tell it and i knew after i saw the sweatshirt i had to tell it in a way and then i discovered which i should have discovered earlier that the university had 130 oral histories that they collected. These archival people at the kent cannes state library deserve medals, everyone of them the Public Library there is, they did a spectacular job collecting information. So what i had tells the story which basically 130 memories and then i supplemented that with interviewing so let me just give you a sense of what that meant from my writing point of view. Every time i came to some moment in the story i had some buddies memory. For example friday night, a woman named Diane Gallagher was working at it pizza joint on water street when just the spirit of the times somebody comes bursting in the door and says, this is after they took a ride on the streets, the revolution has begun, the revolution has begun so naturally she took her apron off and joined the resolution the revolution and gave pizza job. A guy named Danny Benedict, Danny Benedict was the guy in the dormitory and he tells the story the resident advisers stopped the project and says to the students, the rotc building is on fire the National Guard is coming to campus. You cant leave the building. What is the kid going to do . He runs out in the front door is locked and he jumps through the laundry room window and starts running through the main door gate and he comes to the corner. He turns around and races back to the dorm as fast as he can. Jim zachariah la, talk about getting ready for the confrontation on monday he had 50 other people in his dorm room. It must have been a heck of a big dorm room. There was a fair amount if erewhon involved in helping put a guy named henry minkowski, he talked about he was hitting up parking lot and standing next to bill shorter when he was hit. He is a 190 pound guy and hes lifting him off his feeding carrying him through the air back which just tore me apart. He was sitting in there at the Crisis Communication Center trying to make sense of the chaos to communicate that somehow the people in the administration in the restaurant check ayers. Wellknown from whats the comic strip . Crankshaft. He had been out photographing. He decides when the guards start matching marching up the hill that the excitement is over, that retreat is onta reverses back to kens later to turn in his film. He gets in there and hes just trying to get his film out and the kid comes rushing in, freshman. He goes under a desk and starts crying, again. I still get tearful. William easley who was it that vietnam veteran and student told another story. He saw jeff miller on the street lying there and he said he sat down by a tree, under a tree and started crying. There is a lot of crying in the story. Diane peabody didnt get to the demonstrations because she and her friend were late so they went back to their dormitory and she doesnt know what has happened. She sees people running toward her dormitory and she sees her boyfriend running towards the dormitory and she runs out to meet him and he breaks down in tears and falls down to the ground. He thought she might have been hurt and just stories like this all over the place. Even the guardsmen in the oral histories are underrepresented. The guardsmen were deposed. The court action went on for 11 years i think it was, 10 years. If you read the guardsmens depositions and try to make sensible was going on in their heads, at first they all hew to the same party line. We heard incoming super responded but as we get further out you get it deeper sense of people going on in their heads. There was one guy private fourth class named William Perkins who said in his last deposition within 25 feet from my end i was being hit from every point of my body in such a manner that in rome and they put people to death. He tried to be poetic. I read enough accounts like that but i think for majority there was that sense that there was a riot going on in their heads. There was nobody 25 feet from him. The closest person was three times that distance but i think in their heads they thought. There was a woman named roseland he was in the backyard with a bunch of mothers and babies. She had a little 11monthold and there was a roofer working next door listening to the radio and all of a sudden he shouts down all go my god, they have shot the guardsmen, they have shot the guardsmen said the story when out that way and initially the the communication come at the miscommunication went nationwide and they are traveling around the country and i find myself on the social media today what it was like then. There would have been a flash crowds and would have been horrible afterward. There were too many people that were too harmed by fear and did not happen. A woman named barbara who is not there at all pray she was one of the 19,000 cannes state students who were nowhere near what it happened. She was working on a mural anatomy paper peer she was a senior. She said for the next five years she had poster mattock stress syndrome and away because she hadnt been there. You can still get emotional when he talked about this and people tell me the book is an intense. And i think it probably is an intense. I felt a lot of this very meesf pe doing it. Then one i saw the grotesque Urban Outfitters at it made me determined to get it right. Finally the question was how to start the book and have ended and i wrestle with that for a long time. I dont want to give a spoiler alert about the prologue that i decided the only way could do it and be true to what i thought was important was to start the book was in vietnam on may 4, 1970 in vietnam and to tell and very abbreviated forms for stories of the 24 people that died that day in vietnam. 17 people died that day in vietnam in 1970 but there were some midair collision between two helicopters just about exactly the time the shooting took place that killed another seven people. And then as i got to that point i realized you think of the antiwar as binary but they are not binary. It wasnt them and us. There was a guy named timothy defrantz who was one of the more moving stories in all these oral interviews. Timothys brother had been killed 19 days in his first tour of duty in vietnam. Timothy defrantz was a Senior Education major, student teaching. I forget exactly where but he heard about the shootings at rest rush to the hospital where his father was dying of prostate cancer. He gets there and they are bringing in the wind did and his mother standing there and his father dies at the exact moment that they are bringing the first wounded in. She told a story about how protesters threw a bottle through the window at her head and there were protesters. She was very sympathetic to the cause. She had a nephew she raised after his mother died. He was shot on his first tour of duty getting out of the helicopter and never even hit the ground in vietnam when he was killed. Another veteran albert kirk so i tried to tell the afterward for the book to some extent through their eyes and then i thought i could really quickly i wanted to read just the final page and a half of the book and it doesnt give anything away. Dont let it discourage you from buying the book. I will get my glasses on too. I had the smarts that of course i messed that up. In exactly the sense what happens at 12 24 p. M. 4 00 p. M. On blanket hill ide been murder in the second degree. Spiro agnew told david frost. More likely was a manslaughter voluntary or otherwise but the jury would have convicted the guardsmen at that time seems unlikely. Even without residual roadblocks. Trial jury photos respect and treat them with a heavy dose of common sense. Common sense tells anyone that the guardsmen called to duty at kent state was trained in crowd control and in the 24 minutes that preceded shootings used the wrong tools complete a mission. That the guard was there as all resulted in an earlymorning call that never should be made to students behave poorly in some cases criminally in downtown kent on the night of friday, may 1. Way too much beer was publicly just as much for a bigger reason the windows never should have been smashed. This was a charge moment in american history. The air was fraught with rumors of wars to calm good weather for the insult in other regards he reacted when he found the office of Ohio Governor jim rhodes in the wee hours of saturday morning and saw an opening he could run through all the way to the u. S. Senate
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