May 4, 1970, 50 years ago: A surreal day. On the campus of Kent State University, about 40 miles southeast of Cleveland in Kent, Ohio, a demonstration was held, protesting President Richard Nixon's decision to expand the Vietnam War to Cambodia. This would have disastrous consequences for Southeast Asia, both short-term and long-term.
Ohio National Guardsmen, reacting to demonstrators throwing rocks at them, opened fire. They shot 13 students, resulting in 4 deaths and 1 permanent paralysis.
It had been 11 weeks since the convictions of five of the Chicago Seven, although those convictions were overturned 2 years later. Nixon thought sending U.S. troops into Cambodia would aid the war effort.
This seemed to break his promise that he was winding the war down. This led to protests around the country, and led not only to the aforementioned Kent State Massacre, and another shooting that killed 2 at Jackson State University in Mississippi the following week. But since Jackson State was a "historically black college/university" (HBCU), it got less attention from the mainstream media.
Like the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 28, 1968, this was a day when America seemed to turn on America. Truth, justice, logic, equality, nothing seemed to matter except the selfish desires of the attackers. (UPDATE: We can now add the Insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.)
On May 8, 4 days after the Kent State Massacre, construction workers marched down 5th Avenue, in support of Nixon and the war, even attacking people protesting them near City Hall and Wall Street. It became known as the Hard Hat Demonstration: Blue-collar guys marching in New York, in support of the war, and against civil rights. The conservative backlash to a decade of liberalism was well and truly on. The day of Martin Luther King was done, and the day of Archie Bunker had begun.
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Allison Krause, born on April 23, 1951 in Cleveland, was one of the demonstrators. So was Jeffrey Miller, born on March 28, 1950 in Plainview, Long Island, New York. Not among the demonstrators, merely spectators, were Sandy Scheuer, born on August 11, 1949 in nearby Youngstown, Ohio; and William K. Schroeder, born on July 20, 1950 in Cincinnati and grew up in nearby Lorain, Ohio.
John Filo took the most famous photograph of the event, at the top of this post. He was then 22, just a few months older than the oldest of the victims, and working for the newspaper now known as the Valley News Dispatch in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. He won a Pulitzer Prize for the photo, and is still alive.
The photo shows Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over Miller's body. She was just 14, from the Miami suburb of Opa-Locka, Florida, and had run away from home, saying her home life was "volatile." Upon arriving in Kent, she had become friends with Sandy Scheuer, and also with Alan Canfora, who was wounded, but survived.
She had just met Miller, moments before the shooting started. She could very easily have been one of the victims. Filo took the picture because she was the only one who seemed to be going over to Miller and showing any concern over him. She remembered yelling, "Doesn't anyone see what just happened here? Why is no one helping him?"
She got out of Kent, hoping the authorities wouldn't find her. She got as far as Indianapolis, but someone recognized her from the photo, and tipped off a reporter from The Indianapolis Star. He wanted to interview her. She agreed, in the hope that he would give her enough bus fare to get to California and "disappear."
He didn't: He reported her to the police, who sent her back to Opa-Locka. Governor Claude Kirk of Florida publicly called her a "dissident communist" and "part of a nationally organized conspiracy of professional agitators that is responsible for the students' death." Many others blamed her for the deaths, and many people sent her death threats, one accusing her of "sleeping with all those Negroes and dope fiends." Even some people who opposed the war were angry with her, for becoming famous despite not being part of the protest, or the antiwar movement in general.
At 22, she moved to Las Vegas, got married, and worked in a casino. At 39, she got divorced, and moved back to Florida, earning her high school diploma and an associate degree, becoming a respiratory therapist. With retroactive irony, she worked in the spa at Trump National Doral Miami.
She is now 64, and lives in the Florida Everglades. She has returned to Kent State on the milestone anniversaries of the event, as an invited speaker. She has met Filo, and no longer blames his photo for ruining her life. She retains her social conscience, and spoke out against the murder of George Floyd, 50 years later to the month.
Al Albert was a student at Kent State on May 4, 1970. His brother, Marv Albert, was a broadcaster for the New York Knicks, the New York Jets, and the New York Rangers. Marv had heard of the massacre, and, not knowing the names of the dead and the wounded, had made some calls to find out if his brother was all right.
He had to broadcast the 1st half of Game 5 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden not knowing if his brother was alive or dead; fine, emotionally shaken up, in a hospital, or in a morgue 432 miles to the west.
Finally, during halftime, he was handed a note saying that Al had been reached, and was fine, that he was nowhere near the demonstration. The Knicks beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 107-100, despite Willis Reed being injured. The Lakers took advantage of Reed's absence to win Game 6. On May 8, at The Garden, Reed managed to come out to play Game 7, and the Knicks won their 1st Championship.
On May 21, 1970, just 17 days after the massacre, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young recorded "Ohio" at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. Young wrote the lyrics:
Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming
We're finally on our own
This Summer, I hear the drumming:
Four dead in Ohio
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her
and found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?
Mainstream America knew, and, at least at the beginning, ran. Or, at least, shrugged its shoulders and walked away. Mary Ann Vecchio stayed, and tried to help. And millions of others, far from the scene, realized that the war had been brought to them, without their consent, and that, now, anyone was a target, whether they were part of the movement against the war or not.
Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, who went on to win the Democratic nomination for President in 1972, said that Nixon should have been impeached for the Cambodian Incursion. This was before anyone knew just how bad what was originally known as "the Watergate matter" was.
But the people in the movement were outnumbered. Nixon kept the war going. Then, just before the 1972 election, his negotiator, Henry Kissinger, announced, "Peace is at hand." With his biggest issue taken away from him, McGovern was doomed. Nixon won 49 States, all but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
A grand jury indicted 5 National Guardsmen on felony charges, and 3 others on misdemeanor charges. In 1974, a federal Judge, Frank J. Battisti, dismissed the case, despite admitting that, "Such use of force is, and was, deplorable." Deplorable: A word that would be used to describe right-wing overreactors in America again.
A civil case was eventually settled by the State of Ohio -- for $675,000, about $4.5 million in today's money. Given how many people were killed and hurt, it doesn't sound like much. An official apology was also publicly delivered.
But while 1974 was the year the criminal case in Kent State was dismissed, it was also the year that Nixon had to resign the Presidency, knowing that, if he didn't, he would be impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives and removed from office by the U.S. Senate -- not for any of his actions in Southeast Asia, including the one that led indirectly to the Kent State Massacre, but for the myriad crimes that fell under the umbrella term "Watergate."
Although the charges detailed in the Articles of Impeachment that had already been drawn up were very specific, and did not included anything he did in regard to Vietnam, Nixon was, more or less, paying with his job, and his place in history, for everything that he did.
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