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Just past noon, Kent State University in Ohio, May fifth, more than fifty years ago, fifty third anniversary was just observed. In just thirteen fatal seconds, sixty bullets were fired at demonstrators and that left four Kent State students dead, nine wounded. And I was just asking Robert Giles, author of When Truth Mattered, why didn't the governor or the president of Kent State shut down the university on Sunday morning.
Well, there's several reasons for that. First off, as the president, Bob Wide, was out of town. He left on Friday afternoon to go to Iowa for an educational meeting and a family visit. And when he last checked, he thought that the campus was going to be quiet and there was nothing to be alarmed about, and he felt free to take his trip. And so when Governor Rhodes came in, the first thing he did was go into a secret
meeting with local officials and the county prosecutor. A man named Ron Kine strongly urged the governor to shut down the campus. He said, there's going to be something terrible is going to happen here and we should shut down the campus now, and Rhodes said, absolutely not. He said, he's quoted as saying if I shut down the campus, people are going to look at me and say he
caved in to the radicals. And so that was the theme that he then carried out into his press conference when he's referred to these young demonstrators as worse than the Nazis and so on. But that was a series
of things. And then after after the shooting, the county prosecutor ron Kin again called the governor's office, who governor with Brogues back in Columbus by then called his office and said, you've got to shut down the campus, and there was a hesitation, and Rose's aide said, well, the governor wants to think about it, and so ron Kin turned to the local judge named Carris, who said absolutely, adiation in order shutting down the campus immediately, so that
the campus was shut down from late afternoon on May the fourth, after the shooting, and it was the campus was shut down except for people who had special passes and for national guards when who were still on for fifteen days.
You know, it's a type of hubris and the part of politicians that this is about them and not about public safety, which is just you know, it doesn't matter the party. It happens all the time where at an every level, including one centator right now from California, it seems to feel like the whole country can't go on without her. So they don't want to resign. They don't ever want to do anything. They want to control everything about their career and about their image, and it's just
all ego. What would have happened had they shut down the campus that day?
Oh, I saw people would sell me alive because they have had to go home, and and there wouldn't have been any gathering of students to give the service targets from the National Guard.
The What would the National Guard have done? Would they have do you think they would have stuck around on campus for a day or two? But they shut it down.
The governor said that we'll keep the National Guard here as long as it takes to get the campus under control, so they would have stayed for some time.
So the.
Take me through step by step. Then after that announcement gets made, what the rest of Sunday looks like when the campus is open, You've got stringers on the field. You've got photographers and you have one print reporter who's there on campus.
Is that correct that that was on Monday day on Sunday, not on Sunday. Well, we had people covering it on Sunday. But what happened on Sunday was that it was it was a nice spring day, and the kids started to engage with the guardsmen. They played frisbee, you know, they did, got friendly with them until about late in the afternoon when things got tent and the students wanted to have another small demonstration, and the guardsmen pushed them back through
the campus gates and shut the campus down. There was no there was no rough stuff, but it was clearly a moment of rising tension because the guardsmen knew that they had by then, had you been given their orders through the governor uh to make sure that there was going to be no no rally of peace or otherwise the next day, And so the students were already making noises and fading things, which indicated that they were going to try to defy the governor's orders and have their
protests gathering on the following day at noon. That was just a void from Monday in May the fourth.
The irony then of the governor coming out and calling the students brown shirts, when in fact the National Guard was acting more like the controlling you know, I mean, I think the word goon would be too strong a term, but they immediately slipped into the we're going to control you physically, we're going to we're in charge here, much more of what we would consider it to be typical brown shirt behavior. If we're going to look at it like that, go ahead, go ahead, Robert.
I was going to say that the Guard leadership was very incompetent because they didn't have a plan. They didn't have a plan for when the Guard arrived, They didn't have a plan for how they were going to disperse the students on Monday, and they didn't have a plan once they they put their their plan, not their plan, but they gan to move against the students on Monday on noon when the students were gathering for their demonstration.
So what was the background? I mean a lot of ways. Yeah, they didn't plan it, but they were also weren't trained how to plan it, right.
That's true. But they had a Brigadier General Robert Canterbury who was in charge, and some of the photographs show him on Monday Day. In fact, the cover of the photograph and the cover of the book shows him in a civilian suit and tie, and he's at the back. There's a picture on the cover of this of the guardsman shoot actually shooting at the students and General Canterbury's way at the back, and he's got his hand up
now he's trying to get them to stop shooting. But he had no he had no control over the troops. And obviously they the shooting. I think it was everybody seemed to conclude with spontaneous. There's been a lot of effort to sign you know, a command that to shoot, you know, as a single shot, because regards to respond the way it did.
You know the old expression if all you have is a hammer, or everything looks like a nail, right, And so this this general, what was his background.
He had many many years of good service as a in combat and other places. And he was he was the commander of this National Guard unit in Ohio, right, And but he was willfully unprepared. One of the questions that I raised about him was why he wasn't court martial. It turns out that when he was when the National Guard was sent to again state. They were under the
command of the governor of Ohio. Had the had the federal government sent the National Guardian the President Nixon sent the National Guardian, then he were and the National Guard would have been under the federal government, and he would have been subject to the military court of Justice and subject to course martial.
You know, that's so interesting. I didn't know that because in a way, my impression of that was shaped by the Neil Young penned song Ohio done by Crosby Stills, Nash and Young that Tin Soldiers and Nixon's coming were finally on our own. It would have ruined it if they had mentioned the governor. It wouldn't have seemed like right. It's poetic somehow, but that's unfair, all right, So the things get chippy again between the students and the National Guard.
Late on Sunday, what was Sunday night like.
That was pretty quiet. I think the students were back and behind the campus gates, and I think they have some of them were planning how they were going to organize on Monday, or they're going to begin their rally and so on and their protest. But until up until noon on Sunday, just before noon on Sunday, things were fairly quiet.
And so your experience then you didn't even have a reporter there, as you said on Sunday, because it looked perhaps like everything was calming down or that this was
going to get resolved peaceably. There still was no indication of what was coming up on May the fourth, but what was the So you I imagine you were tracking what the college newspaper was doing or have since then, or the college reporters, because you had said you often hired people from the campus that came out there, and it looked like some as particularly the photographers, seemed very talented that came out of out of the student newspaper.
Well, a student newspaper was not really very much involved
in our coverage. And we had a very experienced journalism student named Jeff Salad who was having his on Monday, in fact was his final day of journalims school classes and we had hired him, so they were when he did his coverage, he was really working for the Acrobacon Jeneral and so so uh, we didn't just didn't use use actual members of the college campus newspaper in our cage a Kent State because we had other people who had been on Kent State campus in various roles covering education,
covering sports, doing a lot of other things for many many years, including some demonstrations that had taken place two and three years before. There was a chapter of this Students for Democratic Society that protested against the appearance of police recruiters from Oakland, California. And then there was a group of there was an organization called the Black United Students who protested for more courses and more attention given to.
The black experience, black history, black black literature.
Right right, So, as a matter of fact, this is interesting. The Black United Students, uh did not participate at all on Monday, and they said told one of our reporters that they knew once they saw the guards had had rifles. They said, you know, we will be the first target. So they they disappeared, they lay low, and of course they were not participating in any way in the demonstration, and because they knew that they could become easy targets or they.
Would stand out in war perhaps against the white, predominantly white campus.
So anyhow, so when you look at the photographs of the masses of students, you won't see any any black students.
That's really really thank you for that. I never knew that. Very interesting. So things calm down maybe a little bit. On Sunday night, there's some talk in the dorms, I'm sure, being like any college campus, I'm sure there was a lot of people who were complaining about their campus being under siege and feeling like and this is so interesting, Robert, I think you'll agree with me, there was a different feeling.
Young people today may not realize kind of that sense of ownership that student bodies felt when they gathered at a college campus. It was only going to be theirs for four years. It was a transient ownership, but they were invested in it and this was their place of learning and that this is that whole concept of alma mater. You know, this is a place where something new was
being born and being hatched. And I don't know that there's the same feeling on campuses today everywhere like there was back in the nineteen sixties, that sense of almost you know, proprietorship or territorialseness to the.
It was territorial, but in a different way. Yeah, sort of a snapshot that said it was expressing deep resentment that these armed soldiers were on their campus trying to prevent them from exercising their First Amendment rights to have
a protest. It was a very focused kind of reaction, and but it was it ran very deep throughout that crowd that gathered on the on the Commons on Monday noon because and it was clear that they shifted their their anger from Nixon to Vietnam War to the idea that here were American soldiers with armed arms on their.
Heads, bearing arms yea, and.
Bearing arms, and they were on there this is our turf place where you know, we had we had the freedom to express ourselves.
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