Brian VanDeMark

Right, exactly.

The governor, Jim Rhodes, was a very popular Republican governor of Ohio who was, because of term limits, his service as governor was about to expire and he was seeking nomination on the Republican ticket for a Senate seat that was open.

And he had positioned himself as a law and order candidate.

And that primary election was going to be held on Tuesday, May 5th, 1970.

And I think part of his processing and reaction to the student protests downtown on

Friday evening and the burning of the ROTC building on Saturday was, he's going to project his image of being the tough law and order guy who's not going to put up with the radical fringe that is disrupting the campus in the town of Kent.

The important thing to recognize is local officials, both the university administrators and the county prosecutor named Ron Kane privately implored him not to send the National Guard

Because they understood the mood on campus, how volatile it was, how unstable it was, and how angry the students were.

And their fear was, in this environment, sending uniformed soldiers onto campus is just going to put aviation fuel on the fire.

Yeah, that's right.

Oh, I can't give you an utterly conclusive answer to that.

Generally speaking, I would say that the center of gravity in terms of student opinion on the war had soured dramatically over the last year to year and a half.

So in a sense, it's safe to generalize that the majority of students opposed the war by that point.

But I think it doesn't take a large number of fervent, impassioned, angry people to take that a step or two further.

And it was putting the ROTC bone to the torch that, in a sense, for the conservative population of Kent and the Republican governor of Ohio, they look at this and they say, this is out of control.

and we're going to have to deal with this by dropping the hammer.

But again, university administrators who were not asked what they would do in response would have said the last thing to do in terms of coping with this is to send in the National Guard.

Get the county sheriffs to deal with this.

If you're going to go up the ladder in terms of response, then turn to the State Highway Patrol because they understood that those entities had been trained

To cope with student protests in a way that the National Guard had not.