Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It all began with such promise. In 1422, medieval England finds itself at its apex. It's richer, it's bigger, and now it rules over France too. But in a blink, this will all unravel spectacularly. because England is moments away from tearing itself apart in a civil war called the Wars of the Roses.
That's all for you to discover with me, Dan Jones, on Season 9 of This Is History, A Dynasty to Die For, wherever you get your podcasts.
It is noon, Monday, May 4th, 1970. Around 3,000 people are loosely assembled today here on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio. A few hundred are actively protesting the U.S. military's involvement in Vietnam and President Nixon's recent expansion of that war to neighboring Cambodia. Many more have just stopped by to demonstrate their support or because they're curious.
Some are simply moving between classes. It is a typical scene repeated on campuses across the country for years now. Students chanting, shouting, waving hand-scrawled placards. Many more merely standing around. But something feels different today. Across the commons, a group of soldiers, members of the Ohio National Guard, have formed a skirmish line.
Bayonets fixed onto the barrels of their M1 rifles. Some are wearing masks to protect against the tear gas now deployed. The acrid, stinging smoke spreads low and fast across the ground. Some of the students scatter in fear. A few others pick up the gas canisters and toss them back towards the troops. Rocks are hurled. A noisy tension builds. But for the moment, matters seem contained.
That is, until the line of guardsmen halt, level their rifles at the students, and fire. It is American History Hit, and I'm your host, Don Wildman. Nice to be with you. What defines a darkest hour? Well, it's when a crisis has reached its nadir, when all hope seems lost.
In that moment of trepidation, we face disaster, destruction, and the real possibility that what we value most in life may disappear. Paradoxically, though, with life so much in the balance, it is a prime opportunity for profound and lasting change, though it's hard to see it at the time, it being the darkest before the dawn.
But some of our most distressing moments have led to the most redemptive transformations, one of the enduring hallmarks of American history. In May of 1970, four undergrads were shot dead with nine others injured on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, a nation already at a contentious low fell further. What caused this tragedy, how it played out,
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Chapter 2: What events led to the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970?
And what changes came to pass as a result is what we'll discuss today with historian Brian Vandemark. Recently retired from teaching history at the United States Naval Academy, he is the author of a number of books on U.S. history. He co-authored, in retrospect, Robert McNair's number one best-selling Vietnam memoir.
His latest book is Kent State, An American Tragedy, long listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hello, Professor. Nice to meet you. Greetings.
Thank you, Don. I enjoyed being on your program.
Now, while we are most certainly not a current events series recording here in late January 26 on Kent State, it's impossible not to ignore the echoes of history. Big differences, of course, from then to now. But shootings of American citizens in the act of protest by government forces is such a rarity, you can't help it.
But for this conversation, we are steeped in 1970 in a brand new decade at the time. Take us to that time. What is going on in U.S. and in the world?
This is a period when American involvement in the Vietnam War has been going on for several years. American casualties as well as far larger Chinese casualties have skyrocketed. And the American military effort in Vietnam is clearly bogged down. Progress is not being made.
The American people's frustration with the effort and the cost both in blood and treasure that result from that is intensifying dramatically. It has a deeply polarizing effect on the American public and public opinion toward the war. Mm hmm.
Roughly. It's interesting. This is, you know, baby boom generation. Roughly half of that population is in college at that time. And, you know, after high school, the first major anti-war rally was in April 1965. Twenty thousand people went to D.C. and and they've continued ever since. March of the Pentagon, October 1967. There's a nationwide moratorium, October 1969.
The My Lai Massacre has happened in 1968, 16th of March. Details were published in the New York Times in 1969.
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Chapter 3: What was the atmosphere like on the Kent State campus before the shootings?
I'm just sort of ratcheting up what's happening in the society of America, in the media especially. Why does a bout of protest begin in May on Kent State campus?
Well, I want to make a general point and then a more specific one. The Vietnam War was fought in an era of the draft. And that is a qualitatively profound difference between today and yesterday, so to speak. The draft essentially granted deferments and or exemptions to college Americans up until 1969.
When the manifest injustice of that system, which effectively prejudiced working class Americans whose families couldn't afford to send them to college, they were exposed to draft whereas college students were not. That deferment slash exemption was lifted in 1969, which now exposed College of Americans to the draft.
Another specific point is that Richard Nixon had been elected president in 1968, in part on a, quote, secret plan, unquote, to end the Vietnam War. And the center of gravity politically in the United States, particularly beginning in 1968 and 69, was to move away from continued support to the American military commitment because of the rising costs and the failure to achieve qualitative progress.
And in the spring of 1970, Nix made a decision to send American military forces into Cambodia to attempt to interdict communist sanctuaries
He had been urged to do this by the commanding American general in Vietnam, Creighton Abrams, because in order to speed up the withdrawal of American forces, which he had begun to do, Abrams said you need to protect such withdrawal by removing these sanctuaries.
The problem with that was that it directly contradicted the impression he created when he sought and won the presidency in 1968 to withdraw America from the war. It looked to a lot of college-age Americans as though the war was being expanded or intensified, which inflamed their already pre-existing opposition to the war rather dramatically.
Right. Right. Right. It had become a way of American life and almost like, oh, here we go again kind of feeling. But there was an even more substantial theme to this in that many people, you know, the silent majority was awakened by Richard Nixon's election. There was pushback in a big way happening in America against this at the time, right?
Yes, I mean, this is a theme which we see operative today as well, which is the American public was deeply divided. The polarization in the American body politic was profound. To simplify things a bit in order to make my point, Opponents of the war who tended to be young grew increasingly frustrated, resentful, and angry about the persistent American involvement.
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Chapter 4: How did the National Guard's involvement escalate the situation?
Was this a big, was there a lot of awareness of what was happening on the campus?
Well, I think that one of the distinguishing features of the student body at Kent State in 1970 is that most of those students were the first members of their families to ever have attended college. Many of them had blue collar working class backgrounds. This is more of a blue collar middle class socioeconomic cohort than a middle or upper middle class one.
Many of them were the children of those who had become of age politically during the year of the Depression and the New Deal, who came from fairly strong democratic, capital D, families with the tradition of protest. They were predisposed to vocalize and articulate their opposition to particular policies.
And when you put that in contrast to a very conservative social composition of the town and the county surrounding the town of Kent and the university, it's a very combustible potential mixture. Right.
I mentioned this in the opening, how many of these protests are the vocal few are what people are seeing. And then life is going on around this situation. You usually have a lot of people observing what's happening. You have people who are going about their own life. Sometimes it's in the city streets, but this is on a college campus.
Still the same sort of scene is going on where you'll see this as it's happening. And of course, these were not designed to be what we now know, the Kent State Killings. This is a peaceful rally. This is a nonviolent protest. They're out and about on the campus doing this thing. But anyway, it's all talked about as it comes up.
The difference here, as far as my reading could tell me, was that local authorities had said, we see what's coming, we're going to do this, that, and the other thing while this is happening, the local mayor, etc., Outside of this community, of course, America isn't hearing about this at the time. Was this a typical situation with these campuses and how local communities reacted?
Well, I think it depends largely on location. For example, if you're talking about the residential population of Berkeley, California or Manhattan, it's a different dynamic. The residential population of Kent, Ohio was classically Midwestern, classically traditional. socially quite conservative.
And amidst all of this is a student body that's becoming more and more frustrated, angry, and vocal in their opposition to the war and the American system, which they view as producing this unhappy result in Indochina. So it's a situation where both sides are going further and further apart. The capacity to put yourself in the other person's shoes is diminishing to the vanishing point.
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Chapter 5: What were the immediate consequences of the shootings at Kent State?
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.
That's a big question for me in this because nowadays we are so conditioned to see these this news video of forces in answer. You know, they all have their costume. They all have their uniforms. They all have their helmets. Everybody around the world is now. ready to control a riot somehow with big plexiglass shields and so forth. Back then, it wasn't really like that.
And I wonder, although of course we see riots being controlled by everybody, but that's what I always wondered about this situation, whether it was a matter of training and understanding the circumstances as much as it was the intentional desire to control these things in a different way.
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Chapter 6: How did public opinion shift in response to the Kent State tragedy?
Well, when I reflect on the tragedy, I think that the three most fundamental points to convey here are poor leadership, poor training, and a volatile emotional atmosphere on both sides. And a descending order of priority from first to last.
Leaders have, to me, a moral responsibility to be thoughtful and restrained in the words that come out of their mouth when it comes to dealing with highly volatile situations. The military leadership of the National Guard at Kent State on May 4th under Assistant General Robert Kendery was abysmally inappropriate, unwise, and the consequences of that were horrific.
And the National Guardsmen themselves had almost no training whatsoever in dealing with student protests. Just to make my point, They were armed with tear gas and high velocity rifles with live bullets. Nothing in between, nothing else. And they had no experience dealing with student prisoners.
They hadn't been conditioned in terms of how to deescalate a situation, how to minimize the use of force. In fact, I think quite frankly, a lot of them had joined the National Guard to avoid the draft. And as a result of that, didn't want to be there to begin with.
Yeah, exactly. May 3rd, third day of these events unfolding, 1,200 National Guard are on the Kent State campus. This is when the governor of Ohio, Jim Rhodes, he promises at a press conference that he's going to use law enforcement against the students, declares that the protests are caused by a group of agitators going to campus to campus. This is language we hear even today.
But nonetheless, the room, the university remains open with classes going ahead. Those demonstrators then block traffic and become dispersed with tear gas and importantly, bayonets. Right. This is always a startling thing to me that you would fix bayonets when dealing with what is essentially a bunch of unarmed, you know, rather peaceful in most cases, protesters. Why the bayonets?
Well, again, think about how they are trained or not trained at all and how they're equipped. And as I said, it's so difficult and frankly often dangerous to generalize about this, but if you pressed me, I would say that the typical National Guardsman in Kent over that weekend before May 4th
was probably a working class guy whose parents could not afford to send him to college and at some level resented the fact that these quote-unquote privileged kids who had become radicals who were disrupting law and order And they're operating in an increasingly emotional atmosphere too. And I think that it's a dangerous mixture. It's a volatile mixture.
But another irony of this is on that Sunday, May 3rd, during the day, the National Guardsmen had fraternized with the Kent State College students on campus. There was actually a mood of concord and dialogue.
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Chapter 7: What was the outcome of the investigations following the Kent State shootings?
The Guard is deployed, and it's led by Robert Canterbury, who he and his forces are outnumbered 30 to 1. 30 to 1. So if you're one of those roughly 100 guardsmen confronting 2,500 students, you can see how they must feel insecure, anxious, and vulnerable.
And he tells them to load live ammunition into their rifles and then fails to inform the students who are assembled there that that's been done, directly contradicting the National Guard regulations to do so. I mean, the recklessness of that, to me, is absolutely appalling.
To tell the guardsmen to load their rifles with live ammunition is bad enough, but then not to inform the crowd of students who are there that that's been done is inexcusable. Mm-hmm.
Brian, you say that the amount of guardsmen on the campus is about 100. I previously mentioned 1,200. It's a whole bunch of deployment going on here in the area, right?
Well, they were deployed throughout the town of Kent and surrounding areas of Portage County, as well as on campus.
It's important to realize that at this point, you're talking about a massive group of people, you know, thousands of students against what is essentially a hundred National Guardsmen, right? Correct. How does that unfold?
Well, the students had assembled in the Commons, which was an open area in the center of campus. And Canterbury, who's the ranking National Guard officer on the scene that morning, as I already mentioned, ordered the guardsmen to load their rifles with live ammunition, which to me was unwise and reckless. And then he failed to inform the students that that had been done.
And then he sends out, I believe it's a Kent State University police official to use a bullhorn to tell the students to disperse, which they don't because in their opinion, and the Justice Department of the Nixon administration later said they had a constitutional right to express their opinions about the war. And that escalates the emotional level. the atmosphere there dramatically.
The students become more vocal in terms of the epithets that they hurl vocally, the guardsmen, and some start beginning throwing stones and rocks. And then the Canterbury orders the guardsmen in a line to disperse the crowd.
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Chapter 8: How did the Kent State incident impact future protests and political discourse?
And the students are becoming more aggressive in terms of their resistance to the dispersal order.
To be clear, the National Guardsmen are retreating in effect, right? Moving backwards.
Well, eventually they'll go over Blanket Hill down to a playing field area. And adjacent to that is a parking lot from which a lot of students will roll rocks and stones and other projectiles at the guardsmen. And the guardsmen are effectively, they're cornered because that playing field had a wire fence around it, which meant that they couldn't go any further.
And they felt that the students were beginning to surround them, which I think increased their anxiety and their insecurity.
And it is from that vantage point, from that parking lot, that these shots are fired. Is that correct?
Well, the guardsmen, while they're on the playing field, are ordered by Canterbury to point their rifles toward the students in the parking lot, but only as a deterrent, symbolic deterrent. They weren't ordered to fire. They were just basically trying to scare these people back to get greater distance created between them and the students who were shooting.
vocally and harassing them and taking in some cases more aggressive steps by throwing things at them. And it's at that point that Canterbury then orders the guardsmen to retreat effectively back up Blanket Hill, down the other side, across the commons, back to where they had initially proceeded from.
And as the guardsmen retreat back up Blanket Hill, the students who were in the parking lot in the lower slope of Blanket Hill start moving toward them. First at a walk and then at a pretty rapid walking clip, and in some cases at a run. And there's a tremendous amount of noise. There's a campus bell that's clanging. There's a lot of shouting.
There was actually an audio recording of the event, which has been preserved, and it's just chaotically loud. And that, again, is one of these factors that contribute to the tragedy.
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