by James Rosen
At 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 13, an icy rain dampening their clothes but not their spirits, the first of 45,000 Americans began the March Against Death, parading solemnly from the gates of Arlington National Cemetery to the White House four miles away. Each marcher carried a candle and a sign that bore the name of a fallen soldier or a flattened South Vietnamese village; drummers kept up a steady, funereal beat.28
The real action was yet to come. Along with speeches and marches, conferences on “United States Imperialism” and “The Transition to a Peacetime Economy,” and orderly demonstrations by groups like the Radical Social Workers and Psychologists for a Democratic Society, the following afternoon called for a rally at the Justice Department by the Yippies, who had secured a three-hour picketing permit to protest the trial of their leader, Abbie Hoffman, and the other members of the Chicago Eight.
A large crowd—estimates ranged from one to three thousand people—converged on a park across the street from Justice. Dr. Benjamin Spock, the left-wing obstetrician prosecuted by Ramsey Clark for aiding and abetting draft resisters, condemned Attorney General Mitchell’s “disgraceful” and “unconstitutional” prosecution of the “eight brave men” standing trial in Chicago. Now the Yippies swarmed toward Justice and demanded an audience with Mitchell. “We want to see the Wizard!” three hippies shouted, pounding on the bolted doors. Soon the crowd was chanting: “One, two, stop the trial! Three, four, stop the war! Five, six, kill the pigs! Seven, eight, smash the state!”
Jack Landau, Mitchell’s press secretary, braved the crowd. He told Spock that Mitchell was busy preparing for Saturday’s action and promised an appointment with “someone” at a later date. The crowd handed Landau a stack of petitions demanding freedom for the Chicago Eight. Fearing an explosion, New Mobe lawyer Phil Hirschkop stepped in and urged Spock to lead the crowd away. The doctor heeded the lawyer, and marched the Yippies back to the Mall, blaming their retreat on “insoluble tensions.”29
Finally, Saturday came. The sky was sunny, the air crisp, temperatures in the low thirties: a fine day for the largest protest in the capital’s history. More than a quarter of a million citizens, “nearly all of them young, white and apparently middle-class,” surrounded the Washington Monument to register their peaceful opposition to the war in Vietnam. “Official estimate was 250,000,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. “By our photo count, it was 325,000. Anyway, it was really huge.”
After speeches by Senator McGovern and others, all “largely ignored” by the restive crowd, the New Mobe introduced the final speaker: David Dellinger, the oldest, and putative leader, of the Chicago Eight. After introducing codefendants Hoffman and Rubin, Dellinger urged the enormous crowd, after the march up Pennsylvania Avenue, to join the Yippies and Weathermen in an unsanctioned march on Justice. Richard Kleindienst later identified this moment as a “breach of faith” that all but ensured chaos. “The New Mobe leaders deliberately planned mob violence,” Kleindienst maintained years later. “Dellinger delivered one of the most fiery revolutionary speeches ever given to such a large gathering…a call to arms against America and its institutions of government.”30
Mrs. King led a peaceful march up Pennsylvania Avenue, joined by Senators McGovern and Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, the antiwar Democrat who had helped drive LBJ from office, united in refrains of John Lennon’s antiwar anthem, “Give Peace a Chance.” Then came the march on Justice. At first, Mitchell and his aides only heard the chanting in the distance: “Free Bobby Seale!” “As long as I live,” Kleindienst wrote in 1985, “I will never forget watching from John Mitchell’s office as some ten thousand revolutionaries began their march down Constitution Avenue toward us.”
In the front ranks, protesters carried a giant papier-mâché effigy of Mitchell’s face. More chanting: “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is gonna win!” A clutch of militants rushed toward the flagpole outside the attorney general’s office, lowered the American flag, and replaced it with the Viet Cong’s. White House aide Egil Krogh, assigned to Mitchell’s office for the day, told Haldeman the sight of the enemy banner being hoisted above Justice and a “very strange emotional impact” on him. “Whole business is sort of unreal,” agreed Haldeman. Police struggled to restore Old Glory while the protesters set a small fire.
What happened next no Weatherman could have forecast: John Mitchell himself, the object of all this fury, emerged from his fifth-floor office to watch the fracas from his balcony. In a breach of security protocol unimaginable in later times, Mitchell leaned far over the railing to point at a close-knit section of the crowd, telling an aide: “That’s the hard-core, linked arm to arm.” The revolutionaries below could scarcely believe their eyes. Caleb Rossiter, a student activist from the University of Chicago, stood under the balcony that day.
With unbridled delight at getting a chance to communicate with one of the enemy—Nixon was spending a restful afternoon in the White House watching football—we screamed “Fuck you Mitchell, fuck you Mitchell,” and threw at him whatever debris we could find. He looked down calmly from the railing, which was far too high for our missiles, holding his pipe, and with great deliberation gave us the finger right back.
Suddenly, a series of pops: firecrackers exploding. D.C. police chief Jerry V. Wilson’s walkie-talkie crackled with the sound of an officer asking if help was needed. Just keep your men on standby, Wilson replied. I’ll tell you when we need you. The moment came sooner than he wished. “The situation was rapidly getting out of control,” an eyewitness observed. One to squad, Wilson called out. Teams of riot cops swarmed in. Wilson threw the first tear gas canister himself. Mitchell would later tell his wife: “It looked like the Russian Revolution.”31
With tear gas choking the air, the protesters scattered. “To the White House!” someone yelled, but no one listened. Hubcaps flew, fistfights broke out. Random gangs roamed downtown, smashing bank windows—but the gas was inescapable. “Within minutes,” the Evening Star reported, “the air conditioning system inside [Justice] distributed the fumes throughout the building, including the office of Attorney General John Mitchell.” Krogh reported to Haldeman: “Tear gas bad in Mitchell’s office.” Assistant Attorney General William Ruckelshaus found he could “hardly speak.” In the lobby of the Washington Hotel, several blocks away, protesters lay strewn about, struggling to recover. Strong winds carried the toxic agent for miles, dousing innocent shoppers and even police headquarters on Indiana Avenue.32
Jack Landau remembered it all vividly. “[Mitchell] and I were standing out on the balcony of the attorney general’s office and one of the disruptions happened right under the balcony. And the police shot in tear gas and the wind blew the wrong way and the tear gas hit us.”
And we started coughing and he started coughing very badly, and he fell forward and there’s a wire along the balcony that’s electrified to get the pigeons off, and he got electrocuted—not electrocuted, but shocked. He got shocked by the wire and pulled back, and started to cough very badly and he stumbled backwards into his office to his chair, which was right near the window and he looked at me and started to turn purple. He said: “If I pass out, don’t let Kleindienst call in those troops!”33
Despite the massive numbers of protesters who rallied for the march, antiwar leaders closed out 1969 feeling frustrated. A Gallup Poll that month showed nearly 65 percent of Americans supported the president’s conduct of the war. Nixon’s steady troop withdrawals undercut claims he was expanding the fighting. The November action, for all its strength, had not stopped the killing in Southeast Asia; and turnout for the New Mobe’s next action, in December, proved infinitesimal by comparison. As one historian noted, the winter of 1969–70 marked “a time of significant depression” for the movement. With the radicals in retreat, few—including Mitchell—foresaw that the fiery zenith of campus unrest still lay ahead, and that the spark would be lit not on the marble steps of Berkeley, or in the streets of Washington, but along a placid grassy slope in the great middle of
the country.34
On Thursday, April 30, 1970, President Nixon announced in a prime-time televised address that he had ordered U.S. forces to commence offensive operations inside Cambodia, a limited incursion designed to “clean out” North Vietnamese and Vietcong “sanctuaries” serving as staging grounds for attacks on American troops. Nixon knew the decision would arouse strong emotions, especially on college campuses; but he, like Mitchell, was determined not to let student radicals control the foreign policy of a nuclear superpower. “We live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” Nixon warned. “We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed.”35
Within hours, American campuses were ablaze with anger. Stanford students rioted Days of Rage–style, smashing windows and looting shops. At the University of Maryland, an assault on the ROTC building, and the cops defending it, injured fifty. Protesters at Princeton firebombed an armory. At Ohio State, a six-hour battle between students and police, backed by the National Guard, saw one student shot, six hundred arrested. Strikes shut down classes at Columbia, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, Notre Dame, Brandeis—a firestorm that spread to 80 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities.36
Nowhere was the tension greater than at Ohio’s Kent State University. Reared mostly in the heartland, the student population had, over the preceding two years, grown increasingly radicalized. As a freshman later told the FBI, in previously unpublished testimony, the school by May 1970 harbored as many as a thousand “hard-core militants who would destroy the system by violent means…[and] many more who are sympathetic to such militants.” After two days and nights of lawlessness in the streets of Kent, including the torching of an ROTC building and skirmishes with the National Guard, a rally at noon on the fourth of May drew more than a thousand demonstrators to the Kent State campus commons. The provocations—profane chants and taunts, hurled rocks and bottles—conformed to the deplorable norms of the day; but the response did not. After tear gas failed to disperse the mob, the jittery Guardsmen, armed with World War II–and Korean War–era rifles, and not much older than the students they faced, turned suddenly and fired into the crowd, squeezing off sixty-seven shots in thirteen seconds, killing four and wounding at least nine. “My God,” a woman screamed, “they’re killing them!”37
On May 4, 1972, Doonesbury, the syndicated satirical comic strip, depicted Zonker Harris, a long-haired, perpetually stoned student-philosopher, leaning on a wall in a meadow and sharing his thoughts with silent protagonist Michael Doonesbury. “They say it’s very pretty in Ohio this time of year,” mused Zonker in the first panel. “They say it was a very pretty day exactly two years ago at Kent State,” he continued in the second. The third panel was wordless. Finally Zonker added: “Have a nice day, John Mitchell.”
The cartoon captured the extent to which Mitchell, 350 miles away on the fourth of May, became forever identified with the killings at Kent State. His dark association with one of the most traumatic events in American history was immortalized on August 13, 1971: the day Mitchell announced publicly that Justice would not empanel a federal grand jury to determine whether criminal charges should be brought against any of the Guardsmen. Mitchell told reporters there existed “no credible evidence of a conspiracy” by the Guardsmen and—more important—“no likelihood of successful prosecutions of individual Guardsmen.” “Mitchell Drops Kent State Case” cried the front page of the New York Times; four days later the paper acknowledged, in an editorial titled “Justice at Kent State?” that Mitchell was “probably right” when he cited the impossibility of tying specific Guardsmen to specific deaths.38
Only years later did it become clear that the attorney general followed orders and not his own conscience. Previously unpublished notes and documents establish the Kent State case as perhaps the clearest example of Mitchell’s curious collusion, against his own inclinations, in the villainous public role Nixon assigned him. Although Mitchell supported the Cambodian offensive, he warned the president on April 26 it would create “political difficulty” at home. Yet the day before the killings, according to previously unpublished notes, Nixon sat in the Oval Office and pondered how to extract political mileage from the fevered sentiment he excited among the young. “Never underestimate the value of turning the student thing to our advantage—especially if they get rough,” Nixon told Haldeman. “We have to go on the offensive against the peaceniks.”39
When word of the shootings flickered across news wires, “grim-faced” White House aides huddled over clacking ticker-tape machines, aghast that National Guardsmen had gunned down unarmed American students on a Midwest college campus. Both Nixon and Mitchell grasped at once the moral gravity and political explosiveness of the Kent State case. Jerris Leonard, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, was among the first to see Mitchell after the news broke. “He was pretty shocked,” Leonard recalled. “He couldn’t believe it…. His immediate impression was, ‘Get cracking on it, get the facts.’” The facts proved elusive. Within days, the FBI had three hundred agents working the case; but KSU had shut down and its students scattered across the country, hugely complicating the investigation.40
Over the next few weeks, DOJ lawyers prepared a thirty-five-page summary of the FBI’s findings, and transmitted it to Mitchell on June 22. While acknowledging that the final moments preceding the shootings were “shrouded in confusion,” the DOJ summary also noted that six Guardsmen had “pointedly” told the FBI their lives were not in danger, that “it was not a shooting situation.” Multiple eyewitnesses agreed, and the summary speculated that some Guardsmen’s claims of imminent, life-threatening peril were likely “fabricated subsequent to the event.”
In the end, however, despite the fact that the DOJ summary discounted this evidence and held the Guardsmen at fault, the Department faced an insurmountable hurdle in prosecuting them because the FBI possessed “no ballistics evidence to prove which Guardsmen shot which student.”41
Richard Nixon had his own ideas about what happened at Kent State, and from the first moment he worked assiduously to ensure those ideas prevailed. Haldeman informed Nixon of the tragedy: NBC News was reporting that the Guard had “gunned down” the students. Nixon processed Kent State as he did all other phenomena: through the prism of political opportunism. Haldeman’s previously unpublished notes recorded the president’s first reaction.
need to get out story of sniper
can’t we get something going—Mitchell [ … ]
this will finish [Ohio Governor] Rhodes
unless he turns this
As public outrage mounted—compounded by the shooting deaths on May 14 of two black students, during a night of campus violence at Mississippi’s Jackson State College—the president alternated between two modes of response. On one hand, he struggled to “find [a] more effective way to communicate in view of [the] tragedy,” asking Mitchell to “brainstorm the school problem” and ordering the vice president:
don’t say anything about students
[be] non-political in every respect
pitch one nation—reconciliation
[…]
must be conciliatory re: youth
+ some way admit we’re wrong in our rhetoric
need to show sincerity in saying42
At a hastily scheduled news conference on May 8, Nixon spoke in similar terms when asked what he thought students were trying to tell him. “They are trying to say that they want peace,” Nixon replied. “They are trying to say that they want to stop the killing. They are trying to say that they want to end the draft. They are trying to say that we ought to get out of Vietnam. I agree with everything that they are trying to accomplish.” He added defensively: “I did not send these men to Vietnam.”
Yet at other times, Nixon hardened. He resented the harmful impact the domestic
upheaval was having on his foreign policy, and came to regard all student dissent as an expression of radicalism. To him the episode showed the “totalitarianism of the left,” and evoked in him the language of war. “Have to get out the anti-student line,” he told Haldeman. “Get our offensive launched.”
we now have the lines drawn […]
just as well to have the student thing out [in the open]
they want to run the country […]
K. State showed people against students
people are fed to teeth w/ rioting kids […]
the public is not with students43
John Mitchell took a less embattled view. When thirty black students descended on his office to protest the Jackson State killings, the attorney general sat them down for a friendly chat, then personally visited the campus—overruling the objections of agents in the FBI’s Jackson field office. He told a group of students from Fordham law school, his alma mater, the Kent State shootings “sickened and saddened” him. Though he blamed the unrest on “nihilists,” he also pointed out that National Guard regulations called for minimal use of force.44
Mitchell was the first administration official to state publicly that both students and Guardsmen committed “apparent violations of federal law” at Kent State. In his preferred scenario, a federal grand jury would have been fruitlessly convened—for appearances’ sake, since Mitchell, having read the DOJ summary, knew no Guardsman could be tied to a specific death—leaving authorities in Ohio to file whatever state charges they thought appropriate. Acting through Jerris Leonard, the attorney general ordered DOJ lawyers to share investigative data with Ohio prosecutors. Indeed, even before the shootings, Mitchell had ordered the FBI to investigate whether the torching of the Kent State ROTC building on May 2, an oft-forgotten prelude to the bloodshed, involved violations of “sabotage, sedition and civil rights laws.”45
