American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  But no one expected that a few weeks later authorities would gun down thirteen white college students in broad daylight on a leafy campus in America’s heartland.

  On May 2, 1970—with campuses rising in opposition to the invasion of Cambodia—Ohio governor James Rhodes deployed the state’s National Guard to Kent State University. The immediate pretext was a disturbance in town. Students spilling out of the local bars started a bonfire and began throwing bottles at storefront windows and banks. Police dispersed the crowd with tear gas. When the guardsmen arrived the next night, they were sent to the campus, where someone had set fire to the ROTC building. By the time they got there, the building had burned to the ground as a crowd of students cheered.

  The next morning Governor Rhodes denounced the “dissident groups” at Kent State University. “We’re going to use every part of the law enforcement agency of Ohio to drive them out of Kent. We are going to eradicate the problem.” He then suggested, erroneously, that dissent was caused by outside agitators who “move from one campus to the other and terrorize the community. They’re worse than the [Nazi] brownshirts and the Communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” Rhodes may have been borrowing his rhetoric from Vice President Spiro Agnew, who a few weeks earlier had urged university administrators to “just imagine they [student protesters] are wearing brown shirts and white sheets and act accordingly.”

  At noon on May 4, 1970, Kent State students gathered in the Commons to protest Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. But there was additional anger stirred by the presence of the National Guard. Overnight the guardsmen had transformed the university into an armed camp. They were driving army trucks and jeeps all over campus—even tanks. Hundreds of guardsmen marched with gas masks and M-1 rifles.

  Kent State was a modest public university, not a place of great privilege. Many of its students were from working-class families of the Rust Belt. Quite a few had friends or relatives who served in Vietnam. Indeed, of the 21,000 students at Kent State, about 1,000 were military veterans. The student protesters and the guardsmen were not divided by class so much as circumstance and politics.

  A student named Alan Canfora approached the Commons carrying two black flags to symbolize his opposition to military escalation in Indochina and at home. Ten days earlier he had attended the funeral of a childhood friend who was killed in Vietnam.

  “Hey, boy, what’s that you’re carrying there?” a guardsman called out.

  “Just a couple of flags,” Canfora answered.

  “We’re going to make you eat those flags today,” yelled the guardsman.

  “Just don’t get too close, motherfucker, or I’m going to stick them down your throat,” Canfora shot back.

  More than a thousand protesters gathered near the school’s Victory Bell with perhaps another thousand watching from farther away. Ken Hammond stepped onto the base of the bell and called out a question being raised on campuses all over America. Should the campus go on strike to protest Nixon’s escalation of the war? The crowd chanted, “Strike! Strike! Strike!”

  Before Hammond could continue, a National Guard jeep pulled up and an officer with a bullhorn ordered the students to disperse. It only fueled their anger: “Pigs off campus! Pigs off campus!” With that, a National Guard commander ordered troops to fire canisters of tear gas at the students. The Commons immediately filled with gas and smoke. The guardsmen, with fixed bayonets on their rifles, advanced toward the demonstrators.

  Most students moved back toward the dormitories and other buildings, but a number of students continued to taunt the guardsmen. Some picked up tear gas canisters and threw them back at the guardsmen. Rocks were thrown by both sides. Within minutes, a unit of guardsmen moved onto a practice football field, where they found themselves blocked by a fence to their rear and a semicircle of students to their front. The unit commander ordered his men to form a wedge and move back up the hill toward what was known on campus as the Pagoda—a concrete structure shaped like a large, square-topped umbrella.

  As these guardsmen approached the Pagoda, they made a three-quarter turn in unison, faced the crowd, raised their rifles, and aimed down the hill toward the students. Many witnesses thought it looked like a planned and coordinated maneuver. “It looked like a firing squad,” recalled a Kent State professor of journalism. Within seconds, twenty-eight guardsmen began firing their weapons.

  Some of the guardsmen targeted specific students, but much of the shooting was indiscriminate. Sandy Scheuer was a speech major walking to class some four hundred feet away from the shooters when an M-1 round penetrated her neck. She was dead within minutes. Nearby, Bill Schroeder was turning away from the scene when a bullet struck him in the back and killed him. He had just left a class in military science as part of his training as an ROTC cadet. Friends said he had developed serious reservations about the war and his own military future; he might have stopped at the rally out of curiosity.

  A bit closer to the guardsmen, but still more than a hundred yards away, stood Allison Krause. Unlike Scheuer and Schroeder, she was not a passerby or spectator. She was there to protest. A freshman from Silver Spring, Maryland, she was wearing a T-shirt with the logo of her old high school: “John F. Kennedy.” The word “Kennedy” was soon soaked with blood. A few days after Krause died, her father bitterly recalled Nixon’s description of antiwar demonstrators and told TV reporters, “My daughter is not a bum.”

  Another devoted activist, Jeff Miller, was standing in a parking lot 256 feet from the firing squad on the hill. Hit in the mouth, he fell facedown with his arms tucked under his body. He died instantly. A student photographer near Miller first thought the guardsmen were shooting blanks until he himself was almost hit by a bullet and dropped his camera. He picked it up and began to flee when he saw Miller with blood pooling around his head. As he stopped to take a picture, a girl ran into the frame of his shot and knelt on one knee next to the body. As she stretched out her arms and screamed, “Oh my God!” he snapped the photograph that became the most indelible image of the day.

  A few minutes later, some guardsmen approached and stared at Miller’s body. A sergeant used his boot to roll the corpse onto its back. The guardsmen soon regrouped near the burned-down ROTC building. Some were clearly distraught, even near tears. One man fainted. General Robert Canterbury felt the need to bolster them: “You did what you had to do,” he said. “You did what you had to do!”

  Many Americans seemed to agree. A Gallup poll shortly after the shootings found that 58 percent of Americans blamed the shootings on the student protesters. Nixon encouraged that view in his first official comment on the shootings: “This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy.” He might just as well have said that the students got what they deserved.

  But millions of others—especially among the young—blamed the guardsmen and the authorities who sent them onto campus with loaded weapons. In addition to the four students killed, nine others were struck by bullets and one of them was permanently paralyzed. Four months after the Kent State shootings, a presidential Commission on Campus Unrest concluded that the use of deadly force by the National Guard was “unnecessary, inexcusable, and completely unwarranted.” However, none of the guardsmen or their leaders were ever convicted of a crime. Eight guardsmen were eventually indicted for the shootings, but a judge threw the case out before trial.

  Campuses were already in turmoil because of the invasion of Cambodia. After the Kent State shootings, the tidal wave of rebellion rose and spread. There were protests at virtually every college, and many high schools. At least two million students went on strike. Hundreds of colleges and universities simply shut down for the remainder of the semester.

  On May 21, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young recorded “Ohio,” their haunting song about the killings. Neil Young’s lyrics held Nixon as re
sponsible as the National Guard: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. . . . Four dead in Ohio. . . . What if you knew her / And found her dead on the ground?” A whole new cohort of kids, just entering their mid or late teens and too young to know much about the earlier history of 1960s protest, were now joining the struggle.

  Some histories of the 1960s suggest that the Kent State protests marked the last hurrah of an antiwar movement that quickly collapsed—the victim of bitter factionalism, disillusionment, and the government’s extensive FBI and CIA operations to undermine dissent through spying, infiltration, and flat-out repression. But in spite of those obstacles, the movement continued to be fed by new participants. After the shootings at Kent State, many of them protested the war for the first time.

  Peace activism was given new life, not just by younger students but by returning Vietnam veterans, who created the most formidable antiwar movement of ex-soldiers in U.S. history. Their opposition was rooted in their experience of the war, but Kent State also had a searing impact on a number of them. For example, both Ron Kovic and W. D. Ehrhart cite the shootings as crucial to their transformation from enthusiastic marine volunteers to passionate antiwar activists.

  Ron Kovic was horribly wounded on his second Vietnam tour and paralyzed from the chest down. At the time of the Kent State shootings, he was out of the hospital taking classes at Hofstra University near his hometown of Massapequa, New York. “I still wore a tie and sweater every day to school and had a short haircut,” he recalled in Born on the Fourth of July, a 1976 memoir that became the basis for Oliver Stone’s 1989 movie. When Kovic heard the news about Kent State, it occurred to him that the last time he had felt the same kind of sadness “was the day Kennedy was shot.” It compelled him to participate in his first antiwar demonstration, a May 9 rally in Washington, DC. Nixon’s staff ordered dozens of empty buses to be parked around the White House, bumper to bumper, to screen off the demonstrators. “Was the government so afraid of its own people that it needed such a gigantic barricade?” Kovic wondered. “I’ll always remember those buses lined up that day and not being able to see the White House from my wheelchair.”

  It was the first of countless demonstrations for Kovic. He followed it with hundreds of speeches, more than a dozen arrests, a hunger strike, and an effort to shout down Richard Nixon from the floor of the 1972 Republican Convention (“Stop the bombing, stop the war, stop the bombing, stop the war”). But the journey toward activism was long and painful. When Kovic volunteered for the marines in 1964 after graduating from high school, it was simply unthinkable to him that the United States might fight a war that was anything but righteous, winnable, and fully supported. As he recalled in 2006, “We did not question. We did not doubt. We believed and we trusted our leaders. America was always right. How could we ever be wrong? We were the most powerful nation on earth and we had never lost a war.” He had an ironclad faith in American exceptionalism.

  For a long time, he spurned anyone who questioned that faith. In early 1967, when Kovic returned from his first tour in Vietnam, he saw a photograph of a small group of demonstrators burning an American flag in New York’s Central Park. “I remember tears coming to my eyes . . . I was outraged and became determined to set my own example of patriotism and volunteered to go to Vietnam a second time, ready to die for my country if need be.”

  Kovic’s faith began to unravel as he recovered in a filthy, rat-infested, ill-equipped, and poorly staffed Veterans Administration hospital:

  The most severely injured are totally dependent on the aides to turn them. . . . [Their voices] can be heard screaming in the night for help that never comes. Urine bags are constantly overflowing onto the floors while the aides play poker on the toilet bowls in the enema room. The sheets are never changed enough and many of the men stink from not being properly bathed. It never makes any sense to us how the government can keep asking money for weapons and leave us lying in our own filth.

  Kovic started to think that the war never made any sense either. He was especially anguished by the memory of shooting into a Vietnamese village only to find that he and his squad had killed an old man and a handful of children. Kovic and the other marines cried at the sight of what they had done. It made their lieutenant furious: “You gotta stop crying like babies and start acting like marines! . . . It’s all a mistake. It wasn’t your fault. They got in the way. Don’t you people understand—they got in the goddamn way!” Like General Canterbury at Kent State, the lieutenant sought to suppress the moral doubts of his troops.

  Kovic’s faith in American exceptionalism was slipping away. Once out of the hospital, he found himself on a stage on Memorial Day listening uncomfortably to the overwrought patriotic declarations of the local American Legion commander: “I believe in America! shouted the commander, shaking his fist in the air. And I believe in Americanism! The crowd was cheering now. And most of all . . . most of all, I believe in victory for America!”

  After Kent State, more than ever, America was divided into hostile camps. The multiplying ranks of young white antiwar protesters no longer trusted established institutions to represent their interests, to respect their rights, or even to assure their physical security. That was not a new insight among most African Americans and other people of color, but it was profoundly new to many middle-class white students.

  And just the sight of long-haired kids was enough to anger many Americans, doubly so when they demonstrated disrespect to cops, judges, parents, or the flag. Some people opposed the war and the antiwar movement. Yes, they thought, the war was a mistake, but those protesters seem to be against the country itself and all that has made it great. Some were so angry they wanted to see protesters beaten up and were eager to do it themselves.

  Two days after the Kent State shootings, seven hundred medical students gathered in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park to protest. At a nearby construction site, workers had erected an American flag. When one of the protesters pulled down the flag, the workers attacked, beating up some of the demonstrators. It was a relatively minor skirmish, attracting little attention. But it was one of many sparks that ignited Bloody Friday of May 8, 1970.

  Early that morning, students began gathering at the intersection of Broad and Wall Streets in downtown Manhattan, most of them from Hunter College and New York City high schools. It was one of a number of antiwar rallies throughout the city that day. Mayor Lindsay had issued a proclamation declaring May 8 a “day of reflection” on “the numbing events at Kent State University and their implications for the future and fate of America.” At City Hall, the mayor had the American flag lowered to half-staff.

  By noontime the downtown crowd reached about a thousand. It was a peaceful springtime scene. Many sat on the steps of the Federal Hall National Memorial listening to antiwar speeches. Some of the Wall Street businessmen coming out of their offices for lunch paused to watch, but it was hardly unusual. By 1970, they had seen countless antiwar demonstrations.

  But they hadn’t seen this: Suddenly, some two hundred construction workers poured into the intersection from four different directions. Most of them wore brown bib overalls and yellow hard hats. Many had tool belts filled with wire cutters, hammers, and pliers. At the front of their ranks men carried American flags. As they arrived at Federal Hall, they began chanting “U.S.A.—all the way! U.S.A.—all the way!” A dozen police officers briefly stood between the workers and the demonstrators. As a wave of workers surged toward the students, the police turned aside. First they planted an American flag on the steps of the Federal Hall. Then they attacked the students.

  According to Homer Bigart, a seasoned war correspondent who had covered World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, the workers first went after “those youths with the most hair . . . swatting them with their helmets.” Some workers also used their tools to beat the students. Most of the students ran away from the scene, with the workers in hot pursuit. They chased them “through the canyons of the financial distr
ict in a wild noontime melee.” When a group of the injured took refuge at nearby Trinity Church, some hard hats ripped down a Red Cross banner on the outside gate. More than seventy students and a few businessmen who came to their defense were beaten badly enough to be sent to the hospital.

  Next the hard hats formed into marching lines and headed up Broadway toward City Hall, joined by hundreds of office workers. Along the way, Bigart reported, they starting singing “The Marines’ Hymn”:

  From the Halls of Montezuma

  To the shores of Tripoli;

  We fight our country’s battles

  In the air, on land, and sea;

  First to fight for right and freedom

  And to keep our honor clean.

  Some office workers threw ticker tape down on the marchers as they moved along the traditional Canyon of Heroes.

  When the crowd arrived at City Hall, its mission soon became apparent. Someone slipped inside and up to the roof. As the crowd watched, he “raised the flag that Mayor Lindsay had ordered lowered to half-staff for the slain students. The crowd cheered wildly.” But a few minutes later one of Lindsay’s aides “stalked out on the roof and lowered the flag again.” The crowd was enraged. “Workers vaulted the police barricades, surged across the tops of parked cars and past half a dozen mounted policemen.” Lindsay was not at City Hall, but the deputy mayor prudently ordered the flag raised to full staff.

  Once Old Glory was raised for good, the workers in the crowd took off their hard hats, put their hands over their hearts, and began to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” One of them yelled out to the cops: “Get your helmets off!” About half of the police complied.

  Then some of the hard hats moved a block away to Pace College, where they had seen a peace symbol banner hanging from a top floor. First they broke massive plate-glass windows on the first floor and attacked some students inside. Then someone went after the peace flag. It was brought out into the street and burned. The crowd chanted, “Lindsay’s a Red! Lindsay’s a Red!”