Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Just past noon, Kent State University in Ohio, May fifth,
Speaker 2: more than fifty years ago, fifty third anniversary was just observed.
Speaker 2: In just thirteen fatal seconds, sixty bullets were fired at
Speaker 2: demonstrators and that left four Kent State students dead, nine wounded.
Speaker 2: And I was just asking Robert Giles, author of When
Speaker 2: Truth Mattered, why didn't the governor or the president of
Speaker 2: Kent State shut down the university on Sunday morning.
Speaker 3: Well, there's several reasons for that. First off, as the president,
Speaker 3: Bob Wide, was out of town. He left on Friday
Speaker 3: afternoon to go to Iowa for an educational meeting and
Speaker 3: a family visit. And when he last checked, he thought
Speaker 3: that the campus was going to be quiet and there
Speaker 3: was nothing to be alarmed about, and he felt free
Speaker 3: to take his trip. And so when Governor Rhodes came in,
Speaker 3: the first thing he did was go into a secret
Speaker 3: meeting with local officials and the county prosecutor. A man
Speaker 3: named Ron Kine strongly urged the governor to shut down
Speaker 3: the campus. He said, there's going to be something terrible
Speaker 3: is going to happen here and we should shut down
Speaker 3: the campus now, and Rhodes said, absolutely not. He said,
Speaker 3: he's quoted as saying if I shut down the campus,
Speaker 3: people are going to look at me and say he
Speaker 3: caved in to the radicals. And so that was the
Speaker 3: theme that he then carried out into his press conference
Speaker 3: when he's referred to these young demonstrators as worse than
Speaker 3: the Nazis and so on. But that was a series
Speaker 3: of things. And then after after the shooting, the county
Speaker 3: prosecutor ron Kin again called the governor's office, who governor
Speaker 3: with Brogues back in Columbus by then called his office
Speaker 3: and said, you've got to shut down the campus, and
Speaker 3: there was a hesitation, and Rose's aide said, well, the
Speaker 3: governor wants to think about it, and so ron Kin
Speaker 3: turned to the local judge named Carris, who said absolutely,
Speaker 3: adiation in order shutting down the campus immediately, so that
Speaker 3: the campus was shut down from late afternoon on May
Speaker 3: the fourth, after the shooting, and it was the campus
Speaker 3: was shut down except for people who had special passes
Speaker 3: and for national guards when who were still on for
Speaker 3: fifteen days.
Speaker 2: You know, it's a type of hubris and the part
Speaker 2: of politicians that this is about them and not about
Speaker 2: public safety, which is just you know, it doesn't matter
Speaker 2: the party. It happens all the time where at an
Speaker 2: every level, including one centator right now from California, it
Speaker 2: seems to feel like the whole country can't go on
Speaker 2: without her. So they don't want to resign. They don't
Speaker 2: ever want to do anything. They want to control everything
Speaker 2: about their career and about their image, and it's just
Speaker 2: all ego. What would have happened had they shut down
Speaker 2: the campus that day?
Speaker 3: Oh, I saw people would sell me alive because they
Speaker 3: have had to go home, and and there wouldn't have
Speaker 3: been any gathering of students to give the service targets
Speaker 3: from the National Guard.
Speaker 2: The What would the National Guard have done? Would they
Speaker 2: have do you think they would have stuck around on
Speaker 2: campus for a day or two? But they shut it down.
Speaker 3: The governor said that we'll keep the National Guard here
Speaker 3: as long as it takes to get the campus under control,
Speaker 3: so they would have stayed for some time.
Speaker 1: So the.
Speaker 2: Take me through step by step. Then after that announcement
Speaker 2: gets made, what the rest of Sunday looks like when
Speaker 2: the campus is open, You've got stringers on the field.
Speaker 2: You've got photographers and you have one print reporter who's
Speaker 2: there on campus.
Speaker 3: Is that correct that that was on Monday day on Sunday,
Speaker 3: not on Sunday. Well, we had people covering it on Sunday.
Speaker 3: But what happened on Sunday was that it was it
Speaker 3: was a nice spring day, and the kids started to
Speaker 3: engage with the guardsmen. They played frisbee, you know, they did,
Speaker 3: got friendly with them until about late in the afternoon
Speaker 3: when things got tent and the students wanted to have
Speaker 3: another small demonstration, and the guardsmen pushed them back through
Speaker 3: the campus gates and shut the campus down. There was
Speaker 3: no there was no rough stuff, but it was clearly
Speaker 3: a moment of rising tension because the guardsmen knew that
Speaker 3: they had by then, had you been given their orders
Speaker 3: through the governor uh to make sure that there was
Speaker 3: going to be no no rally of peace or otherwise
Speaker 3: the next day, And so the students were already making
Speaker 3: noises and fading things, which indicated that they were going
Speaker 3: to try to defy the governor's orders and have their
Speaker 3: protests gathering on the following day at noon. That was
Speaker 3: just a void from Monday in May the fourth.
Speaker 2: The irony then of the governor coming out and calling
Speaker 2: the students brown shirts, when in fact the National Guard
Speaker 2: was acting more like the controlling you know, I mean,
Speaker 2: I think the word goon would be too strong a term,
Speaker 2: but they immediately slipped into the we're going to control
Speaker 2: you physically, we're going to we're in charge here, much
Speaker 2: more of what we would consider it to be typical
Speaker 2: brown shirt behavior. If we're going to look at it
Speaker 2: like that, go ahead, go ahead, Robert.
Speaker 3: I was going to say that the Guard leadership was
Speaker 3: very incompetent because they didn't have a plan. They didn't
Speaker 3: have a plan for when the Guard arrived, They didn't
Speaker 3: have a plan for how they were going to disperse
Speaker 3: the students on Monday, and they didn't have a plan
Speaker 3: once they they put their their plan, not their plan,
Speaker 3: but they gan to move against the students on Monday
Speaker 3: on noon when the students were gathering for their demonstration.
Speaker 2: So what was the background? I mean a lot of ways. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they didn't plan it, but they were also weren't trained
Speaker 2: how to plan it, right.
Speaker 3: That's true. But they had a Brigadier General Robert Canterbury
Speaker 3: who was in charge, and some of the photographs show
Speaker 3: him on Monday Day. In fact, the cover of the
Speaker 3: photograph and the cover of the book shows him in
Speaker 3: a civilian suit and tie, and he's at the back.
Speaker 3: There's a picture on the cover of this of the
Speaker 3: guardsman shoot actually shooting at the students and General Canterbury's
Speaker 3: way at the back, and he's got his hand up
Speaker 3: now he's trying to get them to stop shooting. But
Speaker 3: he had no he had no control over the troops.
Speaker 3: And obviously they the shooting. I think it was everybody
Speaker 3: seemed to conclude with spontaneous. There's been a lot of
Speaker 3: effort to sign you know, a command that to shoot,
Speaker 3: you know, as a single shot, because regards to respond
Speaker 3: the way it did.
Speaker 2: You know the old expression if all you have is
Speaker 2: a hammer, or everything looks like a nail, right, And
Speaker 2: so this this general, what was his background.
Speaker 3: He had many many years of good service as a
Speaker 3: in combat and other places. And he was he was
Speaker 3: the commander of this National Guard unit in Ohio, right,
Speaker 3: And but he was willfully unprepared. One of the questions
Speaker 3: that I raised about him was why he wasn't court martial.
Speaker 3: It turns out that when he was when the National
Speaker 3: Guard was sent to again state. They were under the
Speaker 3: command of the governor of Ohio. Had the had the
Speaker 3: federal government sent the National Guardian the President Nixon sent
Speaker 3: the National Guardian, then he were and the National Guard
Speaker 3: would have been under the federal government, and he would
Speaker 3: have been subject to the military court of Justice and
Speaker 3: subject to course martial.
Speaker 2: You know, that's so interesting. I didn't know that because
Speaker 2: in a way, my impression of that was shaped by
Speaker 2: the Neil Young penned song Ohio done by Crosby Stills,
Speaker 2: Nash and Young that Tin Soldiers and Nixon's coming were
Speaker 2: finally on our own. It would have ruined it if
Speaker 2: they had mentioned the governor. It wouldn't have seemed like right.
Speaker 2: It's poetic somehow, but that's unfair, all right, So the
Speaker 2: things get chippy again between the students and the National Guard.
Speaker 2: Late on Sunday, what was Sunday night like.
Speaker 3: That was pretty quiet. I think the students were back
Speaker 3: and behind the campus gates, and I think they have
Speaker 3: some of them were planning how they were going to
Speaker 3: organize on Monday, or they're going to begin their rally
Speaker 3: and so on and their protest. But until up until
Speaker 3: noon on Sunday, just before noon on Sunday, things were
Speaker 3: fairly quiet.
Speaker 2: And so your experience then you didn't even have a
Speaker 2: reporter there, as you said on Sunday, because it looked
Speaker 2: perhaps like everything was calming down or that this was
Speaker 2: going to get resolved peaceably. There still was no indication
Speaker 2: of what was coming up on May the fourth, but
Speaker 2: what was the So you I imagine you were tracking
Speaker 2: what the college newspaper was doing or have since then,
Speaker 2: or the college reporters, because you had said you often
Speaker 2: hired people from the campus that came out there, and
Speaker 2: it looked like some as particularly the photographers, seemed very
Speaker 2: talented that came out of out of the student newspaper.
Speaker 3: Well, a student newspaper was not really very much involved
Speaker 3: in our coverage. And we had a very experienced journalism
Speaker 3: student named Jeff Salad who was having his on Monday,
Speaker 3: in fact was his final day of journalims school classes
Speaker 3: and we had hired him, so they were when he
Speaker 3: did his coverage, he was really working for the Acrobacon
Speaker 3: Jeneral and so so uh, we didn't just didn't use
Speaker 3: use actual members of the college campus newspaper in our
Speaker 3: cage a Kent State because we had other people who
Speaker 3: had been on Kent State campus in various roles covering education,
Speaker 3: covering sports, doing a lot of other things for many
Speaker 3: many years, including some demonstrations that had taken place two
Speaker 3: and three years before. There was a chapter of this
Speaker 3: Students for Democratic Society that protested against the appearance of
Speaker 3: police recruiters from Oakland, California. And then there was a
Speaker 3: group of there was an organization called the Black United
Speaker 3: Students who protested for more courses and more attention given to.
Speaker 2: The black experience, black history, black black literature.
Speaker 3: Right right, So, as a matter of fact, this is interesting.
Speaker 3: The Black United Students, uh did not participate at all
Speaker 3: on Monday, and they said told one of our reporters
Speaker 3: that they knew once they saw the guards had had rifles.
Speaker 3: They said, you know, we will be the first target.
Speaker 3: So they they disappeared, they lay low, and of course
Speaker 3: they were not participating in any way in the demonstration,
Speaker 3: and because they knew that they could become easy targets
Speaker 3: or they.
Speaker 2: Would stand out in war perhaps against the white, predominantly
Speaker 2: white campus.
Speaker 3: So anyhow, so when you look at the photographs of
Speaker 3: the masses of students, you won't see any any black students.
Speaker 2: That's really really thank you for that. I never knew that.
Speaker 2: Very interesting. So things calm down maybe a little bit.
Speaker 2: On Sunday night, there's some talk in the dorms, I'm sure,
Speaker 2: being like any college campus, I'm sure there was a
Speaker 2: lot of people who were complaining about their campus being
Speaker 2: under siege and feeling like and this is so interesting, Robert,
Speaker 2: I think you'll agree with me, there was a different feeling.
Speaker 2: Young people today may not realize kind of that sense
Speaker 2: of ownership that student bodies felt when they gathered at
Speaker 2: a college campus. It was only going to be theirs
Speaker 2: for four years. It was a transient ownership, but they
Speaker 2: were invested in it and this was their place of
Speaker 2: learning and that this is that whole concept of alma mater.
Speaker 2: You know, this is a place where something new was
Speaker 2: being born and being hatched. And I don't know that
Speaker 2: there's the same feeling on campuses today everywhere like there
Speaker 2: was back in the nineteen sixties, that sense of almost
Speaker 2: you know, proprietorship or territorialseness to the.
Speaker 3: It was territorial, but in a different way. Yeah, sort
Speaker 3: of a snapshot that said it was expressing deep resentment
Speaker 3: that these armed soldiers were on their campus trying to
Speaker 3: prevent them from exercising their First Amendment rights to have
Speaker 3: a protest. It was a very focused kind of reaction,
Speaker 3: and but it was it ran very deep throughout that
Speaker 3: crowd that gathered on the on the Commons on Monday
Speaker 3: noon because and it was clear that they shifted their
Speaker 3: their anger from Nixon to Vietnam War to the idea
Speaker 3: that here were American soldiers with armed arms on their.
Speaker 2: Heads, bearing arms yea, and.
Speaker 3: Bearing arms, and they were on there this is our
Speaker 3: turf place where you know, we had we had the
Speaker 3: freedom to express ourselves.
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