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“Four Dead in Ohio: Was There a Conspiracy at Kent State?” Don’t expect a definitive answer to the question in the title of William Gordon’s book, which should come as no surprise to those still asking these types of questions.

Instead Gordon’s book provides an excellent objective summary of what happened on May 4th, good detail about subsequent investigations and litigation, and a decent exploration of possible cover-ups with speculation as to motives.

There is not much to support a real conspiracy regarding the shooting itself, mostly just suspicion stemming from the efforts of local, state, and federal authorities to vindicate the guardsmen involved. Gordon’s logical analysis of the situation, along with information released under the Freedom of Information Act, supports the idea that this was more a desire to cater to the conservative political base than to hide facts about a government conspiracy.

Gordon’s most interesting points are not about the shootings or the subsequent investigations, but about the degree to which the action was condoned (and even applauded) by older Americans. His most memorable statement being that the killings were “the most popular murders ever committed in the United States”.

Many years later Gordon examines the situation from a distanced perspective. The most likely scenario is that a handful of guardsmen and their NCO had agreed at some point during their time on campus to act on their frustrations if a good opportunity arose. After a bungled and especially embarrassing sweep across campus they found themselves bringing up the rear of the formation. When they reached the top of a hill they stopped, turned, and fired a volley into the parking lot 300-400 feet away. A payback scare for the students who had been “disrespecting” them during the 40 hours they had been on campus; or just a demonstration that they had live ammunition.

There had been rocks thrown and tear gas fired during this time, extreme for a crowd control situation but tame by civil disturbance standards. 200 miles east at Watkins Glen (NY) it is an annual tradition for bands of drunken motor racing fans to burn random cars. For years the Sheriff and his special posse have spent entire evenings tear gassing and battling these crowds without a single shot being fired. Of course few (if any) of the deputies had mega-hatred for the race fans; and unlike the KSU students even the most drunken spectator knew that the guns of the deputies were loaded.

While the shots were probably just intended to scare, there is also a possibility that those who hatched up this idea intended to shoot students and just wanted other shooters to cover their actions (no one is telling). It is also possible that some of the troops walking just ahead of this group and unaware of the plan were spooked by the first shots and turned and fired directly into the crowd hitting students.

There were 67 shots fired over a 13 second period, an extremely long time for this sort of situation. Although in photos the firing line looks organized, the targeted locations were extremely varied with enough cars and pavement hit to support the idea that the intent of many (but obviously not all) was to just scare the students. As Gordon points out (and the many photos illustrate) there is little logic to the notion that those who fired felt particularly threatened at the moment of the shooting, if anything they had reached a commanding position far safer than their previous location. In fact there was a detached company of guardsmen much closer to the targeted students (they were deployed a few yards from the students on the parking lot side of Taylor Hall) who looked on with amazement during the shooting.

Allison Krause (a teenage girl) was shot in the “back” three times from a range of 340 feet. Hard to spin that as self-defense. Does anything more need to be said about the amount of hate that was on the firing line that day?

I had several minor issues with the book. On page 32 Gordon reprints a Knight Newspaper drawing (made shortly after the shootings) of the area of campus where the shootings occurred, complete with arrows and labels tracing movement and location of the participants. This diagram is neither in scale nor properly oriented, and gives a confusing (warped and compressed) view of the scene. On page 54 is a chart made by the FBI of the same area. The FBI chart is to scale and properly oriented, and illustrates the significant distortions of the newspaper drawing. The only possible value of the newspaper drawing is that it may explain why some newspaper readers supported the actions of the guardsmen (the compressed scale makes its look like the students are just a few feet from the guardsmen), but Gordon does not explore this possibility. So why even include it?

Related to this are several references to the left flank of the firing line when Gordon apparently means the “right” – military unit alignments “should always” be be described from the unit’s point of view (like a football formation). Finally, his description of the maneuvers on the football practice field appear to suffer from similar right-left confusion.

Then again, what do I know? I’m only a child.
Rating: 4 / 5

For those of us of a certain age, the shootings at Kent State in 1970 were shocking and very personal. They changed our lives, though we weren’t always sure how or why. But we reacted as though the bullets fired that day were aimed at ourselves, not at students half a country away. Over the years, as we have grown older, many of us have evolved beyond our radical mindsets, partly by working through the anger, rage and fear we felt about Kent State. We may have once accepted the myth that the protesters were idyllic peaceniks wearing love beads and singing Kumbaya while being gunned down. But as William Gordon demonstrates in “Four Dead in Ohio,” the truth is not as simple as that. Students (or someone) burned down the campus ROTC building, prompting a jumpy (repressive? opportunistic?) Governor Rhodes to call in the National Guard. Some students were enraged and hurled abusive language and gestures (as well as stones) to tell the Guard they were not welcome on campus. The violence on May 4 was in some way a sad circus — complete with volleying tear gas canisters, rock-throwing from distances that would have challenged major league ballplayers, edgy radicals turning tail from the Guard, black flags, headbands, soldiers walking into a fenced-in enclosure, and then a very unfunny barrage of shots inexplicably aimed not at a pack of nearby students but against a sparse crowd milling in a distant parking lot. Given the sheer number of players and motivations, mysteries and questions were sure to emerge. Given the polarized viewpoints of the participants (not to mention the propensity of the human mind under stress to screw things up) the potential for misunderstanding and distrust are profound.

Gordon’s book tackles the impossible task of making sense of the action on May 1-4 and the confused, frustrating legal aftermath. Central to his exposition is an attempt to determine whether conspiracy lay behind the tragedy. The 60s being the 60s (that decade being said to have ended officially on May 4, 1970) it was inevitable that many took it as gospel that all was not as it seemed — that larger forces were at work in the country, and that nothing happened by accident. Kent State has proven to be a particularly thick porridge of dark speculation. For instance, some witnesses reported seeing the soldiers in a “huddle” on the football field minutes before the fatal volley. But did a huddle occur? If it did, did soldiers use it to plan their fatal attack? Or was the huddle merely a witness’s interpretation of a bunch of soldiers standing close to each other? Why did the Guard, clearly in control of every element of the day, suddenly turn and fire on faraway students? Were they ordered — either verbally of non-verbally? If so, who gave the order and why? What made the soldiers gaze with interest toward the Prentice Hall lot where so many later fell? Finally, was there a wider conspiracy to disrupt student protests against the war involving governmental actors even higher up than the governor of Ohio? Did Nixon’s FBI provide an “agents provacateurs” to initiate the shooting? And why was the Justice Department so reluctant to convene a grand jury to consider charges against the Guardsmen, exasperating victims and their parents?

Sadly, most of these questions will never be definitively answered. Some actors, like Sergeant Myron Pryor — notoriously seen pointing his 45 toward the students as the shooting commenced — denied any culpability, ludicrously claiming not to have fired his weapon at all. Other Guardsmen pled the Fifth Amendment, leaving a gap in the record of what happened. Motivations and memories were lost and befuddled in the swirl of tear gas and adrenaline. Nixon’s interest in the case, if any, cannot be shown to have involved nefarious scheming against the peace movement; it may well have been more related to placating his political base (sadly, the majority of Americans at the time) who thought the Guard was in the right. The court cases that followed the shooting were hampered by stonewalling federal officials, judges ruling against lawyers who ticked them off, politicians trying to keep their electorates happy, defense lawyers being allowed to put the victims on trial, and victims’ lawyers trying to make names for themselves at the expense of winning their court cases. In short, a bloody, yet very human, mess.

Perhaps a result of his own long trek from the land of conspiracies, Gordon leaves some important questions unasked and some hum-drum alternatives unexplored. Why, for instance, did the Guard fire on distant student in the Prentice Hall lot rather than at the thicker knot of students and onlookers on the nearby Taylor Hall veranda? Also, what might have prompted their sudden turn and attack, if not an order? Gordon does not explore the possibility that a rock thrown by a student might have hit a departing and jumpy Guardsman, prompting him and those around him into a knee-jerk and fatal overreaction. Several students and victims, including one who taunted the guardsmen on the playing field, and who subsequently became a vocal supporter of keeping May 4 alive, were in easy rock throwing range of the top of Blanket Hill. But this obvious question — which would fit the Guardsmen’s usually-dismissed testimony about being under siege– was not raised. Also, though Gordon criticizes the Guard for deploying gas masks without corrective lenses for those needing them, he does not much discuss what it might be like for a soldier to be forced to see the world through this barrier. Without having to condone their actions or state of mind, we still have a long way to go to humanize the Guardsmen.

I found Gordon’s survey approach to the topic to be an impediment to the book’s readability. As an investigator with a longtime interest in the case and evident sympathy for the students, he needed to provide more primary material. The American public is ready, I think, to be exposed to eyewitness accounts from both sides and to come to its own conclusions. In this vein, the most interesting part of the book is the end notes, which included the transcript of Gordon’s 1982 interview with Nixon’s notorious chief domestic advisor, John Ehrlichman. That interview, more than anything Gordon could have written, made it pretty clear to me that Nixon was as shocked and surprised about the shootings as anyone else. Gordon uses the notes section to discuss (and dismiss) most of the crazier conspiracy theories about May 4, such as whether an ambulance was on site prior to the shootings, an ominous sign that the killings had been planned. Gordon shows that the Guard, needing a way to address students, commandeered the ambulance for its PA system. Such material should have been included in the body of the text. “Four Dead in Ohio” features relatively few photos, though unlike those in “The Truth About Kent State” by Peter Davies, they are of high quality. This lack is not usually a problem, as the included photos tell most of what the reader needs to know. Yet at least once, Gordon refers to a photo that is not include in the book. And a few more photos of the long distances between Guardsmen and students would have made the case more aptly than Gordon’s insistence or biased eyewitness testimony. The book includes a couple of maps — one from a newspaper and the other from the FBI are generally accurate (with mistakes pointed out by the author) and help ground the reader in the topography of the Commons, Taylor Hall, the football field and Prentice Hall parking lot. A topographical map (or better yet an aerial shot) with labels would have more objective.

The shootings at Kent are tragic and invite reexamination. Gordon’s book leads me to reject the idea of a grand scheme to kill college students. Gordon documents more than enough bumbling, posturing, reckless and venal behavior to have accounted for ten Kent States. But in spite of the book’s shortcomings, it does help the reader identify the questions that still remain unanswered. And it makes it clear how the lack of candor on the part of the Guardsmen — not to mention the heightened and continuing paranoia of some former students — has made it difficult to determine exactly what happened that day. The truth, if and when it eventually comes out, will undoubtedly be far more mundane than even the tamest of conspiracy theories, yet more troubling than the dismissive pose of those who blame the students for their own deaths. Until a fuller telling is possible, Gordon’s book, by mercifully shying away from the wilder theories, and by explaining away many peripheral conspiracy possibilities, helps readers narrow their attention onto the serious remaining mysteries of that day, on which death stalked an American college campus in the form of the young gunning down the young.
Rating: 4 / 5

Yesterday I picked up this book at the Kent State bookstore as I finished out the semester. I had seen this one before, and it looked good. Even though I haven’t completely finished the book yet, I can say already that it is something special. Gordon presents many facts, interviews, and testimonials that make you wonder if there really was a conspiracy at Kent State. I don’t think it’s false information that he’s giving. Alot of it makes you wonder what happened. At the beginning of the book however, Gordon bad-mouths Kent State for not commemorating the 4 students that were killed. Yes, they did dedicate a memorial to the “event” of May 4th, but since being published in 1995, the university has dedicated a number of memorials to the 4 students, including blocking off 4 parking spaces where the students were shot. All in all, this is an excellent book.
Rating: 4 / 5