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Campus "Unrest" demonstrations and consequences, 1970-1971

1970-05-24 Akron Beacon Journal Article: Kent State: The Search For Understanding Page 1

"It didn't have to happen" 

Tragedy in Our Midst -- A Special Report 

AKRON BEACON JOURNAL 

"Both sides just blame each other"

Sunday, May 24, 1970. Ohio's Complete Newspaper, Special Kent State Section

KENT STATE: The Search For Understanding 

BURNED OUR ROTC BUILDING, 1 NATIONAL GUARD, THE COMMONS,2, GUARD LOBBED TEARGAS AT STUDENTS, VICTORY BELL, 3 GUARD CHASED STUDENTS OVER HILL, BLANKET HILL 4, GUARD ADVANCED OVER HILL AFTER STUDENTS, PAGODA, WILLIAM SCHROER, JAMES RUSSELL, GUARD CIRCLED TO PRACTICE FIELD, 5 GUARD ASSUMED POSITIONS BUT, DID NOT FIRE, DEAN KAHLER, ROBERT STAMPS, DOUG WRENTMORE, SANDY SCHEUER, JEFREY MILLER, PARKING LOT, TWO BULLET HOLES IN TREE, 6 GUARD HEAD BACK UP HILL STUDENTS [?] JOHN CLEARY, BULLET HOLE IN STATUE, JOSEPH LEWIS, 7 GUARD WHEELED AND FIRED, TAYLOR HALL, PRENTICE HALL, TOM GRACE, ALLISON KRAUSE, ALAN CANFORA, BULLET HOLE IN PRENTICE HALL DORMITORY WINDOW, DONALD MACKENZIE, SECOND PARKING LOT . 

The report which follows is more than 30,000 words in length, the size of a small book. It is as accurate as hard work and an honest regard for the facts can make it, yet it cannot be called complete: the dimensions of the incident at Kent State University are too enormous, the humanity too complex ever to be fully reduced to writing. 
We began our inquiry because we believed it was essential that the Kent State confrontation be understood, the causes identified and the responsibilities assessed. 
The ultimate implications of the volley of gunfire that rattled across the campus that Spring day seems to us to be too grave to be ignored. 
Of that there has been no possibility. The incident at Kent State has divided the generations of our country; the price of our misunderstanding has grown to become intolerable. 
In the violence and the disruption that have followed, Kent State had been explained only with slogans, accusations and epithets. Few people are without opinions on who was right, who wrong. The search for understanding has yet to begin. 
This society is built on the assumption that property informed citizens call themselves decide to shape their future. It is our responsibility as a newspaper to provide the information that allows public judgment to function. 
The facts of the Kent State incident and the conclusions which these facts require must be of concern to all who seek in America a viable and peaceful society. In the emotionalism of the moment, perceptions of truth and blame and responsibility are individual and unshared; until there is agreement on what it was that really happened, no judgment of fault, no plan for prevention is possible. 
It is our hope that this report will prove common ground and a shared version fro which dialog and understanding may grow. There must be a lesson in this tragedy and it can be learned if only we wil try. 
Members of the [Knight?] newspapers team who prepared this report are Gene [?] of the Miami Herald, Julie Morris, John Oppedahl, William Serrin, William Schmidt and Lee Winfrey, of the Detroit Free Press, Helen Carringer, Pat Englehart, James Herzog and Jeff Sallot of the Beacon Journal. The team was directed by Detroit Free Press City Editor Neal Shine. 

May 4, 1970 -- Date Nation Won't Forget 

At the instant of gunfire from the crest of "Blanket Hill," Maj. Harry D. Hones knew he had to stop the shooting. 
"I had my stick in my right hand and I started beating my men over their helmets. I hit so hard I broke the stick, cracked it. And later threw it away. 
"I had to run our in front of the line in front of the fire
If I wouldn't have, they never would have stopped, 
"And I yelled, 'Cease Fire! Cease Fire! Cease Fire!' And the general at the other end of the line was yelling too."

Maj. Jones is a 43 year old Tennessean who once sold the yellow pages ads for the Ohio Bell Telephone Co. His main worry was about his oldest son learning to drive - before that day of May 4, 1970 at Kent State University. 
It is a day neither Jones nor the nation will easily forget. 
"I accept the guilt - if there is any," Maj. Jones said days afterwards. "The troops were under my command. I've done nothing that I am ashamed of. "

Maj. Jones could see clearly through his pink tinted prescription sunglasses. He wore no gas mask. He stood on a hill 19.6 feet higher than a parking lot 230 feet away. He wore a soft fatigue cap. 
"The major hit me so hard it made my ears ring," said David Rogers, one of 45 enlisted en on the hill from A Company First Battalion, 145th Infantry Ohio National Guard. 
Another "15 to 17" troops from G Company 107th Armored Cavalry Regiment, were bunched atop the hill at the same time. Capt. Raymond J. Srp wasn't sure how many men he had. 
"I could see the kids fall," said Rogers 23, a crewcut young man from Wooster who works for his daddy's business. 

"I saw this one. I didn't know if it was a boy or a girl. It didn't bother me at first either. I've been with my brother's wrecking truck out on wrecks and accidents and things. 
"I will say one thing. The major really risked his life. He was out there waving like crazy. 
"I don;t think anybody wants to know who hit anyone, And I wonder why they took out M1s afterwards if we're not going to get into any trouble?"
Rogers said he heard no order to fire. Maj. Jones said he gave no order. They were two of a thousand witnesses, 1,500 witnesses, perhaps 3000. The opinions and beliefs are legion.

In years that lie ahead, the death of four students that Monday Afternoon is certain to be analyzed, scrutinized and documented in enormous detail. Twelve days afterwards, Joseph Sullivan, assistant director of domestic intelligence for the FBI, still had 90 agents assigned to the 1,850 acre campus and their labor was incomplete, unconcluded. 
In the intensity of instant journalism, facts emerged in fragmentation sometimes out of perspective. The definitive account of the violence at Kent State University - a school ranked 24th in enrollment in the country- is yet to be compiled.
Undoubtedly some academicans will forever equate KSU, as it is idetified on the blue tourist signs, with epic tragedy and deliberate murder. To others, it will stand as a predictable and justifiable consequence of the disobedience of lawful order. 

Truth may lie somewhere in between. It may not. 
Under a hard, enamel blue sky a few moment before noon on May 4, with the temperature at 65 degrees and a southwesterly wind fitful at 8 to 14 miles an hour, someone began to ring the victory bell. It was encrusted in snow when last rung on Nov. 15 in full triumphant legitimacy for KSU's dormat football team. 
The institution, not devoid of tradition in its 60 years, allegedly requires any freshman who unwittingly steps on a 

Guard Had No Meaningful Anti-Riot Training -- pg A-20

bronze sidewalk seal to scrub it with toothbrush. It acquired the iron bell from an Erie railroad steam engine 20 years ago. 
It s ringing, a G-sharp eerie sameness; also signified a summoning, to the broad grass field stretching below "Blanket Hill"
In collective mind of the student body - if there be such a state - ample cause existed for a summoning - 56 busted windows and the ensuing townsfolk bitterness, the icepicked fire hoses tangled in the lilac bushes as the ROTC Building went up in flames, and the hillside chants of "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" as the Ohio National Guard attempted to restore what is known in America as law and order. 

All this was the precede,.

Mike Alewitz and Craig Morgan, opponents for the student presidency of KSU, had learned in togetherness the procedures of the Portage County Jail - no belts. no shoe[laces?] In a crowded cell of curfew violators, Tim Butz, 22, a sophomore thoughtfully taped a dime inside a shirt cuff for a telephone call. 
All this too, was the precede. 
At the sound of the G-sharp, Mary McConville, 23, a teaching fellow studying James Joyce, watched the gathering [nultitutde?], 50, 100, 200, fluid and increasing. 

"The guard was arriving, too. It was all so ludicrous. It was our campus and we needed to get together and we were denied our rights . We couldn't assemble." Mary McConville said. 
The metallic squawking of a bullhorn first top a campus police car and later on a military jeep made this imminently clear. 
Paul Schlemer, KSU Sports Information director, heard 

See HORN ROARED Page A-22

MARY VECCHIO, believed at first to be a co-ed screams as Jeffrey Miller lies dead on Kent State University campus. It was discovered later that Miss Vecchio, 14, had been missing from her Opalocka, Fla., home since last February. Her parents identified her through this photo

The Meaning 

Three weeks ago in Kent, three to five dozen bullets killed four young persons, wounded nine and plunged the nation into the most divisive controversy so far in this decade. 
The four students who were slain were unarmed and had harmed no one. The National Guardsmen who shot them were tired and hungry and many has been hit by stones. 
While a nation quarrelled and chose up sides, more than 400 college campuses closed down and President Nixon set a cutoff date for U.S. warfare in Cambodia, the issue that leg to the fatal confrontation at Kent State University on May 4. 
Overtones of the affair suggest that the four fatal shots at Kent State may have been part of the first heavy volley fired by a nation now at war with its young. 

Obviously, violent protest is no longer a monopoly of traditionally liberal universities like the University of California at Berkeley, Wisconsin and Harvard. The mood of young rebellion now runs so deep that it convulses even conservative campuses. 
The killings at Kent State could have happened anywhere. The gulf between the generations seems to have spread so wide that there is now room for violence almost anywhere. 
An examination of Kent State during thee weekend of May 1-4 is a study in escalation - broken windows, burned buildings and rocks on one side, matched by tear gas, bayonets and bullets on the other. 
There were special ingredients in the mix at Kent notably a governor who reacted to confrontation with heat instead of light.
But most of the ingredients are widespread in America:
Hundreds of students deeply resentful of the Indochinese war. 
A well-meaning university administration which seems aloof to many of its charges. 
A townful of small businessmen who are suspicious of beards and easily frightened by rumors
A handful of young radicals who have given up on peaceful dissent. 
Add to this a National Guard ill-led and ill-equipped to cope with a young unruly mob, and you have a situation in which two boys and two girls are killed, all before they grew old enough to even vote. 

A team of Beacon Journal and other Knight Newspapers reporters spent two weeks investigating the case. They interviewed more than 400 students, National Guardsmen, public officials and townspeople, examined photographs and studied official reports. 
The evidence they found prompts these conclusions. 

THE FOUR victims did nothing that justified their deaths. They threw no rocks nor were they politically radical. 

NO SNIPER fired at the National Guard, No investigative agency has yet found any evidence sufficient to support such a theory. 

THE GUARDSMEN fired without orders to do so. Some aimed deliberately at students ; others fired in panic or in follow the leader style. 

IT WAS NOT necessary to kill or wound any students. The Guardsmen had several other options which they did not 

see DOWTOWN, Page A-18

Saving...

"It didn't have to happen" Tragedy in Our Midst -- A Special Report AKRON BEACON JOURNAL "Both sides just blame each other" Sunday, May 24, 1970. Ohio's Complete Newspaper, Special Kent State Section KENT STATE: The Search For Understanding BURNED OUR ROTC BUILDING, 1 NATIONAL GUARD, THE COMMONS,2, GUARD LOBBED TEARGAS AT STUDENTS, VICTORY BELL, 3 GUARD CHASED STUDENTS OVER HILL, BLANKET HILL 4, GUARD ADVANCED OVER HILL AFTER STUDENTS, PAGODA, WILLIAM SCHROER, JAMES RUSSELL, GUARD CIRCLED TO PRACTICE FIELD, 5 GUARD ASSUMED POSITIONS BUT, DID NOT FIRE, DEAN KAHLER, ROBERT STAMPS, DOUG WRENTMORE, SANDY SCHEUER, JEFREY MILLER, PARKING LOT, TWO BULLET HOLES IN TREE, 6 GUARD HEAD BACK UP HILL STUDENTS [?] JOHN CLEARY, BULLET HOLE IN STATUE, JOSEPH LEWIS, 7 GUARD WHEELED AND FIRED, TAYLOR HALL, PRENTICE HALL, TOM GRACE, ALLISON KRAUSE, ALAN CANFORA, BULLET HOLE IN PRENTICE HALL DORMITORY WINDOW, DONALD MACKENZIE, SECOND PARKING LOT . The report which follows is more than 30,000 words in length, the size of a small book. It is as accurate as hard work and an honest regard for the facts can make it, yet it cannot be called complete: the dimensions of the incident at Kent State University are too enormous, the humanity too complex ever to be fully reduced to writing. We began our inquiry because we believed it was essential that the Kent State confrontation be understood, the causes identified and the responsibilities assessed. The ultimate implications of the volley of gunfire that rattled across the campus that Spring day seems to us to be too grave to be ignored. Of that there has been no possibility. The incident at Kent State has divided the generations of our country; the price of our misunderstanding has grown to become intolerable. In the violence and the disruption that have followed, Kent State had been explained only with slogans, accusations and epithets. Few people are without opinions on who was right, who wrong. The search for understanding has yet to begin. This society is built on the assumption that property informed citizens call themselves decide to shape their future. It is our responsibility as a newspaper to provide the information that allows public judgment to function. The facts of the Kent State incident and the conclusions which these facts require must be of concern to all who seek in America a viable and peaceful society. In the emotionalism of the moment, perceptions of truth and blame and responsibility are individual and unshared; until there is agreement on what it was that really happened, no judgment of fault, no plan for prevention is possible. It is our hope that this report will prove common ground and a shared version fro which dialog and understanding may grow. There must be a lesson in this tragedy and it can be learned if only we wil try. Members of the [Knight?] newspapers team who prepared this report are Gene [?] of the Miami Herald, Julie Morris, John Oppedahl, William Serrin, William Schmidt and Lee Winfrey, of the Detroit Free Press, Helen Carringer, Pat Englehart, James Herzog and Jeff Sallot of the Beacon Journal. The team was directed by Detroit Free Press City Editor Neal Shine. May 4, 1970 -- Date Nation Won't Forget At the instant of gunfire from the crest of "Blanket Hill," Maj. Harry D. Hones knew he had to stop the shooting. "I had my stick in my right hand and I started beating my men over their helmets. I hit so hard I broke the stick, cracked it. And later threw it away. "I had to run our in front of the line in front of the fire If I wouldn't have, they never would have stopped, "And I yelled, 'Cease Fire! Cease Fire! Cease Fire!' And the general at the other end of the line was yelling too." Maj. Jones is a 43 year old Tennessean who once sold the yellow pages ads for the Ohio Bell Telephone Co. His main worry was about his oldest son learning to drive - before that day of May 4, 1970 at Kent State University. It is a day neither Jones nor the nation will easily forget. "I accept the guilt - if there is any," Maj. Jones said days afterwards. "The troops were under my command. I've done nothing that I am ashamed of. " Maj. Jones could see clearly through his pink tinted prescription sunglasses. He wore no gas mask. He stood on a hill 19.6 feet higher than a parking lot 230 feet away. He wore a soft fatigue cap. "The major hit me so hard it made my ears ring," said David Rogers, one of 45 enlisted en on the hill from A Company First Battalion, 145th Infantry Ohio National Guard. Another "15 to 17" troops from G Company 107th Armored Cavalry Regiment, were bunched atop the hill at the same time. Capt. Raymond J. Srp wasn't sure how many men he had. "I could see the kids fall," said Rogers 23, a crewcut young man from Wooster who works for his daddy's business. "I saw this one. I didn't know if it was a boy or a girl. It didn't bother me at first either. I've been with my brother's wrecking truck out on wrecks and accidents and things. "I will say one thing. The major really risked his life. He was out there waving like crazy. "I don;t think anybody wants to know who hit anyone, And I wonder why they took out M1s afterwards if we're not going to get into any trouble?" Rogers said he heard no order to fire. Maj. Jones said he gave no order. They were two of a thousand witnesses, 1,500 witnesses, perhaps 3000. The opinions and beliefs are legion. In years that lie ahead, the death of four students that Monday Afternoon is certain to be analyzed, scrutinized and documented in enormous detail. Twelve days afterwards, Joseph Sullivan, assistant director of domestic intelligence for the FBI, still had 90 agents assigned to the 1,850 acre campus and their labor was incomplete, unconcluded. In the intensity of instant journalism, facts emerged in fragmentation sometimes out of perspective. The definitive account of the violence at Kent State University - a school ranked 24th in enrollment in the country- is yet to be compiled. Undoubtedly some academicans will forever equate KSU, as it is idetified on the blue tourist signs, with epic tragedy and deliberate murder. To others, it will stand as a predictable and justifiable consequence of the disobedience of lawful order. Truth may lie somewhere in between. It may not. Under a hard, enamel blue sky a few moment before noon on May 4, with the temperature at 65 degrees and a southwesterly wind fitful at 8 to 14 miles an hour, someone began to ring the victory bell. It was encrusted in snow when last rung on Nov. 15 in full triumphant legitimacy for KSU's dormat football team. The institution, not devoid of tradition in its 60 years, allegedly requires any freshman who unwittingly steps on a Guard Had No Meaningful Anti-Riot Training -- pg A-20 bronze sidewalk seal to scrub it with toothbrush. It acquired the iron bell from an Erie railroad steam engine 20 years ago. It s ringing, a G-sharp eerie sameness; also signified a summoning, to the broad grass field stretching below "Blanket Hill" In collective mind of the student body - if there be such a state - ample cause existed for a summoning - 56 busted windows and the ensuing townsfolk bitterness, the icepicked fire hoses tangled in the lilac bushes as the ROTC Building went up in flames, and the hillside chants of "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" as the Ohio National Guard attempted to restore what is known in America as law and order. All this was the precede,. Mike Alewitz and Craig Morgan, opponents for the student presidency of KSU, had learned in togetherness the procedures of the Portage County Jail - no belts. no shoe[laces?] In a crowded cell of curfew violators, Tim Butz, 22, a sophomore thoughtfully taped a dime inside a shirt cuff for a telephone call. All this too, was the precede. At the sound of the G-sharp, Mary McConville, 23, a teaching fellow studying James Joyce, watched the gathering [nultitutde?], 50, 100, 200, fluid and increasing. "The guard was arriving, too. It was all so ludicrous. It was our campus and we needed to get together and we were denied our rights . We couldn't assemble." Mary McConville said. The metallic squawking of a bullhorn first top a campus police car and later on a military jeep made this imminently clear. Paul Schlemer, KSU Sports Information director, heard See HORN ROARED Page A-22 MARY VECCHIO, believed at first to be a co-ed screams as Jeffrey Miller lies dead on Kent State University campus. It was discovered later that Miss Vecchio, 14, had been missing from her Opalocka, Fla., home since last February. Her parents identified her through this photo The Meaning Three weeks ago in Kent, three to five dozen bullets killed four young persons, wounded nine and plunged the nation into the most divisive controversy so far in this decade. The four students who were slain were unarmed and had harmed no one. The National Guardsmen who shot them were tired and hungry and many has been hit by stones. While a nation quarrelled and chose up sides, more than 400 college campuses closed down and President Nixon set a cutoff date for U.S. warfare in Cambodia, the issue that leg to the fatal confrontation at Kent State University on May 4. Overtones of the affair suggest that the four fatal shots at Kent State may have been part of the first heavy volley fired by a nation now at war with its young. Obviously, violent protest is no longer a monopoly of traditionally liberal universities like the University of California at Berkeley, Wisconsin and Harvard. The mood of young rebellion now runs so deep that it convulses even conservative campuses. The killings at Kent State could have happened anywhere. The gulf between the generations seems to have spread so wide that there is now room for violence almost anywhere. An examination of Kent State during thee weekend of May 1-4 is a study in escalation - broken windows, burned buildings and rocks on one side, matched by tear gas, bayonets and bullets on the other. There were special ingredients in the mix at Kent notably a governor who reacted to confrontation with heat instead of light. But most of the ingredients are widespread in America: Hundreds of students deeply resentful of the Indochinese war. A well-meaning university administration which seems aloof to many of its charges. A townful of small businessmen who are suspicious of beards and easily frightened by rumors A handful of young radicals who have given up on peaceful dissent. Add to this a National Guard ill-led and ill-equipped to cope with a young unruly mob, and you have a situation in which two boys and two girls are killed, all before they grew old enough to even vote. A team of Beacon Journal and other Knight Newspapers reporters spent two weeks investigating the case. They interviewed more than 400 students, National Guardsmen, public officials and townspeople, examined photographs and studied official reports. The evidence they found prompts these conclusions. THE FOUR victims did nothing that justified their deaths. They threw no rocks nor were they politically radical. NO SNIPER fired at the National Guard, No investigative agency has yet found any evidence sufficient to support such a theory. THE GUARDSMEN fired without orders to do so. Some aimed deliberately at students ; others fired in panic or in follow the leader style. IT WAS NOT necessary to kill or wound any students. The Guardsmen had several other options which they did not see DOWTOWN, Page A-18