Return to the Charles A. Thomas Papers (KSU May 4 Collection)
KENFOUR: NOTES ON AN INVESTIGATION.
Chapter One: The Hounds
and the Mole.
Friday, May 1. On May Day evening 1970, a disturbance broke out on the Strip, the tavern district of an Ohio railway town called Kent. It began with a dispute between members of a local motorcycle gang and counter-culture youth from the town’s state university branch, over the former’s habit of leading their girlfriends around on chains and dog leashes. But it swiftly drew in other members of the same generation if disparate origins: high school kids attracted to the street by the law liquor law enforcement, blue collar rowdies, and students from the university already tense following the announcement, the night before, by President Nixon that he had ordered US troops to invade neutral Cambodia without a declaration of war. Some window-breaking and looting occurred before the local authorities – town police, county sheriff’s deputies, and vigilantes the sheriff’s department referred to as “posse” or “mounted” deputies – cleared the streets with some measure of brutality. There, ordinarily, it would have ended. But the rumor had started, from a source to this day unknown, that the “riot” had been caused by the radical Students for a Democratic Society.
Saturday, May 2. During the early hours of the 2nd, the rumor, with panicky embellishments, flew back and forth between the authorities in Kent and the state capitol in Columbus. The Governor’s office kept the National Guard informed and the Guard detached two officers from its G-2 (Intelligence) section to check on conditions in Kent firsthand. Although the town and the adjoining Kent State campus remained calm all day Saturday, the Guard officers remained a presence at each of the five progressively more agitated meetings between town and University administrators. The point of discussion, inexplicable given the conditions, was whether the National Guard should be brought in en masse. The G-2 officers kept insisting they had to know by five in the evening, and by then, Mayor Leroy Satrom was ready to make the formal request to the Governor. Governor James Rhodes was eager to comply. He was running for the nomination for US Senator on the Republican ticket, focused on the “law and order” issue and particularly violent in his rhetoric about student demonstrators. He was trailing in the polls and the election was scheduled for Tuesday the 5th.
During the following five hours, someone set fire to the Army ROTC classroom building. This has since been given as the reason that the National Guard immediately occupied the Kent State campus, although the Guard had already been en route before the fire was set. Thirty years later, the arsonist(s) have never been identified, despite one of the most massive and intensive investigations in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But while it failed completely in its announced objective, the nature of that investigation raised fundamental questions about the future direction of American society that if anything loom larger today.
Sunday, May 3. University President Robert White flew back in from an out-of-state conference, summoned by news of the ROTC fire. Governor Rhodes – fresh from a news conference at the local firehouse house in which, shouting and hammering on the podium with his fist, he had promised to “eradicate” the radicals responsible – met White on the tarmac.
He told White that four to five hundred “outside agitators” had invaded the campus and threatened further anarchy and destruction, and that for that reason he intended to keep the Guard there. Although around thirty per cent of this page has been censored (blacked out) by the FBI, it is clear that the origin of these assertions was the intelligence arm of the Ohio State Highway Patrol. [1]
An unidentified officer of the Kent State University Police called the FBI’s Cleveland field office around midday to advise “that there had been no new acts of violence reported on the KSU campus since the burning of the Army ROTC Building”. However, the situation remained “tense”. There were “unsubstantiated rumors indicating that KSU students or other individuals on the KSU campus might attempt to burn the Air Force ROTC Building” that evening. [2] The only FBI agent officially admitted to in the Bureau’s report arrived on campus at 8:45 p.m. and stayed until 2:00 a.m. on the 4th. [3] But a student talked that evening with “three men who said they were FBI agents [and] that the campus was under martial law.” [4] The evening, students attempted to stage a peaceful sitdown demonstration at the intersection of Lincoln and Main Streets, on the border of the campus, to protest the continued presence of the National Guard on campus. They were surrounded by a mixed force of campus police, town police, country sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, and National Guard. At first they were assured that President White and Mayor Satrom would address them, only to have this suddenly reversed. As suddenly, they were ordered to clear the street. Before they could comply, the National Guard attacked behind a barrage of tear gas, with rifle butts and bayonets. The Guard then swept the campus, as they had the night before, until all the students had been driven indoors.
Monday, May 4. Students started to gather shortly before noon on the Commons, a grassy quadrangle at the center of the campus and its activities. Now they were not only protesting the invasion of Cambodia, but the occupation of their campus by the Guard and its brutal behavior on the two previous nights. A campus police officer read the order to disperse, but the crowd ignored it. Someone in the crowd shouted that the University should join the national student strike which had begun the previous Thursday night, while President Nixon was still announcing his decision. The Guard fired tear gas but it was dispersed by the wind. The Guard commander ordered his troops to clear the Commons. The soldiers marched across the grass and the crowd dispersed before they could reach it. Most of them halted in place, where they could prevent any of the demonstrators from returning. But a contingent on the right flank of the advance detached itself from the line and for the next twenty minutes, chased a small group of defiant hecklers up the hillside by Taylor Hall, over the crest, down the reverse slope, across a road, and out onto a football practice field, where a chain link fence barred their further progress. After pausing on the practice field, seemingly confused, and then going into a kneeling/firing position, the officers in charge ordered their men back to the Commons. Midway in the return march, as they reapproached the crest of the hill, the Guardsmen suddenly turned and opened fire. Four students were killed, eight others seriously wounded.
There are no reports that include eyewitness statements by FBI personnel. But when Robert Raun, Special Agent in Charge of the US Army 109th Military Intelligence Group, Akron, entered the guard command post with two of his agents about an hour later, he encountered agents of the FBI as well as of the Secret Service. [5] At 1539 hours (3:39 p..m.), the National Guard received a warning “that the Weathermen faction of the SDS are armed and are wearing military uniforms. This was confirmed by the FBI.” [6]
That evening Governor Rhodes cabled J. Edgar Hoover: “I shall appreciate the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in making a complete investigation of the facts.” [7] Thus the FBI formally entered the case.
But the Cleveland field office, at least, was not totally innocent of events at Kent State. It had continually monitored the campus, as well as all those in North Ohio, under its COINTELPRO (“Counterintelligence Program: Internal Security: Disruption of the New Left”). It noted a brief flareup of militancy in late 1968 and 1969, spearheaded by the local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society. [8] But it had also noted the virtual extinction of SDS on campus after an incident at the Music and Speech Building, viewed by many as a “setup”, which resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of the SDS leadership, the revocation of the chapter’s charter, and its expulsion from the campus. [9] Given the assessment of Cleveland that SDS was defunct at Kent State by early 1970, it is interesting to note that the Bureau went to the Portage County Prosecutor’s Office on March 24, 1970, to obtain fresh profiles of Howard Emmer, Colin Neiburger, Edward O. Erickson, and Jeff Powell, the four SDS leaders arrested at Music and Speech the previous year, who were due to be released on April 29 – the day before Nixon announced the Cambodia invasion. [10]
Direction was forthcoming from SOG (Seat of Government, the FBI euphemism for headquarters in Washington) immediately. J. Walter Yeagley, Assistant Attorney General for Internal Security, sent Director Hoover a memo citing six “attacks” on ROTC around the nation. “The foregoing incidents indicate the possible existence of one or more conspiracies to drive the ROTC from the college campuses.” [11] (It is impossible to tell from the document when on the 4th it was created. If after SOG had learned of the killings, the FBI investigation of the arson – in which it would invest twice the resources as to its investigation of the shootings – was possibly a “smokescreen” from the beginning.).
Also of interest is when President Nixon knew. His Memoirs relate how his chief of staff Bob Haldeman told him late in the afternoon. [12] But at two o’clock Haldeman jotted on his ever-present legal pad “keep P. filled in on Kent State.” [13] In his daily journal Haldeman expanded on the President’s reaction: “He very disturbed. Afraid his decision set it off… then kept after me all day for more facts. Hoping rioters had provoked the shootings – but no real evidence that they did.” [14] Even after he had left for the day, Nixon called Haldeman back and among others issued one ringing command: “need to get out story of sniper.” [15]
The President’s degree of concern was prudent. Word of the killings spread like a grass fire. The student strike begun at some institutions now exploded across the country, so fast the wire services could not track it. Many of the soldiers in Vietnam were finally stung into forming an organized opposition to the war within the ranks. The stock market absorbed its biggest one-day loss since the assassination of President Kennedy. The halls of Congress rang with calls for impeachment.
America’s closest allies recoiled from her in horror.
Some, any excuse had to be found for the Guardsmen.
The President’s hopes that they would be justified by a “sniper” shooting at them were perhaps foredoomed. A journalist who had been in the midst of the action was emphatic:
This reporter, who was with the group of students, did not see any indication of sniper fire, nor was the
Sound of any gunfire audible before the Guard volley. Students, conceding that rocks had been thrown,
heatedly denied that there was any sniper. [16]
General Sylvester del Corso, the Ohio Guard adjutant, unwittingly debunked the sniper story by calling a popular Cleveland area talk show that evening. He asserted that a sniper had fired on the Guard with a shotgun from “city property, meaning the commercially zoned strip across Main Street from the campus. The show’s host reminded him that those buildings were only two stories high and 250 yards from the Commons. Anyone who had been on campus knew that there was a hill between the two sites. Del Corso subsided, mumbling. [17]
But there had been a civilian on the scene with a gun. He appears on WKYC-TV sound film running down from the hillside (the slaughter took place on the reverse slope and is off-camera), with a bespectacled black man in pursuit, pointing after him and shouting. [18] The fugitive, a thin-faced white youth makes straight for the National Guard formation and therein seeks out a campus police officer, to whom he surrenders a revolver.
The campus police immediately took the black man, instructor Harold Sherman Reid, Bill Barrett (a co-pursuer), and the youth, Terrence Norman, to their headquarters. Norman told KSUPD Detective R. F. Winkler that he was “covering the demonstrations” and had gotten separated from the Guard line after following it “for protection”. “I then joined the other photographers for protection.” He heard someone yelling “Kill the pigs!”, so he sought out the Guard again “for a little protection”. Reid deposed that he had first seen Norman “standing with a pistol in his hand pointing it in the direction of a man lying on the ground.” [19] But Norman claimed he had been trying to aid “a hippie type person… bleeding from the face”, when he was assaulted by several persons striking him with their fists and trying to get his camera. “I drew my weapon” and told his attackers they were “going to get it”. They ran off in one direction and he ran off after the Guard again. He added that
I state at this time that I was requested to take pictures for the purpose of identification and prosecution of
violators, by Det. Tom Kelly of the Campus Police and Bill Chapin of the FBI, Akron, Field Office. [20]
Norman stated emphatically that he had not fired his revolver.
Tuesday, May 5th. A female KSU student sent a letter to campus security apparently referring to Norman. She had seen a young man outfitted as a photographer “about 5 minutes before the shootings…. He hit a fellow student across the face with the butt of his gun.” “The other kids” took up the cry that the man was armed. “The cameraman turned into an animal” and pointed the weapon at the people around him, threatening to shoot as he backed down the hill. [21]
What may have been a pre-emptive move to silence further speculation about Norman appeared in the Akron Beacon-Journal that morning, as an interview with him. He repeated that he had not fired the revolver and was described – merely – as a Kent State junior and a “free-lance photographer”. He then recited, point by point, an elaborate version of the Guard’s alibis:
…he saw more than 1,000 rock-throwing students back 40 National Guardsmen against the wall at Taylor
Hall…
…the Guardsmen, out of tear gas, dodged rocks and bricks and bottles from nearly point-blank range…
Guardsmen were struck and down.
…he heard what he thought was a shot from the roof of Taylor Hall. [22]
Although the National Guard was scouring the campus for evidence of the missiles they said had been thrown at them, there was no discernible activity by the FBI on the 5th. Agents from the Akron field office interviewed Larry Pennell, a KSU student eyewitness, but only after he had called them and requested it. He told them and would repeat to others that he had seen “an officer” trigger the volley by deliberately firing into the crowd with a handgun. [23] Akron also received a call from a regular Army colonel pursuing a Business Administration degree that would have a lot more to do with the direction the FBI probe would take than any question of who had shot where.
[H]e felt the FBI should look into the background of some of the instructors at KSU in the Liberal Arts
Deparment as some of these people are reportedly very liberal. [C]* felt that instructors of this type have a
tendency to create an atmosphere such as prevailed on the campus on this date, by instilling liberal ideas in the
minds of the students. [C] could not offer the names of any specific instructors in this regard. [24]
The National Guard adjutant office at Fort Hayes, Columbus, Ohio got a similar call from a Nancy Kibler,
whose daughter attends Kent State. The daughter was in class Monday morning 4 May 1970 and said her
philosophy professor was actually inciting them to riot and they were told their grades depended on it. [25]
Wednesday, May 6. One of the numerous students working part-time for campus security confessed to the agents
that he could have been behind the sniper reports. He had been on top of Herr Hall on the 4th taking pictures of demonstrators; his camera had a 300-mm. Lens and was mounted on a rifle-style stock. (He took the occasion to supply the names of fellow students he considered “agitators”. [26]
The New York field office sent a teletype, apparently revoking an earlier one which has not survived in the files: “Review of New York office files disclosed victim Miller not identified as anyone who has participated in radicle [sic] activity in the New York area” [27] -- Jeffrey Miller being one of the students who had been shot to death on Monday. They had initially confused him with another Jeff Miller, also from New York.
The agents, having roped off the whole area of the Monday confrontation, now picked up every stone and every other object that could have been thrown at the Guard, an inventory rendered less than comprehensive by the fact that the Guard had already policed the same area. They combined their debris with the Guard’s and photographed it in sections according to the area in which retrieved. [28] “The rocks were described only as ranging from pebbles to 1 ½” in diameter.” [29] (This last is difficult to reconcile with General Canterbury’s assertion that his men were under a barrage of “rocks… the size of baseballs.” [30] “That’s what the FBI kept wanting to know,” one student interviewee complained, “How many rocks? How could you tell how many rocks were thrown? I thought it was a stupid question.” [31] ) While some of the agents were completing the inventory, another concluded one of the few interviews done with a student eyewitness thus far. The student recalled seeing nothing that would lead the Guardsmen to fear for their lives; “the largest stone he saw thrown was approximately three inches in diameter.” [32]
A Guard jeep pulled up at campus police headquarters that afternoon and several of the militiamen wordlessly unloaded thirteen tagged M-1 rifles. [33] The M-1 was the basic weapon they had been carrying on Monday: a high-powered semi-automatic rifle whose .30 caliber bullet is capable of killing at two miles. The Portage County Sheriff’s Department would also turn over fragments of bullets removed from the bodies of the dead students to the FBI. [34] Now all the Bureau, with its legendary ballistics testing facility, had to do was match the tracks on the bullet fragments with the lands and groovers inside the rifle barrels and they would know who had killed whom – or would have. But in their haste to go on duty this time the Guardsmen had not signed out for their rifles on the usual control cards; “a lined pad was used as a sign-out sheet for arms and ammo… it disappeared from the arms room about the same time that the FBI obtained custody of some weapons from Troop G” [35] -- i.e., that afternoon. It was never seen again.
This disappearance was the lynchpin of what British-born author Peter Davies would come to call the ultimate coverup. Faced in 1973 with a Congressional probe into Kent State, the Justice Department went through the motions of trying the Guard “shooters”. In his opening statement the Department’s “prosecutor” succeeding in “virtually assuring their acquittal” by announcing that there was no way to prove which man had fired which bullet. The judged directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty, and thence the Guardsmen could never be tried again. Davies’ hypothesis was that Justice was far more worried about anything a renewed – and, under the auspices of the Congress, independent – investigation of the ROTC fire might turn up than about anything that could happen to the “shooters”.
…the ROTC fire on May 2 was the work of agents provocateurs. Acting on behalf of the Justice
Department’s Internal Security Division, then headed by Robert Mardian, in conjunction with the intelligence
community, whose domestic covert operations had become President Nixon’s secret weapon in his campaign
to silence dissent, these provocateurs set the stage for the show of force that was to come two days later. [36]
Davies’ conclusion, reached after examining hundreds of documents in the 1975 Kent State civil trial, suggests why the FBI may have been moving so cautiously on the 6th. But SOG was about to raise the heat. The head of the Civil Rights Division at Justice, Jerris Leonard, requested J. Edgar Hoover have his agents examine the killings in the light of 18 USC 242: violation of the civil rights of American citizens by killing them for attempting to assemble and voice their grievances.
Subsequent events more than suggest that Leonard could not have consulted with his Attorney General before taking this step – and either didn’t know that John Mitchell and Richard Nixon were determined that the Guardsmen would never be prosecuted, or didn’t care. Meanwhile the President was swinging between “a dejected and lachrymose state, downing scotches with the reproachful refrain, ‘Everyone misunderstands me’,” and manic episodes of tasking his aides to take arrays of countermeasures against his newly augmented horde of enemies. On the 6th, he had a “secret, unlogged meeting with Dr. Arnold Hutchsnecker,” [37] who by now was denying that he had treated Nixon for psychiatric problems in the 1950s. [38]
Everyone at the White House was feeling the heat. Despite the stock market crisis the day before, Haldeman noted on the 5th that
Big problem today is the whole student disorder situation… a lot of planning for strikes & marches for
The rest of the week. Reaction very tough to the four killed at Kent State yesterday
And on the 6th,
As day went on, concern from outside re campus crisis built rapidly… P. came to grips with it this
aft. …He agreed to plan of action – meet Univ. Pres. Tomorrow – press conference Fri. night…
Very aware that goal of the Left is to panic us – so we must not fall into their trap [39]
Thursday, May 7th. Jerris Leonard followed up with three more memos. It is impossible to determine in which order they were sent, or if simultaneously. Presuming he hewed to Internal Security’s priorities, he first asked the FBI to “determine the identity of the persons involved in the recent arson of the ROTC building” – but only in Kent; the other five “attacks on ROTC” were not mentioned again. Far more exhaustively, he tasked the Bureau to probe the killing by “Unknown Subjects, Ohio National Guard” of “Allison Krause [et. al.], Victims, Summary Punishment, CIVIL RIGHTS.” The request for the arson investigation ran a page and a half; that of the murders, six. “[B]ecause of the widespread public concern and the request of the President to be kept currently informed,” he wanted at least interim results by Tuesday, May 12th “and periodically thereafter”. [40] His third memo went to John Ehrlichman, the President’s chief domestic advisor, under a “Highly Confidential” distribution, “[p]ursuant to the request of the President”, summarizing the areas to be investigated. The murder/ civil rights charge led the list. [41]
So the FBI agents in Kent began the interviews needed to reconstruct the killings. The first witness, General Canterbury, repeated the story he never would change:
As the troops were withdrawing from the practice field to the crest of the hill… they were virtually surrounded
by hostile members of the crowd… The crowd had come to within ten to 12 feet of the flanks of the troops.
[P]iles of rocks, sticks, bricks, bottles, and other available debris had been gathered in piles for apparent
intended use against the troops by the demonstrators. [42]
When General del Corso repeated the allegation of the stockpiled missiles that summer, the Commission investigator asked him if he really thought the students planned in advance to be chased off the Commons, up one side of Blanket Hill and down the other, across the road, and onto the practice field, where the stockpiles were waiting. “At this point, he backed off and stated only that he had received reports that persons were reported to have carried sacks of something to the demonstration.” [43]
The first Guardsman to be interviewed squarely contradicted the stereotype the media were even then perpetuating, of the Guardsmen who fired as being “scared kids”. Sergeant Lawrence Shafer had taken extensive riot control training and was a “combat” veteran of urban riots in Hough (1966) and Youngstown, Akron, and Cleveland (1968). He related how, as the formation whirled around on the crest of the hill, he heard three or four shot “on his right side”. He fired one round over the “crowd”, cleared a jammed cartridge, then aimed at a student. “He felt that this man was advancing on him as an individual… He did not observe anything in the hands of this man, but the man was shouting at him” and making an obscene gesture – so Shafer shot him in the groin and again, in the leg, as he was falling. [44]
The second Guardsman said he had heard a “muffled shot”, so he turned and fired one shot into the air. Then he aimed a shot at a demonstrator “who was in the act of raising his arm over his head and beginning to throw an object his way” – but missed. He repeated his own version of the line that all the “shooters” would repeat: “I felt to protect my own life I had to fire.” [45] (More frequently, repeated as if by rote, it was “I fired because I believed my life was in danger”.) But the third, although he admitted firing three shots over the crowd, stated “He personally does not feel he was in any danger for his life at this time.” [46]
And so it went. The Guardsmen were so forthcoming as to be offering themselves up for punishment in a common fit of guilt, or possessed of an anachronistic concept of what constituted the permissible application of lethal force. Shafer’s mates in the ranks continued to confess to firing aimed shots at individual students. Sp/4 James Pierce fired at two different persons, one of whom he described as a “rock throwing” demonstrator, then swung the muzzle to his opposite flank and shot at another “who was about to throw a rock at him.” Sp/4 James McGee claimed he fired at the knee of a demonstrator when he “realized the shots [over their heads] were having no effect”. Sgt. Barry Morris admitted firing “into the crowd”. Sp/4 William Herschler emptied his weapon into the crowd, according to his sergeant. [47]
The shots Sgt. Shafer claimed to have heard to his right echoed in Washington that same day. Major General Winston Wilson, chief of the National Guard Bureau, told the Senate Armed Services Committee of the sound of “four shots fired by a person in the dissident group”. Also in support of the sniper theory, he unwittingly implicated one of the Guard officers with a reference to a “non-military shell casing” found in the area. And he repeated one of the most pernicious myths already spawned by the confrontation, of “a girl, dashing out of a dormitory… [who] ‘fired a weapon at the Guard as they turned away. They turned back and returned fire’.” [48]
A non-sniper explanation of the four shots, one of the students interviewed on the 7th said that a coed had told him “that an armed photographer had been attacked by the demonstrators and fired four shots at the demonstrators.” [49] Janet Falbo’s “animalistic” photographer?
But had the camera man (Terry Norman) hit anyone? A student who had taken refuge in Engelman Hall right after the volley saw a male entered the lounge area wearing a headband and an army-type shirt, “sweating profusely as in shock, his face was bloody, and he appeared to have a bullet wound [C].” [50] Terry Norman had been seen standing over a “hippie type” student – he claimed, to render him aid. But Harold Sherman Reid had seen him standing over a person lying on the ground, pointing a pistol at him. The investigation, on its first day of serious interviewing, was already getting touchy.
In fact, at this juncture, SOG decided it would need a special kind of supervision. William C. Sullivan, Director Hoover’s third-in-command – after the unexpected retirement of Cartha DeLoach, his heir apparent – arrived in Ohio to take over from Cleveland SAC Charles Cusick. [51] And Sullivan was no ordinary FBI agent. His rise within the Bureau might be accounted for as another instance of Hoover’s failing judgement. Sullivan was widely suspected by his peers of divided loyalties – in fact, of being the CIA’s chief “mole” within the Bureau.
He had been Assistant Director for Intelligence since 1961, and the Bureau’s representative on the US Intelligence Board. More to the point, he was the chief of three FBI representatives on the HONETOL committee. HONETOL (an acronym created by fusing HO[OVER] and ANATOL[Y GOLITSYN, a Soviet defector) was the code name for the witchhunt conducted for double agents by CIA Counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, which gutted the Agency during this period. Sullivan provided Angleton with the foot soldiers – bugging and tapping specialists, foot and mobile surveillance – to pursue suspected traitors, all of whom would turn out to be innocent. In the process, he became a full convert to Angleton’s “sick-think” world view. (Dr. Jerrold Post, a CIA psychologist, assessed Angleton as “not clinically paranoid; rather… Angleton had a strong paranoid orientation and propensity.”). [52]
J. Edgar Hoover was fighting a rearguard action against increased pressure from the White House and the CIA to draw the FBI into the overall program for increased surveillance of American citizens. Not that Hoover was a longtime, rabid champion of civil liberties. But he had a finely-honed sense of public relations, and in his obsession to protect the image of his beloved FBI, he foresaw the furor that would result if the extreme violations of American rights being contemplated by the Nixon administration were ever to be discovered. He opted out of the secret war. Sullivan fought him doggedly, if covertly. “A few months after Hoover outlawed the use of ‘illegal’ investigative techniques, I began to receive complaints from the rest of the intelligence community.” [53] Another senior agent suspected Sullivan of plotting to “undermine Hoover’s position with the President and succeed to the position of Director himself.” [54] But this would only be to turn the FBI into a domestic fact-gathering arm of the CIA, [55] subordinate by reason of its inferior intellectual resources and inherent timidity. And as such, he was just the man to head the Kent State investigation Nixon’s way, in the spirit of the KGB technique of dezinformatsiya on which the CIA, armed with significant assets in the mass media, had so vastly improved.
Friday, May 8th. The agents at Kent began trying to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the ROTC fire. The local authorities weren’t much help. An official of the Portage County Sheriff’s Department claimed that his men had moved in to protect the building at 9:17 and were not relieved by the National Guard until 10:30 p.m. [56] Mayor Satrom claimed that the Guard had arrived in Kent at 7:00 p.m. to protect the town. [57] Then why had the armored convoy driven straight through Kent to the campus, without even slowing down? Satrom added that he wouldn’t let his firemen return to campus until ten when the Guard could protect them. The Guard had dallied in town for three hours while the building was being burned?
Chief Donald Schwartzmiller, of the campus police (KSUPD) furnished a copy of his department’s report on the fire, dated the third. It stated he had mobilized two twelve-man squads at 7:30 p.m., as soon as students started gathering on the Commons, as well as notifying the county sheriff, and the city police and fire department. But his men were not actually ordered to protect the building until 8:50. (The orders were given by a Mr. [C].) The building did not “flame up” until ten p.m. and the Guard arrived thereafter. This statement does not include the indicated attachments: four eyewitness statements.
Talking to the students could be touchy. One of them who had seen the shootings insisted that “the ONG had been under orders to fire their weapons” and that it was “planned murder”. The agents objected to this characterization, for he then added that “what he really meant and intended to say was that the ONG should have retreated”. But then he added to this that “he felt the guardsmen were murderers since they did have the alternative to move down to the Commons.” The remaining 40% of his interview is blacked out. [58]
The FBI on campus received word from the Albany, New York, resident agency transmitting a harrowing statement of how the Guard had broken up the sitdown demonstration on May 3rd with their bayonets. The first the student knew of it – he couldn’t see much because he was seated on the street and could hear little but “mumbling” over a loudspeaker – people around him were fleeing. A Guardsman loomed over him with a fixed bayonet, snarling, “I told you to get up.” As the student turned to rise, he felt the bayonet enter his back, severing muscle in the area of the kidneys. The five lines in which he describes his attacker, who was not wearing a gas mask, are blacked out. [59]
A female freshman proved to nothing firsthand. But she said that another coed “had seen a girl among the group of students with a gun and that she, [C], knows a boy… who took photographs of this girl with the gun… this girl fired at the ONG [Ohio National Guard].” [60] The “girl with a gun” had surfaced as a rumor two days before, and she had what may have struck the inquisitors with a most opportune identity. The Guard command post on campus had logged a call from a Lou Bertram, “[County] Prosecutor’s Office”. He claimed to have a witness, “David Lepo”, a KSU student who “saw Allison Krouse [sic] (Tall girl) with a gun before the shooting… Suggested we talk to house mother of this girl (Allison Krouse) about her possibly having had a gun in her room.” [61]
Allison Krause was the ideal target for disinformation. Of the four students who had been killed on Monday, she had been the one who instantly seized the popular imagination. An exotically beautiful, statuesque (5’11”) brunette who rarely wore makeup or a bra, she had been one of the defiant dozen who had held back to taunt the Guardsmen when everyone else had scattered. People around the world were writing poetry and dedicating music to her four days after her death. Revered by an alienated generation, she was correspondingly loathed by the embittered, aging men who held power. She was the ideal foil for sexual repressions as well as the anti-Semitism of Nixon, Hoover, and their retainers. (Hoover, during one of his visits to the White House during this week, “informed other officials that one of the female victims had been ‘sleeping around’ and was ‘nothing but a whore’ anyway.”) [62]
It is difficult to underestimate the lacerating effect the spectacle of assertive, let alone violent, women had on men like Hoover and his lieutenants. Senior Associate Director Mark Felt, facing indictment in the late 1970s for massive violations of Americans’ civil rights, justified programs like COINTELPRO on the basis of the threat to society posed by the radicals, particularly the females. After asserting that America had been at war with Vietnam, “whether formally declared or not”, he charged Bernardine Dohrn’s “career of violence would fill a book by itself” – but could only cite a single remark Dohrn had allegedly made about the Manson murders as evidence. He also accused Naomi Jaffe of shooting down American aircraft over North Vietnam and her distaff comrades of “brutalizing wounded American prisoners of war”, a fantasy straight out of the “men’s adventure” magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. [63]
As tantalizing as the image of Allison blasting away at the Guard may have been, it collided with reality almost immediately. The same day the FBI interviewed a coed who claimed to have known Allison well. The witness had avoided the Monday rally, but her boyfriend had been present, and had seen Allison on the Commons standing near students who were throwing things, but not throwing anything herself. She had not been carrying a gun or anything from which she could have drawn a gun. Allison “really cared for mankind and was definitely not the type of individual to promote the use of force to obtain any kind of student demands.” [64]
With the good came the bad; the day could scarcely end without another Terry Norman sighting. This one was relayed from the Buffalo field office, quoting a witness to the effect that “This man was carrying a 35-mm. Camera and a sliver handgun. I observed him run up to a student with long hair & hit him with the gun.” [65]
As the 8th waned, the Kent FBI team seemed capable of maintaining its desultory pace, despite or because of Sullivan’s presence. But events outside the small Ohio town were moving toward a state that some likened to impending civil war. John Ehrlichman called Jerris Leonard to thank him for “your recent report” and to remind him of the President’s “interest”.
The President would like same-day copies of all field reports relative to the Kent State investigations. These
reports should be unabridged – not boiled down or condensed. He would like very much to see the original field
report(s) [66]
Leonard reminded Hoover and Hoover relayed the message back to Ohio: finish the “shooting” investigation by noon, Tuesday, May 12th, and the “sabotage” (ROTC fire) by noon, Thursday the 14th. Ohio protested in vain that the earliest they could finish anything was the 18th. Hoover scrawled on the bottom of this phone memo, “This is too long. I have already set Tuesday, May 12th, for the deadline.” [67]
That evening the President was scheduled to meet the press for the first time since the killings. That which Haldeman had hoped would justify Kent State to the American people, a smashing victory in Cambodia, had not been forthcoming.. The generals still could not report that they had located, let alone captured COSVN, the giant communist command center for all Southeast Asia which the President had announced on national television as the operation’s goal. (In two more days, any use of the acronym would quietly disappear from military briefings.) A giant antiwar rally was scheduled for the following morning across the street from the White House, a hundred and fifty thousand protestors – a staggering number to have been organized and transported to Washington from all over the country at a week’s notice.
The President’s staff was split. John Ehrlichman wanted to keep the lines of communication open to the protestors. Attorney General John Mitchell and especially National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger preferred crushing them with an all-out show of force. [68] The military prepared to protect the White House with a number of Draconian security measures, including surrounding it with two concentric rings of D.C. transit buses. According to the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this was to prevent “this same group that was at Kent to come to Washington to have a student killed on the White House grounds… I’m not sure what [group] it was, but you could look it up.” [69]
The Justice Department had denied the demonstrators the use of the Ellipse, the open grassy area across the street from the White House to the south. That left them the streets at the intersection of 16th and “H” on the north. Two of the demonstration’s marshals claimed to have inside information “from officials in the mayor’ office and other sources” that this was intended to be a giant kill zone; the plan was to “trap the crowd between a double horseshoe of police and troops” after dark, [70] thus avoiding all those embarrassing photographs that had come out of Kent. Could the administration actually have contemplated anything so monstrous as expanding on the example of May 8th? Haldeman summarized the two sides’ positions: “if you want confrontation, can have at 16 & H – E(hrlichman) this very bad judgement -- lousy politics to have bloodshed at WH.” [71] Ehrlichman must have prevailed; at the last minute, the protestors were granted the use of the Ellipse.
That resolved, the President left his briefing books at Camp David and chopped back to the White House for his press conference. He faced it with dread; contrary to custom, he told Haldeman he would not take any phone calls afterward. His fears were for nought. The reporters assembled under this roof were so timid and deferential that one of their number referred to the conference as a “pallid and synthetic ritual… a fusillade of spitballs at 50 paces.” [72] Afterward Nixon countermanded his own order and wound up staying on the phone until 4:22 a.m., fifty calls in all.
Just before dawn, before a panicked Secret Service could respond, Nixon disappeared from the White House. With only his valet, the President had gone down to the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial, into the midst of a sea of protestors against which his aides had fortified the White House, to talk to the young. His attempt to engage them in a dialogue turned into a low-pitched when not inaudible monologue, during which he rambled from good surfing beaches in California to Neville Chamberlain at Munich to the merits of various college football teams. One coed reported feeling awe at first, which turned to “disappointment and disillusionment… Then I felt pity because he was so pathetic and then just plain fear to think that he’s running the country.” [73]
His aides finally managed to catch up with him and talk him into leaving the Memorial grounds. But instead of returning to his White House redoubt, he insisted on being driven to the Capitol. There he autographed a Bible for a black cleaning women, assuring her that his mother had been a saint, and delivered an address to a chamber occupied only by his valet. Then he wanted to eat breakfast out, for the first time since taking office. And all the while, he just kept “rambling on”. When he insisted on walking back from breakfast to the White House, through streets thronged with demonstrators, Haldeman signaled a young assistant, and they pushed him into a limousine and drove him back. Even there, he refused to go to bed, but marched into his office to begin the new day’s work.
Haldeman, who headed his journal entry “The weirdest day yet”, confessed that
I am concerned about his condition – the decision; the speech; the aftermath – killings, riots, press, etc; the
press conference; the student confrontation have taken their toll – and he has had very little sleep for a long time
& his judgement, temper & mood suffer badly as a result… He’s still riding on the crisis wave – but the letdown is
near at hand and it will be huge. [74]
The chief of staff was too discreet and loyal, even in the pages of his personal journal, to come out and say what other intimates realized: the President had snapped. Haldeman played for time, until he could get Nixon off for a vacation in Florida. The plan would backfire; even then the President would not be able to sleep, slow down, or relax. His obsession with his Enemies had only grown more all-engulfing. This is the man to whom the FBI would have to report the results of the Kent State probe, a man who from here on out would only hear what he wanted to. In this as in other things, Bill Sullivan knew how to make a superior believe he was loyal him.
CHAPTER TWO: TORQUEMADA REDUX.
Saturday, May 9th. It seems unlikely if not impossible that news of the President’s personal crisis could have reached the agents at Kent on the day that it was unfolding, and thus disturbed their measured pace. They were picking their way through a minefield. They used the “one-stop-shopping” technique: a subject contacted because s/he might have knowledge of the ROTC was also questioned about the riot on North Water Street, the incident at the Library, and the shootings on Monday. But the arson investigation remained the “burning” priority. Here they were continually foiled by the same problem: whoever had orchestrated the events at the ROTC had waited until after dark to avoid recognition. Cusick had already directly advised Hoover of the investigation’s ultimate barrier the day before: “KSU P.D. Officer indicated it was too dark for them to identify unsubs [unidentified subjects] at the time of the fire.” [75]
Witnesses questioned about it continued to raise the same question as had chief faculty marshal Dr. Glenn Frank: where had the campus police (or police of any kind?) been during the hour to ninety minutes during which the would-be arsonists were left unmolested while they attacked the building with rising violence and ineptitude? [76] Meanwhile, corroboration of the Guard’s surviving alibi for the shootings, the rock-throwing horde of radicals, continued to be elusive. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing the soldiers surrounded by hundreds of students heaving all manner of dire missiles at them. More had seen a few stones shied by a few demonstrators, falling way short. Then there were those who “did not see any rocks thrown at the guard by the demonstrators during the entire confrontation.” [77]
But they continued to tell of a “sniper”, or more correctly, a young man with a gun, always described as “with a camera,” [78] always in a sports jacket, sometimes with a gas mask. A friend of one interviewee saw a man wearing “a tan coat or shirt and a gas mask run out of Johnson Hall and shoot a student in the neck with a pistol.” [79] Second-hand, hearsay – but devastating in terms of the pattern. (Reid had seen Norman with a pistol standing over a student lying on the ground; Norman had confessed to standing over a “hippie-type” student with a bloody face; and a witness had seen a student enter Engleman Hall with blood on his face coming from a wound in his (neck? [C].)
Aside from Norman, fresh evidence continued to discredit the sniper theory. A senior OSHP (Ohio State Highway Patrol) officer told the agents that
during the whole period of time of the disruptions at KSU the rumors were flowing hot and heavy, and
that he was getting periodic rumors that such and such a dormitory was an armed camp and that there were
snipers on the roofs of various dormitories. He ordered the rumors to be checked out and they appeared to be
false. [80]
So the agents at Kent proceeded cautiously, perhaps with one eye on the mass antiwar demonstration in Washington.
They needn’t have been concerned about it, anymore than the President. With the Bureau’s informers and provocateurs swarming in the ranks of the protestors, particularly in their top echelons, they probably knew by the end of the day that this greatest of protest rallies had expired amid poor planning, backbiting and personal spite among the leaders, and trivialization by the commercial media. And to the degree that his metabolism was set by the public opinion polls, the President had to know as soon that the latest Gallup Poll reported most Americans approved of his actions, even after the invasion of Cambodia. [81] He would proceed as if this meant he had been right all along.
Sunday, May 10th. Interviewing of local law enforcement officers – except the firemen – became intensive. This did not make it more informative. Many of the lawmen in the ranks were stolid and unimaginative men who recited where they had been sent and when during the weekend of the incident. Some even made the ROTC fire sound dull. The student violence that drew their strongest complaint – solicited, obviously in many cases, by their questioners – was the obscene language, especially as used by the women, that had been used to taunt them.
Student witnesses continued to blame the violence on the authorities, particularly on the treacherous and brutal way in which the sitdown demonstration on the evening of the 3rd had been broken up. “[T]he demonstration Sunday had been entirely peaceful… and… many of the marchers were enraged by their treatment by the Guard.” [82] “[T]hey had been double-crossed on Sunday evening when diligent efforts had been made to keep the demonstration peaceful… she felt sure the feelings of the students were carried over from Sunday to Monday.” [83] One speculated that there wouldn’t have been such a large crowd at Monday noon – the largest he had ever seen on campus – if the Governor hadn’t forbidden all assemblies.
These students didn’t feel that it was right that someone would tell them that they couldn’t gather.
They felt that they had something to say and they should be listened to and that a peaceful demonstration
was harmless. [84]
It was a citation of Constitutional privilege that ratified Leonard’s selection of 18 USC 242 as the enabling statue of the murder investigation.
The agents had been showing pictures of the nation’s leading radicals to interviewees, eliciting a chorus of negative responses, e.g., “she had not seen any of these individuals on the KSU campus during the recent trouble.” The same woman responded that although she knew of around a hundred activists on campus, “she did not care to name any names or identify these individuals,” dismissing them as “frustrated” and “misguided.” [85] But other students, whether responding to leading questions and/or prompting, or on their own, were willing to define a new category of crime for their nation. “[W]hen JERRY RUBIN appeared on campus about four weeks before, [C] was on stage with RUBIN and appeared in sympathy with Rubin’s comments.” [86] “[S]he observed three individuals with long hair at the Student Union and [they] proceeded to pass out mimeographed sheets of paper.” [87] “[H]e was aware of one student… who allegedly had a printing press in his room… he believes the literature for the rallies was run off on this printing press.” [88] To help their witnesses along, the agents had compiled a photo album of campus events including demonstrations – with the guidance of campus security and the editor of the school newspaper (see below) – and asked subjects if they could identify persons in them – not if they were committing crimes, just if they were present. [89]
Leads appeared and were discarded, particularly when they proved embarrassing. One of the Kent City police photographers insisted he had a picture, taken at Lincoln and Main on the evening of May 3rd, of a boy and a girl in a tree. “The male has a handgun clearly visible and other students passing beneath the tree are carrying large rocks.” [90] But this photograph has never been seen by any recorded witness. Perhaps it depicted some person(s) who shouldn’t have been caught on film.
A student named Terry Ryan Stubbe had tape-recorded the entire confrontation on Monday with a “recording mike” on his dormitory windowsill. [91] Stephen Titchenal had also made a tape recording. But while Stubbe had recorded with an external microphone on a stable platform, Titchenal had used the internal mike on a cassette recorder. And Titchenal, like so many present during the moments before the fatal volley, had assumed that the confrontation had ended and had shut off his recorder. [92] Once he realized what was happening, he restarted it. But he missed the first crucial seconds of the lethal violence and those so-called “other shots” that the Guardsmen insisted had preceded their own fire, the shots fired by the sniper(s). Titchenal played his recording for the presidential commission in an open hearing that summer. But the commission never got a copy of Stubbe’s tape and it was not included in the commission’s records as retired to the National Archives.
The agents dutifully logged the day’s two “sightings”:
[T]wo “UPI photographers” chased a white male wearing a tan coat and light trousers, yelling that this man
had a fake UPI card in his possession… he observed this young man turn over to police officers a .38 caliber
pistol. [93]
This photographer reportedly had a gun and had pulled this gun on demonstrators when they tried
to take a camera away from him and he supposedly fired four shots into the ground. [94]
Several of the agents showed up at a house in Kent, rented out by students for off-campus living, with a search warrant. On the flimsiest kind of evidence, this house was to become the focus of their whole futile investigation. They advised one of the residents that they were acting on a tip “that four men had entered the house” on the evening of the 2nd and “claimed they had burned down the ROTC building”. The interviewee replied that he had been there all evening on the 2nd and he had heard no such thing. [95] (They may have been proceeding on third hand information from someone in the neighborhood – over 50% of the paragraph identifying the source is blacked out – from a sheriff’s deputy that a black KSU student named Al Tate had been seen “carrying five bombs” into the house the night of May 1st or 2nd. [96] )
The G-men talked to another resident who said he had five housemates, each of whom he described, and had noticed a number of visitors on the evening of May 2nd. Everyone had gone to the roof to watch the ROTC fire, except for two residents who were “mobile” that evening. “[H]e does not recall anyone running into the residence saying that we have just burned the ROTC building.” A third said that one of the residents had left the area and did not anyone to know where he was going. [97]
But the major event of the day – one that suggested a whole new and more rewarding direction for the investigation to take, without any of the troublesome aspects of the others – was the interview with Chester Williams, KSU’s Director of Public Safety. He gave the agents a complete briefing on the campus “radicals”, particularly the ones on the faculty and one professor in particular. His take-off point was the Kent Free University, a brief, bygone teaching experiment:
I recall one of the first classes that was held, the guerrilla warfare. There LOUGH took part…
…there is information that shows that Professor TOM LOUGH… provided instructions to students
on making different types of bombs. Other professors, such as [C]… are very active in terms of taking a
radical point of view; sometimes openly in their assemblies and sometimes behind the scenes.
He related how, just before noon on May 4th, he eavesdropped on a lecture by a professor who may or may not have also been Lough.
I was amazed at the tone of his presentation… he was voicing his concern as a faculty member as to
why the National Guard was in our campus, such that [sic] every student had a right to know why things were
as they were, and they should pursue and find out.
His presentation, in my opinion, was of an inflammatory nature. [98]
Thus modestly was the Inquisition born.
The President and his men spent a quiet Sunday, waiting for the reaction of the press to the events of May 4th through 10th. “Problem starts w/ over-riding news re the demonstration… Not much good in the local Sunday papers,” Haldeman complained. [99] But Nixon felt the “students have overplayed their hands. If blue collar rise up against students P. can mobilize blue collars.” [100] The reference was to the events of Friday the 8th, when hundreds of well-organized construction workers had attacked antiwar demonstrators and bystanders in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district with fists, feet, clubs, baseball bats, and heavy tools. A number of eyewitnesses charged that the “hard hats” were directed by men in three-piece suits with colored tabs in their lapels and carrying two-way radios. In July Scanlan’s magazine published a memorandum from the desk of Vice President Spiro Agnew identifying the organizers as operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency. [101] The denouement was typical of the new order of things after May 4th; Scanlan’s went out of business shortly afterward. Back issues are extremely difficult to find.
Monday, May 11th. At 10:27 a.m., Egil Krogh – the young staff assistant who had been the first one to notice the President was missing at dawn on the 9th – called J. Edgar Hoover. Krogh mentioned that John Ehrlichman might be calling him about Kent State because “he just wanted to get the feel as to how it was going because it is awfully hot.” Hoover casually replied that “I think it is a situation of six of one and a half dozen of the other and that the students invited and got what they deserved.” [102]
An anonymous male called the Akron office at 12:10 p.m.. to report that one of the “automatic weapons” used to fire on the Guard had been put in a brown paper bag and thrown into the Ohio Canal near the Rathskellar in Kent. [103] Shortly after three, a police diver entered the water and emerged thirty minutes later with a brown paper bag containing a .32 caliber pistol, which he estimated had been submerged there two or three days. [104] The pistol, misidentified to and/or by the local press as a .22, [105] was forwarded to the FBI laboratories in Washington for tests, [106] with an attached teletype reporting the KSU agent team had found “[n]o latent impressions developed on revolver, four cartridges, rubber band, or padlock.” [107] Nothing more was heard of it.
Thus vanished the sniper, again. As many times as s/he disappeared, the lone civilian shooter in the crowd resurfaced. A coed had looked out her dorm window in Lake Hall at 12:25 p.m. on May 4th to see a white male “wearing a yellow-gold jacket with no tie” and carried what she perceived as a movie camera. She saw him reach into the left side of his sports jacket with his right hand and pull out a “long-barreled weapon, approximately three feet long”. He held it with two hands in front of him or at his right hip.
She observed this weapon recoil twice and she heard two shots… immediately following this there was a
volley of shots… this individual appeared to drop the weapon but it did not go on the ground… the weapon
might have been tied to the individual in some way.
She ran downstairs and tried to tell a National Guard sergeant what had happened. “[T]here were a number of other students also telling the Sergeant that the man shot with a gun”, but the sergeant made no notes on it. [108]
On this same date, something led the campus policemen to launch their own followup investigation of the gunman with the camera (or the cameraman with the gun). Patrolman Harold Rice gave a long, rudely evocative account of the incident: After the volley, he had