Kent State: After 45 Years We Need to Take A Serious Look at What Happened and Why

By Murray Polner

It’s been 45 years since draft-deferred 0hio National Guardsmen aimed their M-1 rifles and .45 pistols at unarmed Ken State College students, killing four and wounding nine on May 4, 1970. You have to be well into middle age now to remember that day. My memory is stirred whenever I look at three photos: John Filo’s striking shot of teenager Mary Ann Vecchio on her knees weeping as she bends over student Jeffrey Miller’s body, I photo I took of Jeffrey’s grieving mother for a magazine my son Alex once edited, and a picture of two of the forever crippled in wheelchairs, KSU student Dean Kahler and wounded Marine Vietnam vet Ron Kovic of ‘Born on the Fourth of July” fame.

On the 41^st anniversary of the shootings in 2011, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the state’s largest newspaper, concluded, “There has never been a completely satisfactory explanation for why the Guard fired.” In fact, it went on, “The central unresolved question in the Kent State affair has been why several dozen Ohio Guardsmen pivoted in unison and fired” and for 13 agonizing seconds killed and wounded so many of their peers. The previous year the paper had reported the finding of an audio recording where a Guard office was said to shout, “All right, prepare to fire.” This led to an editorial urging the state to take another look “and give full account of that tragic day.”

“That tragic day” followed Nixon’s announcement that the U.S. had invaded Cambodia and expanded the war, causing antiwar college students throughout the nation to go on strike. It was a time when the President called antiwar students “bums” and Ohio’s Republican Governor James Rhodes, in a tight and ultimately losing race, described students against the war as “worse than brown shirts and the communist element and also night riders and vigilantes. They are the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”

A majority of blinkered Americans agreed. Apprehensive and uncertain, yearning for a return to an allegedly untroubled era before the tumultuous sixties, and manipulated all their lives to believe that only an “exceptional” America protected them against Communist and Asian hordes, they supported the shootings, as a  Gallup poll reported. Pat Moynihan thought May 4^an amounted to a pro-war plebiscite, a prescient remark given that two years later Nixon overwhelmingly defeated George McGovern, an unflinching dove. And Milton Viorst, one of the sharpest pundits of those years, thought, “The 1960s ended in a small town in Ohio named Kent.”

  After several trials, a presidential commission, and books galore, no-one was ever held responsible despite a final settlement of a meager $674,000 distributed among the thirteen families. It did, however, lead to the development of the superb May 4^th Collection at the KSU Library with its rich lode of material. One is Charles A. Thomas’s memoir. He had worked for the National Archives and was asked to examine films used by the Scranton (investigating) presidential commission. His finding: “it looked very much as if someone had doctored the evidence to minimize any impression of the Guard’s brutality and to plant the spurious notion that the soldiers had been confronted with a raging student mob,” a charge refuted by the Justice Department when it summarized the FBI’s  findings. There’s much more in the May 4^th Collection.

It also includes the long-forgotten Scranton commission’s devastating verdict that, while liberally casting responsibility on all parties, something happened that should never have happened: “the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable.” Period!

Still, the case is now deemed to be dead. Why? Who cares? Who remembers? Who wants to remember?

My own judgment is that while I know of no smoking gun or death bed confession the “guilty” one (s) got away, the “guilty” being the person or persons who ordered the Guardsmen to open fire.  So many unanswered questions remain about Rhodes’ close ties with the FBI, an armed FBI informer on campus, what if anything relevant college, local and state police discovered. And what role, if any, did VIPs in Washington’s uber-secret chambers play? Contemporary critics have regularly and repeatedly proposed many more questions.

Years after May 4, 1970, Caroline Arnold, a Kent resident, wrote a column for the Kent-Ravenna Record Courier in which she reminded her small-town readers that “Truth wasn’t murdered at Kent State. People were murdered, people were wounded, hurt, frightened and bewildered, and much damage was done across the community and university.”

For our national political elite unwilling to publicly confront those responsible for the slaughters of the pointless Vietnam and Iraq/Afghan wars it may be too much to expect anyone to bother themselves with a piddling four deaths and nine wounded college kids.

Still, I have to ask if anyone in the White House on down has the audacity to call for a new investigation? Anyone?

Remembering the Dead

By Murray Polner

I used to commute to work by rail with a neighbor. One day I learned that we were both veterans, me a Korean War draftee and he an officer in the Vietnam War. One of his military jobs was, to say the least, a bit unusual. For a time he was assigned to visit families of the dead to inform them their husband, son, grandson, nephew had been killed in the war.

I was stunned. I wondered how it affected him then and now. Does he still hear their cries? Did he ever try to contact some of them?  I remember turning to him, asking for more, please. “No, I’m sorry I told you, forget it,” he said, not unkindly. But not before he added a final word. He’d never allow his two sons to join the military, never. “Let the non-vets shouting USA USA go. Not my kids.”

I remember others too who died in war. In our earlier “Good War,” Irving Starr, whose family owned the delicatessen in the house adjoining our four-family apartment, was killed during a raid over Romania’s Ploesti oil fields. Buddy, his younger brother, told me that insofar as he knew, Irving’s body was never recovered.

I learned about Phil Drazin’s death while playing punch ball on the street next to his father’s grocery store. When his father received the news I watched in fear as his father ran out of his store on Straus Street and Lott Avenue, crying, yes, crying, and I thought I had never seen a grown man cry in public. “Maybe it’s a mistake, maybe it’s a mistake,” he kept shouting.

I wish I could remember the name or face of the 18 or 19 year old boy whose family had recently moved into an adjoining apartment just before he received his draft notice. I do remember that on one especially humid, hot summer weekday afternoon I watched from our second floor window as his father stumbled toward an apartment bench and began sobbing. My mother, who was standing next to me, was very good about such things. She ran down to the street and embraced the father while he was still wailing. She then gently led this heartbroken stranger whom none of us knew to his equally devastated wife. My mother then returned to our apartment, her eyes wet with tears at what she had just witnessed, and told me she was glad I was still too young to go to war.

My boyhood pal Porky was drafted and never returned from the Korean War. The laconic and pleasant Trinchintella boy, who worked at his family’s neighborhood gas station, was trained as a Vietnam War helicopter gunner. Gravely wounded, he died in a military hospital in Japan, his traumatized parents seated helplessly in an empty corridor, waiting. An uncle told me that the family would never again speak about their son’s death.

I remember an African American former student, Ronald Boston, shy, unathletic, a kid who tried hard to earn good grades and was drafted during Vietnam. Ironically, his mother worked in the nursing home in which my mother, stricken with Alzheimer’s disease, resided and where she tended her. One day she told me about a dream in which Ronald had been killed in Vietnam. Poor Mrs. Boston. Poor Ronald. He never did make it home except in a flag-covered casket. Years later I received an email from Cathy R. Boston, Ronald’s sister, telling me her niece had found my recollection of Ronald on the Internet. She wrote me: “So I decided to write you a short email to say thank you for writing and remembering. My mom and Dad never recovered, in fact the family never recovered from Ronnie’s death. The subsequent ‘wars’ have been protested in this household and will continue to be protested, Please do not give up the fight as u have not.”

I’ve forgotten the source but I also remember reading a small item about a mother in New York State mourning her soldier son’s death in Iraq. What’s it about, she asked? “Is it about oil? I don’t know what this war is for. We don’t want anyone else to die in this useless stupid war.”  

It’s hard to keep an accurate count of all the wars large and small this

country has fought and lost since 1945. Convincing parents to send their young men and women to war is a relatively simple matter. Flags will wave, bumper stickers will urge us to “support our troops,” stay-at-home pundits will approve, and support in polls will rise, at least until the dead and badly wounded start trickling home.  Herman Goering was among the worst of the worse, but he came pretty close to understanding how governments manipulate people. “It is always a simple matter to drag people along,” he said while awaiting his trial in Nuremberg. “All you have to do is tell them that they’re being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Even war lovers like Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling changed their tunes once their sons died in WWI. Kipling tried to assuage his guilt and grief in this shattering couplet:

“If any question why we died

Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

Too late, Rudyard -- and Teddy too.

Obama’s Legacy?

 By Murray Polner

When all the biographies, memoirs and histories are written about Barack Obama’s foreign policy legacy it will be a mixed one, ranging from the indulgent because of complex and unsolvable challenges to disappointed assessments from the idealistic left and also from the confrontational right. Personally, I liked how David Bromwich once portrayed him after five years of his presidency: “The world’s most important spectator.”

“Obama has a larger-spirited wish to help people than any of his predecessors since Jimmy Carter,” Bromwich began, “though caution bordering on timidity has kept him from speaking.”

Well, not quite anymore, given his new-found courage in finally taking on Netanyahu and his congressional bootlickers who’d love to see the USAF level Tehran but also avoid a land invasion we would surely lose even if Israel joined in. As a prudent warning once went, “If you liked Iraq, you’ll love Iran.”

Obama’s legacy will also be positively burnished with his move to undo the too-long, ideologically-grounded isolation of Cuba while the US simultaneously befriended death squad and neo-fascist El Presidentes south of the border. Remember them? Try Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista?

But there’s also a worrying side to Obama’s legacy, specifically the risky games he’s playing with Putin’s increasingly Tsarist Russia, where both sides have a huge pile of ready-to-use nuclear bombs and where, without any debate or concern outside of the Imperial City’s political class, the US has now become deeply involved in a revived East-West battle. In 2014-15, the US and NATO gifted to Kievan Ukraine, a dysfunctional and corrupt state whose current politicians assumed power after an American-supported coup, military, political and financial aid with which to fight Russia’s breakaway Donbas proxy.

It is precisely in Eastern Europe that Obama fits Bromwich’s portrayal of him as a “spectator.”  Some of his State Department people behave like virtual free agents, with Obama muttering scripted, supportive lines. State’s leading neoconservative regarding Ukraine is Victoria Nuland, whose husband Robert Kagan is a major DC neocon.

Meanwhile, if there is any coherent plan about Eastern Europe in particular and Ukraine in general, it is to establish a cordon sanitaire circling Russia. It didn’t work in 1941-45 and it won’t work now, even though NATO’s Article 5 could lead a former Soviet satellite like NATO members Latvia or Lithuania -- and presumably, one day, Ukraine, if the neocons have their way-- to claim it had been attacked and then invoke Article 5, whereby the US is obliged to come to the aid of any attacked member nation.

Make no mistake. The US is now an active player in regions Russia views as an integral part of its sphere of influence. As if the hopeless, insolvable mess in the Middle East isn’t enough of a burden, the US has recently sent 300 US soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade to Ukraine for six months to “train” Ukrainian soldiers.  In another move barely known if at all to John and Mary Doe, Americans and Bulgarians will hold joint Balkans military drills, while NATO ships prowl the Black Sea, Russia’s sole warm waterway and home to its fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea. This led Aleksandr Grushko, Russia’s envoy to NATO, to warn of his country taking “necessary countermeasures.” (American tanks and more than 120 armored components have also been shipped free of charge to Latvia). More ominously, Putin’s press secretary warned that “The participation of instructors or specialists from third countries on Ukrainian territory” could destabilize the present fragile truce between eastern and western Ukraine. Not to mention Putin’s not so veiled threat about nuclear war.

What ever happened to diplomacy? Melvin Goodman, a former CIA analyst recently proposed in the NY Times nothing less than negotiations to cool everyone down and avoid provoking a still- powerful Russia in its own backyard. “Isn’t it time to recognize the ‘existential’ importance of Ukraine to Russia,” asked Goodman, “to prevent the worsening of the crisis and to ensure continued cooperation in the arms control arena as well as conflicts in the third world?”

This may sound like Munich- style appeasement to our Washington-based “ostentatious warmongering” base – as Christian Lorentzen, a British editor put it -- but as Henry the K. offered, regular condemnations of Putin is no substitute for a  coherent, well-considered policy. While dispatching air patrols, shipping sophisticated war materials and piles of free money to former Warsaw Pact states, and providing potentially inflammatory “training” exercises may not be Act One of a future Big War, it could lead to an unintentional or deliberate incident or alibi (Sarajevo in 1914, Poland in 1939, Korea in 1950, Tonkin Gulf in 1964, Bush’s WMDs in 2013) causing a war, possibly nuclear, which will surely blow Obama’s legacy, and the rest of us, to hell.