American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (27 page)

“T
HE
COUNTRY
IS
virtually on the edge of a spiritual, and perhaps even physical, breakdown. For the first time in a century
we are not sure there is a future for America
.” This apocalyptic assessment came from John Lindsay, the liberal mayor of New York City, on May 6, 1970, two days after four students were shot dead by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. Lindsay’s stark vision of national peril came just five years after he was first elected mayor in 1965 with a politics of idealism and hope. He reminded many of John Kennedy—young, handsome, charismatic, articulate, inspiring, and rich. But unlike Kennedy, Lindsay was a Republican, a reflection of the fact that in the mid-1960s members of both political parties could unite around liberal reforms to overcome persistent problems. Mayor Lindsay said the future looked bright, and many people agreed. By 1970, he wondered if there would even be a future, and many people shared his concern. America’s deep and bitter divisions had become greater than at any time since the Civil War.

The Vietnam War was the knife that cut the deepest. It had spawned increasingly fiery debates for half a decade. Back
in 1965, antiwar protests had begun
in earnest but were still on the periphery of national consciousness. Demonstrations were generally small and well-mannered affairs. Groups gathered in public spaces to stand in silent vigil. Or they marched with signs, the women in skirts or dresses and the men in ties and jackets. Or they attended “teach-ins” to hear public debates about the war. Even in 1965, some protests were defiant: there were public draft card burnings and efforts to block trains carrying U.S. troops. And some actions were extreme: three Americans burned themselves to death that year in protest of the war. But most of the activism was inspired by a conviction that collective political protest could effect meaningful change. After all, the nonviolent civil rights movement had moved Congress to pass landmark legislation in 1964 and 1965; perhaps the peace movement could indeed stop the war.

With time, that faith faded. Despite growing opposition, the war only got larger and more lethal. From 1965 to 1968, U.S. troop levels soared to a half million and beyond. The size of antiwar protests rose accordingly, and so did their stridency. As the war continued, frustration and anger deepened, especially among long-term activists. Yet the movement continued to attract new people and groups with fresh energy and commitment.
Those who organized
against the war were a diverse lot, despite a common stereotype suggesting that virtually all protest came from college campuses. And as the antiwar movement grew by leaps and bounds in the late 1960s its variety became all the more striking, including students, church groups, civil rights activists, pacifists, socialists, professionals, writers, businesspeople, homemakers, union activists, and Vietnam veterans. And there was also a small but fervent group of self-declared revolutionaries determined not just to end the Vietnam War but to bring down the capitalist state that waged it.

And each new manifestation of public opposition to the war further raised the hackles of Americans who viewed the uprising as a fundamental insult to national pride, patriotism, and “the American way of life,” a phrase that once stood for a set of widely accepted values, but was now denounced by many critics as a smug expression of rampant materialism and militarism. By 1970, debates about the war had deepened into debates about the very meaning of America. Was it the “greatest nation on earth” as so many citizens had long contended, or was it a counterrevolutionary empire that betrayed its own revolutionary ideals at home and abroad? Was America a model and agent of good throughout the world or, as Dr. King had said, its “greatest purveyor of violence”? In the 1950s, the claim of national superiority—American exceptionalism—was so commonplace it rarely prompted more than quiet assent. By the late 1960s, it could trigger a brawl.

And the war, as Mayor Lindsay warned in 1970, was driving the wedge ever deeper: “
All that we are and all that we can be
dies a little bit each day the war goes on,” he said, “and it dies whenever we succumb to the easy conclusion that the contestants there or here are gooks or devils, bums or pigs.” Lindsay’s call for civility between “contestants” was almost laughable given the ugly rancor of the times—like whispering “calm down” in the middle of a bar fight. But he was right to suggest that the home front battles were almost as venomous as the war itself. Both Presidents Johnson and Nixon often sounded as if they were more troubled by their political enemies at home than their enemies in Hanoi.

The war prompted some of the angriest public speech in U.S. history. “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” became a common chant of young protesters. And it wasn’t just the kids. Powerful and prominent adults could be as foulmouthed as the most profane demonstrator. At the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, for example, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut denounced the beating of antiwar protesters by Chicago’s police. From the podium, he looked directly at Mayor Richard
Daley
and attacked the “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” TV cameras turned to the enraged Chicago mayor as he cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed back at Ribicoff. His words were inaudible on TV, but you did not have to be a skilled lip reader to pick up Daley’s words: “Fuck you, you Jew son-of-a-bitch, you lousy motherfucker! Go home!”

The protesters in Chicago were beaten and tear-gassed so severely it looked to many as if civil war had truly begun. “The whole world is watching!” chanted the young activists, imagining that anyone who saw the police brutality on TV would side with the protesters. In fact, polls showed that more people sided with the cops. That is one explanation for the narrow presidential victory of Republican Richard Nixon. Many Americans wanted an end to the war
and
an end to turmoil at home. Nixon promised both. No one could imagine that Nixon would be forced from office six years later with both goals still unrealized.

When Nixon took office he soon announced a plan to gradually withdraw U.S. ground troops and begin turning more of the fighting over to the South Vietnamese. But the plan was so vague and unpromising the antiwar movement continued to expand. The largest protests to date took place in the fall of 1969.

Then on April 30, 1970, Nixon made the stunning announcement that he was expanding the war; U.S. troops were invading Cambodia. It ignited a firestorm of opposition throughout the nation, from the halls of Congress to the streets. Within days, hundreds of campuses were brought to a standstill by the news. Nixon added fuel to the fire by denouncing the “bums” who were “
blowing up the campuses
.” To a group of Pentagon staffers, the president explained that these bums were actually “the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are, burning up the books.” The White House liked these off-the-cuff remarks so much, it distributed a transcript.

Book burning was rare, but campus activists were certainly embracing more radical steps to challenge authority. Petitions, vigils, marches, and demonstrations had all accomplished nothing, they argued. It was time to “raise the stakes” of opposition. On dozens of campuses, radical students occupied buildings and burned or bombed the most obvious campus symbol of the war—the ROTC building. Advocates of violence always represented a small subset of the huge and growing number of young people opposed to the war, but their provocative rhetoric and actions aroused equally inflammatory calls for a crackdown. In April 1970, California governor Ronald Reagan said it was time, at last, to rid college campuses of radical student dissent: “
If it takes a bloodbath
, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”

But no one expected that a few weeks later authorities would gun down thirteen white college students in broad daylight on a leafy campus in America’s heartland.

On May 2, 1970—with campuses rising in opposition to the invasion of Cambodia—Ohio governor James Rhodes deployed the state’s National Guard to Kent State University. The immediate pretext was a disturbance in town. Students spilling out of the local bars started a bonfire and began throwing bottles at storefront windows and banks. Police dispersed the crowd with tear gas. When the guardsmen arrived the next night, they were sent to the campus, where someone had set fire to the ROTC building. By the time they got there, the building had burned to the ground as a crowd of students cheered.

The next morning Governor Rhodes denounced the “dissident groups” at Kent State University. “We’re going to use every part of the law enforcement agency of Ohio to drive them out of Kent.
We are going to
eradicate
the problem
.” He then suggested, erroneously, that dissent was caused by outside agitators who “move from one campus to the other and terrorize the community. They’re worse than the [Nazi] brownshirts and the Communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” Rhodes may have been borrowing his rhetoric from Vice President Spiro Agnew, who a few weeks earlier had urged university administrators to “
just imagine they [student protesters] are wearing brown shirts
and white sheets and act accordingly.”

At noon on May 4, 1970, Kent State students gathered in the Commons to protest Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. But there was additional anger stirred by the presence of the National Guard. Overnight the guardsmen had transformed the university into an armed camp. They were driving army trucks and jeeps all over campus—even tanks. Hundreds of guardsmen marched with gas masks and M-1 rifles.

Kent State was a modest public university, not a place of great privilege. Many of its students were from working-class families of the Rust Belt. Quite a few had friends or relatives who served in Vietnam. Indeed, of the 21,000 students at Kent State, about 1,000 were military veterans. The student protesters and the guardsmen were not divided by class so much as circumstance and politics.

A student named Alan Canfora approached the Commons carrying two black flags to symbolize his opposition to military escalation in Indochina and at home. Ten days earlier he had attended the funeral of a childhood friend who was killed in Vietnam.

“
Hey, boy, what’s that you’re carrying there
?” a guardsman called out.

“Just a couple of flags,” Canfora answered.

“We’re going to make you eat those flags today,” yelled the guardsman.

“Just don’t get too close, motherfucker, or I’m going to stick them down your throat,” Canfora shot back.

More than a thousand protesters gathered near the school’s Victory Bell with perhaps another thousand watching from farther away. Ken Hammond stepped onto the base of the bell and called out a question being raised on campuses all over America. Should the campus go on strike to protest Nixon’s escalation of the war? The crowd chanted, “Strike! Strike! Strike!”

Before Hammond could continue, a National Guard jeep pulled up and an officer with a bullhorn ordered the students to disperse. It only fueled their anger: “Pigs off campus! Pigs off campus!” With that, a National Guard commander ordered troops to fire canisters of tear gas at the students. The Commons immediately filled with gas and smoke. The guardsmen, with fixed bayonets on their rifles, advanced toward the demonstrators.

Most students moved back toward the dormitories and other buildings, but a number of students continued to taunt the guardsmen. Some picked up tear gas canisters and threw them back at the guardsmen. Rocks were thrown by both sides. Within minutes, a unit of guardsmen moved onto a practice football field, where they found themselves blocked by a fence to their rear and a semicircle of students to their front. The unit commander ordered his men to form a wedge and move back up the hill toward what was known on campus as the Pagoda—a concrete structure shaped like a large, square-topped umbrella.

As these guardsmen approached the Pagoda, they made a three-quarter turn in unison, faced the crowd, raised their rifles, and aimed down the hill toward the students. Many witnesses thought it looked like a planned and coordinated maneuver. “It looked like a firing squad,” recalled a Kent State professor of journalism. Within seconds, twenty-eight guardsmen began firing their weapons.

Some of the guardsmen targeted specific students, but much of the shooting was indiscriminate. Sandy Scheuer was a speech major walking to class some four hundred feet away from the shooters when an M-1 round penetrated her neck. She was dead within minutes. Nearby, Bill Schroeder was turning away from the scene when a bullet struck him in the back and killed him. He had just left a class in military science as part of his training as an ROTC cadet. Friends said he had developed serious reservations about the war and his own military future; he might have stopped at the rally out of curiosity.

A bit closer to the guardsmen, but still more than a hundred yards away, stood Allison Krause. Unlike Scheuer and Schroeder, she was not a passerby or spectator. She was there to protest. A freshman from Silver Spring, Maryland, she was wearing a T-shirt with the logo of her old high school: “John F. Kennedy.” The word “Kennedy” was soon soaked with blood. A few days after Krause died, her father bitterly recalled Nixon’s description of antiwar demonstrators and told TV reporters, “My daughter is not a bum.”

Another devoted activist, Jeff Miller, was standing in a parking lot 256 feet from the firing squad on the hill. Hit in the mouth, he fell facedown with his arms tucked under his body. He died instantly. A student photographer near Miller first thought the guardsmen were shooting blanks until he himself was almost hit by a bullet and dropped his camera. He picked it up and began to flee when he saw Miller with blood pooling around his head. As he stopped to take a picture, a girl ran into the frame of his shot and knelt on one knee next to the body. As she stretched out her arms and screamed, “Oh my God!” he snapped the photograph that became the most indelible image of the day.