May 21, 2023 • 17 mins
Guest Host Ian Punnett and Robert Giles discuss the events leading up to the Kent State Shooting.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Just past noon, Kent State University in Ohio, May fifth,
more than fifty years ago, fifty third anniversary was just observed.
In just thirteen fatal seconds, sixty bullets were fired at
(00:26):
demonstrators and that left four Kent State students dead, nine wounded.
And I was just asking Robert Giles, author of When
Truth Mattered, why didn't the governor or the president of
Kent State shut down the university on Sunday morning.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Well, there's several reasons for that. First off, as the president,
Bob Wide, was out of town. He left on Friday
afternoon to go to Iowa for an educational meeting and
a family visit. And when he last checked, he thought
that the campus was going to be quiet and there
(01:10):
was nothing to be alarmed about, and he felt free
to take his trip. And so when Governor Rhodes came in,
the first thing he did was go into a secret
meeting with local officials and the county prosecutor. A man
named Ron Kine strongly urged the governor to shut down
(01:34):
the campus. He said, there's going to be something terrible
is going to happen here and we should shut down
the campus now, and Rhodes said, absolutely not. He said,
he's quoted as saying if I shut down the campus,
people are going to look at me and say he
(01:56):
caved in to the radicals. And so that was the
theme that he then carried out into his press conference
when he's referred to these young demonstrators as worse than
the Nazis and so on. But that was a series
of things. And then after after the shooting, the county
(02:18):
prosecutor ron Kin again called the governor's office, who governor
with Brogues back in Columbus by then called his office
and said, you've got to shut down the campus, and
there was a hesitation, and Rose's aide said, well, the
governor wants to think about it, and so ron Kin
(02:40):
turned to the local judge named Carris, who said absolutely,
adiation in order shutting down the campus immediately, so that
the campus was shut down from late afternoon on May
the fourth, after the shooting, and it was the campus
(03:02):
was shut down except for people who had special passes
and for national guards when who were still on for
fifteen days.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
You know, it's a type of hubris and the part
of politicians that this is about them and not about
public safety, which is just you know, it doesn't matter
the party. It happens all the time where at an
every level, including one centator right now from California, it
seems to feel like the whole country can't go on
(03:36):
without her. So they don't want to resign. They don't
ever want to do anything. They want to control everything
about their career and about their image, and it's just
all ego. What would have happened had they shut down
the campus that day?
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Oh, I saw people would sell me alive because they
have had to go home, and and there wouldn't have
been any gathering of students to give the service targets
from the National Guard.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
The What would the National Guard have done? Would they
have do you think they would have stuck around on
campus for a day or two? But they shut it down.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
The governor said that we'll keep the National Guard here
as long as it takes to get the campus under control,
so they would have stayed for some time.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
So the.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Take me through step by step. Then after that announcement
gets made, what the rest of Sunday looks like when
the campus is open, You've got stringers on the field.
You've got photographers and you have one print reporter who's
there on campus.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Is that correct that that was on Monday day on Sunday,
not on Sunday. Well, we had people covering it on Sunday.
But what happened on Sunday was that it was it
was a nice spring day, and the kids started to
engage with the guardsmen. They played frisbee, you know, they did,
(05:19):
got friendly with them until about late in the afternoon
when things got tent and the students wanted to have
another small demonstration, and the guardsmen pushed them back through
the campus gates and shut the campus down. There was
(05:39):
no there was no rough stuff, but it was clearly
a moment of rising tension because the guardsmen knew that
they had by then, had you been given their orders
through the governor uh to make sure that there was
going to be no no rally of peace or otherwise
the next day, And so the students were already making
(06:04):
noises and fading things, which indicated that they were going
to try to defy the governor's orders and have their
protests gathering on the following day at noon. That was
just a void from Monday in May the fourth.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
The irony then of the governor coming out and calling
the students brown shirts, when in fact the National Guard
was acting more like the controlling you know, I mean,
I think the word goon would be too strong a term,
but they immediately slipped into the we're going to control
(06:46):
you physically, we're going to we're in charge here, much
more of what we would consider it to be typical
brown shirt behavior. If we're going to look at it
like that, go ahead, go ahead, Robert.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
I was going to say that the Guard leadership was
very incompetent because they didn't have a plan. They didn't
have a plan for when the Guard arrived, They didn't
have a plan for how they were going to disperse
the students on Monday, and they didn't have a plan
(07:25):
once they they put their their plan, not their plan,
but they gan to move against the students on Monday
on noon when the students were gathering for their demonstration.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
So what was the background? I mean a lot of ways. Yeah,
they didn't plan it, but they were also weren't trained
how to plan it, right.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
That's true. But they had a Brigadier General Robert Canterbury
who was in charge, and some of the photographs show
him on Monday Day. In fact, the cover of the
photograph and the cover of the book shows him in
a civilian suit and tie, and he's at the back.
(08:13):
There's a picture on the cover of this of the
guardsman shoot actually shooting at the students and General Canterbury's
way at the back, and he's got his hand up
now he's trying to get them to stop shooting. But
he had no he had no control over the troops.
And obviously they the shooting. I think it was everybody
(08:38):
seemed to conclude with spontaneous. There's been a lot of
effort to sign you know, a command that to shoot,
you know, as a single shot, because regards to respond
the way it did.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
You know the old expression if all you have is
a hammer, or everything looks like a nail, right, And
so this this general, what was his background.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
He had many many years of good service as a
in combat and other places. And he was he was
the commander of this National Guard unit in Ohio, right,
And but he was willfully unprepared. One of the questions
(09:30):
that I raised about him was why he wasn't court martial.
It turns out that when he was when the National
Guard was sent to again state. They were under the
command of the governor of Ohio. Had the had the
(09:52):
federal government sent the National Guardian the President Nixon sent
the National Guardian, then he were and the National Guard
would have been under the federal government, and he would
have been subject to the military court of Justice and
subject to course martial.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
You know, that's so interesting. I didn't know that because
in a way, my impression of that was shaped by
the Neil Young penned song Ohio done by Crosby Stills,
Nash and Young that Tin Soldiers and Nixon's coming were
finally on our own. It would have ruined it if
they had mentioned the governor. It wouldn't have seemed like right.
(10:36):
It's poetic somehow, but that's unfair, all right, So the
things get chippy again between the students and the National Guard.
Late on Sunday, what was Sunday night like.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
That was pretty quiet. I think the students were back
and behind the campus gates, and I think they have
some of them were planning how they were going to
organize on Monday, or they're going to begin their rally
and so on and their protest. But until up until
(11:19):
noon on Sunday, just before noon on Sunday, things were
fairly quiet.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
And so your experience then you didn't even have a
reporter there, as you said on Sunday, because it looked
perhaps like everything was calming down or that this was
going to get resolved peaceably. There still was no indication
of what was coming up on May the fourth, but
(11:49):
what was the So you I imagine you were tracking
what the college newspaper was doing or have since then,
or the college reporters, because you had said you often
hired people from the campus that came out there, and
it looked like some as particularly the photographers, seemed very
(12:09):
talented that came out of out of the student newspaper.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Well, a student newspaper was not really very much involved
in our coverage. And we had a very experienced journalism
student named Jeff Salad who was having his on Monday,
in fact was his final day of journalims school classes
(12:37):
and we had hired him, so they were when he
did his coverage, he was really working for the Acrobacon
Jeneral and so so uh, we didn't just didn't use
use actual members of the college campus newspaper in our
(12:59):
cage a Kent State because we had other people who
had been on Kent State campus in various roles covering education,
covering sports, doing a lot of other things for many
many years, including some demonstrations that had taken place two
and three years before. There was a chapter of this
(13:25):
Students for Democratic Society that protested against the appearance of
police recruiters from Oakland, California. And then there was a
group of there was an organization called the Black United
Students who protested for more courses and more attention given to.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
The black experience, black history, black black literature.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Right right, So, as a matter of fact, this is interesting.
The Black United Students, uh did not participate at all
on Monday, and they said told one of our reporters
that they knew once they saw the guards had had rifles.
(14:18):
They said, you know, we will be the first target.
So they they disappeared, they lay low, and of course
they were not participating in any way in the demonstration,
and because they knew that they could become easy targets
or they.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Would stand out in war perhaps against the white, predominantly
white campus.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
So anyhow, so when you look at the photographs of
the masses of students, you won't see any any black students.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
That's really really thank you for that. I never knew that.
Very interesting. So things calm down maybe a little bit.
On Sunday night, there's some talk in the dorms, I'm sure,
being like any college campus, I'm sure there was a
lot of people who were complaining about their campus being
(15:17):
under siege and feeling like and this is so interesting, Robert,
I think you'll agree with me, there was a different feeling.
Young people today may not realize kind of that sense
of ownership that student bodies felt when they gathered at
a college campus. It was only going to be theirs
for four years. It was a transient ownership, but they
(15:40):
were invested in it and this was their place of
learning and that this is that whole concept of alma mater.
You know, this is a place where something new was
being born and being hatched. And I don't know that
there's the same feeling on campuses today everywhere like there
was back in the nineteen sixties, that sense of almost
(16:05):
you know, proprietorship or territorialseness to the.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
It was territorial, but in a different way. Yeah, sort
of a snapshot that said it was expressing deep resentment
that these armed soldiers were on their campus trying to
prevent them from exercising their First Amendment rights to have
(16:29):
a protest. It was a very focused kind of reaction,
and but it was it ran very deep throughout that
crowd that gathered on the on the Commons on Monday
noon because and it was clear that they shifted their
(16:51):
their anger from Nixon to Vietnam War to the idea
that here were American soldiers with armed arms on their.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Heads, bearing arms yea, and.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
Bearing arms, and they were on there this is our
turf place where you know, we had we had the
freedom to express ourselves.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Listen to more Coast to Coast a M every weeknight
at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to
Coast a m dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Just past noon, Kent State University in Ohio, May fifth,
more than fifty years ago, fifty third anniversary was just observed.
In just thirteen fatal seconds, sixty bullets were fired at
(00:26):
demonstrators and that left four Kent State students dead, nine wounded.
And I was just asking Robert Giles, author of When
Truth Mattered, why didn't the governor or the president of
Kent State shut down the university on Sunday morning.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Well, there's several reasons for that. First off, as the president,
Bob Wide, was out of town. He left on Friday
afternoon to go to Iowa for an educational meeting and
a family visit. And when he last checked, he thought
that the campus was going to be quiet and there
(01:10):
was nothing to be alarmed about, and he felt free
to take his trip. And so when Governor Rhodes came in,
the first thing he did was go into a secret
meeting with local officials and the county prosecutor. A man
named Ron Kine strongly urged the governor to shut down
(01:34):
the campus. He said, there's going to be something terrible
is going to happen here and we should shut down
the campus now, and Rhodes said, absolutely not. He said,
he's quoted as saying if I shut down the campus,
people are going to look at me and say he
(01:56):
caved in to the radicals. And so that was the
theme that he then carried out into his press conference
when he's referred to these young demonstrators as worse than
the Nazis and so on. But that was a series
of things. And then after after the shooting, the county
(02:18):
prosecutor ron Kin again called the governor's office, who governor
with Brogues back in Columbus by then called his office
and said, you've got to shut down the campus, and
there was a hesitation, and Rose's aide said, well, the
governor wants to think about it, and so ron Kin
(02:40):
turned to the local judge named Carris, who said absolutely,
adiation in order shutting down the campus immediately, so that
the campus was shut down from late afternoon on May
the fourth, after the shooting, and it was the campus
(03:02):
was shut down except for people who had special passes
and for national guards when who were still on for
fifteen days.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
You know, it's a type of hubris and the part
of politicians that this is about them and not about
public safety, which is just you know, it doesn't matter
the party. It happens all the time where at an
every level, including one centator right now from California, it
seems to feel like the whole country can't go on
(03:36):
without her. So they don't want to resign. They don't
ever want to do anything. They want to control everything
about their career and about their image, and it's just
all ego. What would have happened had they shut down
the campus that day?
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Oh, I saw people would sell me alive because they
have had to go home, and and there wouldn't have
been any gathering of students to give the service targets
from the National Guard.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
The What would the National Guard have done? Would they
have do you think they would have stuck around on
campus for a day or two? But they shut it down.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
The governor said that we'll keep the National Guard here
as long as it takes to get the campus under control,
so they would have stayed for some time.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
So the.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Take me through step by step. Then after that announcement
gets made, what the rest of Sunday looks like when
the campus is open, You've got stringers on the field.
You've got photographers and you have one print reporter who's
there on campus.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Is that correct that that was on Monday day on Sunday,
not on Sunday. Well, we had people covering it on Sunday.
But what happened on Sunday was that it was it
was a nice spring day, and the kids started to
engage with the guardsmen. They played frisbee, you know, they did,
(05:19):
got friendly with them until about late in the afternoon
when things got tent and the students wanted to have
another small demonstration, and the guardsmen pushed them back through
the campus gates and shut the campus down. There was
(05:39):
no there was no rough stuff, but it was clearly
a moment of rising tension because the guardsmen knew that
they had by then, had you been given their orders
through the governor uh to make sure that there was
going to be no no rally of peace or otherwise
the next day, And so the students were already making
(06:04):
noises and fading things, which indicated that they were going
to try to defy the governor's orders and have their
protests gathering on the following day at noon. That was
just a void from Monday in May the fourth.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
The irony then of the governor coming out and calling
the students brown shirts, when in fact the National Guard
was acting more like the controlling you know, I mean,
I think the word goon would be too strong a term,
but they immediately slipped into the we're going to control
(06:46):
you physically, we're going to we're in charge here, much
more of what we would consider it to be typical
brown shirt behavior. If we're going to look at it
like that, go ahead, go ahead, Robert.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
I was going to say that the Guard leadership was
very incompetent because they didn't have a plan. They didn't
have a plan for when the Guard arrived, They didn't
have a plan for how they were going to disperse
the students on Monday, and they didn't have a plan
(07:25):
once they they put their their plan, not their plan,
but they gan to move against the students on Monday
on noon when the students were gathering for their demonstration.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
So what was the background? I mean a lot of ways. Yeah,
they didn't plan it, but they were also weren't trained
how to plan it, right.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
That's true. But they had a Brigadier General Robert Canterbury
who was in charge, and some of the photographs show
him on Monday Day. In fact, the cover of the
photograph and the cover of the book shows him in
a civilian suit and tie, and he's at the back.
(08:13):
There's a picture on the cover of this of the
guardsman shoot actually shooting at the students and General Canterbury's
way at the back, and he's got his hand up
now he's trying to get them to stop shooting. But
he had no he had no control over the troops.
And obviously they the shooting. I think it was everybody
(08:38):
seemed to conclude with spontaneous. There's been a lot of
effort to sign you know, a command that to shoot,
you know, as a single shot, because regards to respond
the way it did.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
You know the old expression if all you have is
a hammer, or everything looks like a nail, right, And
so this this general, what was his background.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
He had many many years of good service as a
in combat and other places. And he was he was
the commander of this National Guard unit in Ohio, right,
And but he was willfully unprepared. One of the questions
(09:30):
that I raised about him was why he wasn't court martial.
It turns out that when he was when the National
Guard was sent to again state. They were under the
command of the governor of Ohio. Had the had the
(09:52):
federal government sent the National Guardian the President Nixon sent
the National Guardian, then he were and the National Guard
would have been under the federal government, and he would
have been subject to the military court of Justice and
subject to course martial.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
You know, that's so interesting. I didn't know that because
in a way, my impression of that was shaped by
the Neil Young penned song Ohio done by Crosby Stills,
Nash and Young that Tin Soldiers and Nixon's coming were
finally on our own. It would have ruined it if
they had mentioned the governor. It wouldn't have seemed like right.
(10:36):
It's poetic somehow, but that's unfair, all right, So the
things get chippy again between the students and the National Guard.
Late on Sunday, what was Sunday night like.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
That was pretty quiet. I think the students were back
and behind the campus gates, and I think they have
some of them were planning how they were going to
organize on Monday, or they're going to begin their rally
and so on and their protest. But until up until
(11:19):
noon on Sunday, just before noon on Sunday, things were
fairly quiet.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
And so your experience then you didn't even have a
reporter there, as you said on Sunday, because it looked
perhaps like everything was calming down or that this was
going to get resolved peaceably. There still was no indication
of what was coming up on May the fourth, but
(11:49):
what was the So you I imagine you were tracking
what the college newspaper was doing or have since then,
or the college reporters, because you had said you often
hired people from the campus that came out there, and
it looked like some as particularly the photographers, seemed very
(12:09):
talented that came out of out of the student newspaper.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Well, a student newspaper was not really very much involved
in our coverage. And we had a very experienced journalism
student named Jeff Salad who was having his on Monday,
in fact was his final day of journalims school classes
(12:37):
and we had hired him, so they were when he
did his coverage, he was really working for the Acrobacon
Jeneral and so so uh, we didn't just didn't use
use actual members of the college campus newspaper in our
(12:59):
cage a Kent State because we had other people who
had been on Kent State campus in various roles covering education,
covering sports, doing a lot of other things for many
many years, including some demonstrations that had taken place two
and three years before. There was a chapter of this
(13:25):
Students for Democratic Society that protested against the appearance of
police recruiters from Oakland, California. And then there was a
group of there was an organization called the Black United
Students who protested for more courses and more attention given to.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
The black experience, black history, black black literature.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Right right, So, as a matter of fact, this is interesting.
The Black United Students, uh did not participate at all
on Monday, and they said told one of our reporters
that they knew once they saw the guards had had rifles.
(14:18):
They said, you know, we will be the first target.
So they they disappeared, they lay low, and of course
they were not participating in any way in the demonstration,
and because they knew that they could become easy targets
or they.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Would stand out in war perhaps against the white, predominantly
white campus.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
So anyhow, so when you look at the photographs of
the masses of students, you won't see any any black students.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
That's really really thank you for that. I never knew that.
Very interesting. So things calm down maybe a little bit.
On Sunday night, there's some talk in the dorms, I'm sure,
being like any college campus, I'm sure there was a
lot of people who were complaining about their campus being
(15:17):
under siege and feeling like and this is so interesting, Robert,
I think you'll agree with me, there was a different feeling.
Young people today may not realize kind of that sense
of ownership that student bodies felt when they gathered at
a college campus. It was only going to be theirs
for four years. It was a transient ownership, but they
(15:40):
were invested in it and this was their place of
learning and that this is that whole concept of alma mater.
You know, this is a place where something new was
being born and being hatched. And I don't know that
there's the same feeling on campuses today everywhere like there
was back in the nineteen sixties, that sense of almost
(16:05):
you know, proprietorship or territorialseness to the.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
It was territorial, but in a different way. Yeah, sort
of a snapshot that said it was expressing deep resentment
that these armed soldiers were on their campus trying to
prevent them from exercising their First Amendment rights to have
(16:29):
a protest. It was a very focused kind of reaction,
and but it was it ran very deep throughout that
crowd that gathered on the on the Commons on Monday
noon because and it was clear that they shifted their
(16:51):
their anger from Nixon to Vietnam War to the idea
that here were American soldiers with armed arms on their.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Heads, bearing arms yea, and.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
Bearing arms, and they were on there this is our
turf place where you know, we had we had the
freedom to express ourselves.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Listen to more Coast to Coast a M every weeknight
at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to
Coast a m dot com for more
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