Both sides to blame at Kent State?
13 Seconds
A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings
Philip Caputo
Chamberlain Bros./Penguin: 200 pp., $21.95, includes DVD
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The sad and shocking photograph of the Kent State student lying face down, shot dead by rifle fire from a National Guard unit on May 4, 35 years ago, was especially shocking to me. For several long moments, as I pored over it, I had to force myself to recognize that the small, dark-haired young man lying on the ground was someone who’d been a classmate of mine in high school and junior high school.
Jeffrey Miller had been the good-natured, cheerful, soft-spoken guy with a husky voice and shy, chipmunk smile who’d been in many of my classes from the seventh grade on: “A math whiz with a bright future,” according to the yearbook. He wanted very much to go to the University of Michigan and often wore a Michigan sweatshirt. As I now learn from Philip Caputo’s intelligent and admirably concise book about the Kent State shootings, “13 Seconds,” Jeff had indeed gone to Michigan, following in the footsteps of his older brother. But in January 1970, he made what proved to be a fatal transfer to Kent State in Ohio, where a few months later he and three other students would be killed in a burst of fire.
Jeff, Caputo tells us, was an antiwar activist, along with his friend and fellow victim Allison Krause; this, in contrast to the other two who died: William Schroeder, who was just looking, and Sandy Scheuer, who was on her way to a class. But as Caputo aptly remarks, Jeff (like Allison) advocated nonviolence and “was so far from the Weather Underground end of the spectrum that he’d called home ... to ask his mother if it was all right for him to attend Monday’s rally.”
The 13-second barrage of bullets not only killed these four students but also wounded nine others, leaving one young man paralyzed from the waist down for life.
A former Marine, Caputo was sent to cover the story back then, and he found the National Guard’s version of events exceedingly hard to believe: “From my experience in Vietnam I knew something about real combat and what it was like to fear for your life.... If the guardsmen had perceived themselves to be in danger, then something was wrong with their perceptions, or more likely, their training, discipline, and leadership.”
Taking us step by step through the movements of the students and troops, Caputo thoughtfully sifts through conflicting testimonies and reports to provide a clear and convincing account of what actually happened. Next, he examines the serious question of what went wrong with the guardsmen.
Reviewing the alarming events of that weekend, including a mysterious fire at the ROTC building, Caputo re-creates a powerful sense of a poisonous atmosphere of anger and hate: “In the name of protesting the actions of a remote federal government, vandals had lashed out at shopkeepers who had nothing even remotely to do with making war policy and had wrecked businesses that had taken a lifetime to build.... This is not to say that the guardsmen were in any way justified in doing what they eventually did. God knows, it is not to say that ... [the] victims ‘deserved what they got.’ It is to say that the demonstrators who resorted to violence ... also collaborated in the tragedy....”
These reckless actions were more than matched, in Caputo’s considered opinion, by the equally if not more reckless reactions of those in authority. Citing the incendiary statements of officials such as Ohio’s governor, James Rhodes, who likened the agitators to brownshirts and communists, and vowed to “eradicate the problem,” Caputo concludes: “Those in power have an obligation to use their power wisely; the greater the power, the greater the obligation.”
An award-winning journalist and author of the novel “A Rumor of War,” Caputo is a compellingly readable writer. Balanced but far from bland, fair-minded but justly indignant, he offers a forthright, insightful and ultimately sobering account of what happened. He shows clearly how both sides of the conflict were to blame, but he also makes a more important point: To blame everyone is tantamount to blaming no one. Rightly, he considers it wrong to pretend that what happened was not the result of human agency but merely some natural disaster like a flood or earthquake.
What was the effect of this tragedy? Although any number of academics, pundits and ordinary observers have pointed to Kent State as a turning point, bringing the war home to a nation, changing hearts and minds, Caputo believes the reverse is true.
Recalling the harsh comments he heard after the killings, the cruel letters received by Schroeder’s parents and polls revealing more sympathy for the guardsmen than for the victims, he sadly concludes that “the only change ... [Kent State] wrought in hearts was to harden them.”
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Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.