KENT STATE AUTHOR DONATES FREE EBOOKS TO STUDENTS, FACULTY MEMBERS, AND ALUMNI
By Guest Columnist, cleveland.com This post originally appeared on the op-ed page of the March 6, 2020 Cleveland Plain Dealer. LOS ANGELES -- Even though I received some of the best reviews of any book about the May 4, 1970, killings at Kent State University, I have been repeatedly prevented from speaking on the campus. Every time my original publisher or I tried to schedule a speaking engagement, it was made clear to me that I was, in the words of a sociology professor, “not welcome” at Kent State. The reasons are varied and include the fact that I exposed some abominable behavior by some of the tragedy’s best-known characters, including that professor, who was laden with multiple conflicts of interest. Also, as far as the May 4 Task Force is concerned (the student group supposedly in charge of keeping alive the memory of May 4 ), I am much too respectable and middle class. That group, by the way, also blocked other May 4 authors from speaking at Kent, including Philip Caputo, a distinguished Pulitzer-Prize-winning author. As an exercise in “creative revenge,” I decided that in 2020, during Kent State’s yearlong 50th anniversary commemoration of the shootings, I would donate the updated ebook version of my book, “Four Dead in Ohio,” to any student, faculty member, and alumnus or alumna who is interested. I figured that If the university was going to repeatedly censor me, I would make it impossible for KSU to prevent its students from discovering what I had to say. I do not expect many students to take me up on the offer because, let us face it, the university still has not provided today’s students with a good reason to even remember May 4. If we were to be brutally honest about it, we would stipulate that May 4 (as it is called in shorthand) has very little to do with anything going on in the world today. The people who want to keep its memory alive are mostly the stuck-in-the-'60s protesters who want to be remembered as heroes of the anti-Vietnam War movement. For this year’s commemoration, Kent State’s administration has been conned into honoring several not-so-former radicals who either have not been truthful about their own roles in the tragedy, or who still champion violent protest. I have been particularly disturbed by the claims of two of Kent State’s “honorees,” wounded student Alan Canfora and his sister Chic, that they represent the views of the parents of the four students killed. As someone who actually worked with those parents in an attempt to get some semblance of justice, I can tell you they were, more often than not, not on the same page, particularly when the parents sought a federal grand jury investigation. Kent’s “honorees” actually opposed a full investigation because they feared that they would be criminally prosecuted themselves instead of the Ohio National Guardsmen. In fact, another “honoree,” wounded survivor Thomas Grace, whose book “Kent State” is essentially a “love letter” to the defunct Students for a Democratic Society, disparaged the parents’ struggle for justice, telling fellow student Paul Keane that “the only way to get justice is to pick up a gun.” The parents of those killed May 4 would never have approved of this behavior, nor wanted their “search for the truth” and “the struggle for justice” obliterated from KSU’s official history. Unfortunately, that is what Grace and his friends primarily accomplished when they served as consultants for Kent’s May 4 Visitors Center. The reason May 4 deserves to be remembered is not because it single-handedly ended the war in Vietnam (although it obviously played some part), but because it quietly morphed into one of the greatest injustices in modern American history. The country may have grown weary of the war, but it had also lost its patience with the protesters who, in the name of peace, committed violence. In fact, the unpopularity of the victims was exactly why it was so easy to cover up the real story of the May 4 shootings. Perhaps if Kent State had a law school instead of a sociology department, someone there might have recognized what transpired right in front of their eyes. If nothing else, I hope the donation of my book will help point Kent State’s scholars in the direction of the debate around these questions: Why did the Guardsmen fire? Why was no one held accountable in the courts? And perhaps it might help students better understand why I and others who examined the hard, cold physical evidence concluded that murder may have been committed at Kent State. William A. Gordon is a 1973 Kent State University graduate and the author of “Four Dead in Ohio” and three other books.
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Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties, Thomas Grace, University of Massachusetts Press, $90 hardcover/$19.95 paperback
Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings, Craig S. Simpson and Gregory S. Wilson, Kent State University Press, $28.95 67 Shots: Kent State and The End of American Innocence, Howard Means, da Capo Press, $25.99 This spring three new books will revisit the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State. Two of these books were written mostly for academic audiences, while the third was written by a professional author. The first study was written by Thomas Grace, a KSU alumnus who was severely wounded when an Ohio National Guard bullet shattered his left ankle, leaving him with a limp. Grace is now an adjunct professor of history at Erie Community College in College in Buffalo, NY, and the only one of the nine wounded survivors I have never met. I had plenty of opportunity, but had no desire to, after he told a friend “the only way you get justice is to pick up a gun.” It is not clear whether Grace still subscribes to that view, but his heart and mind still belong with sixties militants. His book is mostly an academic history of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and antiwar protest at Kent and throughout the United States, followed by a detailed recounting of the events of 1970, which culminated with the four unnecessary deaths on May 4, 1970. Grace devotes a good 200 pages to this pre-1970 history, but never adequately explains why he joined the SDS. Nor does he try to connect the dots between the behavior of former SDSers (which, as a group, had been officially banned from campus) and the May 2 destruction of the university's ROTC building and the killings on May 4. In fact, Grace removes himself from the equation so completely that you forget he was an active participant in the protests. The Justice Department concluded that Grace, as well as Canfora, waved a flag and encouraged people to throw rocks at the Guardsmen. Grace was also close friends with Thomas "Aquinas" Miller who was involved in the arson of the ROTC building. Grace does not acknowledge what his friend did, and his portrayal of himself as an innocent bystander in all these events struck me as being disingenuous. As knowledgeable as Grace is about the events of May 4, he seems to holding back on everything he knows. His Kent State is definitely not a tell-all book. One is tempted to call it closer to what the Nixon administration used to call (during the Watergate cover-up) "a limited, modified hang-out." The second book, the bizarrely titled Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings, was co-written by Craig S. Simpson, a former archivist at Kent, and Gregory S. Wilson, a history professor at the nearby University of Akron. Although the title makes it sound like these scholars were in an invisible blimp watching the action below, Simpson explains in his introduction what he really meant: "We, as authors and historians, have sought to stay above the din and present a multitude of perspectives, respecting (if not always agreeing with) the views of the narrators." The narrators in this case are mostly former students and faculty members who shared their recollections with Kent State's Oral History Project organized some 20 years after the fact. The majority of the statements were collected at least ten years after more than 8,000 pages of FBI reports and a 13,000 page trial transcript became available, making the oral history project redundant at best. The book at least publishes excerpts from some of the better narratives, while intermittently lecturing on the theories of oral history. I would say that I am not a big fan of this Weenie School of History--where historians are too afraid to weigh in on any controversy--but my wife says I should always find something positive to say about other people's hard work. So I will say this: after four and a half decades and half a dozen books published by the Kent State Press, Kent State has finally found two scholars who will at least acknowledge there was a debate. Mazel tuv, Kent State. 46 years later, you have taken another baby step! At least Howard Means, the author of the third book, 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence, was willing to wade into that debate. His book is the 36th on what is known by shorthand as May 4 (if you count all the children's books, novels, and subdisciplinary scholarly works.) In telling the story Means, a professional author, relies extensively on the same oral histories as Simpson and Wilson. His book, however, is better written, and he does a better job distilling the collection’s few nuggets and molding them in a mostly chronological narrative. In an attempt to be fair, Means faithfully reports what all sides claimed. His book may not break any new ground, but the book's real significance is that Means is now the sixth of the eight major May 4 authors to agree that the shootings were deliberate. That in itself is a pretty damning statement against the Ohio National Guard. Finally, there is one issue that casual readers probably would not pick up on, but which actually is emblematic of the often atrocious behavior quietly taking place behind the scenes. Personally, I found it annoying that even though my own book on the shootings (Four Dead in Ohio: Was There a Conspiracy at Kent State?) clearly influenced Means (Means seconded over 20 major conclusions I reached 26 years earlier), Means refused to mention me once. (For that matter, he refused to credit all the other authors for their original reporting and research.) Both casual readers and scholars who check his source notes might jump to the wrong conclusion that everything Means reports in his book originated from Means himself. Here’s an example: on page 43 of his book, when discussing the arson of the university's ROTC building two days before the students were killed, Means reports that two previously unidentified individuals (the both now-deceased Thomas “Aquinas” Miller and George Walter Harrington, the brother of another of Grace's friends), were among those who helped set the university’s ROTC building on fire. This information–-specifically, the identities of these two arsonists--did not originate from Means' research. It was actually lifted from the first chapter of the updated e-book version of my book, which was the first book on the killings to identify the arsonists. Despite this, and the almost identical conclusions we both reached--Means never once acknowledged the existence of my book. He even excluded Four Dead in Ohio from his bibliography, while mentioning virtually all the other essential May 4 books. It was almost as if he did not want to anyone to draw comparisons between his book and mine. Just to be clear, Means does not actually plagiarize anyone; he simply makes all the previous chroniclers of the Kent State tragedy magically disappear. The question of who burned the Army ROTC building at Kent State two nights before the May 4, 1970, killings has always been one of the Kent Affair’s unsolved mysteries. That act of arson, as I wrote in my book, Four Dead in Ohio, was “the one act of violence that resulted in the calling-out of the National Guard. If there had not been a fire, the Guardsmen would not have come onto the campus and the students might not have been killed on May 4.”
Until now only one person, a high school student named George Walter Harrington, who was visiting his brother Jim that night, has been positively linked to the fire. We now know the identity of two other men. One of them outed himself in an online video supporting a Kickstarter campaign to complete an authorized documentary of Devo, the New Wave group that formed after several of its members witnessed the May 4, 1970 shootings. "Jerry Casale, the son of a Kent State English professor, and Bob Mothersbaugh of Akron were two of Devo's founding members." In the preview tape, Mothersbaugh actually admitted on tape: “I helped burn the ROTC building down.” The confession can be heard at www.kickstarter.com/projects/1409838010/authorized-devo-documentary-film/posts/278030. Mothersbaugh has never been mentioned before in any previous account of the tragedy. He did not elaborate on his role, or about the roles of others who tried alongside of him. Mothersbaugh is not the only name that has recently surfaced. A not-yet-published book, “Fortney Road,” by Jeff C. Stevenson, about a Christian cult, devotes an entire chapter to the late Thomas "Aquinas" Miller, a drug addict who was not a student at Kent at the time, but who was nevertheless one of the most visible protestors that weekend. Miller was prominently featured in a Life Magazine photo as the protestor who lost it after the shootings and dipped a black flag in the blood of the slain Jeffrey Miller and sprayed it on other students. Chapter 13 of the manuscript, which quotes what Tom told his younger brother John, reports that on May 4 Tom admitted he, along with two of his companions provoked the soldiers and that Tom Miller even screamed “at the top of my lungs: “Shoot me! I’m a helpless woman. I’m a child! Shoot me! I was referring to the My Lai massacre.” The brother, John Miller, also quotes Tom as saying “he was among the group that set the ROTC building on fire.” The manuscript does not come out and say who accompanied Tom on the night of May 2, 1970, but it makes clear that on May 4 Miller was joined at the hip with two of his closest friends and fellow members of the “Kent Krazies,” Alan Canfora and Tom Grace. Canfora and Grace were also friends of Jim Harrington. Both Canfora and Grace were wounded by the National Guard. Miller, who later converted to the Christian cult, felt he was the one who deserved to die. The revelation raises renewed questions about whether Canfora and/or Grace also were involved in the arson. Canfora, in particular, appears to be still covering up other crimes and testified falsely about his role that weekend. At the 1975 wrongful death and injury trial, Canfora testified falsely under oath that he was not even present at the building that night. However, he has since admitted he was, and in a 1979 interview for the Burr, the school yearbook, Canfora proudly told reporter Eric Kosnac that he was "in the thick of things” that weekend and was surprised he was only indicted for second degree rioting. There is a professor at Kent State who has a rather nasty habit of sabotaging anyone he perceives as a professional threat. Although he does not dare say anything publicly, he has been quietly trying to discredit his competitors by claiming their work is riddled with errors.
For example, in 1990, when American History Illustrated published a 20th anniversary article he wrote, he tried to convince Geneva Politzer, the magazine's editor, not to publish an accompanying article by freelance writer Lesley Wischmann. The professor vehemently claimed her article contained numerous errors of fact. Politzer then asked Lewis to prove his claim by itemizing these supposed mistakes. When push came to shove the professor had to back down and admit he could not even cite one single example. Wischmann's article was subsequently published and, would not you know it? Neither I nor anyone else found any errors or problems with anything she wrote. Word also reached me that the professor emeritus, Jerry M. Lewis, has been conducting a whispering campaign against my book, making the same unsubstantiated charges. Again, he would only talk in generalities and could not cite one single example. It was, of course, deliberate slander, pure and simple. One of the reasons Lewis' lies infuriated me is that I take great pride in my journalism. In the 22 years since my book was originally published, no one--not a single scholar, journalist, or groupie--has ever identified any error of fact, either significant or nitpicking. No one has ever claimed I misquoted them or did not accurately report what was in any historical documents. No one has ever suggested that I was less than conscientious with the mountains upon mountains of raw material that attorneys deliberately created and preserved for historians to study. And, of course, I am still the only chronicler of this event who has actually studied and written about them. The failure to find errors in my book is something that cannot be said about most other books about the killings, including books by two Pulitzer Prize winners, James Michener and Philip Caputo. Kent State professors, fellow journalists, and attorneys for the defendants found numerous problems with Michener's reporting, and Caputo committed a few sloppy errors that his more radical critics blew out of proportion because he was not one of them. I have no problem with people disagreeing with my conclusions. May 4 certainly was not a black-and-white case, and disagreements are to be expected any time a writer tackles a highly controversial cause celebre. But as far as my basic reporting is concerned, I feel I deserve to be commended for treating an enormous body of evidence in such a conscientious manner. Instead, I found myself the subject of a smear campaign, and I do not like it one bit. A few things need to be said here. First, Lewis has several reasons to be unhappy with my book. Not only did I not praise his scholarship, but I skewered his tortured subdisciplinary reasoning for recommending the main campus memorial be built. While others felt the memorial was needed because four students were killed in a tragedy a presidential commission called "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable," Lewis felt a memorial was needed because it "sensitized America to regimented lines of communication and authority. May 4 changed forever how future demonstrations--peaceful or otherwise--must be perceived, analyzed, understood. and settled nonviolently." I also ridiculed him and his colleagues for their obstinate refusal to acknowledge the real debate. I also did not feed his supersized ego. One year Jerry, apparently confusing himself with a celebrity, actually gave his students a handout of his schedule of his upcoming TV appearances. And perhaps most importantly, my book contains some highly embarrassing revelations about the ethically challenged professor. On pages 256 and 257 of the paperback edition, the book reveals how, in just a matter of a few days, Lewis politically shapeshifted from a champion of campus radicals who opposed a federal grand jury investigation, to someone who voluntarily became a secret informant against the victims. Jerry briefed then KSU President Glenn A. Olds about a confidential meeting among the victims in which their legal strategy was discussed. Four Dead in Ohio discloses a document I discovered in the archives which demonstrated this happened at a time when the victims were suing the university. It was akin to someone infiltrating a legal defense. Jerry did this after he spoke out in defense of the radicals who opposed the grand jury investigation (which the victims sought), and was roundly humiliated by Arthur Krause, the father of slain student Allison Krause, who exploded: "Jerry, that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard!" Lewis kept quiet for the rest of the meeting, but he later retaliated against Krause by briefing Olds and again later by telling me that Krause was crying on cue during a television interview, as if Krause was faking his grief. And, of course, Jerry has also been threatened by my research. I did not quite understand why he urged me so strongly to give up seeking publication until the president of a U.S.-Canadian textbook distribution company told me that my book was perfect for classes in "Social Problems." That happens to be Lewis' field of expertise. Incidentally, he assigned his own May 4 textbook in that class. Jerry will not be happy to hear that my book has been adopted for classes at nine or ten universities. I hope there are a few professors at Kent who are wise enough to challenge Lewis the next time he pulls this crap. As far as I am concerned, he is shamelessly intellectually dishonest. And an absolute disgrace to his profession. POSTSCRIPT My recommendation for a new word in The American Heritage and other dictionaries: to "jerrylewis" someone Definition: To sabotage one's competitor, especially one who has far surpassed his own work. Yes, he wants to be the leading expert on the Kent State shootings so badly that I am going to oblige him. I intend to make him into a household name. |
AuthorThis blog is written by William A. Gordon, a Kent State alumnus and the author of "Four Dead in Ohio" and three other books. It offers commentary on the still unfolding developments in the Kent State shooting case. Archives
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William A. Gordon Email: BGordonLA@aol.com Website: www.KentStateShootingsExpert.com |