On August 13, 2024, W. W. Norton will release a new book, Kent State: An American Tragedy by Brian VanDeMark, a Vietnam War historian and a professor at the United States Naval Academy. According to a prepublication review in Publishers Weekly, the book will reveal that platoon Sergeant Matthew McManus, one of the eight Ohio National Guardsmen who were indicted (but not convicted) for violating the victims' rights to due process of law, has changed his tune and is now admitting he issued an order to fire in the air before, and not after, the troops unleashed a 13-second barrage of bullets. Four students were killed, and nine others were wounded in the once-shocking incident that brought home the war in Vietnam.

McManus is still sticking to his story that the soldiers had to fire to defend their lives. That claim was disputed by the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, which concluded the killings were "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable." Similarly, the Justice Department attorneys who reviewed over 8000 pages of FBI documents felt the self-defense claim was nothing more than a cover-up and that the claim was "fabricated subsequent to the event."   

If McManus' revised version is true, it would suggest that quite a few soldiers may have perjured themselves at the trials. Almost to a man those soldiers claimed there was no such
order and they fired strictly in self-defense, and not because McManus ordered them to. Still, a number of questions have to be asked before anyone can confidently say McManus is now telling "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

      For example:

    * If McManus gave the order it would stand to reason that other soldiers close to him would have heard it. Yet only three of the 29 "shooters" admitted they heard the word "Fire" before they fired. 

    * McManus also claims he ordered them to fire "in the air." No Guardsman has ever testified that "in the air" followed the order, and at least six Guardsmen disobeyed McManus and fired directly into the crowd.

     * Did McManus even have the authority to give any kind of order to fire? It just seems weird that a sergeant would bark that order when there were plenty of higher-ranking soldiers around, including a general, a colonel, a major, and three captains.

    * What are we supposed to do with all the other evidence that another sergeant, Myron Pryor, and Major Harry Jones, allegedly issued the command to start shooting? These men were at least 20 feet closer to the crowd than McManus was, according to an FBI chart showing where each soldier stood on the firing line. Two eyewitnesses testified Pryor tapped the backs of the soldiers closest to him, as if he was giving a signal and pointing to potential targets. 

As for Jones, he kept motioning with a riot baton he borrowed from a friend in the Guard, a sheriff's deputy. Jones testified the only orders he issued were "Hurry up" or "Stay in formation." Yet five student eyewitnesses believed that Jones was the one ordering the soldiers to about-face and shoot protestors opposed to the war in Vietnam.

    * What possessed McManus to go public 54 years after the fact?  Did he do it because he had a guilty conscience, or is there more to the story behind the story we should know about? 

     * What happens next? Will McManus' confession be met with shrugs, or will a floodgate of tell-all stories emerge that may or may not support McManus' version?

At this point about the only thing we can say with certainty is that the evidence remains as problematic as ever. For that reason, I would encourage VanDeMark to make public his full interviews with McManus and any other Guardsmen he may have talked to. 
​
I know: we cannot expect 70+-something year-old soldiers to accurately remember what happened five decades earlier. No Guardsman needs to be rehabilitated or prevented from shooting anyone else. Our goal here should not be to put these men in jail, but to see if we can get to the bottom of what really happened.

I am sorry. I meant to the top.

A brief write-up of Moments of Truth: A Photographer’s Experience at Kent State, 1970. (Kent State University Press: 2019 ($34.95).   
                                                                                                                                                          Howard Ruffner did something very clever in his just-published collection of photographs taken at Kent State just before and during the May 4, 1970 killings. Ruffner, a photographer and stringer for Life magazine (where some of his photographs originally appeared), enhanced his famous photograph of the Guardsmen turning and preparing to fire on the students. As Ruffner notes, his enhanced photographs show a complete absence of rocks by the feet of the Ohio National Guardsmen.  
                                                                                                                                                                  For those who are old enough to remember the campus killings, Ruffner's photographs just demolish the Ohio National Guards' claims that they were pelted with rocks and other objects before they fired to protect themselves from a lemming-like crowd of crazed students. Ruffner's photographs may be the most damning evidence that the Guardsmen did not tell the truth and the four fatalities did not deserve to be killed.

The rest of Ruffner's photographic memoir consists of a brief retelling of his background, a review of how he became one of the most important witness for the victims during both the criminal proceedings and a civil trial alleging wrongful death and injury. He also provides other photographs taken both before the shootings, and in its immediate aftermath, and in the four days following President Richard Nixon's announcement that he was sending combat troops into Cambodia, which many students considered to be an expansion of a hated war.

​Ruffner’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on the tragedy, and reminds us that while there might be plenty of "moments of truth," we still do not why a faraway war came home to America's campuses.

    When Bob Woodward speaks at Kent State on May 4, someone should ask him about an article he and Carl Bernstein he wrote for the Washington Post way back in 1973 (May 17, to be precise). Quoting their infamous source, "Deep Throat," the reporters wrote that the Nixon administration used an array of dirty tricks against protestors of the war in Vietnam, including the use of  paid provocateurs to encourage violence at antiwar demonstrations early in the first Nixon administration." 

     If Woodward can provide evidence supporting this claim (Bernstein could not remember the report when I chauffeured him to a speech in L.A. years ago), the question has to be asked: was one of those paid provocateurs  a part-time Kent State student  named Terry Norman? On May 4, 1970, Norman took photographs of  protestors for both the campus police and FBI. He has always been a compelling and mysterious figure in the debate over what caused the Ohio National Guardsmen to kill four Kent State students. At one point, the late Indiana Senator Birch Bayh even accused him of being the tragedy's "fatal catalyst." 

     Stuart Allen, one of the two audio experts who examined the only continuous recording of the shootings, was convinced that Norman was involved in a scuffle with his fellow students and that he whipped out his concealed .38 caliber pistol and fired four bullets 70 seconds before the main volley. Several witnesses indirectly support this claim; while others, including Norman, insist he never fired at all.  But even if Allen was right, and Norman fired before any Guardsmen did, it seems highly improbable that the National Guard would have twiddled their rifles for 70 seconds before responding. A minute and ten seconds is a very long time to react to gunfire. 

     Still, there are other reasons to wonder about how Terry Norman  fits into the larger puzzle. A photograph surfaced during discovery before the 1975 wrongful death and injury trial revealed that Norman was on what was then the university's practice football field (where a gym annex now stands), and that he was literally surrounded by a semi-circle of soldiers. This photograph was taken approximately five to ten minutes before the Guard retreated up a hill and opened fire. There has never been an explanation as to why Norman, among the thousands of students present that day, waltzed up to the soldiers or whether his presence was even welcome.  

      We do know, though, that shortly after this encounter, Norman positioned himself in between the students and the Guardsmen and threw rocks at the students. Guard captain John Martin witnessed this and asked himself, 'What is that idiot doing?" Norman himself admitted in his pretrial deposition that he threw two or three rocks. And a third witness, Tom Masterson, who admitted that he was the person who jumped Norman (supposedly to take out his frustration over the killings), insisted that the number of rocks Norman threw was closer to "half a dozen, a dozen."

    Why? Was Norman trying to provoke an incident between the students and the Guardsmen, and if so, was he acting on his own or at the behest of the FBI? Could he have been one of the out-of-control informants  that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warned his agents about? 

     All we know for certain is that Norman supplied the police and the FBI with photographs of antiwar demonstrators because he liked to see them go to jail. And after the shootings, Kent State Detective Tom Kelley wrote Norman a letter of recommendation that helped him secure a job with the Washington, D. C. police department, where he later became a member of its S.W.A.T. unit.
​
     Terry Norman's role on May 4, 1970, is of course, only one of the many unresolved mysteries of the killings at the university. So is the question of whether or not the Guardsmen took the law into their own hands and either agreed among themselves to shoot the students, or were ordered to do so by a commanding officer. Six of the eight authors of major May 4 studies, including myself, concluded the shootings were no accident: that they were a deliberate response to the mostly verbal abuse they received from the students.

      By inviting luminaries like Woodward to speak on the anniversaries--or by doing what the university did on the 20th anniversary: inviting thousands of poets to participate in festivities--the university, of course, guarantees that the tragedy itself will be overshadowed and that the university will get some positive publicity. Kent State says it is trying to "bring high-profile, world-renowned experts to Kent State for serious, thought-provoking discussions and conversations.''  

      If only the university were as welcoming to the Bob Woodwards in Ohio who sought what Woodward and Bernstein called "the best obtainable version of the truth." 

A year and half ago, when I let Howard Means off the hook for plagiarizing my book, (http://kentstatedevelopments.blogspot.com/), I was inexplicably thinking that he had to have copied my text word to word in order to  be guilty of plagiarism. I do not know why I thought that. Perhaps I did not want to believe he was capable of theft . . . or maybe I did not want to make a big issue of it. We are, after all, competitors and anyone who knows anything about the cesspool that May 4 has become would understand that he did not hurt me as much as others have. 

In any event, after I was reintroduced to the Chicago Manual of Style, it appears that I was wrong about Means. The Manual's guidelines suggest he did in fact steal from my work without crediting my original reporting.

Section 4.85 of the Manual, which defines what constitutes fair use and what constitutes plagiarism, states:

"With all reuse of others' materials, it is important to identify the original as the source. This not only bolsters the claim of fair use but also helps avoid any accusation of plagiarism. Nothing elaborate is required: a standard footnote will suffice."

Means used no such footnote in passing off my research as if it were his own. Last year, in my blog post of April 6, 2016, I noted that on page 43 of his book Means basically lifted  from what I wrote about in the updated e-book edition of Four Dead in Ohio published a year earlier. 

In my book (Kindle location 414-450), I cited my sources in reporting that two individuals had finally admitted to being involved in the destruction of the university ROTC building on May 2, 1970. two days before the killings. Before that, no one had ever admitted being responsible for the arson (although I did report in the original hardcover edition of my book (1990) that one of the individuals involved, the late George Walter Harrington, was prominently mentioned in memos sent to and from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. If you will forgive my footnote fetish, I raised the question as to why Harrington was never indicted, especially since he admitted to the FBI that he played a key intermediary role in the initial attempts to burn ROTC down).

Instead of revealing how he came across this information, Means cited only "an anonymous source" in identifying the second arsonist, Thomas "Aquinas" Miller. I first reported about Miller, citing a report in an unrelated book (Fortney Road) which reported Miller's subsequent involvement in a cult. 

Means' claim that he used "an anonymous source" does not withstand the smell test. Journalists typically grant anonymity when they have to protect whistleblowers who might be fired if their identifies were publicly revealed. Kent State, on the other hand, is strictly an historical event.

In this case, both of individuals involved in the arson (Harrington and Miller) have been dead for over 30 and 40 years. There was no compelling reason for anyone to ask for anonymity, or for Means to grant it. Given that I was the first to link Harrington to Miller and write about them together a year before the Means' came out, it strains credulity to believe that Means' "anonymous source" was anything other than my book.

The Chicago Manual makes it clear that an author (Means) cannot take "a free ride on the first author's labor." I also noted in my blog that Means' work as a whole was far less original than his book seemed to suggest. In the final analysis, he did not break any new ground but essentially seconded more than 20 conclusions I reached 26 years earlier. 

And what could be more suspicious than the fact that Means pretended my exhaustive research did not exist? Means never once cited my book in his source notes and even excluded it in his selected bibliography. That bibliography, by the way, cites every other other essential book on May 4, 1970. As I wrote last year: "it was almost as if he did not want anyone to compare his book with mine." Means also wrote as if no previous May 4 author came before him.

I am sure Means will come up with some excuse, as if a 70-something-year-old author of over ten books did not know that plagiarism is the most serious journalistic sin a journalist or popular historian can commit.

This issue suddenly became important again after the announcement that producer/director Jay Roach intends to turn Means book, 67 Shots, into a motion picture using the same title as Means. The proposed movie is being packaged by Roach's production company. Other producers include Tina Fey and her composer husband, Jeff Richmond, a graduate of Kent State. 

This article originally appeared in the November 20, 2016 edition of History News Network.

C. D. "Gus" Lambros was the staunchest defender of the Ohio National Guard during the first few years after the killings at Kent State University. He successfully defended three of the shooters during the 1974 criminal trial, as well as Sergeant Myron Pryor. Pryor was not indicted after a book by Peter Davies accused him of launching a murderous conspiracy at Kent State. 

Now, Lambros's granddaughter's husband, John Fitzgerald O'Hara, an associate professor with the American Studies and Writing Program at Stockton University in Galloway, New Jersey, has written the first thoughtful, independent analysis of the evidence since my own book was published in 1990.

The title of O'Hara's article, "The Man Who Started the Killings at Kent State," is a twist on my own chapter on the shootings, which ended: “Of course, no one was willing to confess. Which is understandable. After all, how would you like to go down in history as the man who started the killings at Kent State?”

O'Hara believes the Guardsmen were not innocent, but also says that Davies and Pryor's other accusers are overlooking exculpatory evidence. O'Hara particularly takes to task Davies and wounded survivor Alan Canfora, who once described Pryor as a beady-eyed, bald barbarian who now resides in Hell. As O'Hara points out, the evidence against Pryor "was never airtight or beyond a reasonable doubt."

O'Hara argues: “First, neither [Pryor] nor anyone else should be solely blamed for such a terrible event without a sober consideration of evidence. Second, pinning the shootings exclusively on Pryor may oversimplify the historical event.”

O'Hara feels that an assumption that Pryor was guilty “occludes other important lines of analysis which might point to other nefarious individuals and forces at work. This may lessen our ability to find a different culprit, or to recognize degrees and responsibilities spread among many individuals and groups, guardsmen and protestors, military and political leaders . . . Truth and justice with respect to Kent State remain important; however, neither is served by passing judgments unqualified by contradictory accounts and evidence.”

In making his case, O'Hara concedes that a famous photograph depicting Pryor standing several feet in front of the firing squad, intently pointing his pistol, may implicate Pryor as a shooter "despite his own assertion that the weapon was neither loaded or fired." Then, contradicting this conclusion, O'Hara cites a controversial 1974 conclusion by Electromagnetic Systems Laboratory (ESL), a forensics photographic lab commissioned by the Justice Department to analyze the evidence. ESL concluded Pryor's weapon was not fired and "that the slide was in fact in the locked position."

Moreover, O'Hara cites the claim by Pryor's superior, Captain Raymond Srp, that he inspected and sniffed Pryor's gun and determined it had not been fired. Pryor also passed three lie detector tests arranged by Lambros. (These tests were never introduced into evidence at the subsequent wrongful death and injury trial which named Pryor as a defendant. Polygraphs are inadmissible in federal courts.)

Without delving into all the nitty gritty details of O'Hara's first two arguments (including the question of whether Srp was friends with Pryor), O'Hara seems to be on much sounder ground when he points out that Pryor "had no official authority to issue an order to fire." The key word here, of course, is "official." As Davies pointed out, the soldiers seemed to have lost faith in their commanders, who marched them onto a practice football field, where they found themselves surrounded on three sides. After the trials, one shooter, Sgt. Lawrence Shafer, bitterly complained the shootings would have never happened if the general did not have "his head up his ass." 

The commanding officers seemed to have lost control of the troops, who then started improvising by throwing rocks and gas canisters back at the students. The fact that Pryor was a noncommissioned officer does not negate the possibility that there was an unauthorized order to open fire, whether given by Pryor or someone else. Indeed, a 2010 study by forensics audio expert Stuart Allen, using the most sophisticated technology available today, noted that he enhanced the tape recording of the shooting, a voice could be heard giving such an order.

O'Hara doubts that Pryor gave this alleged order, writing that Pryor "was wearing a gas mask that would arguably muffle any verbal commands that he gave." The main point of his article was that an over-investment in "Myron Pryor as the centerpiece of a murderous conspiracy," makes us forget that there were multiple contributing causes of May 4, 1970, and leads us to overlook other scenarios explaining what actually precipitated the Guardsmen to open fire.

That may be, but it is also true that the other theories of what precipitated the shootings are fraught with far greater weaknesses than the theory that Pryor or another Guardsman issued an order to fire on Blanket Hill.

The possibility that there was a sniper was ruled out early in the investigation, although an undercover FBI photographer and part-time Kent State student was involved in a curious incident before the shooting broke out. As suspicious as his actions were (e.g., placing himself between the Guardsmen and the students and throwing rocks at the students), it is highly improbable that Terry Norman could have instigated the tragedy. Even if Norman fired four shots, as forensic expert Stuart Allen also concluded, it is illogical to believe that the Guardsmen, upon hearing these shots, waited a full 70 seconds before firing into the crowd. Even senior citizens do not have that slow a reaction time, and the Guardsmen, of course, were mostly in their twenties.

Moreover, the other much discussed scenario: that the Nixon White House orchestrated the shootings, requires manipulating so many people and so many events that it seems beyond the scope of human capacity. Certainly, suspicions swirled around the not-so-veiled threats to shoot protestors the day before it actually happened, at a press conference led by Ohio Governor James Rhodes. (At the time of the shootings, the governor was trying to get the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in Ohio. Rhodes was behind in the polls, and preaching "law and order" to the masses.) However, after four and a half decades, no one has been able to produce one iota of evidence that the shootings were pre-planned. Indeed, it is one thing to say that Rhodes, as the Ohio National Guard commander-in-chief, set the tone that made the shootings possible, but quite another to say Rhodes or Nixon (or Nixon and Rhodes) gave any specific orders to kill students. 

The spur-of-the-moment order to fire theory at least explains why an estimated half a dozen to ten Guardsmen simultaneously stopped, about-faced approximately 135 degrees, and fired a 13-second barrage at students who, according to a Justice Department report, were too far away to pose even a remote danger to the soldiers. When the shootings broke out, the Guardsmen were also just ten feet away from passing around the corner of Taylor Hall, where they would be beyond the protestor's field of vision. Any rocks would have just bounced off the corner of the building.

The much sought after "smoking gun" may still elude us, but the spur-of-the-moment order-to-fire theory still seems to be the least problematic, and the one most consistent with the eyewitness accounts. 

O'Hara's article appears in the August issue of an online scholarly journal, The Sixties. It costs $43 to order it on the Internet, but I saved that by finding a friendly librarian who inter-library loaned the article to me.

- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164234#sthash.lEhAsp6H.dpuf

William A. Gordon is a journalist, Kent State graduate (class of 1973), and author of five books, including Four Dead in Ohio: Was There a Conspiracy at Kent State?

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.

(Continued from Part One) 

Canfora engaged in quite a bit of psychological projection in his recent attacks of me on both his personal web site and the web site for his "charity." (And when was the last time you've seen a legitimate "charity" engage in personal attacks?) 

One of his more deceptive claims was that my book was self-published, which is highly misleading since the book was originally published by Prometheus Books, based in Buffalo. As it so happened, by the time Prometheus allowed the book go out of print, I became an independent publisher myself, bought and sold all of their remaining copies of the hardcover version, and decided to bring out a paperback edition. Despite his insinuations, there is nothing unusual about an author keeping a book in print (visit the Author's Guild "Back in Print" program at
www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/ag-partners-with-open-road-for-back-in-print-program/

Canfora also misrepresented my credentials, suggesting that I was just a Hollywood tour guide. A more honest individual would have acknowledged that I am actually an author, editor, and publisher of books and databases, not someone who rides around Hollywood giving tours on buses. 

Canfora also wants you to believe that I am a frustrated wannabe writer. That is a mighty silly argument considering that Four Dead in Ohio was published two and a half decades ago, and I have gone on to write and/or edit three other books. 

While Canfora dismisses my book as "lame" (his one-word review), critics who are not personally threatened by my work gave me reviews most authors would love to have. The Cleveland Plain Dealer thought I did "an excellent job piecing together the events that culminated in the killings and the subsequent cover-ups" and that I put Kent State into historical perspective. The Detroit Free Press called the book "definitive" while Knight Newpapers called it "convincing, well documented and well researched." Paul Aron, the author of  Unsolved Mysteries of American History, thought the book was balanced and thorough--"and as close to the last word as anyone has come so far." Choice magazine thought I brought "more clarity to this controversial historical tragedy than any other work to date." It even called the book "as entertaining as the best detective fiction and and as analytical and well documented as the best journalism or scholarship."

Contrary to his claims I curried favor with KSU student government leaders in my senior year at Kent (whatever currying favor is supposed to mean), the president of student government, Bob Gage, appointed me as his special assistant. Note how Canfora makes that appointment sound sinister. And while he criticizes me for interviewing attorneys who represented the National Guardsmen, since when is that, as he suggests, a treacherous act?   All it means is that I am not an ideologue and I wanted to hear what the defense attorneys had to say about their trial strategy and their thoughts on what the acquittal meant. 

Ironically, while Canfora claims that I have been attacking everyone in sight, I have never engaged in a public feud with anyone else, as Canfora has on numerous occasions. I may have exposed some pretty reprehensible behavior, including Canfora's incessant lying, but I believe that everything should come out, whether it involves with a dishonest wounded student, a dishonest professor, a Guardsman who kills unnecessarily, or anyone else who butchers the truth.

Canfora, as I mentioned, has a long record of (how shall I put it?) not playing well with others. He has fought with targets who have had far less political differences than he and I do. For example, once he even attacked his fellow wounded survivor, Robbie Stamps, after Stamps complained that a member of Canfora's May 4 Task Force came close to physically assaulting former KSU President Carol Cartwright while she stood vigil at the site of one students' death. Canfora, ever the confrontationalist, defended that student's behavior  and actually lectured his "blood brother" Stamps for supporting a more civilized approach.

Canfora also feuded with Greg Rambo, another student who helped get the Guardsmen prosecuted; Laurel Krause, fatality Allison Krause's younger sister, who wanted to work with him to videotape eyewitness testimony; university administrators like Dr. Faye Biles, who defended the university's insistence on building a gym annex over a significant chunk of the shooting site; and former KSU President Michael Schwartz, who did not appreciate Canfora's oft-repeated threats to shut down Kent State if he did get the exact size memorial he wanted (Schwartz called him a "ruthless ax-grinder").  Then of course, there are the Guardsmen themselves, whom Canfora regularly characterizes as a "death squad" hell-bent on murdering innocent students.         

Canfora has also fought with several other researchers, including the late Charles Thomas, whom Canfora once denounced as a charlatan. After Thomas died Canfora actually had the chutzpah to announce Thomas' death--something he also did for another nemesis, Guard Colonel Charles Fassinger. 

Regarding the parents of the dead students: far from condemning me, most of them have on several occasions expressed their appreciation for everything I did for them. The only ingrate among the victims is Canfora, who acts as if May 4 is his personal domain and that he and only he can dictate how May 4 is remembered. 

In Canfora's world, there is no "agree to disagree" principle. It always has to be his way and if he does not get his way, he will lash out at you. Even some of his fellow activists (for instance Bill Arthrell)  complain he acts like the "dictator of May 4."

In addition to trying to smear me on both his personal web site and the web site of his so-called "charity," Canfora even attacked me on a Facebook page after I asked a simple question about a fatality's living situation. I asked the question only because I suspected a screenwriter had it wrong. This was an another unprovoked attack that seemed not only contrived but driven by his own hatred of anyone who poses a threat to his being at the center of attention. 

In fact, this feels more like a petty, pointless fight not over May 4 but who gets to enjoy the spoils of May 4. At stake are movie rights, lecture fees, and recognition and publicly from historians, newspeople, and documentarians. How else can one explain why Canfora been so consistently irrational and utterly ruthless in trying to destroy his competition? How else does one account for his hysterical, over-the-top attacks on someone who is not only sympathetic to the very victims he pretends to represent, but who has consistently and more thoroughly documented the injustices done to the twelve other victims? 

Coincidentally, I discovered Canfora's attacks on me on the same day the 66-year-old celebrated the birth of his first child. One would think that a time like that his heart would be filled with love and joy, and not with thoughts of revenge and destroying his competition.

After a 13-year lull, Alan Canfora has revived his campaign to damage my reputation and dissuade people from reading my book on the 1970 Kent State shootings. Not only is he trying to undermine my expertise, but he is also trying to intimidate me into silence. In doing so, he only succeeds in reminding us that he is his own worst enemy. 

My book seems to infuriate him for a number of reasons, including the fact I am not on board with his attempts to wholly rewrite the history of the Kent State murders. As I see it, far from being a hero or a patriot (as he has variously described himself), Canfora was one of the bad actors who stupidly tested the limits of the National Guard's patience. He was the one person who emerged from the crowd of protestors, walked within 100 feet of the Guardsmen, and provocatively waved what his sister has described as a "black flag of anarchy," much like a bullfighter in a ring. While Canfora remains proud of his actions, there is little question that his recklessness put himself and his fellow students in danger. Perhaps not mortal danger (the Scranton Commission, after all, determined the shootings were "unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable"), but he made it much easier for the troops to pull the triggers, resulting in the deaths of four students and the wounding of nine others, including Canfora, who received a minor wound when was shot in the wrist.  

My book also undoubtedly infuriates Canfora because I do not give a crap about what he repeatedly refers to as "our revolt." Like many college students at the time, I was opposed to the war in Vietnam but I certainly never joined a group advocating violence to end violence like Canfora's Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). I believe that if you commit a crime you should be prepared to do the time, and that everyone who committed crimes at Kent State (students and Guardsmen alike) should have been brought to justice.  

If new evidence is to be believed, Canfora may have even participated in the destruction of the university's Army ROTC building two nights before the shootings. A new book, Fortney Road, devotes a chapter to Canfora's close buddy Thomas "Aquinas" Miller, a Kent State dropout, local drug dealer, and fellow member of the SDS offshoot "the Kent Krazies." The book reports that Miller told his brother John that he helped burn down Kent's ROTC building.  Since Canfora and Miller seemed practically joined at the hip on May 4 (both waved the anarchist flags), it is not unreasonable to ask if Canfora joined his friend in the repeated attempts to burn down the building.

Canfora is no doubt also upset that I've been the first author to expose his four-decades-long record of either outright lying and/or deceiving the press and the public about all kinds of matters pertaining to May 4. No one else at the university dares to challenge or correct him whenever he starts propagandandizing, lest they receive the same treatment he has given me and numerous other people involved in the Kent State case.

In the recently released expanded e-book edition of Four Dead in Ohio I wrote:
  
“COMPULSIVE, HABITUAL OR PATHOLOGICAL?: Alan Canfora’s disproven claim that the words, “Right here. Get set. Point. Fire,” appear on the tape of the shooting was hardly the only time Canfora misled the public . . .             

Another untrue statement Canfora made came under oath at the 1975 wrongful death and injury trial, when he testified he was never an activist or member of the SDS (Krause vs. Rhodes, Vol. 16, pgs. 3719 and 3727) . Canfora has since proudly admitted publicly that both of these claims are true.

In a January 18, 1982 interview for this book, he admitted to me that he lied to the FBI (again while under oath) when he told them that  he was 50-75 feet farther away from the soldiers then he actually was. Canfora told me the reason he lied was because he was  worried about being indicted by the state grand jury (which he ultimately was).

He also testified at the trial that he did not participate in the ROTC fire and only watched it from a  distance of 400 feet (Krause v. Rhodes, page 3653). Canfora later referred to “our original crowd” (ProActivist.com, June 24, 1999), as if he were a leader, and [wrote]  how “we were thrilled that about 2,000 students left their dorms and joined our anti-war march.” In 2000 Canfora was even quoted by Erin Kosnac, a reporter for the the campus yearbook, the Burr, as saying he was in the “thick of things” during the pre-shooting protests, and that he was relieved that he was only indicted for second degree rioting. (“The Human Side of History,” Burr, Spring 2000, p. 41). That admission strongly suggests he is still covering up his involvement in more serious crimes . . . 

Canfora’s lack of truthfulness at the 1975 wrongful death and injury trial so concerned Arthur Krause, the father of slain co-ed Allison Krause, that he confided to friends that he feared losing the case “because of Canfora’s lying.”

That is not all. Years later, Canfora conned William Canterbury, a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal, into writing a front-page story that Universal Studios would, in 1997, make a major motion picture about his life (“Kent State tragedy heads for silver screen,” Akron Beacon Journal, February 12, 1996). It turned out that all Universal did was option the rights to his still unpublished book, which he has claimed to have worked on since at least 1984 and which he has yet to produce. The proposed movie never went beyond the initial development stage and was abandoned by Universal long before Canfora eventually conceded the movie would not be made.

While Canfora had told reporters all he wanted was to find the truth about the shootings, and that he was not interested in revenge, he proved otherwise by establishing a web site, “Kent May 4th Central,” on the 30th anniversary of the killings.

"Kent State May 4th Central also included a telltale link to his so-called "charity," the "Kent May 4th Center." Although Canfora denies any involvement in the establishment of the site, one does not have to be a linguist to recognize that “Kent May 4th Central” used language identical to what Canfora wrote in his other postings. “Kent May 4th Central” also included two telltale links: one back to Canfora’s personal website and the other to his so-called “charity,” the “Kent May 4th Center.”

“Kent May 4th Central” published the names, home addresses, and in some instances the telephone numbers of the Guardsmen who were on Blanket Hill on May 4 and urged his fellow activists to visit these men at their homes, ask them questions, and take their pictures. It was essentially an  invitation to harass the soldiers a full 30 years after the fact.

Canfora removed the site after a few days, presumably so the site’s existence would not be traced back to him. However, as most readers know by now, once something appears on the Internet, it never can be completely erased.

Canfora was caught in yet another lie when he told reporters that as the “charity”’s director, he was volunteering his services for free. At the same time he made this declaration Canfora submitted a budget to the IRS (later made available to this author) indicating he intended to pay himself a salary of $30,000 a year.

Canfora also pretended to be a spokesman for the parents of the dead students and the other wounded survivors. While all of the parents wanted the soldiers who killed their children to be held accountable, none of them, as far as I can tell, gave a damn about his “revolt” or his glorification of student protest . . .

Canfora also fabricated out of whole cloth claims that I was “the National Guardsmen’s best friend,” despite the fact I did more than he did to get the soldiers prosecuted. He also falsely claimed on his website that I was in cahoots with the author of another book on May 4, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Caputo (whom I’ve had no contact with). And he maliciously repeats his fabricated claim that I was a disruptive person and was thrown out of meetings between the victims and their attorneys during the 1975 civil trial. It never happened. While it is true that I had attended earlier strategy meetings before the litigation started, I never attended any of the attorney-client trial meetings Canfora referred to. Moreover, I have never been thrown out of a meeting in my life or been involved in a disruptive event. I am simply not that type of person.

The “disruptive” tag, however, fit Canfora himself like a glove, and I have long noticed how he projects his own worst qualities onto others whenever he fights with them.

(Part One of Canfora at the bottom of the page)

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​POSTSCRIPT: When Canfora claimed the words "Right here. Get set. Point. Fire," were on the tape of the shootings, he deceived reporters by claiming those words were confirmed by an acquaintance of his, Ian MacKaye of the rock band Fugazi. MacKaye had enhanced the tape as a favor for Canfora, using his band's sound equipment, not the more sophisticated state-of-the-art tools later used by Stuart Allen. Mackaye later told me never heard the words Canfora attributed to MacKaye, which means Canfora's so-called "discovery" was either wishful thinking on his part or an outright purposeful hoax. After Canfora's death in 2019, the university subsequently honored Canfora for his activism. Poor Kent State. It never figured out that it had been conned.

(End of Part One. Part Two to follow.)

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.