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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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." 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. |
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 |