Biased Objectivity
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
Biased Objectivity Kent State: What Happened and Why Bv James Michener Random House. 559 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Assistant Professor of History, Douglass College, Rutgers ON...
...Young people who willingly enter the experimental communes in Kent are seen as taking the first step toward an underground life emphasizing violence and a commitment to dictatorship...
...There was death, but not murder...
...within a few seconds four students lay dead...
...The portrayals of leading young radicals in Kent State are also worth considering...
...Partly we refrained because we did not want parents to see such words attributed to their daughters...
...and scores of independent researchers have published their own "authentic" accounts...
...Of the Guard, he writes: "There is no acceptable proof of collusion on the part of officers or men to account for that sudden and dramatic turn of 135?before firing, but it seems that some kind of rough verbal agreement had been reached among the troops when they clustered on the practice field...
...As Michener himself notes in closing: "One of the most dangerous conditions that could exist in America would be for the civilian population to turn its sympathies against the military, and the best way to prevent this is for the military always to present clean hands to civilian eyes...
...Certainly no one will disagree with the assertion that the shootings were "tragic" and "deplorable...
...In one typical interview, a well-mannered, clean-cut fraternity man named Bob Perko gives his impression of a protest rally held by "the freaks": "I attended their protest meetings...
...They had been on duty for almost a week, first to quell a truckers' disturbance in Akron and then to restore order on the campus at Kent...
...a small group of Guardsmen had likely decided in advance to open fire on the crowd...
...Perhaps the most complete analysis is found in James Michener's Kent State—a well-documented, cohesive book that reconstructs the Kent tragedy through personal interviews with students, faculty members, street people, townspeople, and Guardsmen...
...Yet even with these facts in hand, Michener concludes his work by exonerating the National Guard and indicting the student radicals...
...Of the radicals: "We are driven to our final and significant conclusion...
...And," he continued, "I don't believe in firing warning shots, either...
...The United States cannot allow young people to be shot down in its streets, for if this were to become common, a revulsion would result of such dimension as to sweep away our forms of government...
...Usually, the Guardsmen could handle this pressure...
...And I could easily have been caught up in the frenzy except for one thing...
...The National Guard came to the campus on May 2 to terminate 36 hours of sporadic rioting, some of it instigated by student radicals...
...If this were really the case, one can only wonder why states like Idaho, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky—where labor agitation was truly severe, radical and effective—have more or less escaped the phenomenon of violent student protest...
...Only the courts can decide that point, although Attorney General John Mitchell has declined to prosecute on the Federal level...
...many Guardsmen had expressed hostile opinions about the ungrateful, unpatriotic, unwashed young punks who were raising hell on college campuses...
...The National Guard officer whose troops opened fire on the students (known affectionately to his men as "Captain Gas" for his "copious use of it" in previous confrontations) claimed he would never put a soldier into a civil disturbance without a loaded weapon...
...A distinguished Presidential commission issued one report, a special grand jury another...
...This inherent attitude pervades much of the book...
...the Guard was in no mortal danger when it opened fire...
...Bernardine Dohrn had been educated in Ohio, and she appreciated the peculiar structure of the state, with its outward propriety and inner revolt...
...We see Mark Rudd as a brawling drunk who blows into town for a speaking engagement, sleeps with a starry-eyed coed, gets into a fist fight with another radical over his fee, and sobers up long enough to make the trip on to the next campus...
...That is most fortunate, since the Buckeye state apparently mobilizes its Guard at the slightest hint of trouble...
...there was no sniper...
...Firing into the air can be dangerous...
...we have used an occasional noun or adjective to indicate the general coloring of the conversation, but even this has been embarrassing when reporting what girls said...
...The question remains, though, whether they were accidental...
...far from being surrounded, the Guard encountered no major resistance and the vast majority of students were several hundred feet in front of them...
...Without warning, a group of Guardsmen suddenly wheeled around and fired at the crowd...
...Until they do, the overwhelming burden of proof must rest with the National Guard, and with those individual soldiers who fired their weapons into a crowd of vocal, angry, yet totally defenseless students...
...Michener, though, refuses to be taken in...
...I listened to what the brighter young faculty members were saying...
...Sharoff is a devious young revolutionary who is in the movement primarily to feed his ego...
...In other words, the state was trigger happy...
...A more careful reading, however, suggests a powerful bias against one particular group—those who stray too far from the center of the political spectrum...
...Aside from their normal military duties, they had studied "Disturbance Control: Guidelines for Small Unit Commanders and Troops...
...That it happened at Kent State was pure accident, but the confrontation itself was not...
...Ohio, which stood sixth among the states in population, stood fifth in the frequency with which it experienced civil disturbances, but first by a long margin in its willingness to call out the National Guard to deal with these disturbances," writes Michener...
...When they allegedly burn down the rotc building following President Nixon's Cambodia speech, their real motive is not to rid the campus of military influence or even to dramatically protest an endless, unjust war, it is to physically disrupt the university...
...a situation wherein our guideline is minimum application of force consistent with our objective...
...no student performed any act on May 4 for which he deserved to be shot...
...But we have dissected all the adverse evidence, explored each ugly rumor and we cannot convince ourselves that murder was committed by the Guard...
...She knew that the labor agitations dating back to 1880 and continuing through the Depression had insured the propagation of revolutionary ideas...
...He portrays the various forces at Kent so objectively and spreads the blame around so evenly that the killings become a senseless episode in which there are no villains...
...Grandchildren of the radical leadership of those times would provide a cadre to work with, and this made Ohio an attractive target for the sds leadership...
...Michener's observations on the shootings are as follows: The students did not gather to riot on May 4, and should not have been dispersed...
...When they spice their rhetoric with obscene phrases, their real motive is not to shock the nation out of its moral lethargy or to devise a "no-retreat" vocabulary that other groups cannot coopt, it is to debase and ultimately destroy the traditional language of orderly society...
...Perko is a perceptive, responsible conformist who will not be swayed by that "same old agitation...
...The roles here are clearly defined...
...Michener's professional opinion is that "Bob Perko was not radicalized . .. but many less analytical students were, so that the sds operation at that time must be counted a conspicuous success...
...Bernardine Dohrn, on the other hand, seems blessed with a Machiavellian gift for historical analysis...
...On the day of the killings, the Guardsmen were understandably tired and disgruntled...
...While admitting that the young radicals' use of obscenity is vital to their concept of revolution ("If language could be taken apart and restructured," he states, "new types of communication might become possible, and young revolutionaries might very well end up in control of them, using them to say new things in a drive for new purposes"), he judiciously censors it from his work: "In the text, we have avoided reporting the constant flow of obscenity that marked our interviews...
...The hard-core revolutionary leadership across the nation was so determined to force a confrontation —which would result in gunfire and the radicalization of the young—that some kind of major incident had become inevitable...
...As I listened to the new leader, Steve Sharoff, I began to suspect, 'That guy is doing the whole thing as an ego trip.' And when I analyzed what he said and why he said it, I saw that it was probably only a front for the same old agitation...
...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Assistant Professor of History, Douglass College, Rutgers ON MAY 4, 1970, at approximately 12:25 p.m., a small group of Ohio National Guardsmen fired their rifles directly into a crowd of students at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine others...
...Since that day, there have been many attempts to discover what really happened...
...These observations may or may not provide the foundation for a charge of premeditated murder...
...It creates confusion____" Indeed, the National Guard commander, General Canterbury, spent most of his time at Kent stomping around in civilian clothes, telling everyone within earshot that "These students are going to have to find out what law and order is all about...
...After one strips away Michener's vague generalizations about their moral and political beliefs, they all emerge as student radicals, essentially nihilistic creatures trying to destroy every form of established authority...
...But Michener admits that no known agitators were spotted at the final confrontation...
...While beating a hasty retreat, it was met by a hail of missiles (few came within striking distance), threats and obscenities...
...the crowd at the commons was very peaceful before the Guard arrived and it is therefore logical to assume that had the Guard not been there, no confrontation would have developed...
...On the whole, Michener tells us, these men are tough, dedicated, serious, friendly, and patriotic...
...First we are told how important "gutter language" is to an understanding of the radical philosophy, then we are refused the opportunity of hearing it in its natural context...
...The condescension here is overwhelming...
...After informing the students of their unlawful assembly and vainly ordering them to disperse, the Guardsmen moved quickly to clear the area...
...But there were some disturbing contradictions...
...After completing six months of basic training and 32 hours of riot drill, they seem ready for action...
...Thus they knew that "criminal sanctions may be imposed against any Guardsman who exceeds his authority in accomplishing his mission," and that "the restoration of law and order in an Ohio city is not exactly a combat situation, but rather...
...One unit of this well-oiled military machine swept across the commons and soon found itself trapped against a chain-link fence...
...the Guard had recently handled disturbances involving tough, blue-collar crowds without firing a single shot...
...At first glance, Michener's detached, scholarly manner seems almost impeccable...
...In direct contrast to the student radicals stands the Ohio National Guard—a well-trained, no-nonsense outfit with an esprit de corps not unlike the legendary Barbella-Kowal-ski-Goldberg-O'Brien platoons of the William Bendix era...
...It was an accident, deplorable and tragic...
...Their main job on this tragic day was to prevent students from gathering in large blocs —a rather ironic twist, since a massive noontime rally was already planned to protest the Guard's presence...
Vol. 54 • September 1971 • No. 18
