James Michener's Knent State: A Study of Distortion
Roberts, Joe Eszterhas and Michael
James Michener's Kent State A STUDY IN DISTORTION by JOE ESZTERHAS and MICHAEL ROBERTS One year after that long burst of gunfire at Kent State University, the circumstances of the shooting...
...But the FBI report said nothing about Molotov cocktails...
...Referring to Michener's suggestion of a structural link between SDS and the May disturbances, the Student Senate quotes the Scranton Commis- sion report: "After the SDS was banned from Kent in April, 1969, the group held no open meetings and directed no demonstrations on campus...
...It was the perfect best-selling mar- riage...
...We are not sure how the incident started," says the Jus- tice Department summary...
...James Michener's Kent State A STUDY IN DISTORTION by JOE ESZTERHAS and MICHAEL ROBERTS One year after that long burst of gunfire at Kent State University, the circumstances of the shooting were fictionally embellished with Molo- tov cocktails, phantom revolutionaries, guerrilla strategy, and a suggested sense of justification...
...eszterhas: Jim, don't you believe in American justice...
...Kent police chief Roy Thompson, whom Michener describes as "a solid man not easily given to exaggeration," told us he had "intelli- gence" that SDS Weathermen and guns were on campus and believed the Communist Party was organizing "the revolution" in his town...
...None" of the twelve stu- dents who live there "is a revolution- ary," Michener writes, "in the sense that he would bomb or set fire to buildings...
...michener: I won't let you read that...
...As we read the Digest articles and the book, re-examining our own find- ings, the Commission report, and the Justice Department summary, we won- dered where Michener could have got some of his outlandish and unfounded "conclusions...
...In other words, they were just talking...
...A brief listing of these visitors," he says, "provides an answer to the question— 'Was Kent State University attacked by outside agitators?' " He lists the visitors—Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn, Terry Robbins, "who eventually became a Weather- man...
...Michener makes no mention in either the Digest or the book of the excesses committed this night by the National Guard...
...I went through the window and it took me a couple of seconds to realize I'd been bayoneted...
...One man reported, T saw an Illinois car loaded with six Weather- men and armed with shotguns.' " "Toward eight o'clock," Michener writes, "as if moving on signal, the crowd began to leave the Commons...
...We later took leaves and wrote a book (Thirteen Seconds: A Confron- tation at Kent) about the shootings be- cause we believed the facts demanded a cold, objective account...
...It was an accident, deplorable and tragic...
...Their book, "Thirteen Seconds: A Confrontation at Kent/' was published by Dodd Mead last fall...
...Michener's campaign has not ended with publication of his Reader's Digest articles and book...
...As you know, the ones who start the trouble are the ones who never get arrested...
...They had horrified stares on their faces...
...As these dedicated revolution- aries passed through Kent," he writes, "for the first time in its history the stolid university rang to cries of stu- dent demonstrations...
...The FBI describes the "fren- zied calls to action" this way: "An un- identified person made a short speech urging a university strike...
...In the case of the house on Ash Street, he was forced to add: "Although there is no such street in Kent, the house is not imaginary...
...In our investigation, we found a few students who jabbed at the hose with penknives...
...He pronounced the National Guard and the nation not guilty of the killing of four students and the wound- ing of nine others—it was "an accident, deplorable and tragic"—and he sug- gested that the "accident" was pro- voked by Outside Revolutionary Agi- tators...
...Michener's Digest account asks—is the house on the imaginary Ash Street...
...You smeared those kids...
...We recalled the paranoia of the state and local law enforcement agencies...
...Instead of reaction to the Cam- bodian announcement, Michener sees agitators and revolutionaries as the causative factor for the initial disturb- ances at Kent State...
...Several of the people around me in the library had been hurt by the Guard...
...The Grand Jury indicted no professional revolutionaries, no outside agitators...
...Adjutant General Sylvester T. Del Corso, who often linked the Communist conspiracy to the antiwar movement, threw rocks back at demonstrators and yelled: "If these little bastards can throw rocks, I can too...
...JOE ESZTERHAS and MICHAEL ROBERTS are staff writers for The Cleveland Plain Dealer who covered the Kent State tragedy in May, 1970...
...michener: I am indeed...
...Who were these visitors...
...The com- ment, of course, not only flatly contra- dicted his subsequently published find- ings but also a statement he made on April 27 at a Random House press conference in New York: "The first thing I did when I went to Kent was to get in touch with the top revolution- ary people whom the FBI had been looking for for three or four months...
...The show ended, and in a waiting room Michener told Stone why he wouldn't let him read the statement...
...The majority of them are a splinter group of the Communist Party...
...We concluded that the fundamental and overwhelming reason for the dis- turbances was President Nixon's de- cision to send American troops into Cambodia—a decision announced the day before disturbances began at Kent (and at scores of other campuses around the country...
...I'd say three or four I know of...
...I think they have had enough trouble already...
...That's why I think I want to see justice done here, and justice is not going to be done by bringing in indictments against the National Guard which no court will support...
...He turns from the facts again when he describes National Guard conduct on Sunday...
...A few non-students were also present, some dropouts from Kent State University...
...The reason he wouldn't let Stone read it, Michener said, was be- cause one of the students who had signed it was himself one of the * 'revolutionaries.'' We stood in the room for a moment and blinked, wondering whether we— and all others who criticized Michen- er's "facts"—would figure as revolu- tionaries in Michener's next book...
...He told the Scranton Commission: "The demon- strations that weekend were planned by subversive elements...
...On countless talk shows and in other public appearances, he has been advancing the argument that it would be a "disaster" to con- vene a Federal grand jury to investi- gate the killings at Kent State...
...I didn't...
...We in- spected every photograph of the speak- ers who led the rally, and no one could identify them as students who had ever been here before...
...Mich- ener offers the anonymous quote in the Digest, but his book says something different again...
...They ar- rived on the campus about forty-five minutes after the killings and stayed with the Kent State developments for the next three months...
...Nor does the FBI ever mention "ice picks and ma- chetes...
...Kent State: What Happened and Why received al- most universally favorable reviews...
...Both of us had read Michener in the past, and neither of us had thought him capable of such an expert application of whitewash...
...We are ready then for the Digest introduction to our second revolution- ary haven, the mysterious Haunted House, from which, Michener tells us, "came a series of extraordinary events that came close to destroying the uni- versity...
...Honestly, there was no provocation, none whatsoever...
...The Guard was coming, swinging their bayonets and rifle butts back and forth...
...When the Reader's Digest published its first Michener installment, we were stunned...
...The Ohio Highway Patrol "facts" were so preposterous that even the rural Portage County Grand Jury, which ab- solved the National Guard and indicted twenty-five students and faculty mem- bers, failed to take them seriously...
...Brigades" of rock-throwers had been organized...
...I must be naive, or I was naive, but kids around me started to run...
...He does not quote last year's student body president, Frank Frisina, who told us: "All the kids were around television sets in the dorms [as Nixon announced the invasion...
...michener: Because it has been the history throughout our country...
...The "radical communications cen- ter" turned out to be a legal aid office...
...michener: I believe fully in Amer- ican justice...
...michener: Now wait a minute, I know that statement...
...a fireman "beat- en with a club and knocked to the ground...
...Michener fails to point out that Mark Rudd spent only two days there, attracting fifty listeners at a single speech, and seemed more interested in coeds than in revolution...
...The FBI report says: "A few rocks were thrown at the jeep—one hitting the jeep and a sec- ond hitting a Guardsman but causing no damage...
...Significantly, the FBI re- port adds: "We have some reason to believe that the claim by the National Guard that their lives were endangered by the students was fabricated subse- quent to the event...
...We mulled Hayth's "facts" and cate- gorically rejected them after investiga- tion...
...President Nixon's Cam- bodian speech had minimal effect upon the first group, but a profound one upon the radicals, who would have ap- proved nothing he proposed...
...Michener's "final and inescap- able" finding was: "The hard-core revolutionary leader- ship 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...
...Nor does he point out that Bernardine Dohrn was there for only three days, and that Ter- ry Robbins visited at Kent when SDS was not yet committed to Weatherman violence...
...that "the groundwork for the May disturbances had been laid far in the past and those responsible were long absent from the scene...
...Common sense tells me that if a Federal grand jury did indict the Guard, jurors would then feel obli- gated to bring in a handful of indict- ments of students and professors just to prove they were even-handed...
...And I don't want to see the students in the United States get into any more trouble over situations like this...
...The Kent State Student Senate, re- plying to the alleged links between the houses and the May, 1970, demonstra- tions, said: "Effective literary atmos- phere is sometimes created at some dis- tance from reality as we on campus know it...
...Before the Digest article flashes from the Haunted House to the burning of the ROTC building, we are given a brief vignette...
...The effect on the public was bound to be pro- found...
...While Michener has such a close eye, the FBI lacked even the kind of detail which could tell it what set off the disturbances...
...In the Digest condensation, as Mich- ener describes a rally held at noon on Friday, May 1, he makes no mention whatever of the average student's re- action to the Cambodia invasion...
...if they exist here they are underground...
...The two of us, reporters for the Cleveland Plain Deal- er, were assigned on the day of the shootings, May 4, 1970, to cover the event...
...The Haunted House is presented as a hippie commune visited by people whose names, it is claimed, answer the question—'Was Kent State attacked by outside agitators?' But the house is not a commune...
...In the lx>ok, Michener spices his agitator theory a bit...
...We were near the library at the time...
...Finally, Michener's version of what happened at Kent State is barely rec- ognizable to us in light of our own intensive investigations...
...We concluded that the shootings were, indeed, mur- der, and that there was no revolution- ary organization at Kent...
...The constant background theme of "revolutionary activity" painted a tech- nicolored, out-of-focus picture of Kent as a place besieged by nefarious Invis- ible People...
...The public bought it...
...Michener applied his mass-circula- tion anesthetic in two issues of the Reader's Digest and a heavily merchan- dised Book-of-the-Month Club selec- tion...
...The transcript reads: michener: I visualize a Federal grand jury convening and indicting some of the Guards who certainly should be indicted and the courts throwing that out, and then also in- dicting students, and then it's the poor students who are going to get it in the neck...
...But on Friday night there were twenty-five or fifty of them down there talking things up...
...No member of the crowd who heard that alleged whisper is quoted...
...There was, however, a hard-core of radical acti- vists—abetted by a few real revolution- aries, not necessarily from the university —who grasped at the disturbance as a means of advancing their own well- defined aims...
...The overwhelming majority of persons were, however, stu- dents enrolled at Kent State...
...There was death, but not murder...
...Ending its description of Friday's noon rally, the Justice De- partment summary says: "The rally disbanded without exhortation to more violent means of protest...
...Michener's fictive imagination ap- pears at its best when, describing the crowd Friday night, he provides an ex- act headcount: "Some boys from cam- pus wore Indian headbands or uni- forms from past centuries...
...No men- tion of the "sinister instruction" whis- pered through the crowd...
...stone: Now let me speak...
...Another girl was screaming...
...The student was taken out in hand- cuffs...
...And from this house on Ash Street have come many of the plans for the disrup- tions that have upset Kent State in re- cent years...
...He de- scribes "screaming students . . . racing toward the ROTC building," a fire- man's hose "hacked to pieces with ice- picks and machetes...
...But what the Grand Jury rejected, Michener believed...
...It was like the begin- ning moments of panic...
...While the Scranton Commission had found the Nixon move into Cambodia to be the "primary cause" of discontent on the Kent State campus, and while the Justice Department summary of the FBI report had established the link be- tween the invasion and the campus dis- turbances—"The reaction of some Kent State University students and faculty members was immediate"—Michener saw it another way: "The great majority saw the disturb- ance as merely another spring frolic and were activated by nothing more serious than a desire for fun...
...Nor does Michener say, as the Scranton Commission did, that the en- try of the Guard on campus replaced the Cambodian invasion as the "pri- mary cause" of student unrest...
...Hours after the Nixon speech, Michener reports, "agi- tators"—not, presumably, outraged stu- dents—spray-painted pavements with anti-war slogans...
...There were others in other parts of the building...
...The crowd apparently was initially peaceful and relatively quiet...
...He wrote of such sinister revolution- ary command posts as the "Haunted House" and the "house on Ash Street...
...We researched and wrote the facts as objectively as possible...
...I don't want to see any more of it...
...On May 4, the first anniversary of the tragedy, the 559-page Michener book, Kent State: What Happened and Why, appeared— a Reader's Digest book published in co- operation with Random House...
...The Digest stories and the Digest book, we found, offered a Magical Mystery Tour of in- nuendo, half-truth, carefully-structured quotation and anonymous attribution...
...She described to us the action at the Rock- well library and the Guard's perform- ance this way: "A group of us began to walk back toward the dorms, away from the en- trance of the university, when we saw ten National Guardsmen coming to- ward us...
...But what did these students really do...
...As the program ended, Stone was trying to read a statement from the Kent Student Senate branding Mich- ener's work a "fiction," and we were trying to make him name the outside agitators and revolutionaries he kept talking about...
...The FBI had never heard of the fireman "beaten with a club...
...We put together twenty-five of our most knowledgeable people," the professor says, "kids who know this campus inside-out...
...In his book he con- tinues: "There were at least seven cases of bayoneting, possibly more, but no evidence exists that these were vicious or that students were pursued or run down in any sense of vengeance...
...The student union group, the ones who really run the protests, are rarely seen in town...
...The FBI's ac- count is very different: "We believe that the rock fire reached its peak at this time...
...In the same speech, delivered before the Digest articles or the book were published, Michener acknowledged that "we found no Kent State students who were revolutionaries...
...Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Michener reaches this conclusion about the shooting itself: ". . . We cannot convince ourselves that murder was committed by the Guard...
...When a Guard jeep pulls out order- ing the students to disperse, Michener says that the jeep was greeted with a "shower of rocks...
...Our conclusions, it turned out, agreed with the findings of the Presi- dent's Scran ton Commission and the Justice Department's summary of the FBI report on Kent State, but they were in total contradiction to the Mich- ener findings...
...stone: If you're so anxous for jus- tice to students, why did you let the Reader's Digest take out of the book those two chapters...
...hugh downs, the host: Aren't you in effect indicting the American sys- tem of justice...
...A highway patrol picture showed "a rev- olutionary in a tree with a gun...
...But if they were "planning disruptions" they would be liable under law...
...The FBI reports do not indicate that any of the disruptions at Kent State May 1-4 were planned by members of SDS...
...Neither did the Scranton Commission...
...The kids started to go through windows in the library to get out of the way...
...He quotes National Guard officer C. Joseph Barnette: "The city tended to over-react...
...Michener quotes one student, Tim Butz, saying he heard another student say: 'Don't forget the street action at nine tonight.' The book makes no mention of "most onlookers...
...Everyone had an assign- ment," he said...
...It was, once again, a case of agitators and revolu- tionaries...
...He opposed a Federal grand jury while he knew that, in his words, some Guards- men "certainly should be indicted...
...We felt the nation had to confront what had hap- pened at Kent State with brutal hon- esty, so it would never happen again...
...Kent Mayor LeRoy Satrom is told by an anonymous de- tective that "two carloads of agitators . . . each car with six passengers" have come to Kent "from Chicago...
...With the same shot, he answered our questions about the unnamed revolu- tionaries...
...Who were these people who exhorted and led the student march...
...In describing the off- campus burning of a barn Monday night, he writes: "If a defiant gesture was needed to prove that Kent State harbored revolutionaries, this act of ar- son provided it...
...Roberts: How do you know that...
...As Michener gave Kent's winter commencement address, a stu- dent listening to him challenged his defense of the "poor students" who would be hurt by a grand jury probe...
...Those chapters did for the Administration what they hoped the Scranton Commission would do for them but didn't—present this as a conspiracy, ending that first install- ment with that horrible letter about "We Gotta Use Bullets...
...You wouldn't believe the type of in- telligence that kept pouring into City Hall...
...I met them all secretly...
...Plans for the disruptions," innuen- dos of conspiracy...
...A phalanx of bayonet-wielding National Guardsmen moved on a group of students pinned against a dormitory wall...
...His account does not include an in- terview with Helen Opaskar of Uni- versity Heights, Ohio, a senior at Kent State University and an honor student, who spent three days in a hospital recovering from bayonet wounds of the lower abdomen and right leg...
...Imagine a university," Michener asks dramatically in the Digest, "try- ing to operate with the house on Ash Street on one flank and the Haunted House on the other...
...The only purpose of convening such a grand jury," he said in a speech at Kent, "would be to pin more blame on the Guard...
...As the Guardsmen stood in the prac- tice football field and were stoned, Michener writes: "It is at this point that some witnesses believe the Guard was in mortal danger...
...This did not stop Michener, incredibly, from calling our effort an "excellent full-length account" in his book...
...But he would divulge no names, and Stone wasn't having much success: stone: In justice to the students may I quote from a statement ap- proved by the Senate of Kent...
...It is a four- apartment house rented by the local Catholic church and regularly houses college faculty, fraternity men, and other ordinary people...
...Yet the FBI report says: "Although there has been speculation in law en- forcement circles that they [the four SDS leaders] participated or even planned the confrontation . . . there is no evidence to substantiate this...
...An anonymous coed says, "It was all planned and arranged by outsid- ers," and Michener quotes three stu- dents, all close friends, who claim to have seen Molotov cocktails and over- heard revolutionary dialogue...
...The law doesn't run its course...
...A celebrated, internationally- known author, a Pulitzer Prize winner, had reached his conclusions about an event that shook the nation, and he had pumped these conclusions into a magazine bought by twenty-nine mil- lion people and into a book...
...No one to date has seen the picture of the "revolutionary in a tree with a gun...
...Gossip columnist Jack O'Brien tipped off his readers that the Michener-Digest account was the first "non-radical" report on the shootings...
...that "mature leaders, not necessarily en- rolled at the university, engineered this riot and quarterbacked the burning of the building...
...After the horror of the shooting, Michener feels his readers must be re- minded again of the presence of rev- olutionaries...
...First he offers another quote from another anonymous student: "There are two types of campus leaders, the student union group and the down- town group...
...The Haunted House, he ex- plains, was run by a couple who were among the SDS leadership, often vis- ited by non-students—"Some of these kids are now on the Wanted List of the FBI...
...Time magazine praised Michener for putting events "in perspective" and of- fered its italicized approbation: "Now we know that there were outside agi- tators at Kent...
...Yet the FBI is specific about the attendance at the rally: "A few high school students who attended Kent State University High School located on the campus were present...
...According to law, the stu- dents have done nothing wrong...
...As proof positive that trouble in Kent that Friday night was organized, he offers this unattributed paragraph in the March edition of the Digest, summarizing his description of a rally held on the campus at noon: "More- over, most onlookers recall that it was at the all-white burial of the Constitu- tion that they heard the sinister instruction whispered through the crowd: 'Street action downtown to- night.' " The full-length book version, however, says something very differ- ent...
...The FBI report had no doubt who the burners were: "None has been identified as an out-of-state, non-stu- dents as having any part in the unlaw- ful burning [sic...
...A number of protesters," he writes, "were already hiding in the shadows of the Rockwell Library and some forty or fifty of them rushed the Guardsmen...
...In his Reader's Digest articles and his book Michener reported that "Kent State harbored revolutionaries...
...He writes, "There is yet another factor that some re- sponsible observers think touched off the explosion—the presence on Water Street of at least four SDS lead- ers who had been released from the Portage County Jail two days before...
...Neither did we find anyone who saw any Molotov cocktails...
...The FBI very clear- ly never heard about the "planned street action...
...It points out only that "fire hoses were taken from them and cut...
...We recalled a bright sunny day out- side the Kent administration building when Ohio Highway Patrol Captain C. C. Hayth, heading the Patrol's in- vestigation of the shooting, told us that "everything was organized by outside agitators...
...Evidence" for nationally-known revo- lutionary leadership turned out to be a confiscated letter to a Kent student from Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, canceling a speaking appearance...
...In light of the many official and unofficial distor- tions and half-truths, we felt there was an urgent need for a Federal grand jury investigation if the nation was to salvage its stated belief in "justice...
...But Mich- ener, unlike the FBI, has no serious doubts about what triggered Friday night's disturbances...
...The implica- tion is clear: Rudd and the others were the agitators who attacked the university and helped organize demon- strations at Kent State...
...Michener describes the beginning of the rally this way: "Two students climbed to the top of the [bell] hous- ing, issuing calls to action and waving a flag...
...In his next para- graph Michener tells us: "Why hasn't the university done something to rout them out...
...On the NBC "Today" show the day after that press conference, the authors of this article, with I. F. Stone, pressed Michener on his reasons for opposing a Federal grand jury...
...A "radical communica- tions center" gave front-line telephone instructions to "those in the field...
...In March and April, 1971, the Digest, the world's biggest-selling magazine, well known for its political Right-eous- ness, published its ballyhooed two-part series, "Kent State—Campus Under Fire," by Michener, one of the world's biggest-selling authors...
...More than ninety per cent of those arrested were Kent State students but that doesn't mean anything...
...In less than a minute, Michener had managed to say he believed fully in American justice and then had said there was no justice in America...
...But all are radicals who would gladly see the present forms of government and society collapse...
...In describing a meeting Monday morning between Guard, town, and university officials, Michener avoids specifics—"there are conflicting stories of what was said there"—and he never questions the wisdom of the decision made at that meeting to break up a rally scheduled for noon...
...It is not called the 'Haunted House' by townspeople and its sinister atmosphere in the Di- gest is a literary creation...
...Nationally known revolu- tionaries," Hayth said, had "planned" all the demonstrations "from Chicago...
...As long as young radicals merely preach the overthrow of the university, while refraining from taking overt action, they cannot be punished...
...In his account of Sunday night's ac- tion, Michener puts the Guard on the defensive...
...Best-selling author James A. Michener spared the nation the crudest of traumas—the recogni- tion that it was not just a horrified wit- ness to a tragedy, but a participant...
...As his account of the Monday rally begins, Michener quotes a journalism professor to stress, once again, the pres- ence of agitators...
...Before I knew it I was sur- rounded by them and someone was pushing and pulling me into the li- brary...
...There were no fewer than eight Daniel Boones, six Davy Crocketts, and four young men in velvet jackets of the Edwardian period...
...Even Tom Wicker, who took Michener to task in a thoughtful New York Times review for his patent failure to under- stand the nation's youth, credited him with having produced "a detailed, pain- staking, fair-minded, skillful, often illu- minating book...
...And, incredibly, 200 pages later in the book, Michener withdraws his own red her- ring when he says: "Governor Rhodes was wrong when he intimated that the four SDS leaders who had recently been released from jail had been re- sponsible" for the disorders...
...According to the FBI, firemen were "harassed...
...His first revolutionary communal headquarters — "Who sleeps with whom...
...Many students at Kent regard Michener's position as intolerably hypocritical...
...fur- thermore, the new cadre of secret lead- ers who did operate on campus were not visible during the trouble...
Vol. 35 • September 1971 • No. 9
