Brian VanDeMark on the Kent State Massacre and What the Shootings Meant to America

On May 4, 1970, during a rally on the campus of Kent State University opposing expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia by United States military forces, as well as protesting the draft and the Ohio National Guard’s presence on campus, all it took was 13 seconds for 28 National Guard soldiers to fire 67 rounds, killing four and wounding nine unarmed college students. One of the nine injured suffered permanent paralysis, and students Allison Krause, 19, Jeffrey Miller, 20, Sandra Scheuer, 20, and William Schroeder, 19, were killed. Students had been protesting on campus since May 1, and after the Kent State shootings, immediate and massive outrage sparked at college campuses across the country. More than four million students participated in organized walkouts at hundreds of colleges, universities, and even high schools, and the shootings made the United States’ role in the Vietnam War even more contentious. It was a loss of innocence, and a Pulitzer Prize winning photo of a young woman wailing over the body of Jeffrey Miller summed up the feelings of a generation. In the photo, she seems to silently scream “Why? Why? Why?” After the incident, eight of the shooters were charged and ultimately acquitted in a bench trial. The Kent State massacre was a cultural moment that shook the nation, and, as Brian VanDeMark writes in his brilliant new book Kent State: An American Tragedy, out tomorrow, “If you want to know when the Sixties died, they died on May 4, 1970, right there and then, at 12:24 in the afternoon.” Today on the show, Brian and I discuss so much, including what Kent State represented on the whole for America, its legacy, and what we learned from it. Brian teaches history at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis and is the author of several books on American history, including co-authoring Robert McNamara’s bestselling Vietnam memoir, In Retrospect, which became the basis of the Academy Award-winning documentary The Fog of War. Take a listen to this fascinating conversation with him about a moment that changed history forever.

Kent State: An American Tragedy by Brian VanDeMark