In similar times, different reactions to protest tragedies
On May 4, 1970, I was standing in the newsroom of the student newspaper at Northern Illinois University next to the clattering UPI machine when the bell struck four times.
I still remember being startled because four bells were reserved for the most momentous news, and I read the first few lines. There had been a shooting by National Guard troops at Kent State University during a protest against the Vietnam War. UPI initially reported falsely that both students and guard members had been killed. After a good deal of confusion, the death toll was four students.
Within days, NIU, like campuses around the nation, had been consumed by protests.
Also, within days, the musician Neil Young saw pictures in Life Magazine of the scene including the iconic photo of 14-year-old run-away Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller as blood pooled on the ground around him. Young quickly wrote some simple lyrics and a haunting guitar riff and within weeks Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had released the song Ohio with its blunt refrain: “Four dead in O-hi-o.”
When I hear the song today, that refrain still cuts through me and I can feel some of the same visceral emotions I felt as a 20-year-old.
In recent days, Bruce Springsteen wrote a song prompted by the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis entitled “Streets of Minneapolis” and released it. This is not 1970 relying on radio stations. Today, things “go viral.”
Those songs, then and now, channel an undercurrent of rage, but it very much seems that we were just as divided as a nation then as we are now. In the wake of the Kent State shootings, a Gallup Poll found that 58% of Americans blamed the students. Only 11% thought the Guard was at fault.
Recent polling today has found that only 3% of Democrats believe that Renee Good was trying to hit an ICE Agent with her car before she was shot and killed, while 53% of Republicans believe that was exactly what she was trying to do. Unlike 1970, however, we have cellphone video, but in our polarized environment people can see the same video and come to very different conclusions, coached by TV talking heads. That is a problem that does not seem to have an obvious solution.
What seems to be very different from 1970 is the political reaction. President Nixon felt compelled by the outcry to appoint an independent commission to investigate campus unrest in general and the Kent State and Jackson State killings in particular. Nixon did not stonewall or label the student protesters “terrorists.”
The commission was headed by former Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton and the eight other members included legal scholars, a police chief, a general, a newspaper editor, a university president and a young campus activist from Harvard. It issued its report expeditiously in just four months. They wrote:
“Even if the guardsmen faced danger, it was not a danger that called for lethal force. The 61 shots by 28 guardsmen certainly cannot be justified. Apparently, no order to fire was given, and there was inadequate fire control discipline on Blanket Hill. The Kent State tragedy must mark the last time that, as a matter of course, loaded rifles are issued to guardsmen confronting student demonstrators.”
Here we are again debating the use of lethal force by the government against Americans. Can we expect an independent commission to review events in Minneapolis? Not likely. This administration, and particularly ICE, is allergic to oversight and as George Will dryly noted, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is “unlikely to acquire the inconvenience of a conscience.”
• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86. His book “American Dreams: The Story of the Cyprus Fulbright Commission” is available from Amazon.com.