67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence by Howard Means, and: Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings by Craig S. Simpson and Gregory S. Wilson (review)

The 50th anniversary of the killing of four students and the wounding of nine others by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University will be marked on 4 May 2020. Despite the abundance of books on the subject, until recently the work of historians has been limited to oral histories, scholarly articles, and chapters in anthologies. The year 2016 saw a surge in the publication of books on the subject. Thomas M. Grace's excellent Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), reviewed in l/lt's issue 78, marked the first monograph on the subject by an historian. The two books reviewed here - Howard Means' 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence and Craig Simpson and Gregory Wilson's Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings - both rely heavily on oral history. Only the latter, however, adds anything meaningful to our understanding of the events at on 4 May 1970, and even then, only minimally.

Means falsely attempts to create a moral dichotomy between those US troops killed in action that day in Indochina and the students killed in Ohio. He describes the former as having died while committing "small acts of bravery." (2) The latter, in contrast, were foul-mouthed arsonists who threw bags of human excrement at, taunted, and sometimes even assaulted Ohio National Guardsmen. The obvious difference between the two groups of fatalities, which appears to be lost on Means, is that only one of them was armed.

Means' basic narrative of the events at Kent State on and around 4 May 1970 is for the most part accurate: the United States invaded Cambodia on the Wednesday, President Nixon announced it on Thursday, students demonstrated at Kent State (and around the world) on Friday, and that night there were disturbances in downtown Kent. On Saturday night students attacked the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (rotc) building on campus, which burned to the ground later in the evening, just in time for the arrival of the Ohio National Guard. The following evening Guardsmen dispersed an impromptu demonstration at the campus gates with tear gas. (Means fails to mention that between three and eight unarmed students were bayoneted in the process. [Grace, 212]) On Monday at noon Guardsmen dispersed another demonstration, this time with firearms, killing four and wounding nine. Means uses the best secondary sources available on the shootings at Kent State. These include The Report of the President's Commission on Campus Unrest (New York: Arno Press, 1970), Peter Davies' The Truth about Kent State: A Challenge to the American Conscience (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1973), Joseph Kelner and James Munves' The Kent State Coverup (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), and Carole Barbato and Laura Davis' edited collection of essays Democratic Narrative, History and Memory (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2012). It is Means' cherry-picking of outrageous, unsubstantiated statements by participants, often anonymous, indeed often anonymous former Ohio National Guardsmen, found in the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project that makes the book the irrelevant work that it is. He assumes the veracity of these sources without question or analysis. An example of this is a statement by Ellen Mann, an area resident who worked on campus at the time: "Just killing four white students, four white kids, was enough to stop the whole antiwar movement." (214) It didn't. A reading of any of the vast body of literature on the anti-Vietnam War movement clearly indicates the opposite. Cambodia and Kent State breathed new life into the movement. (Charles Debenedetti and Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era [Syracuse: Syracuse...