Fifty years ago, Ohio National Guardsmen fired sixty-seven rounds over thirteen seconds on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio. Thirteen bodies fell to the ground; four of them died. At that moment, a largely complacent anti-war movement was electrified. The students had been protesting America’s bombing of neighboring Cambodia during the Vietnam War. President Richard Nixon had hoped to settle the war by turning the fight over to America’s allies in South Vietnam and cutting a deal with the enemies in Hanoi. But as the feckless South Vietnamese regime crumbled, and the protest movement gathered steam, Nixon was forced to delay negotiations.

While not a turning point in the politics of the war, the shooting revealed the administration’s failed strategy. In the subsequent years, Kent State, much like the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre, and the release of the Pentagon Papers, became a cultural event unto itself. Like these moments, the Kent State shooting has become the subject of mythology and misunderstanding, its meaning shifting over time. Today, the iconic photograph of the event—a horrified young American lady crouched over the dead body of an American student—endures as an expression of a disastrous foreign policy’s impact on the lives of Americans at home. 

Across the United States, Kent State pitted Nixon’s “Silent Majority” (older suburban whites, World War II veterans, and veterans of Vietnam) against a burgeoning counterculture movement that openly rejected the war, advocated for civil rights, and questioned the construct of patriotism. A divide broader than the war revealed itself at the core of the nation. While this dark moment grew of issues larger than the war in Vietnam, it began with a critical decision in that conflict.

Nixon Enters Cambodia: A Flashpoint in an Unpopular War

Like many of the agents involved in managing the war in Vietnam, Richard Nixon was viewed as a loathsome, scheming figure. Nixon was elected into office due partly to his "secret plan" to honorably extricate the United States from the disastrous blunder in Southeast Asia and partly to his appeal to that group of Americans who did not necessarily support the war but did not protest in the streets or join counterculture movements. He always knew reelection in 1972 would require extricating America from the war and doing so in a manner that ensured the preservation of American credibility overseas.

To end the war, or at least America’s involvement in it, while restoring American prestige, Nixon hoped to turn most of the fighting over to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the South Vietnamese fighting force built up over years by American troops. His strategy of "Vietnamization" was doing just that, with mixed success. In truth, both Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his secretary of state and national security advisor, knew that the South alone could not hold up against a North with strong Soviet and Chinese support. Both understood that very shortly, there would be little to no support from the American public. For the White House, the key was to disengage with a fig leaf of honor.

Among the problems afflicting the Vietnamization program was the haven afforded North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong (VC) operatives in next-door Cambodia. Nixon's predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), refused to authorize either American airstrikes or ground raids into Cambodia, despite pleas from his top general, William Westmoreland of the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MAC-V). LBJ did not want to own a legacy of widening a war he felt could not be won. Lê Duẩn, leader of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam (VCP), had no such concerns and, in fact, occupied and exploited much of Laos and Cambodia as secure supply routes.

By early 1970, Nixon, Kissinger, and new MAC-V commander General Creighton Abrams believed a strike into Cambodia would give the ARVN its best opportunity to regain control over border areas and reduce infiltration into the populated coastal regions of Vietnam. Throughout the Johnson administration, Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s Prime Minister, allowed North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and VC forces free access to the country.

The military coup that swept right-wing Prime Minister Lon Nol into power in Phnom Penh in August of 1969 created an opportunity to clear out the North Vietnamese forces in their support areas in the eastern portions of Cambodia and “the parrot’s beak” area north of Saigon. This disruption of the North Vietnamese support area would allow for ARVN forces to clear out the unsupported North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam. There was also the illusory hope that this incursion could capture the Central Office for South Vietnam, the command node for all Northern operations in the southern portion of Vietnam.

On the evening of April 30, 1970, President Nixon, who had already promised an American reduction of 150,000 U.S. troops from Vietnam, addressed the nation and announced an American incursion into Cambodia. More than 32,000 American G.I.s, along with more than 50,000 ARVN soldiers, had already entered Cambodia to destroy logistics and command and control cells of the Viet Cong, the North-supported guerilla force that fought against South Vietnam and the United States.

As early as 1965, the American college campus was the beating heart of the Vietnam War protest movement. Initially relegated to small groups of activists, the movement spread as the televised war continued with unclear success over the next three years. Over time, the movement grew intertwined with the counterculture movement, an anti-establishment phenomenon that rejected war, the notion of patriotism, and traditional American customs. When the stunning Tet Offensive in January 1968 demonstrated that no end to the war was in sight, anti-war fervor exploded across the country, with marches and protests in major cities. By April of 1970, American campuses served as the final redoubt for a fading antiwar movement. Nixon and Kissinger expected immediate blowback on American campuses. They got it, and more.

A Mishandled Crisis: Cascading Leadership Failures Lead to Tragedy

Nixon's announcement roused the antiwar movement on colleges around the country almost immediately. On the Kent State campus, for years a long-term sanctum for the counterculture movement, the reaction was initially measured. A few dozen students gathered peacefully on spring's first warm day, Friday, May 1. A group demonstrated its concern with Nixon’s announcement by symbolically burying the American Constitution on campus. By that evening, the mood had shifted. Students, many of whom had been drinking all afternoon, lit fires on streets in downtown Kent, stopped cars on the main thruway, and threw rocks through windows of local shops. In an attempt to restore order, Kent’s mayor LeRoy Satrom ordered all bars closed. Students in the bars poured into the streets and joined the melee.

The next day, Saturday, May 2, concerned about escalation, the school administration restricted students to campus. Protests roiled at Kent State throughout the day. Students grew increasingly violent, throwing bottles at police and firebombing the campus ROTC building. Rioters shattered windows and threw rocks at government officials. Kent's mayor declared a state of emergency. With the campus in violent turmoil, the governor of Ohio called in the National Guard.

The campus ROTC buildings stood as a symbol of the evil American war machine and, as such, became an attractive target for the restless crowd. The armed troops arrived on the evening of Saturday, May 2, amidst a firebombing of the Kent State ROTC building. Guardsmen fired teargas to stop protestors from hitting the defenseless firefighters attempting to extinguish the blaze. By Sunday morning, the building had burned to the ground.

On Sunday, May 3, Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes, running for the Senate seat in the Republican primary, visited the campus. Rhodes, facing an uphill battle in the Republican senatorial primary scheduled for May 5, saw the protests primarily as a political opportunity. In an attempt to rally his law-and-order base, Rhodes gave a fiery press conference on campus in which he compared protestors to Nazi brownshirts and promised to use force to end the protests swiftly. That belligerent rhetoric only emboldened the activists. A battle was brewing. 

The university ordered a ban on all rallies, an order subsequently determined lawful by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. The rallies continued. By nightfall, one group of students snatched a police megaphone and demanded the removal of the ROTC program from campus.

By Monday, May 4, the campus turned into an occupied state. M114 Armored Personnel Carriers guarded the entrance and exit points. Helicopters flew overhead. Throughout the day, the presence of the rifle-wielding, gas mask-wearing National Guardsmen transformed the confrontation from an anti-war protest to a protest about the presence of the Guard. At the campus Commons at noon approximately 3,000 students gathered. This group, the largest congregation yet, protested not the American involvement in the Vietnam War, but the militarization of the campus. Approximately eighty Guardsmen confronted them.

In this febrile atmosphere, there was significant confusion around the legal status of the protestors and the role of the National Guard in the confrontation. The Kent State University leadership, in concert with the office of Governor Rhodes, distributed handbills declaring martial law. Martial law was not, in fact, formally declared. Neither the police nor the city were aware of the handbills. The National Guard leadership was unclear about its legal powers to support such an order. The university was unclear about who was legally in charge. The Guard members were basically amateur soldiers, poorly led, in a highly volatile situation that would have tested the most professional military unit.

Multiple failures of command provoked the calamity that came next. The troops were untrained for riot control operations. With only tear gas canisters and M-1 rifles with bayonets affixed and eight or nine live rounds each, the Guardsmen were inappropriately equipped, trained or led to safely control a large, frenzied crowd with anything short of deadly force. The troops were hobbled by poor guidance from all levels, unclear instructions and confusing rules of engagement. 

Compounding those failures, Brig. Gen. Robert Canterbury, the mission commander and senior Ohio Guardsman, marched his troops into a cul-de-sac fenced in on two sides. (Many histories of the event report that the Guardsmen were "surrounded," though that is not true; beyond and adjacent to the fencing were wide open areas.) Lieutenant Colonel Charles Fassinger, the senior commander closest to the troops at the commons, told his pinned-down troops to disperse the crowds, but provided no real guidance on how to do this short of deadly force.

The crowd, frenzied by the anarchy raging around them, grew emboldened. The situation rapidly became chaotic. Some students, believing the Guardsmen only carried blank rounds, began taunting the troops. A small group of students began throwing rocks and concrete at the National Guardsmen, pinning some of them against a wire fence. The students stood roughly the length of a football field away from the Guardsman. Many of the troops faced away from the mob. Suddenly, twenty-eight Guardsmen turned and fired indiscriminately. The origin of the decision to fire remains an unsettled matter. At least one of the Guardsmen incorrectly believed a sniper fired at him.

The numbers speak to the dizzying speed at which scared men turn bestial: sixty-seven rounds, thirteen seconds, nine wounded, four dead.

Protests Mobilized: The Aftermath

In the months preceding Kent State, reduced draft calls and the withdrawal of thousands of troops dampened the fervor of the anti-war movement. By the end of 1969, the anti-war movement waned outside of college campuses. After May 4, it roared back to life.

That afternoon, rather than offer a healing sentiment, Nixon issued a decidedly cold statement on the matter, placing blame on the students. The president’s words caused further grief among those shocked by the seemingly random firing upon unarmed Americans.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, nearly 450 college campuses across the country were closed due to student walkouts and for fear of copycat riots. Kent State closed for the remainder of the semester. Many universities removed all ROTC activities from campus and massive protests erupted in major American cities. More than 100,000 Americans marched on Washington, DC on May 10 to register disgust with the shooting. Sixteen states mobilized the National Guard to restore order within their boundaries. 

Within weeks, the famous folk group Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young released a protest song, "Ohio," in response to the shooting. The call to end the war grew louder across the country. More significantly, a joint amendment by Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper from Kentucky and Democratic Senator Frank Church from Idaho limited Nixon’s power to go after NVA forces in Laos with either ground or air assets.

American troops withdrew from Cambodia at the end of June 1970. The White House trumpeted the incursion as an operational triumph, claiming that conditions were now set for a reasonable peace agreement. The raids had been tactically successful but of no real strategic value. Nonetheless, MAC-V had done little to prepare the government of President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu to defend the South without significant American forces and resources.

There remained a gap between MACV’s military strategy and Nixon’s strategic objective of exiting while ensuring South Vietnam would remain independent. The ARVN were unable to defend the South without Americans. North Vietnamese official Le Duc Tho’s question to Kissinger in February 1970 remained without answer: “If the United States could not win with half a million of its own troops, how can you succeed when you let your puppet troops do the fighting?” Nonetheless, the president continued to gradually withdraw troops while searching for a face-saving way out of Vietnam. By this time, he had no real choice.

In the months that followed, the rift between the Silent Majority and the anti-war protestors expanded. Nixon, convinced Hanoi had a hand in the protest movement, grew paranoid and bitter. As a result, he unleashed the Linebacker bombing campaign, specifically designed to punish the north by striking previously off-limits targets such as power plants. The anti-war movement surged again. The Silent Majority dug in. Fueled by a frozen moment from the catastrophe at Kent State, captured and displayed across the nation, America grew more polarized.

Horror in the Heartland: An Image That Defined A War

Every war has its memories, songs, and moments that define a conflict to its fighters and citizenry. Newspaper and television coverage of the war in Vietnam sent many images into American living rooms that slowly turned American public support against the war. U.S. involvement in that conflict, widely supported across the country when initially deepened by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, began to turn as the unsettling scenes shocked the American public. 

General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan's extended arm, his bullet exiting the skull of Viet Cong operative Nguyễn Văn Lém. The horrific scene of seven-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked to escape the ravages of a napalm attack. The Associated Press photograph that needs no caption: a gathering of wounded, muddy paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade, desperate to leave the battlefield, one of them trying to guide a medical evacuation helicopter. That soldier, arms extended as if in prayer, defining the utter hopelessness of U.S. policy. These scenes combined came to turn the public against the war. In Filo’s photograph, taken not on a foreign battlefield, but in a little-known state college in northeast Ohio, our war in this strange Indochinese country had at long last come home.

It was not so much the event itself, as the image that spoke for it, that became a rallying cry in the weeks and months that followed. In particular, John Paul Filo's picture of a horrified young woman kneeling over the body of student Jeffrey Miller captured the shocking moment. The photo ran in every major American newspaper the next day and served as the cover of the May 18, 1970 edition of Newsweek.

The stark photograph was distinct from images of American soldiers on stretchers and more disturbing than the images of GIs pointing rifles at terrified elderly south Vietnamese women. Filo's photograph was different.

These images came to define the war for Americans. At the time, they created a collective experience of a conflict somehow dirtier and less honorable than World War II. Today, long after the fall of Saigon, these photos speak to us through the souls of the countless Vietnamese, American, Laotian, and Cambodian dead.

For a moment in 1970, the photograph defined the way American citizens felt about their military and government, galvanizing domestic pressure to end the war. It also shaped the character of the domestic reporting of Nixon's handling of the war. The American public no longer cared about winning or losing, it just wanted the war over. By June of 1970, for the first time, a majority of Americans felt the war in Vietnam was a mistake.

Why did this image resonate so vividly? There is a certain exaggerated sense of lost innocence in the vision of a young, terrified white woman in the American Midwest. In May of 1970, the average American could see herself or her son or daughter as the dead college student or the horrified white woman.

A mere eleven days after the deadly shooting in Ohio, police killed two young, unarmed African-Americans, freely firing hundreds of rounds of bullets on protesters gathered at Mississippi's predominantly black Jackson State College. The police officers did not call ambulances until they picked up all shell casings (police later denied firing at all). This incident remains mostly forgotten; there are no iconic photographs and no protest songs. School cancellations did not follow. The nation is unlikely to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Jackson State shooting in the coming weeks.

Myths, Inaccuracies, and Overlooked Details: Clarifying Kent State

The image of the distressed young woman is now representative of the antiwar movement. However, curiously, her name, Mary Ann Vecchio, is largely unknown. Most news outlets, and the original Associated Press caption, identified Vecchio as a Kent State student and protestor. She was neither; Vecchio was a fourteen-year-old runaway passing through campus at the time of the protest. 

Another myth of Kent State is that all four Americans killed were protestors. This is not the case. William K. Schroeder, nineteen-year-old sophomore and ROTC cadet, was walking to class when a bullet entered his chest, pierced his left lung, and exited his left shoulder. Likewise, Sandra Lee Scheuer, who did not participate in the day’s protests, was walking across the school grounds when a bullet pierced her jugular vein, causing her to bleed to death.

However, perhaps the most glaring inaccuracy about the Kent State shooting involves the match that lit the fuse to the explosion at the small campus on May 4. Most histories of the incident claim that the protests formed in response to Nixon's invasion into a neutral country. This claim is only made true by stretching the words "invasion" and "neutral" to their widest application.

Nixon's Cambodia operation was an expansion, not an invasion, and by 1970 Cambodia was hardly neutral. North Vietnamese regulars occupied the border state. The Cambodian government could no longer control its borders. The right-wing Prime Minister Lon Nol asked for American forces to clear out North Vietnamese base camps. Cambodia had long been a theater within the war between North and South Vietnam. Nonetheless, the anti-Nixon media narrative stuck and remains reported to this day.

Several histories of the 1960s campus protest movement claim that the reaction to the Kent State shootings forced Nixon to withdraw from Vietnam. This is grossly untrue; that decision had already been made. Pressure was building on Nixon to end U.S. commitment to the war from the moment he took office in January 1969. That pressure gained strength with the New York Times' publication of front-page articles on the Pentagon Papers in January 1971. Nixon’s base was unmoved by the news out of Ohio. The Silent Majority largely placed sole blame on the students. 

Many accounts claim that an anti-war sentiment, grown dormant by the ceaseless American combat effort, roared back to life on May 4, 1970. This is unsupported by the volume of mass protests around the country in early 1970. 

The Kent State shooting did not, in fact, define a pivotal moment in the American view of the war. The country’s heart had long been gashed. The carnage of the surprise Tet Offensive, two years prior, was much more damaging to domestic support for America’s entanglement. This was, after all, the primary reason that President Lyndon Johnson did not seek reelection in 1968.

It is certainly the case that a nation already weary of images of American boys dying in jungles, farms, and rice paddies was horrified by this vision of hell in Ohio and paid attention to the news of the war with renewed interest. Filo’s photograph was shocking. It offended the sensibility of the nation. It did not, however, mobilize a long-term groundswell of demand for withdrawal.

While Kent State served to escalate, for about a year, an antiwar movement on college campuses, U.S. forces remained in Vietnam for thirty-two months after shots rang out in Ohio. Nixon, Kissinger, and Abrams tried pounding the NVA into submission from the air, blockading the North, and mining major ports, all in an attempt to pressure the North Vietnamese into an agreeable peace deal. An agreeable peace deal for Nixon meant one that would give the U.S. breathing space before the inevitable Northern victory. 

Lost in much of the history about the Kent State incident is one of the great ironies regarding American involvement in Vietnam: the Ohio National Guard, composed of many young Americans who avoided the draft and terrors of combat in the war, fired on young Americans protesting combat in the war. Young Americans firing on young Americans in the American heartland. We had come to this—the confusion, contradiction, and agony of American policy in Vietnam and its effect on the American psyche. 

Also lost to history, but important to mention is the coincidence that at almost the same time as the shooting at Kent State, seven paratroopers from the U.S. Army's 101st Assault Helicopter Battalion died in the mid-air collision of a Huey UH-1H and a Cobra AH-1G in the Thua Thien province of South Vietnam. Another seventeen American Soldiers were killed in combat in Vietnam the same day. Today is the fiftieth anniversary of their death as well.

A Hero and A Villain: Leadership Lessons from May 4, 1970

Such an emotionally-wrought situation does not adhere to binaries of right and wrong. Many parties, including the feckless school administrations, and the local government, deserve some measure of blame for escalating the situation. Certainly, the Ohio National Guard acquitted itself poorly. Both a presidential commission and an FBI investigation later determined that the troops were never in real danger.

While the shooting resulted from multiple points of failure, the reckless actions of Governor Jim Rhodes stand out. In an attempt to advance his political fortunes, Rhodes stirred emotions on both sides when he should have served as a calming influence.

On the other hand, the compassion of Glenn Frank, a geology professor, likely prevented additional carnage. In the minutes after the shooting, the Guardsmen moved forward to disperse the bewildered crowd. Frank pleaded with the students, begging them to leave. He also attempted to calm the National Guard leadership. Were it not for his humanity, a second altercation seemed likely.

Beyond the controversy and blame, today it is important to remember the names of the four unarmed Americans gunned down before the age of twenty-one in the United States by representatives of their government: Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Allison B. Krause, William Knox Schroeder, and Sandra Lee Scheuer.

Frozen in Time: The Legacy of Kent State

233 years after delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered to build a nation based on self-rule, the ideas at the heart of the American experiment are manifest in the events of May 4, 1970. The respect for nationhood, the golden notion of individual liberties, and the hostility against a tyrannous standing Army and an oppressive government, are all speaking to us from that haunting photograph. So, too, are lessons about leading and organizing young men and women, the manner in which passions evolve over time, and the concept of history itself

In troubled, polarized times, Kent State has much to say to the country. The United States has seen division at home before. It has lived through turmoil, uncertainty, and political polarization. The country has come through all such moments with a mature understanding of who its citizens are. Today, fifty years on, the image of that horrific event stands as a symbol of what degree of separation can exist between a government and its people. The final lesson from Kent State is also the most critical: any war in which the United States engages must have a foundation of truth and that truth must be acceptable to the American public.

Joe Buccino is a U.S. Army Soldier and the author of the forthcoming book Burn the Village to Save It, about the 1968 Tet Offensive. Views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the official position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Army.

Image: National Archives