Return to the Charles A. Thomas Papers (KSU May 4 Collection)

 

 

KENFOUR: NOTES ON AN INVESTIGATION.

 

an e-book by Charles A. Thomas

 

 

 

 

Chapter One: The Hounds and the Mole.

 

 

 

 

 

          Friday, May 1.   On May Day evening 1970, a disturbance broke out on the Strip, the tavern district of an Ohio railway town called Kent.  It began with a dispute between members of a local motorcycle gang and counter-culture youth from the town’s state university branch, over the former’s habit of leading their girlfriends around on chains and dog leashes.  But it swiftly drew in other members of the same generation if disparate origins: high school kids attracted to the street by the law liquor law enforcement, blue collar rowdies, and students from the university already tense following the announcement, the night before, by President Nixon that he had ordered US troops to invade neutral Cambodia without a declaration of war.  Some window-breaking and looting occurred before the local authorities – town police, county sheriff’s deputies, and vigilantes the sheriff’s department referred to as “posse” or “mounted” deputies – cleared the streets with some measure of brutality.  There, ordinarily, it would have ended.  But the rumor had started, from a source to this day unknown, that the “riot” had been caused by the radical Students for a Democratic Society.

 

            Saturday, May 2.    During the early hours of the 2^nd, the rumor, with panicky embellishments, flew back and forth between the authorities in Kent and the state capitol in Columbus.   The Governor’s office kept the National Guard informed and the Guard detached two officers from its G-2 (Intelligence) section to check on conditions in Kent firsthand.   Although the town and the adjoining Kent State campus remained calm all day Saturday, the Guard officers remained a presence at each of the five progressively more agitated meetings between town and University administrators.  The point of discussion, inexplicable given the conditions, was whether the National Guard should be brought in en masse.  The G-2 officers kept insisting they had to know by five in the evening, and by then, Mayor Leroy Satrom was ready to make the formal request to the Governor.  Governor James Rhodes was eager to comply.   He was running for the nomination for US Senator on the Republican ticket, focused on the “law and order” issue and particularly violent in his rhetoric about student demonstrators.  He was trailing in the polls and the election was scheduled for Tuesday the 5^th.

            During the following five hours, someone set fire to the Army ROTC classroom building.   This has since been given as the reason that the National Guard immediately occupied the Kent State campus, although the Guard had already been en route before the fire was set.   Thirty years later, the arsonist(s) have never been identified, despite one of the most massive and intensive investigations in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.   But while it failed completely in its announced objective, the nature of that investigation raised fundamental questions about the future direction of American society that if anything loom larger today.

 

            Sunday, May 3.   University President Robert White flew back in from an out-of-state conference, summoned by news of the ROTC fire.   Governor Rhodes – fresh from a news conference at the local firehouse house in which, shouting and hammering on the podium with his fist, he had promised to “eradicate” the radicals responsible – met White on the tarmac.

He told White that four to five hundred “outside agitators” had invaded the campus and threatened further anarchy and destruction, and that for that reason he intended to keep the Guard there.  Although around thirty per cent of  this page has been censored (blacked out) by the FBI, it is clear that the origin of these assertions was the intelligence arm of the Ohio State Highway Patrol. [1]   

            An unidentified officer of the Kent State University Police called the FBI’s Cleveland field office around midday to advise “that there had been no new acts of violence reported on the KSU campus since the burning of the Army ROTC Building”.    However, the situation remained “tense”.  There were “unsubstantiated rumors indicating that KSU students or other individuals on the KSU campus might attempt to burn the Air Force ROTC Building” that evening. [2]    The only FBI agent officially admitted to in the Bureau’s report arrived on campus at 8:45 p.m. and stayed until 2:00 a.m. on the 4^th. [3]     But a student talked that evening with “three men who said they were FBI agents [and] that the campus was under martial law.” [4]                                  The evening, students attempted to stage a peaceful sitdown demonstration at the intersection of Lincoln and Main Streets, on the border of the campus, to protest the continued presence of the National Guard on campus.  They were surrounded by a mixed force of campus police, town police, country sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, and National Guard.  At first they were assured that President White and Mayor Satrom would address them, only to have this suddenly reversed.  As suddenly, they were ordered to clear the street.   Before they could comply, the National  Guard attacked behind a barrage of tear gas, with rifle butts and bayonets.  The Guard then swept the campus, as they had the night before, until all the students had been driven indoors.

 

            Monday, May 4.   Students started to gather shortly before noon on the Commons, a grassy quadrangle at the center of the campus and its activities.  Now they were not only protesting the invasion of Cambodia, but the occupation of their campus by the Guard and its brutal behavior on the two previous nights.  A campus police officer read the order to disperse, but the crowd ignored it.  Someone in the crowd shouted that the University should join the national student strike which had begun the previous Thursday night, while President Nixon was still announcing his decision.   The Guard fired tear gas but it was dispersed by the wind.  The Guard commander ordered his troops to clear the Commons.   The soldiers marched across the grass and the crowd dispersed before they could reach it.   Most of them halted in place, where they could prevent any of the demonstrators from returning.  But a contingent on the right flank of the advance detached itself from the line and for the next twenty minutes, chased a small group of defiant hecklers up the hillside by Taylor Hall, over the crest, down the reverse slope, across a road, and out onto a football practice field, where a chain link fence barred their further progress.   After pausing on the practice field, seemingly confused, and then going into a kneeling/firing position, the officers in charge ordered their men back to the Commons.   Midway in the return march, as they reapproached the crest of the hill, the Guardsmen suddenly turned and opened fire.  Four students were killed, eight others seriously wounded.

            There are no reports that include eyewitness statements by FBI personnel.  But when Robert Raun, Special Agent in Charge of the US Army 109^th Military Intelligence Group, Akron, entered the guard command post with two of his agents about an hour later, he encountered agents of the FBI as well as of the Secret Service. [5]    At 1539 hours  (3:39 p..m.), the National Guard received a warning “that the Weathermen faction of the SDS are armed and are wearing military uniforms.   This was confirmed by the FBI.” [6]

            That evening Governor Rhodes cabled J. Edgar Hoover:  “I shall appreciate the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in making a complete investigation of the facts.” [7]    Thus the FBI formally entered the case.

            But the Cleveland field office, at least, was not totally innocent of events at Kent State.  It had continually monitored the campus, as well as all those in North Ohio, under its COINTELPRO (“Counterintelligence Program: Internal Security: Disruption of the New Left”).  It noted a brief flareup of militancy in late 1968 and 1969, spearheaded by the local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society. [8]    But it had also noted the virtual extinction of SDS on campus after an incident at the Music and Speech Building, viewed by many as a “setup”, which resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of the SDS leadership, the revocation of the chapter’s charter, and its expulsion from the campus. [9]    Given the assessment of Cleveland that SDS was defunct at Kent State by early 1970, it is interesting to note that the Bureau went to the Portage County Prosecutor’s Office on March 24, 1970, to obtain fresh profiles of  Howard Emmer, Colin Neiburger, Edward O. Erickson, and Jeff Powell, the four SDS leaders arrested at Music and Speech the previous year, who were due to be released on April 29 – the day before Nixon announced the Cambodia invasion. [10]

            Direction was forthcoming from SOG (Seat of Government, the FBI euphemism for headquarters in Washington) immediately.  J. Walter Yeagley, Assistant Attorney General for Internal Security, sent Director Hoover a memo citing six “attacks” on ROTC around the nation.   “The foregoing incidents indicate the possible existence of one or more conspiracies to drive the ROTC from the college campuses.” [11]    (It is impossible to tell from the document when on the 4^th it was created.  If after SOG had learned of the killings, the FBI investigation of the arson – in which it would invest twice the resources as to its investigation of the shootings – was possibly a “smokescreen” from the beginning.).

            Also of interest is when President Nixon knew.  His Memoirs relate how his chief of staff Bob Haldeman told him late in the afternoon. [12]    But at two o’clock Haldeman jotted on his ever-present legal pad “keep P. filled in on Kent State.” [13]   In his daily journal Haldeman expanded on the President’s reaction: “He very disturbed.  Afraid his decision set it off… then kept after me all day for more facts.   Hoping rioters had provoked the shootings – but no real evidence that they did.” [14]    Even after he had left for the day, Nixon called Haldeman back and among others  issued one ringing command: “need to get out story of sniper.” [15]

            The President’s degree of concern was prudent.  Word of the killings spread like a grass fire.  The student strike begun at some institutions now exploded across the country, so fast the wire services could not track it.  Many of the soldiers in Vietnam were finally stung into forming an organized opposition to the war within the ranks.  The stock market absorbed its biggest one-day loss since the assassination of President Kennedy.  The halls of Congress rang with calls for impeachment.

America’s closest allies recoiled from her in horror.  

            Some, any excuse had to be found for the Guardsmen.

            The President’s hopes that they would be justified by a “sniper” shooting at them were perhaps foredoomed.  A journalist who had been in the midst of the action was emphatic:

 

                        This reporter, who was with the group of students, did not see any indication of sniper fire, nor was the

            Sound of any gunfire audible before the Guard volley.  Students, conceding that rocks had been thrown,

            heatedly denied that there was any sniper. [16]

 

            General Sylvester del Corso, the Ohio Guard adjutant, unwittingly debunked the sniper story by calling a popular Cleveland area talk show that evening.   He asserted that a sniper had fired on the Guard with a shotgun from “city property, meaning the commercially zoned strip across Main Street from the campus.  The show’s host reminded him that those buildings were only two stories high and 250 yards from the Commons.   Anyone who had been on campus knew that there was a hill between the two sites.  Del Corso subsided, mumbling. [17]

            But there had been a civilian on the scene with a gun.  He appears on WKYC-TV sound film running down from the hillside (the slaughter took place on the reverse slope and is off-camera), with a bespectacled black man in pursuit, pointing after him  and shouting. [18]    The fugitive, a thin-faced white youth makes straight for the National Guard formation and therein seeks out a campus police officer, to whom he surrenders a revolver.

            The campus police immediately took the black man, instructor Harold Sherman Reid, Bill Barrett (a co-pursuer), and the youth, Terrence Norman, to their headquarters.  Norman told KSUPD Detective R. F. Winkler that he was “covering the demonstrations” and had gotten separated from the Guard line after following it “for protection”.   “I then joined the other photographers for protection.”  He heard someone yelling “Kill the pigs!”, so he sought out the Guard again “for a little protection”.  Reid deposed that he had first seen Norman “standing with a pistol in his hand pointing it in the direction of a man lying on the ground.” [19]    But Norman claimed he had been trying to aid “a hippie type person… bleeding from the face”, when he was assaulted by several persons striking him with their fists and trying to get his camera.   “I drew my weapon” and told his attackers they were “going to get it”.  They ran off in one direction and he ran off after the Guard again.  He added that

 

                        I state at this time that I was requested to take pictures for the purpose of identification and prosecution of

            violators, by Det. Tom Kelly of the Campus Police and Bill Chapin of the FBI, Akron, Field Office. [20]

 

 

Norman stated emphatically that he had not fired his revolver.

 

 

            Tuesday, May 5^th.   A female KSU student sent a letter to campus security apparently referring to Norman.   She had seen a young man outfitted as a photographer “about 5 minutes before the shootings….  He hit a fellow student across the face with the butt of his gun.”  “The other kids” took up the cry that the man was armed.  “The cameraman turned into an animal” and pointed the weapon at the people around him, threatening to shoot as he backed down the hill. [21]

            What may have been a pre-emptive move to silence further speculation about Norman appeared in the Akron Beacon-Journal that morning, as an interview with him.   He repeated that he had not fired the revolver and  was described – merely – as a Kent State junior and a “free-lance photographer”.   He then recited, point by point, an elaborate version of the Guard’s alibis:

 

                        …he saw more than 1,000 rock-throwing students back 40 National Guardsmen against the wall at Taylor

            Hall…

                        …the Guardsmen, out of tear gas, dodged rocks and bricks and bottles from nearly point-blank range…

            Guardsmen were struck and down.

                        …he heard what he thought was a shot from the roof of Taylor Hall. [22]

 

 

            Although the National Guard was scouring the campus for evidence of the missiles they said had been thrown at them, there was no discernible activity by the FBI on the 5^th.  Agents from the Akron field office interviewed Larry Pennell, a KSU student eyewitness, but only after he had called them and requested it.  He told them and would repeat to others that he had seen “an officer” trigger the volley by deliberately firing into the crowd with a handgun. [23]    Akron also received a call from a regular Army colonel pursuing a Business Administration degree that would have a lot more to do with the direction the FBI probe would take than any question of who had shot where.

                                               

                        [H]e felt the FBI should look into the background of some of the instructors at KSU in the Liberal Arts

            Department as some of these people are reportedly very liberal.  [C]* felt that instructors of this type have a

            tendency to create an atmosphere such as prevailed on the campus on this date, by instilling liberal ideas in the

            minds of the students.  [C] could not offer the names of any specific instructors in this regard. [24]

 

                        The National Guard adjutant office at Fort Hayes, Columbus, Ohio got a similar call from a Nancy Kibler,

 

                        whose daughter attends Kent State.   The daughter was in class Monday morning 4 May 1970 and said her

            philosophy professor was actually inciting them to riot and they were told their grades depended on it. [25]

 

 

            Wednesday, May 6.   One of the numerous students working part-time for campus security confessed to the agents

that he could have been behind the sniper reports.  He had been on top of Herr Hall on the 4^th taking pictures of demonstrators; his camera had a 300-mm. Lens and was mounted on a rifle-style stock.  (He took the occasion to supply the names of fellow students he considered “agitators”. [26]

            The New York field office sent a teletype, apparently revoking an earlier one which has not survived in the files:  “Review of New York office files disclosed victim Miller not identified as anyone who has participated in radicle [sic] activity in the New York area” [27] --  Jeffrey Miller being one of the students who had been shot to death on Monday.  They had initially confused him with another Jeff Miller, also from New York.

            The agents, having roped off the whole area of the Monday confrontation, now picked up every stone and every other object that could have been thrown at the Guard, an inventory rendered less than comprehensive by the fact that the Guard had already policed the same area.  They combined their debris with the Guard’s and photographed it in sections according to the area in which retrieved. [28]    “The rocks were described only as ranging from pebbles to 1 ½” in diameter.” [29]    (This last is difficult to reconcile with General Canterbury’s assertion that his men were under a barrage of “rocks… the size of baseballs.” [30]     “That’s what the FBI kept wanting to know,” one student interviewee complained, “How many rocks?   How could you tell how many rocks were thrown?  I thought it was a stupid question.” [31] )   While some of the agents were completing the inventory, another concluded one of the few interviews done with a student eyewitness thus far.  The student recalled seeing nothing that would lead the Guardsmen to fear for their lives; “the largest stone he saw thrown was approximately three inches in diameter.” [32]

            A Guard jeep pulled up at campus police headquarters that afternoon and several of the militiamen wordlessly unloaded thirteen tagged M-1 rifles. [33]   The M-1 was the basic weapon they had been carrying on Monday: a high-powered semi-automatic rifle whose .30 caliber bullet is capable of killing at two miles.  The Portage County Sheriff’s Department would also turn over fragments of bullets removed from the bodies of the dead students to the FBI. [34]    Now all the Bureau, with its legendary ballistics testing facility, had to do was match the tracks on the bullet fragments with the lands and groovers inside the rifle barrels and they would know who had killed whom – or would have.   But in their haste to go on duty this time the Guardsmen had not signed out for their rifles on the usual control cards; “a lined pad was used as a sign-out sheet for arms and ammo…  it disappeared from the arms room about the same time that the FBI obtained custody of some weapons from Troop G” [35]   -- i.e., that afternoon.   It was never seen again.

            This disappearance was the lynchpin of what British-born author Peter Davies would come to call the ultimate coverup.   Faced in 1973 with a Congressional probe into Kent State, the Justice Department went through the motions of trying the Guard “shooters”.   In his opening statement the Department’s “prosecutor” succeeding in “virtually assuring their acquittal” by announcing that there was no way to prove which man had fired which bullet.   The judged directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty, and thence the Guardsmen could never be tried again.   Davies’ hypothesis was that Justice was far more worried about anything a renewed – and, under the auspices of the Congress, independent – investigation of the ROTC fire might turn up than about anything that could happen to the “shooters”.

 

                        …the ROTC fire on May 2 was the work of agents provocateurs.  Acting on behalf of the Justice

            Department’s Internal Security Division, then headed by Robert Mardian, in conjunction with the intelligence

            community,  whose domestic covert operations had become President Nixon’s secret weapon in his campaign

            to silence dissent, these provocateurs set the stage for the show of  force that was to come two days later. [36]

 

 

            Davies’ conclusion, reached after examining hundreds of documents in the 1975 Kent State civil trial, suggests why the FBI may have been moving so cautiously on the 6^th.   But SOG was about to raise the heat.   The head of the Civil Rights Division at Justice, Jerris Leonard, requested J. Edgar Hoover have his agents examine the killings in the light of 18 USC 242:  violation of the civil rights of American citizens by killing them for attempting to assemble and voice their grievances.  

            Subsequent events more than suggest that Leonard could not have consulted with his Attorney General before taking this step –  and either didn’t know that John Mitchell and Richard Nixon were determined that the Guardsmen would never be prosecuted, or didn’t care.  Meanwhile the President was swinging between “a dejected and lachrymose state, downing scotches with the reproachful refrain, ‘Everyone misunderstands me’,” and manic episodes of tasking his aides to take arrays of countermeasures against his newly augmented horde of enemies.   On the 6^th, he had a “secret, unlogged meeting with Dr. Arnold Hutchsnecker,” [37] who by now was denying that he had treated Nixon for psychiatric problems in the 1950s. [38]

            Everyone at the White House was feeling the heat.   Despite the stock market crisis the day before, Haldeman noted on the 5^th that

 

                        Big problem today is the whole student disorder situation…  a lot of planning for strikes & marches for

            The rest of the week.   Reaction very tough to the four killed at Kent State yesterday

 

 

            And on the 6^th,

 

                        As day went on, concern from outside re campus crisis built rapidly…  P. came to grips with it this

            aft.   …He agreed to plan of action – meet Univ. Pres. Tomorrow – press conference Fri. night…

                        Very aware that goal of the Left is to panic us – so we must not fall into their trap [39]

 

 

            Thursday, May 7^th.   Jerris Leonard followed up with three more memos.  It is impossible to determine in which order they were sent, or if simultaneously.  Presuming he hewed to Internal Security’s priorities, he first asked the FBI to “determine the identity of the persons involved in the recent arson of the ROTC building” – but only in Kent; the other five “attacks on ROTC” were not mentioned again.    Far more exhaustively, he tasked the Bureau to probe the killing by “Unknown Subjects, Ohio National Guard” of “Allison Krause [et. al.], Victims, Summary Punishment, CIVIL RIGHTS.”   The request for the arson investigation ran a page and a half; that of the murders, six.   “[B]ecause of the widespread public concern and the request of the President to be kept currently informed,” he wanted at least interim results by Tuesday, May 12^th “and periodically thereafter”. [40]     His third memo went to John Ehrlichman, the President’s chief domestic advisor, under a “Highly Confidential” distribution,  “[p]ursuant to the request of the President”, summarizing the areas to be investigated.   The murder/ civil rights charge led the list. [41]

            So the FBI agents in Kent began the interviews needed to reconstruct the killings.  The first witness, General Canterbury, repeated the story he never would change:

 

                        As the troops were withdrawing from the practice field to the crest of the hill…  they were virtually surrounded

            by hostile members of the crowd…  The crowd had come to within ten to 12 feet of the flanks of the troops.

                        [P]iles of rocks, sticks, bricks, bottles, and other available debris had been gathered in piles for apparent

            intended use against the troops by the demonstrators. [42]

 

 

            When General del Corso repeated the allegation of the stockpiled missiles that summer, the Commission investigator asked him if he really thought the students planned in advance to be chased off the Commons, up one side of Blanket Hill and down the other, across the road, and onto the practice field, where the stockpiles were waiting.   “At this point, he backed off and stated only that he had received reports that persons were reported to have carried sacks of something to the demonstration.” [43]

            The first Guardsman to be interviewed squarely contradicted the stereotype the media were even then perpetuating, of the Guardsmen who fired as being “scared kids”.   Sergeant Lawrence Shafer had taken extensive riot control training and was a “combat” veteran of urban riots in Hough (1966) and Youngstown, Akron, and Cleveland (1968).    He related how, as the formation whirled around on the crest of the hill, he heard three or four shot “on his right side”.   He fired one round over the “crowd”, cleared a jammed cartridge, then aimed at a student.   “He felt that this man was advancing on him as an individual…   He did not observe anything in the hands of this man, but the man was shouting at him” and making an obscene gesture – so Shafer shot him in the groin and again, in the leg, as he was falling. [44]

            The second Guardsman said he had heard a “muffled shot”, so he turned and fired one shot into the air.  Then he aimed a shot at a demonstrator “who was in the act of raising his arm over his head and beginning to throw an object his way” – but missed.  He repeated his own version of the line that all the “shooters” would repeat:  “I felt  to protect my own life I had to fire.” [45]     (More frequently, repeated as if by rote, it was “I fired because I believed my life was in danger”.)    But the third, although he admitted firing three shots over the crowd, stated  “He personally does not feel he was in any danger for his life at this time.” [46]

            And so it went.   The Guardsmen were so forthcoming as to be offering themselves up for punishment in a common  fit of guilt, or possessed of an anachronistic concept of what constituted the permissible application of lethal force.   Shafer’s mates in the ranks continued to confess to firing aimed shots at individual students.   Sp/4 James Pierce fired at two different persons, one of whom he described as a “rock throwing” demonstrator, then swung the muzzle to his opposite flank and shot at another “who was about to throw a rock at him.”   Sp/4 James McGee claimed he fired at the knee of a demonstrator when he “realized the shots [over their heads] were having no effect”.   Sgt. Barry Morris admitted firing “into the crowd”.   Sp/4 William Herschler emptied his weapon into the crowd, according to his sergeant. [47]

            The shots Sgt. Shafer claimed to have heard to his right echoed in Washington that same day.   Major General Winston Wilson, chief of the National Guard Bureau, told the Senate Armed Services Committee of the sound of “four shots fired by a person in the dissident group”.   Also in support of the sniper theory, he unwittingly implicated one of the Guard officers with a reference to a “non-military shell casing” found in the area.   And he repeated one of  the most pernicious myths already spawned by the confrontation, of “a girl, dashing out of a dormitory… [who] ‘fired a weapon at the Guard as they turned away.  They turned back and returned fire’.” [48]

            A non-sniper explanation of the four shots, one of the students interviewed on the 7^th said that a coed had told him “that an armed photographer had been attacked by the demonstrators and fired four shots at the demonstrators.” [49]    Janet Falbo’s  “animalistic” photographer?

            But had the camera man (Terry Norman) hit anyone?   A student who had taken refuge in Engelman Hall right after the volley saw a male entered the lounge area wearing a headband and an army-type shirt, “sweating profusely as in shock, his face was bloody, and he appeared to have a bullet wound [C].” [50]    Terry Norman had been seen standing over a “hippie type” student – he claimed, to render him aid.   But Harold Sherman Reid had seen him standing over a person lying on the ground, pointing a pistol at him.   The investigation, on its first day of serious interviewing, was already getting touchy.

 

 

            In fact, at this juncture, SOG decided it would need a special kind of supervision.   William C. Sullivan, Director Hoover’s third-in-command – after the unexpected retirement of Cartha DeLoach, his heir apparent – arrived in Ohio to take over from Cleveland SAC Charles Cusick. [51]    And Sullivan was no ordinary FBI agent.   His rise within the Bureau might be accounted for as another instance of Hoover’s failing judgment.   Sullivan was widely suspected by his peers of divided loyalties – in fact, of being the CIA’s chief “mole” within the Bureau.

            He had been Assistant Director for Intelligence since 1961, and the Bureau’s representative on the US Intelligence Board.   More to the point, he was the chief of three FBI representatives on the HONETOL committee.   HONETOL (an acronym created by fusing HO[OVER] and ANATOL[Y GOLITSYN, a Soviet defector) was the code name for the witchhunt conducted for double agents by CIA Counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, which gutted the Agency during this period.   Sullivan provided Angleton with the foot soldiers – bugging and tapping specialists, foot and mobile surveillance – to pursue suspected traitors, all of whom would turn out to be innocent.   In the process, he became a full convert to Angleton’s “sick-think” world view.   (Dr. Jerrold Post, a CIA psychologist, assessed Angleton as “not clinically paranoid; rather… Angleton had a strong paranoid orientation and propensity.”). [52]

            J. Edgar Hoover was fighting a rearguard action against increased pressure from the White House and the CIA to draw the FBI into the overall program for increased surveillance of American citizens.  Not that Hoover was a longtime, rabid champion of civil liberties.   But he had a finely-honed sense of public relations, and in his obsession to protect the image of his beloved FBI, he foresaw the furor that would result if the extreme violations of American rights being contemplated by the Nixon administration were ever to be discovered.   He opted out of the secret war.   Sullivan fought him doggedly, if covertly.   “A few months after Hoover outlawed the use of ‘illegal’ investigative techniques, I began to receive complaints from the rest of  the intelligence community.” [53]    Another senior agent suspected Sullivan of plotting to “undermine Hoover’s position with the President and succeed to the position of Director himself.” [54]    But this would only be to turn the FBI into a domestic fact-gathering arm of the CIA, [55]   subordinate by reason of its inferior intellectual resources and inherent timidity.   And as such, he was just the man to head the Kent State investigation Nixon’s way, in the spirit of the KGB technique of  dezinformatsiya on which the CIA, armed with significant assets in the mass media,  had so vastly improved.

 

            Friday, May 8^th.   The agents at Kent began trying to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the ROTC fire.   The local authorities weren’t much help.   An official of the Portage County Sheriff’s Department claimed that his men had moved in to protect the building at 9:17 and were not relieved by the National Guard until 10:30 p.m. [56]    Mayor Satrom claimed that the Guard had arrived in Kent at 7:00 p.m. to protect the town. [57]    Then why had the armored convoy driven straight through Kent to the campus, without even slowing down?  Satrom added that he wouldn’t let his firemen return to campus until ten when the Guard could protect them.  The Guard had dallied in town for three hours while the building was being burned?

            Chief Donald Schwartzmiller, of the campus police (KSUPD) furnished a copy of his department’s report on the fire, dated the third.   It stated he had mobilized two twelve-man squads at 7:30 p.m., as soon as students started gathering on the Commons, as well as notifying the county sheriff, and the city police and fire department.   But his men were not actually ordered to protect the building until 8:50.   (The orders were given by a Mr. [C].)   The building did not “flame up” until ten p.m. and the Guard arrived thereafter.  This statement does not include the indicated attachments: four eyewitness statements.

            Talking to the students could be touchy.   One of them who had seen the shootings insisted that “the ONG had been under orders to fire their weapons” and that it was “planned murder”.   The agents objected to this characterization, for he then added that “what he really meant and intended to say was that the ONG should have retreated”.   But then he added to this that “he felt the guardsmen were murderers since they did have the alternative to move down to the Commons.”   The remaining 40% of his interview is blacked out. [58]

            The FBI on campus received word from the Albany, New York, resident agency transmitting a harrowing statement of how the Guard had broken up the sitdown demonstration on May 3^rd with their bayonets.   The first the student knew of it – he couldn’t see much because he was seated on the street and could hear little but “mumbling” over a loudspeaker – people around him were fleeing.  A Guardsman loomed over him with a fixed bayonet, snarling, “I told you to get up.”   As the student turned to rise, he felt the bayonet enter his back, severing muscle in the area of the kidneys.   The five lines in which he describes his attacker, who was not wearing a gas mask, are blacked out. [59]   

            A female freshman proved to nothing firsthand.   But she said that another coed “had seen a girl among the group of students with a gun and that she, [C], knows a boy… who took photographs of this girl with the gun…   this girl fired at the ONG [Ohio National Guard].” [60]    The “girl with a gun” had surfaced as a rumor two days before, and she had what may have struck the inquisitors with a most opportune identity.    The Guard command post on campus had logged a call from a Lou Bertram, “[County] Prosecutor’s Office”.    He claimed to have a witness, “David Lepo”, a KSU student who “saw Allison Krouse [sic] (Tall girl) with a gun before the shooting…    Suggested we talk to house mother of this girl (Allison Krouse) about her possibly having had a gun in her room.” [61]

            Allison Krause was the ideal target for disinformation.   Of the four students who had been killed on Monday, she had been the one who instantly seized the popular imagination.   An exotically beautiful, statuesque (5’11”) brunette who rarely wore makeup or a bra, she had been one of the defiant dozen who had held back to taunt the Guardsmen when everyone else had scattered.   People around the world were writing poetry and dedicating music to her four days after her death.    Revered by an alienated generation, she was correspondingly loathed by the embittered, aging men who held power.   She was the ideal foil for sexual repressions as well as the anti-Semitism of Nixon, Hoover, and their retainers.   (Hoover, during one of his visits to the White House during this week, “informed other officials that one of the female victims had been ‘sleeping around’ and was ‘nothing but a whore’ anyway.”) [62]

            It is difficult to underestimate the lacerating effect the spectacle of assertive, let alone violent, women had on men like Hoover and his lieutenants.   Senior Associate Director Mark Felt, facing indictment in the late 1970s for massive violations of Americans’ civil rights, justified programs like COINTELPRO on the basis of the threat to society posed by the radicals, particularly the females.   After asserting that America had been at war with Vietnam, “whether formally declared or not”,  he charged Bernardine Dohrn’s “career of violence would fill a book by itself” – but could only cite a single remark Dohrn had allegedly made about the Manson murders as evidence.   He also accused Naomi Jaffe of shooting down American aircraft over North Vietnam and her distaff comrades of “brutalizing wounded American prisoners of war”, a fantasy straight out of the “men’s adventure” magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. [63]

            As tantalizing as the image of Allison blasting away at the Guard may have been, it collided with reality almost immediately.   The same day the FBI interviewed a coed who claimed to have known Allison well.   The witness had avoided the Monday rally, but her boyfriend had been present, and had seen Allison on the Commons standing near students who were throwing things, but not throwing anything herself.  She had not been carrying a gun or anything from which she could have drawn a gun.   Allison “really cared for mankind and was definitely not the type of individual to promote the use of force to obtain any kind of student demands.” [64]

            With the good came the bad; the day could scarcely end without another Terry Norman sighting.   This one was relayed from the Buffalo field office, quoting a witness to the effect that “This man was carrying a 35-mm. Camera and a sliver handgun.   I observed him run up to a student with long hair & hit him with the gun.” [65]

            As the 8^th waned, the Kent FBI team seemed capable of maintaining its desultory pace, despite or because of Sullivan’s presence.   But events outside the small Ohio town were moving toward a state that some likened to impending civil war.    John Ehrlichman called Jerris Leonard to thank him for “your recent report” and to remind him of the President’s “interest”.

 

 

                        The President would like same-day copies of all field reports relative to the Kent State investigations.  These

            reports should be unabridged – not boiled down or condensed.   He would like very much to see the original field

            report(s) [66]

 

 

            Leonard reminded Hoover and Hoover relayed the message back to Ohio: finish the “shooting” investigation by noon, Tuesday, May 12^th, and the  “sabotage” (ROTC fire) by noon, Thursday the 14^th.   Ohio protested in vain that the earliest they could finish anything was the 18^th.   Hoover scrawled on the bottom of this phone memo, “This is too long.  I  have already set Tuesday, May 12^th, for the deadline.” [67]

That evening the President was scheduled to meet the press for the first time since the killings.   That which Haldeman had hoped would justify Kent State to the American people, a smashing victory in Cambodia, had not been forthcoming..  The generals still could not report that they had located, let alone captured COSVN, the giant communist command center for all Southeast Asia which the President had announced on national television as the operation’s goal.   (In two more days, any use of the acronym would quietly disappear from military briefings.)   A giant antiwar rally was scheduled for the following morning across the street from the White House, a hundred and fifty thousand protestors – a staggering number to have been organized and transported to Washington from all over the country at a week’s notice.

            The President’s staff was split.   John Ehrlichman wanted to keep the lines of communication open to the protestors.   Attorney General John Mitchell and especially National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger preferred crushing them with an all-out show of force. [68]     The military prepared to protect the White House with a number of Draconian security measures, including surrounding it with two concentric rings of D.C. transit buses.   According to the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of  Staff, this was to prevent “this same group that was at Kent to come to Washington to have a student killed on the White House grounds…  I’m not sure what [group] it was, but you could look it up.” [69]   

            The Justice Department had denied the demonstrators the use of the Ellipse, the open grassy area across the street from the White House to the south.   That left them the streets at the intersection of 16^th and “H” on the north.  Two of the demonstration’s marshals claimed to have inside information “from officials in the mayor’ office and other sources” that this was intended to be a giant kill zone; the plan was to “trap the crowd between a double horseshoe of police and troops” after dark, [70]    thus avoiding all those embarrassing photographs that had come out of Kent.   Could the administration actually have contemplated anything so monstrous as expanding on the example of May 8^th?   Haldeman summarized the two sides’ positions:   “if you want confrontation, can have at 16 & H –  E(hrlichman) this very bad judgement --  lousy politics to have bloodshed at WH.” [71]    Ehrlichman must have prevailed;  at the last minute, the protestors were granted the use of the Ellipse.

            That resolved, the President left his briefing books at Camp David and chopped back to the White House for his press conference.   He faced it with dread; contrary to custom, he told Haldeman he would not take any phone calls afterward.   His fears were for nought.   The reporters assembled under this roof were so timid and deferential that one of their number referred to the conference as a “pallid and synthetic ritual… a fusillade of spitballs at 50 paces.” [72]    Afterward Nixon countermanded  his own order and wound up staying on the phone until 4:22 a.m., fifty calls in all.

            Just before dawn, before a panicked Secret Service could respond, Nixon disappeared from the White House.   With only his valet, the President had gone down to the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial, into the midst of a sea of protestors against which his aides had fortified the White House, to talk to the young.   His attempt to engage them in a dialogue turned into a low-pitched when not inaudible monologue, during which he rambled from good surfing beaches in California to Neville Chamberlain at Munich to the merits of various college football teams.   One coed reported feeling awe at first, which turned to “disappointment and disillusionment…  Then I felt pity because he was so pathetic and then just plain fear to think that he’s running the country.” [73]

            His aides finally managed to catch up with him and talk him into leaving the Memorial grounds.   But instead of returning to his White House redoubt, he insisted on being driven to the Capitol.   There he autographed a Bible for a black cleaning women, assuring her that his mother had been a saint, and delivered an address to a chamber occupied only by his valet.   Then he wanted to eat breakfast out, for the first time since taking office.   And all the while, he just kept “rambling on”.  When he insisted on walking back from breakfast to the White House, through streets thronged with demonstrators, Haldeman signaled a young assistant, and they pushed him into a limousine and drove him back.   Even there, he refused to go to bed, but marched into his office to begin the new day’s work.

            Haldeman, who headed his journal entry “The weirdest day yet”, confessed that

 

                        I am concerned about his condition – the decision; the speech; the aftermath – killings, riots, press, etc; the

            press conference; the student confrontation have taken their toll – and he has had very little sleep for a long time

            & his judgement, temper & mood suffer badly as a result…   He’s still riding on the crisis wave – but the letdown is

            near at hand and it will be huge. [74]          

 

            The chief of staff was too discreet and loyal, even in the pages of his personal journal, to come out and say what other intimates realized: the President had snapped.   Haldeman played for time, until he could get Nixon off for a vacation in Florida.   The plan would backfire; even then the President would not be able to sleep, slow down, or relax.   His obsession with his Enemies had only grown more all-engulfing.   This is the man to whom the FBI would have to report the results of the Kent State probe, a man who from here on out would only hear what he wanted to.   In this as in other things, Bill Sullivan knew how to make a superior believe he was loyal him.

 

 

           

 

CHAPTER TWO:  TORQUEMADA REDUX.

 

 

 

 

 

            Saturday, May 9^th.     It seems unlikely if not impossible that news of the President’s personal crisis could have reached the agents at Kent on the day that it was unfolding, and thus disturbed their measured pace.   They were picking their way through a minefield.   They used the “one-stop-shopping” technique: a subject contacted because s/he might have knowledge of the ROTC was also questioned about the riot on North Water Street, the incident at the Library, and the shootings on Monday.   But the arson investigation remained the “burning” priority.   Here they were continually foiled by the same problem: whoever had orchestrated the events at the ROTC had waited until after dark to avoid recognition.   Cusick had already directly advised Hoover of the investigation’s ultimate barrier the day before:  “KSU P.D. Officer indicated it was too dark for them to identify unsubs [unidentified subjects] at the time of the fire.” [75]   

            Witnesses questioned about it continued to raise the same question as had chief faculty marshal Dr. Glenn Frank: where had the campus police (or police of any kind?) been during the hour to ninety minutes during which the would-be arsonists were left unmolested while they attacked the building with rising violence and ineptitude? [76]    Meanwhile, corroboration of the Guard’s surviving alibi for the shootings, the rock-throwing horde of radicals, continued to be elusive.  Some eyewitnesses reported seeing the soldiers surrounded by hundreds of students heaving all manner of dire missiles at them.   More had seen a few stones shied by a few demonstrators, falling way short.   Then there were those who “did  not see any rocks thrown at the guard by the demonstrators during the entire confrontation.” [77]

            But they continued to tell of a “sniper”, or more correctly, a young man with a gun, always described as “with a camera,” [78]   always in a sports jacket, sometimes with a gas mask.    A friend of one interviewee saw a man wearing “a tan coat or shirt and a gas mask run out of Johnson Hall and shoot a student in the neck with a pistol.” [79]    Second-hand, hearsay – but devastating in terms of the pattern.   (Reid had seen Norman with a pistol standing over a student lying on the ground; Norman had confessed to standing over a “hippie-type” student with a bloody face; and a witness had seen a student enter Engleman Hall with blood on his face coming from a wound in his (neck? [C].)

            Aside from Norman, fresh evidence continued to discredit the sniper theory.   A senior OSHP (Ohio State Highway Patrol) officer told the agents that

 

                        during the whole period of time of the disruptions at KSU the rumors were flowing hot and heavy, and

            that he was getting periodic rumors that such and such a dormitory was an armed camp and that there were

            snipers on the roofs of various dormitories.   He ordered the rumors to be checked out and they appeared to be

            false. [80]

 

            So the agents at Kent proceeded cautiously, perhaps with one eye on the mass antiwar demonstration in Washington.

They needn’t have been concerned about it, anymore than the President.   With the Bureau’s informers and provocateurs swarming in the ranks of the protestors, particularly in their top echelons, they probably knew by the end of the day that this greatest of protest rallies had expired amid poor planning, backbiting and personal spite among the leaders, and trivialization by the commercial media.   And to the degree that his metabolism was set by the public opinion polls, the President had to know as soon that the latest Gallup Poll reported most Americans approved of his actions, even after the invasion of Cambodia. [81]      He would proceed as if this meant he had been right all along.

 

 

            Sunday, May 10^th.   Interviewing of local law enforcement officers – except the firemen – became intensive.   This did not make it more informative.   Many of the lawmen in the ranks were stolid and unimaginative men who recited where they had been sent and when during the weekend of the incident.   Some even made the ROTC fire sound dull.   The student violence that drew their strongest complaint – solicited, obviously in many cases, by their questioners – was the obscene language, especially as used by the women, that had been used to taunt them.

            Student witnesses continued to blame the violence on the authorities, particularly on the treacherous and brutal way in which the sitdown demonstration on the evening of the 3^rd had been broken up.   “[T]he demonstration Sunday had been entirely peaceful…  and… many of the marchers were enraged by their treatment by the Guard.” [82]    “[T]hey had been double-crossed on Sunday evening when diligent efforts had been made to keep the demonstration peaceful… she felt sure the feelings of the students were carried over from Sunday to Monday.” [83]   One speculated that there wouldn’t have been such a large crowd at Monday noon – the largest he had ever seen on campus – if the Governor hadn’t forbidden all assemblies.                                  

                        These students didn’t feel that it was right that someone would tell them that they couldn’t gather.

            They felt that they had something to say and they should be listened to and that a peaceful demonstration

            was harmless. [84]

 

 

It was a citation of Constitutional privilege that ratified Leonard’s selection of 18 USC 242 as the enabling statue of the murder investigation.

            The agents had been showing pictures of the nation’s leading radicals to interviewees, eliciting a chorus of negative responses, e.g., “she had not seen any of these individuals on the KSU campus during the recent trouble.”   The same woman responded that although she knew of around a hundred activists on campus, “she did not care to name any names or identify these individuals,” dismissing them as “frustrated” and “misguided.” [85]    But other students, whether responding to leading questions and/or prompting, or on their own, were willing to define a new category of crime for their nation.   “[W]hen JERRY RUBIN appeared on campus about four weeks before, [C] was on stage with RUBIN and appeared in sympathy with Rubin’s comments.” [86]     “[S]he observed three individuals with long hair at the Student Union and [they] proceeded to pass out mimeographed sheets of paper.” [87]    “[H]e was aware of one student… who allegedly had a printing press in his room… he believes the literature for the rallies was run off on this printing press.” [88]    To help their witnesses along, the agents had compiled a photo album of campus events including demonstrations – with the guidance of campus security and the editor of the school newspaper (see below) – and asked subjects if they could identify persons in them – not if they were committing crimes, just if they were present. [89]

            Leads appeared and were discarded, particularly when they proved embarrassing.   One of the Kent City police photographers insisted he had a picture, taken at Lincoln and Main on the evening of May 3^rd, of a boy and a girl in a tree.   “The male has a handgun clearly visible and other students passing beneath the tree are carrying large rocks.” [90]    But this photograph has never been seen by any recorded witness.   Perhaps it depicted some person(s) who shouldn’t have been caught on film.

            A student named Terry Ryan Stubbe had tape-recorded the entire confrontation on Monday with a “recording mike” on his dormitory windowsill. [91]    Stephen Titchenal had also made a tape recording.   But while Stubbe had recorded with an external microphone on a stable platform, Titchenal had used the internal mike on a cassette recorder.   And Titchenal, like so many present during the moments before the fatal volley, had assumed that the confrontation had ended and had shut off his recorder. [92]    Once he realized what was happening, he restarted it.   But he missed the first crucial seconds of the lethal violence and those so-called “other shots” that the Guardsmen insisted had preceded their own fire, the shots fired by the sniper(s).   Titchenal played his recording for the presidential commission in an open hearing that summer.   But the commission never got a copy of Stubbe’s tape and it was not included in the commission’s records as retired to the National Archives.

            The agents dutifully logged the day’s two “sightings”:

 

                        [T]wo “UPI photographers” chased a white male wearing a tan coat and light trousers, yelling that this man

            had a fake UPI card in his possession…   he observed this young man turn over to police officers a .38 caliber

            pistol. [93]

 

                        This photographer reportedly had a gun and had pulled this gun on demonstrators when they tried

            to take a camera away from him and he supposedly fired four shots into the ground. [94]

 

 

            Several of the agents showed up at a house in Kent, rented out by students for off-campus living, with a search warrant.   On the flimsiest kind of evidence, this house was to become the focus of their whole futile investigation.   They advised one of the residents that they were acting on a tip “that four men had entered the house” on the evening of the 2^nd and “claimed they had burned down the ROTC building”.   The interviewee replied that he had been there all evening on the 2^nd and he had heard no such thing. [95]    (They may have been proceeding on third hand information from someone in the neighborhood – over 50% of the paragraph identifying the source is blacked out – from a sheriff’s deputy that a black KSU student named Al Tate had been seen “carrying five bombs” into the house the night of May 1^st or 2^nd. [96] )

            The G-men talked to another resident who said he had five housemates, each of whom he described, and had noticed a number of visitors on the evening of May 2^nd.   Everyone had gone to the roof to watch the ROTC fire, except for two residents who were “mobile” that evening.   “[H]e does not recall anyone running into the residence saying that we have just burned the ROTC building.”   A third  said that one of the residents had left the area and did not anyone to know where he was going. [97]

            But the major event of the day – one that suggested a whole new and more rewarding direction for the investigation to take, without any of the troublesome aspects of the others – was the interview with Chester Williams, KSU’s Director of Public Safety.   He gave the agents a complete briefing on the campus “radicals”, particularly the ones on the faculty and one professor in particular.   His take-off point was the Kent Free University, a brief, bygone teaching experiment:

 

                        I recall one of the first classes that was held, the guerrilla warfare.   There LOUGH took part…

                        …there is information that shows that Professor TOM LOUGH… provided instructions to students

             on making different types of bombs.   Other professors, such as [C]… are very active in terms of taking a

            radical point of view; sometimes openly in their assemblies and sometimes behind the scenes.

 

 

He related how, just before noon on May 4^th, he eavesdropped on a lecture by a professor who may or may not have also been Lough.

 

 

                        I was amazed at the tone of his presentation… he was voicing his concern as a faculty member as to

            why the National Guard was in our campus, such that [sic] every student had a right to know why things were

            as they were, and they should pursue and find out.

                        His presentation, in my opinion, was of an inflammatory nature. [98]

 

            Thus modestly was the Inquisition born.

            The President and his men spent a quiet Sunday, waiting for the reaction of the press to the events of May 4^th through 10^th.  “Problem starts w/ over-riding news re the demonstration… Not much good in the local Sunday papers,” Haldeman complained. [99]    But Nixon felt the “students have overplayed their hands.   If blue collar rise up against students  P. can mobilize blue collars.” [100]    The reference was to the events of Friday the 8^th, when hundreds of well-organized construction workers had attacked antiwar demonstrators and bystanders in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district with fists, feet, clubs, baseball bats, and heavy tools.   A number of eyewitnesses charged that the “hard hats” were directed by men in three-piece suits with colored tabs in their lapels and carrying two-way radios.   In July Scanlan’s magazine published a memorandum from the desk of Vice President Spiro Agnew identifying the organizers as operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency. [101]    The denouement was typical of the new order of things after May 4^th; Scanlan’s went out of business shortly afterward.   Back issues are extremely difficult to find.

 

            Monday, May 11^th.   At 10:27 a.m., Egil Krogh – the young staff assistant who had been the first one to notice the President was missing at dawn on the 9^th – called J. Edgar Hoover.   Krogh mentioned that John Ehrlichman might be calling him about Kent State because “he just wanted to get the feel as to how it was going because it is awfully hot.”   Hoover casually replied that “I think it is a situation of six of one and a half dozen of the other and that the students invited and got what they deserved.” [102]

            An anonymous  male called the Akron office at 12:10 p.m.. to report that one of the “automatic weapons” used to fire on the Guard had been put in a brown paper bag and thrown into the Ohio Canal near the Rathskellar in Kent. [103]    Shortly after three, a police diver entered the water and emerged thirty minutes later with a brown paper bag containing a .32 caliber pistol, which he estimated had been submerged there two or three days. [104]    The pistol, misidentified to and/or by the local press as a .22, [105] was forwarded to the FBI laboratories in Washington for tests, [106]   with an attached teletype reporting the KSU agent team had found “[n]o latent impressions developed on revolver, four cartridges, rubber band, or padlock.” [107]    Nothing more was heard of it.

            Thus vanished the sniper, again.   As many times as s/he disappeared, the lone civilian shooter in the crowd resurfaced.   A coed had looked out her dorm window in Lake Hall at 12:25 p.m. on May 4^th to see a white male “wearing a yellow-gold jacket with no tie” and carried what she perceived as a movie camera.   She saw him reach into the left side of his sports jacket with his right hand and pull out a “long-barreled weapon, approximately three feet long”.   He held it with two hands in front of him or at his right hip.

 

                        She observed this weapon recoil twice and she heard two shots… immediately following this there was a

            volley of shots… this individual appeared to drop the weapon but it did not go on the ground…  the weapon

            might have been tied to the individual in some way.

 

She ran downstairs and tried to tell a National Guard sergeant what had happened.   “[T]here were a number of other students also telling the Sergeant that the man shot with a gun”, but the sergeant made no notes on it. [108]

            On this same date, something led the campus policemen to launch their own followup investigation of the gunman with the camera (or the cameraman with the gun).   Patrolman Harold Rice gave a long, rudely evocative account of the incident:  After the volley, he had heard someone call his name.   It was Harold Sherman Reid, shouting for him to stop Terry Norman.   Although everyone present saw Norman make straight for Rice and call him by name, Rice now claimed, “I had seen this subject on campus and in the Police Department before, but did not know his name.”   He further claimed that he had “broken” the cylinder out of the revolver and had seen that “all the cartridges were fully loaded” (i.e., had not been fired).  “I smelled the end of the barrel to see if I could smell burnt powder, which I could not.”   KSU Detective Thomas Kelly added that he and fellow Detective Thomas Willison had examined the pistol: “a .38 Cal. Smith & Wesson Pistol.   Model 36.  2 Inch barrel.   Statinless [sic] steel… the gun was found to be loaded with 5 rounds of live ammo.”   Detectives Robert Winkler and Richard Savelle had both been told that Norman “had shot someone” or had “possibly fired on the hill”.   Lt. Jack Crawford had also heard that Norman had shot someone but claimed to have examined the weapon and found it with “5 load [sic] shells still in the chamber.” [109]

            The departmental consensus tended to exonerate Norman, except to the degree which it consisted of its members questioning each other and that Norman had immediately confessed to working for them.

            This kind of result might have had the FBI longing for an end to the “shooting” phase of the investigation.   But the “arson” probe was turning out to be just as tricky – perhaps much more so, given the political and emotional capital the Director and the President had invested in it.    That same day someone suggested an answer to Dr. Frank’s question, shared by so many others, about where the police and the firemen had been all the time the crowd had tried so ineptly to start a fire on or in the building.

 

                        [C] arrived in the wooded area north of the ROTC Building and saw approximately 16 University

            Policemen and several fireman [sic] huddled on the North and West sides of the ROTC Building…  there

            appeared to be only a small fire burning in the building.

 

He followed the students when the police finally emerged to scatter the crowd – “the firemen had sufficiently controlled the fire at this time” – and drifted back to the ROTC area when everyone else did, after running into the National Guard arriving on the border between campus and town (Main Street at the Prentice Gate).   “[C] returned to the area near the ROTC Building and noted that the fire had again flared up although he did not witness anyone attempting to re-ignite it.” [110]

            Or, as another faculty marshal put it,

 

                        A fire truck came up shortly afterward and put the fire out…   The mob then headed for downtown Kent.  

            They came back shortly thereafter and the building was burning brightly.  He did not know how it came to be burning

            again. [111]

 

            The picture was becoming clearer even in the darkness of the evening of May 2^nd.   The students had bungled their opportunity to burn the building.   The firemen had extinguished whatever incendiary products their amateurish efforts had produced.  Then they had pulled out and the campus police had moved in and had driven the crowd off.  Then, while the building was in the hands of the authorities, someone who knew what they were doing had set the real fire.   But who?  possibly the FBI was not really supposed to find the answer, or if it did, was to ignore it.

            More discreet to pursue that other class of villains Chester Williams had pointed to.   One of the campus student informers (this one in the network pervading the All-Student Housing Program) had another explanation for the dereliction of the police at the ROTC fire:   “it appeared to him the school authorities were content to sacrifice one old building to appease the militant dissidents.”   “Weak college administrators” had already become the rhetorical scapegoats of the Republicans in Congress in their defensive oratory since the killings.   The same informer also blamed the faculty, particularly the “23 Concerned Faculty”, a group of teachers who had met after the ROTC fire.   He charged that the statement they had issued on May 3^rd deploring the presence of the Guard on campus had “inflamed the discontented and reenforced [sic] the tense situation at KSU.”

            And he presented the agents with a “radical slut” yarn that was to take on a vicious life of its own.   He stated on May 4^th he and a colleague were on duty on the desk at Johnson Hall when three “hippie type” girls entered and asked to use the women’s rest rooms.   Somehow the two men observed the to be carrying empty Pepsi Cola bottles under their coats.   Afraid they were going to make Molotov Cocktails (home-made gasoline bombs) with the bottles, the two of them peeked into the ladies’ room after them and “observed the girls urinating in the Pepsi Cola bottles which the girls then took with them when he ordered them out of Johnson Hall.   [C] said the girls obviously intended to use the bottled filth against the National Guardsmen.” [112]

            Hoover’s men recorded the story without comment on its improbable aspects (how did the informers see the bottles under the coats?  Weren’t they a little concerned about being caught peeking into the women’s rest room?   Why did they think the women thought they would find gasoline in a lavatory?   Didn’t they have any idea of how possible it would be for a woman to urinate into an aperture as small as the mouth of a soda bottle?)   But its gynophobic and scatological elements would prove irresistible as propaganda aimed at Middle America.

`           The President needed good news.   Haldeman had found little of comfort in his review of the Sunday editions and news talk shows, and Monday morning’s crop of newsweekly magazines.  

 

            Magazines were pretty bad today.  All the negatives & very little positive…  Mainly obsessed with the uprising   and no attempt to put it in any kind of perspective. [113]

 

 

“[F]inal directive on Post & Times,” Nixon told his chief of staff Monday morning, “everybody boycott Post completely.”

But the President had his own means of getting his story out, even if the press were against him.  He added immediately (apparently to his hatchet man Murray Chotiner), “Hobe Lewis – re how decision made.  K. see him first – tell him all details --- then P. see – about 11 – ½ hour.”   (He repeated the order at 9:00 a.m.)   “Hobe Lewis” was Hobart Lewis, the president and editor-in-chief of the Reader’s Digest and a Nixon intimate since 1952.  Hobe was in town and due to see the President about a book project which would become the Digest’s priority.   Hobe and his most famous “roving editor” would try to enshrine the Pepsi bottle story, among other lurid and titillating myths, in the President’s own history of Kent State, which was already in the planning stages.   Whether with regard to this or not, Nixon gave Haldeman something to pass along back to Ohio: “call Sullivan – good show.” [114]

 

            Tuesday, May 12^th.   The deadline had arrived.   The shooting report had to be in at noon.   It had not been difficult to reconstruct the crime.   There was if anything too much evidence.   As Murphy would summarize it to Leonard in a few weeks, there had been no sniper; the Guardsmen had been in no danger when they fired; they had gotten together on the self-defense alibi after the fact. [115]

            How could they present conclusions to this like Nixon and Mitchell?

            It could have been with some relief that they turned all their attention to the “sabotage” (the burning of the ROTC building) phase.   Here the problem was the opposite: there was no enough evidence, or evidence that pointed in directions potentially embarrassing to the regime of which they were part.   But they could turn the situation to their advantage if they could find any evidence, however slight, that the fire had been set by “radicals”, particularly the SDS.

            They started by tracking down the SDS members who had been arrested at the Music and Speech Building the year before, the first to his place of employment.   His employer furnished them with his personnel jacket, containing his social security number and all his family and personal data.   And the boss volunteered the information that [C] and his wife, who also worked there, “were, in his opinion radically motivated”, adding that he had to ask them to stop discussing “revolutionary issues” on the job.   He added ominously that [C] was late for work on Monday, May 4^th, and that after the shootings, his wife announced that the two of them were leaving Ohio.   He also furnished the names and telephone numbers of co-workers “whom he feels are quite close to [C].” [116] .

            Meanwhile the agents were relearning that the zeal of an informant does not always guarantee the value of his/her information.

 

                 [C] has attended meetings of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) and the Student Mobilization Committee (SMC)…   On the basis of his attendance at

            these meetings and his friendships with members of these organizations, which he feels are subversive, he is positive that members of the YSA and

            SMC are responsible for the entire KSU incident. [117]

 

 

            He accused one “friend” of being an “acid freak” and a “member of a musical group”, another of being a “mental case”, and stated that a YSA member had “threatened to burn the ROTC building by himself” – but couldn’t remember his last name.   He said that he had arrived on campus at 2:00 p.m. on May 2^nd and left three hours later after having “watched the students and the National Guard hassling”  (the students had not started to gather until 7:30 p.m., and none of the competing arrival time estimates place the Guard on campus earlier than at least an hour after that).   Moreover his principal assertion was denied by an official of the campus police:

 

                 …to his knowledge, none of the persons known to be associated with SMC (Student Mobilization Committee), SRL (Student Religious Liberals), YSA

            (Young Socialist Alliance), and the former SDS chapter were observed to be connected with the burning of the US Army ROTC building on the KSU

            campus. [118]

 

 

            Another campus cop, shown the FBI photo album, did manage to identify Ruth Gibson.   “[H]e believes she is a member of the Kent Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which organization is considered subversive by [C].” [119]    He also identified Kenny Hammond as a radical.

            They talked to an older woman, who with her husband apparently knew Hammond and his family.   This page of the report is so heavily censored that only fragments emerge coherently: “KENNY HAMMOND until about two weeks ago was a very fine young man…  over the past two years, KENNETH HAMMOND HAD ([C] – about four to six words) several individuals whom she considered to be radical in their views.” [120]

            One University official, whose “assignment is to monitor rallies”, told of two persons taking pictures of the 35 to 40 students on the Commons around 7:30 p.m. on May 2^nd, who were threatened by their subjects.   He learned this by talking to the “photographers” themselves, “whom he would not identify”.   He saw a fireman   trying to put out the initial blaze at ROTC assaulted by four or five individuals.   “[H]e ran around to the fire truck and saw two sheriff’s deputies and told them a fireman was being beaten and they did not react at all to his statement.” [121]

            Of a brief rally on the Commons before the fire, a student recalled

 

                  he knows of no organization behind it and stated it is entirely possible that it was started by rumor…  no speeches were made at this rally

            and in fact it seemed very disorganized.

 

When the police finally drove the students away, “[t]he fire seemed to be out at this point, inasmuch as he saw only smoke.” [122]    Another student saw a “Negro male” in the crowd wearing a white raincoat “and he noticed a bulge in his pocket…  this individual took a short-barreled gun out of his pocket, looked at it, and put it back in his pocket.”   He wore his hair in an Afro, but “fairly short”. [123]

            The only real lead the agents had thus far was “the subversive house”, which turned out to be at 230 East Main Street, where persons had allegedly entered on the evening of May 2^nd saying they had just burned the ROTC building.  (At some point, the obvious should be belabored: “they” could have been used as third person, plural, indefinite – as in, “we, the students”, “we, the people”, etc.)

            After they had grilled a non-student about the political views and associations of a KSU coed he had been dating for three weeks, the youth also gave them thumbnail descriptions of his housemates.   “[B]ecause of casual comments they made and the literature and posters observed in their bedrooms, [some] gave the impression of being on ‘the radical side”. [124]    But another resident denied any knowledge of persons entering the house May 2^nd bragging about being the arsonists – and he stipulated that he had been there all evening.   He was also asked about a phone call allegedly made that evening; the caller said that it had taken three flares to burn the ROTC building.   He denied any knowledge of it. [125]

            A third blamed the University for everything.   “KSU is an ‘ultra conservative’ institution which refuses to recognized demands of students or even communicate with them.”   In the same spirit, he refused to give agents a photo of himself because it might help identify him as being present at a rally.    “The regulations at KSU are so rigid that even an observer of a campus demonstration is violating KSU regulations.” [126]

            But the fourth resident provided a lead; he identified Doug Cormack as “one of the leaders of the group” on the evening of May 2^nd.  But under further questioning he admitted that “[h]e did not see DOUG do anything except to get the crowd off the hill at Taylor Hall” because “they were sitting ducks for the National Guard” there. [127]    The agents located Cormack almost immediately.  But he spurned the mantle of  incendiary leadership they offered him.   He admitted to standing on the housing of the Victory Bell, but only to get a better view of, not to incite the crowd.   He admitted carrying a pillow case to the scene to use as protection against tear gas.   He gave it to another boy on the assumption that he wanted it for the same thing, and was surprised that the other wrapped it around a stick.   He did make a point of telling them about “a white male, age about 40, with brown thinning hair… agitating the students.” [128]

            They asked the fifth resident whether the SDS Four – Emmer, Neiburger, Powell, and Erickson – were on the campus May 1^st through 4^th.   He replied that

 

                 friends of theirs made sure they were not on campus during the demonstrations but in Cleveland… it was common campus knowledge that the reason

            was probably due to the fact they had just been released from jail. [129]

 

           

            A sophomore who had just moved into the “subversive house” claimed to know little about the other residents and nothing about the ROTC fire.   He did admit to knowing Allison Krause, and the agents forgot about the other subjects.   He said he had seen her at the ruins of the ROTC Building on May 3^rd.   “ALLISON KRAUSE… gave an indication that she was pleased about the burning.”    How? “No conversation was engaged in with ALLISON KRAUSE.”

“[C] described ALLISON KRAUSE as a ‘moderate’ somewhere between a radical and a conservative…   not an organizer or leader of student disorders at KSU.” [130]    

            They also got something else on Dr. Thomas Lough.   A witness had seen him talking to 20 to 30 “of the more radical-looking individuals” just after the shootings.   Lough was blaming the violence on University President Robert White and urging that “White is the one they should go after…  Lough appeared to be trying to incite the already frenzied crowd to further violence and to attack.” [131]    The shooting investigation was officially finished and the arson investigation, due to be terminated in another two days.   But the agents would pursue the “girl with the gun”, the radical professor, and the phantoms of the “subversive house” long afterward.

 

 

            Wednesday, May 13^th.    By now the university police had collected a statement from every officer who had been on campus between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on May 4^th.   At noon on Tuesday the 12^th, a senior KSUPD officer, [C], left them on the desk of ([C] – four to six words – possibly Chief Schwartzmiller.)   On the morning of the 13^th at 8:30 a.m, ([C] – two to four words) checked for them and they were missing.   They were never seen again. [132]

            Although the shooting investigation was formally closed,  the agents were still taking statements on it, and still getting burned.  A boy related how he had entered the area after the volley and had seen students lying on the ground.   Then,

 

                 he definitely heard one girl yelling, ‘There is some maniac around here with a gun shooting people.’   [C] stated he thought this meant that an individual

            had shot the students as he was of the opinion the ONG had blanks. [133]

 

 

            A woman told them of sitting on a bench by the Library on the evening of May 3^rd and witnessing the Guard attack on the sitdown demonstration.

 

                 The Guards came toward them and she heard the command, ‘Charge and get them’…   The Guard appeared upset and disturbed and, indiscriminately

            it seemed to her, jumped on students who were actually trying to get out of the way.

 

 

She also had the same comment on the ROTC fire that the FBI was beginning to hear more and more often: “everyone on the campus as far as she knew was aware of the fact that the ROTC building was going to be burned down since the students had tried to burn it down previous years.” [134]    Then why hadn’t the authorities been prepared for it and able to anticipate and prevent it?   Even more discouraging, in the light of their prime directive from Yeagley “to establish a conspiracy”, was the increasingly-heard assertion that the arson was spontaneous – “all of these activities were unorganized and occurred spontaneously, with no one or more kids being the leaders”. [135]

            Governor Rhodes’ theory, that “radical outside agitators” had been the prime movers, was not standing up to investigation.

 

                 [H]e saw no one whom he recognized as any type of student activist leader that he knew… he knew of no outside agitators who were present at

            this particular time… he heard of no outside agitators being brought into [sic] the campus… practically all of the people at the ROTC building were

            students that he had seen at one time or another on the campus. [136]

 

 

                 [S]he recognized most of the individuals present as KSU students…  She did not see any particular person throw rocks, and did not see who set

            fire to the building or how it was done….  she did see some flares thrown at the building, but she does not know who threw them. [137]

 

 

            Always that same obstinate cadence of events: students throw things at building; students try to set fire to building and fail; police drive students off; someone sets fire to building.

 

                 The ROTC building was at this point not burning out of control but was merely a series of small fires which could have easily been extinguished, and

            some of which were in fact going out on their own….

                 …the ROTC  building had suddenly burst into a ball of flame and he did not think that the small fires which he had last observed could have so quickly

            burned out of control. [138]

 

 

            Even their investigation of their villainess-in-chief backfired:

 

 

                 ([C] – ½ line) of the four people killed during this shooting.   ([C] – 1/3 line) ALLISON KRAUSE ([C] – 3 to 4 words) in Cleveland, Ohio for a period

            of time.  He advised that ([C] – 2 words) ALLISON KRAUSE to the November march on Washington D.C.   He described her as a peaceful person.

            He advised ([C] – 2 words) JEFF MILLER ([C] – 2 words) a former student at Michigan State.  He described MILLER as a person who is an activist. [139]

 

 

 

            They did manage to place Krause at the scene of one disturbance, the breakup of the sitdown on May 3^rd.   She had been caught up in the stampede after the Guard attacked the students at the intersection and stranded along with many of them in the Tri-Towers high-rise dorm.   “ALLISON KRAUSE telephoned her mother and told her what was going on… her mother told her not to get hurt.” [140]    The picture of the hard-core revolutionary emerging from clouds of tear gas, tucking her gun in her belt, and then calling her Mom may have been difficult to sustain.

            They encountered no such glitches with their dossier on Professor Tom Lough.   In fact, they were learning to use it as a wedge to open an offensive against all the “leftists” on the faculty.   They questioned a woman who had been in his Social Problems class right before the deadly convocation on the 4^th.   “The discussion was primarily concerning the burning of the ROTC Building.”   At the end of the class, “the professor, THOMAS LOUGH, said, ‘We’ll see you at the rally’.” [141]

            That was fairly innocuous.   But a member of the Political Science Department furnished the agents with a letter from a colleague, [C], who specifically charged Lough with inciting to riot that day.   The interviewee named two other faculty members, [C], who would bear witness against Lough for the same offense.   He told the FBI that there had been a “rump” session of the faculty May 5^th – after the Guard had shut down the campus – at a church in Akron and supplied copies of two resolutions passed there, which he deemed “subversive”.   Even now the agents could not keep from turning up something on Terry Norman.  One of Lough’s accusers admitted speaking to [C] at the scene of the shootings.   “He had a camera and he told me that some of the radical students had tried to seize his camera but were not successful.” [142]     (It seems credible that a faculty member informing on a colleague would discuss the confrontation with an informer for campus police and the FBI.)

            Since Williams had initially connected Lough with the Free Kent University, the agents opened a dossier on the FKU, covered by a blanket assessment offered by a senior office of the KSUPD.

 

                 [I]t was his opinion that the ‘Free Kent University’ was a Students for a Democratic Society based organization and that it was largely made up

            of radical and activist individuals.

                 [C] advised that publications put out by this organization were printed on a printing press at the residence of [C], Kent, Ohio.   ([C] – 2/3 line)

            the Student Religious Liberals. [143]

 

 

            [C] attached a crude catalogue put out by FKU which included course offerings in Zen Buddhism, World Peace, and Folk Guitar.   Someone has underlined the class titles Guerrilla Warfare, American Domestic Policy – Who Rules America?, Development of the US Labor Movement, Humanism in the Modern World, and The Revolution – Where It’s At – Where It’s Going. [144]

            Meanwhile, an agent working the streets spoke with an apartment manager who advised him that his quarry had moved recently.  A man and a woman with a baby had appeared to pick up his belongings.   The subject had never returned.   The agent asked if he could see the apartment and the landlord let him in.  The agent then recorded select titles from the bookshelves: a back number of The Militant, Meno Lowenstein on Capitalism, Communism, Socialism;  The Writings of  Leon Trotsky; and Louis E. Lomax, The National Revolt. [145]

 

 

            If the President was reading the fresh, unexpurgated FBI reports as they were generated, he had to know that the Bureau was even then crossing the line into the realm of policing thought crime.   It may have been that he scarcely minded.   Since his ordeal on the night of May 8^th-9^th, he had been more obsessed with the anti-war movement than ever.   He had flown into a rage at Ehrlichman’s hint that he had not made sense during his “dialogue” with the students at the Lincoln Memorial, and that the whole episode demonstrated how much he needed to rest.   He dictated a long memo which began “even when I am tired I do not talk about nonsensical things”.   It was Ehrlichman’s failing if he failed to understand the Presidential mission that night.   He had gone out among the students “to try to lift them a bit out of the miserable intellectual wasteland in which they now wander aimlessly around.” [146]

            Nor was venting in his reply to Ehrlichman enough to erase the trauma of that night and dawn.   He would trump the students by staging a monster rally of his own.   “B. Graham – bring ½  mill to DC for America    Graham   Gleason   J. Cash   use Legions  etc…   4^th of July    Stand Up for America day.”   Meanwhile the attack on the radical students and their treacherous professors would  be stepped up.   On the morning of the 13^th, “had J. Edgar in to discuss the new procedure for top material – only to me.   Hoover very pleased…   Dropped a few goodies about Kent State (later proved to be somewhat inaccurate) and then reviewed the whole conspiracy theory re campuses.” [147]     Interest in the arson and murder investigations was diminishing, as they looked less and less promising.   But the witchhunt was on.

 

              

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Three: Arch-Rads.

 

 

 

 

 

            (A note on notation: I am aware that the minority of readers who check references must be weary by now of the endless repetition of ibid. [a footnote citing the same source as a previous footnote].   Experimentation with the “short form” or “short title” variety of notation has proven it to be just as tedious [the endless repetition of FBI Report].    Since the rest of this book will also rely mainly on the FBI Report, I will attempt to break the monotony by citing the FBI Report in the footnotes the first time and for each reference in the text thereafter, placing the notation behind the last sentence quoted in the body of the text [i.e., 5, 2, 430, where 5 is the number of the release, 2 is the volume, and 430 is the page number.).

 

 

 

 

 

            Thursday, May 14^th.   Hoover’s deadline had arrived.   The Kent State investigation was to have been finished by noon.    The Bureau’s team had reason to expect the Director to be less than pleased with their work.   The interviews that day summed up more or less what they had already learned:

            The May 1^st rally on the Commons:  “none of the speakers preached violence or riot.”

            The riot on North Water Street, May 1^st:  “some individuals on motorcycles entered entered the town and caused a disturbance.”

            The Commons, May 2^nd:  “there were no speakers at this demonstration… most of the action was started by one individual student making a suggestive command and the crowd following him.” [148]    (or)

            “There was no apparent student organization and it appeared ‘leadership went to the loudest mouth.” (5, 1, 270).

            The ROTC fire, May 2^nd:

 

 

                 [I]t was common knowledge that many students preferred to see the building destroyed and he has heard that a group

            actually approached the building on Friday, May 1, 1970, but did not burn it because security forces were nearby. (6, 1, 58; EA*)

                                                                                                                                                                                    *EMPHASIS ADDED

 

 

                 [T]he stoning apparently alienated the main group, who moved on.   When the police did not respond to this initial assault,

            the students regrouped and returned to the ROTC building…   The police should have responded when the ROTC building was

            stoned and not to wait [sic] until it was burned. (5, 1, 334-335)

 

 

            The rally on the Commons, May 4^th:

 

 

                 [T]he people in the crowd Monday for the most part were students who had not taken part in previous demonstrations… most of the students were

            angered by the actions taken by the National Guard on Sunday evening. (5, 1, 254).

 

 

                 [H]e could give no reason for the National Guard firing at the students.   He heard no shots fired prior to the National Guard shooting…

            He was shocked with disbelief. (5, 1, 186)

 

 

            The only new thing they learned that day about the fire was that one of the more vivid tales of the evening – students cutting fire hose(s) – might have been a myth.   Some witnesses had reported seeing water spurt up and may have assumed that was the cause.   But one standing back from the crowd noticed that the sprinkler system out on the grass had been activated. (5, 1, 244)

            A passage that might have led to an arsonist remains so heavily censored, thirty years later, as to be useless:

 

                 On May 14, ([C] – two words) furnished a signed statement stating that a person she met at the ([C] – two to three words), Kent, Ohio,

            ([C] – one line), Kent State University (KSU) campus, the night of May 2, 1970, and started the fire from the inside of the building.   [C] did

            not know the identity of this person when he told her that he started the fire.   During the weekend of ([C] – four to five words) saw this man

            again and determined that his name is ([C] – two words) or ([C] – one word).

                 (Most of the next paragraph is blacked out). [149]

 

 

            And of course, someone else would have to report seeing Terry Norman.   Or was it Terry Norman?

 

 

                 [H]e saw some student wearing a gas mask, standing approximately ten yards from him.   [C] said he heard another student shout

            ‘Let’s go get him’, at which time he and eight other students advanced on the student wearing the gas mask.   He advised that this

            student wearing the gas mask drew a small caliber revolver from his clothing and pointed it at [C], then turned and ran without firing

            a shot. (5, 1, 90)

 

 

            But this gunman was described as wearing glasses and a long, dark topcoat, and brandishing a small dark handgun like a starter pistol (Norman’s was always described as “shiny” or “silver”).   Had there been  another undercover agent waving a gun at students?   Or was this a third civilian gunman (recall, above, the young woman who had seen a man pull a long-barreled weapon from under his cover and fire it)?

            But these irritants were minor; the investigation was embarked on a different course now.   Some of the agents returned to campus police headquarters and locator information on everyone who had had anything to do with Jerry Rubin’s speaking appearance at KSU that spring. (6, 3, 661)    Their colleagues working the street continued to canvass the town, on the track of “radicals”:

 

 

                 [C] further advised he has noticed a picture of MAO-TSE-TUNG on the wall of ([C] – two words)’s  apartment, and he had been told by

            ([C] – one line) that at one time ([C] – two words) had ‘Communist literature’ in their storage locker. (5, 2, 699)

 

 

            One woman, a two-year employee of the campus police, told them “she attended meetings of the groups on campus in order to report the content and participation at those meetings:

 

                 [S]he attended meetings of the Students for a Democratic Society and [the] Committee to End the War in Vietnam, [but] she was never able to

            establish in her mind how meetings were organized, who controlled the meetings while in session, and very seldom could identify the persons in

            attendance. (5, 2, 645)

 

 

            The agents fared better showing the photo albums to student body president Frank Frisina, who identified and provided thumbnail dossiers on any number of campus figures.   (Frisina had campaigned by distributing anti-SDS leaflets warning of “outside agitators”.   When, in 1967, the usually reactionary Daily Kent Stater student newspaper had printed a few letters to the editor critical of the Vietnam War, he had publicly asserted that the newspaper and the Kent Committee to End the War in Vietnam were part of the communist master conspiracy to undermine the Free World.) [150]     A sample of his capsule denunciations:

 

                 [S]he has been in some campus agitation but is believed by [C] to be used more than she is actually an aggressive participant…

                 He is probably leftist, but FRISINA has not known him to take part in campus agitations. (5,2, pp. 138-139).

 

 

            Doggedly, they pursued their favorite student radical.   “([C] – three to four words), a friend of ALLISON KRAUSE, who was killed during the incident ([C] – one half line).   Both KRAUSE ([C] – two words) were in his ([C] – two words) class at Bowman Hall, which was taught by Dr. FNU ([C] – two words).

(5, 2, npn.).   A link between the Bureau’s femme fatale and the evil genius of the faculty?  Tom Lough had given his “inflammatory” lecture in Bowman just before the shootings.   From what little survives of the document, it is impossible to tell.

            And who was to say that there was only one evil genius on the faculty?    At any rate, there were plenty of sources; like the students, the professors proved only too ready to come forward with evidence against their peers.   A university official reported that a professor had phoned him on May 3^rd to report an emergency meeting of as many faculty members as could be assembled on short notice, that same morning.   They wanted to discuss the state of emergency with President White.   While some went to find him, twenty-three of the ones who stayed behind drafted a resolution calling for the end of martial law on campus.   It also deplored the invasion of Cambodia and called for the impeachment of President Nixon, which led some present to refuse to sign it.   The next six lines are blacked out.   The FBI opened a dossier on the “23 Concerned Faculty” members who did sign. (5, 2, ______).

            A professor accused Tom Lough and his friend Elaine Wellin of appearing at a memorial service for the dead students, held at the University of Indiana at Bloomington and collecting funds for the one hundred seventy KSY students still being held on “open charges”.   He enclosed in its entirety an article from the Indiana Daily Student, which he found subversive, although in it Lough and Wellin counsel the Indiana students to avoid violence.   “[H]e was highly incensed over the statements made buy LOUGH and WELLIN… and he made his protest by walking out of the meeting.” (6, 3, 493-495, with enclosure). [151]

            As always, the agents started with the campus police, and as always, the result was less than satisfying.   A KSUPD spokesman dismissed Lough as “a campus agitator and a faculty member who would engage in any and all forms of protest”, and connecting him vaguely with the SDS and the KCEWV, “both of which organizations are considered subversive”. (5, 2, _______).   But he supplied nothing that could connect Lough with violence.     However, two University employees accused him of “agitating” on the day of the killings, at the Hub, the aptly-named food service and social center of the Student Union.   One said he had charged in minutes after the volley and demanded of a group of students, “Are we going to take this lying down?”   “LOUGH was wearing a handkerchief around his neck and in her opinion LOUGH had used the handkerchief to avoid breathing tear gas.”   When she approached to ask him what he was doing, he got up and left “with a young girl” (who was described in great detail). (5, 2, 680).

            Her co-worker said Lough had been in and out of the Hub on the morning of the 4^th.   Another employee told her that he had called the campus radio station on the 3^rd and had “made several inflammatory statements”.   He had not given his name on the air, but “she recognized the voice as that of Dr. Lough.”   After the shootings, Lough returned to the Hub “urging the students to go back outside and run the ‘pigs’ off campus – ‘Are you going to just sit there and do nothing?’”   That was useful, but then she added something that might have gone into the “forget to follow up” file:   Someone else had come into the Hub looking for “some girls” – a white male, “about 30 years old, was 5’10” tall, weighed 160 pounds, dark brown hair, neatly cut, wearing a light brown suit and tie.”   He found the “girl” he was looking for, and left with her and several of her female companions; “she considered this group of girls…  as belonging to the many of the activist and anti-war groups on the campus.” (5, 2, 681)

            Armed with class rosters provided by the University, the agents were already tracking down Lough’s Social Problems students.   The first they cornered replied that Lough had given out the questions that would be on the “mid-term” on May 6^th (?).   One of the questions implied “that the Professor was going to demonstrate how to make a Molotov cocktail prior to the exam”.   But the witness cut class on the 4^th and did not know if he had missed that lecture. (5, 2, 683).    A second student “described LOUGH’s political or social philosophies as one who advocates change and will do anything to effect it, excluding open violence.”   The Molotov lecture?  “he was doing this as an analogy to the English who had published the Smythe report on the work of the assemblage of the Atom bomb”, and as a gesture of contempt for the Daily Kent Stater, which had condemned others of his lectures as subversive.   Having exonerated Lough to this extent, however, the same student went on to say that Lough had accompanied the lecture with

 

                 a one-page drawing of  a molotov  cocktail which, in itself, was sufficient information in [sic] the construction of a molotov cocktail.

            LOUGH went into considerable detail concerning the history of the molotov  cocktail

 

 

which included tips on how to load it with gasoline so that it would explode with optimum effect.   The same source also accused him of inviting “various radicals” to speak in front of his classes: an SDS member who “advocated ‘doing away with people’ who got in the way of ends or goals”; a black woman who “advocated ‘burning and killing’”; and a black man supposedly a veteran of the riots in New Jersey.(5, 2, 675-676) [152]

            A female student provided the agents with the mimeographed sheet of exam questions and pointed out that the purpose of the Molotov question was entirely symbolic.

 

                 ‘Question 75’ in this set dealt with the fact that information concerning Molotov Cocktails would be give out and then gave three alternative answers

            as reasons for this.   [C] indicated the correct answer was to show the relationship between secrecy and self-discipline. (5, 2, 685)

 

 

            A male classmate expanded on the idea of the question’s philosophical implications.   Lough’s real aim had been to illustrate the hypocrisy inherent in the fact that “instead of spending millions on poverty, the United States is spending millions on secrecy.

 

                 LOUGH then stated that if anyone wanted to know how to make a Molotov cocktail, all they had to do was go to a book in any local library as

            it was no big secret as to making incendiary devices. (6, 3, 490)

 

 

            Meanwhile word had been spreading around campus about the nature of the FBI’s inquiry, and the first hints of resistance were appearing.   The agents called on one faculty member who had been identified from the photo album as having been in the Commons area during one of the demonstrations.    But he declined to inform on his colleagues or to tell them anything else

 

                 since the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had made certain comments through the news media in the recent past, he doubted the

            investigative neutrality of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (6, 3, 601).

 

 

            But then, Sullivan had felt the Bureau’s biggest handicap had been the current Director for some time now.

 

 

 

            Friday, May 15^th.   It had been a week since the President’s darkest hour:  the press conference, the all-night telephone marathon, and the bizarre pilgrimage to the Memorial.   Haldeman had been hanging on until he could get his chief away for a vacation in Florida, and think of some way of calming him down.

 

                 The whole period of two weeks of tension & crisis preceded by two weeks of very tough decision making has taken its toll.   P. won’t admit it –

            but he is really tired, and is, as some have observed, letting himself slip back into the old ways…   All of this OK if he can unwind this weekend –

            and if nothing big come[s] up in the interim.   But could be tough if a new crisis arises cause he’s not ready to handle it [153]

 

 

            Unfolding events would not be conducive to calming anyone.   As Nixon finally winged toward Key Biscayne, his Florida retreat, far below and a few hundred miles to the west at the primarily black University of Mississippi at Jackson, students gathered around a women’s dormitory, Alexander Hall.   They were not there for a panty raid, but to protest the expanding war and the presence of ROTC on campus.   A small army of National Guard and state highway patrol gathered around them in turn.   In response to a sound in the darkness – the police claimed a shot from a sniper, the students a can or bottle hitting a pavement – a supernova of muzzle flashes lit up the sky, “a thousand rounds in seven seconds, all kinds of shotguns, rifles, pistols, handguns, everything.” [154]     Only the fact that they were firing blind held the fatalities to two.   One of the highway patrol inspectors called in, “You better send some ambulances.   We killed some niggers.” [155]

            At the beginning of the week, the police had already killed six black men in Augusta, Georgia, all six shot in the back with the standard load of 00 buckshot. [156]    Three had been bystanders caught up in the rioting following the protracted torture-murder of a retarded black youth in the city jail. [157]     These racially explosive incidents led Vice President Spiro Agnew to call J. Edgar Hoover to ask for photos of blacks looting Augusta.  (He pointed out what a wonderful job Governor Ronald Reagan had done in using such easy-to-understand visual aids to excuse official violence in California.)   Hoover replied, “I said they were severely provoked at Kent, and we will finish Augusta, Atlanta, and Jackson this week.” [158]     Haldeman’s hopes that the President could relax were doomed from the first day.   The President spent much of it fuming over a media “conspiracy” to underestimate the size of the crowd that had greeted him at the airport.   He devoted the rest to devising new initiatives against the Cambodia backlash and the student movement. [159]    As noted above, his psychiatrist flew in for a “house call”, but found it impossible to reach his patient.    Nixon was not interested in communicating with anyone except allies against the encroaching sea of enemies, whose ranks had now been swollen by much of black America.

            Does this explain why the agents of the KENFOUR team were not allowed to pack their bags, to flee the less-than-cosmopolitan Ohio hamlet on the Cuyahoga?   Both deadlines had come and gone.   But now the investigation moved into overdrive.   And, with the shooting phase all but ignored since the Guardsmen’s virtual confessions on the 7^th, it concentrated solely on the ROTC fire.    The same anomaly recurred almost immediately, as soon as they started interviewing witnesses on the 15^th.    A Geauga County deputy sheriff  -- one of the lawmen called in to help Portage County from other jurisdictions during the crisis – recalled arriving on the night of May 2^nd in time to be confronted with the smoldering remains of the ROTC building.   He asked a fireman whether any weapons had been removed from the site.   Then he “forced his way” into the arms room.   Whether he was a Guardsman himself or not, he was sure that the wooden cabinet he saw there was meant to store sidearms.   “He was unable to locate any .45 caliber pistols in the arms room and feels certain that some would be there.” (5, 1, 490).   Questions about the Guard’s .45 pistols – where they were on the 4^th and who might have fired them – continued to proliferate in the following

years. [160]

 

            Two weeks after the event, and with still no idea who had burned the ROTC building, the agents now plunged deep into the interlocking networks of university informers.   Thus their report stands as a fascinating, if unencouraging, document of the American university police state as of 1970.    As they learned while pursuing the Pepsi bottle caper, the key apparat operated through the All-Student Housing office.   The Resident Counselors were the senior agents, frequently graduate students; they operated dormitory receptionists – who were in a unique position to observe the comings, goings, and associations of students – and cultivated amateur informers among the students.   For instance, with regard to the situation on the Commons as of 8:00 p.m. May 3^rd,

 

                 At this point, he ran ahead of the crowd and went to a telephone in Manchester Hall and called the Residence Counselor.   He told the Counselor

            of the growing crowd…

                 At approximately 10:30 or 11:00 p.m., [C] noted that ([C] – two words) who had been outside with the demonstrators, returned to Manchester Hall…

            [C] heard [C] mention to someone that they should be at the rally Monday at noon and ‘We’ll put an end to this’.

 

 

Sometimes it became difficult to follow who was following whom:

 

 

                 [C] recalls that on Sunday, May 3, 1970, ([C] – one line) in Wright Hall, told [C] , who is a freshman from [C] and who also lives on the [C] floor in

            Manchester Hall, to follow [C] on Sunday evening and [C] assumes that [C] was asking to have [C] followed because [C] is an activist in demonstrations.

            [C] knows that [C] in turn told ([C] – one line) to follow [C] that Sunday afternoon and evening. (6, 2, 233-236)

 

 

            There was of course the administrative management of the University, which used a few key persons to spy on everyone.   One such told agents that after the ROTC fire, he had gone to the Guard command post to identify himself as KSU’s official liaison with the Guard.   He provided the agents with a list of the reporters on the scene then.   There was some redundancy to this, because most of the “reporters” were from the campus newspaper and radio station, and thus working for the KSU media surveillance arm.   But, after viewing the FBI photo albums, this person was also able to “make” CBS News reporter Ike Pappas and one of his support crews. (5, 1, 370-376)

            One of the student “reporters” he identified as being there that night was Bill Armstrong, a notorious campus ultra-rightist, who as editor of the Daily Kent Stater had been providing information to campus security on subversives since the days of the Kent Committee to End the War in Vietnam. [161]   The director of WKSU, the “student” radio station, Bob Carpenter, actually “wired” his “reporter” Margaret Murvay to tape interviews with local and visiting radicals.   Murvay, who was working for campus security at the time, promptly testified against her interviewees before the House Internal Security Committee. [162]

            Now Armstrong unerringly guided the agents through the Stater’s clipping file.   With a nod to Professor Lough, and what Williams had identified as his subversive peer group, he steered them to a file he had kept for two years back on the Kent Free University.   He accused instructor Ron Weisburger of being its founder and Rick Erickson of participating in FKU’s “discussions of the philosophies and writings of HERBERT MARCUSE”.   Another section of the files was devoted to FKU’s activities as lynchpin of the radical conspiracy.   Among its course offerings: Man and His Environment; Science Fiction; Poverty in America; Blues; Anarchism seminar; Folk Guitar, and, tentatively, Astrology and Pathayoga.   Armstrong identified Lough as one of the instructors. (5, 2, 643-644)

            The agents were able to turn up less on the WHORE, the World Historians Opposed to Racism and Exploitation, the group that had organized a noon rally on campus May 1^st to protest the invasion of Cambodia.   One history major said that he had been told by “other members of the department” that the “group formed as a joke”. (6, 3, 602)   A graduate student told them that the WHORE had been sponsored by the NUC (New University Conference), but he refused to supply the names of NUC members who had attended the May 1^st rally.   He did furnish a copy of one of the speeches (the speaker, [C], was Chris Plant) accusing President Nixon of violating constitutional law by invading a neutral country without a declaration of war, and of trying to turn the constitutional system of three branches of government into a dictatorship.   Nowhere did he advocate violence. (5, 2, 660)  

            A check with [C], “University records”, yielded a letter advising the Provost, Louis Harris, of the formation of NUC and asking for its recognition.   Its stated goals were “a) The changing of the grading system” and “b) An overall structural change on KSU campus”.   No radical violence there, but the letter was signed by Dr. Thomas Lough, so it went into the dossier.   The records office attached a list of names and addresses of faculty members of NUC. (6, 3, 472)   For more on the NUC and the May 1^st rally, the agents returned to the campus police, this time in the person of Detective Tom Kelly.   He identified the speakers at the rally as Ralph Bevilaqua, Bobby Franklin, Steve Sheroff [sic], and Ken Hammond.

 

                 FRANKLIN’s statements were more militant and called for violence.   However, he could not recall any specific statements made by FRANKLIN…

            he said that [Ruth] GIBSON’s statements called for the destruction of accepted American institutions.   Here again he could not recall any specific

            statements made by GIBSON. (5, 2, 662-663).

 

 

            The hunt for radicals continued to turn up what might turn out to be the wrong people.   A female freshman remembered seeing five males, four white and one “very dark, but not a Negro… very black straight hair and looked very much like an American Indian” sitting in the lounge of Metcalf Hall around midday on May 2^nd.   All wore their hair short.   One told her he went to school in Pennsylvania, another that he worked in a steel mill; “they might have been ‘high on dope’…   They told her that some guy from ‘public relations’ had called them down to Kent.” (6, 2, 136)

            The FBI had in Kent had opened dossiers on the slain students on reflex.   This proved as counter-productive as unearthing possible rightist operatives while looking for radicals.   The file on Bill Schroeder – star basketball player, ROTC scholarship cadet, all-American boy – had never really had a chance.   The only item of subversive innuendo they could turn up on him came from one of his Military Science professors.   The officer had “counseled” Schroeder about “his hair not being kept in accordance with military standards” and failing to show up to help guide ROTC scholarship candidates around the campus.   The officer furnished agents with a copy of an unsigned memo of the counseling session that alleged Schroeder “had seriously considered fleeing to Canada to get out of his contract (i.e., his contract to go on active duty on graduation, probably in Vietnam). (5, 1, 35-36).

            The investigation of Sandra Lee Scheuer was as embarrassing as it was intensive.   They probed catalogued her biographical data, transcripts, academic and/or social probationary status, organizations belonged to, dating habits, and political views.   The last category was the most succinct; as far as anyone on campus could tell, “Space”, as she was known to her contemporaries, didn’t have any political views.   She had enrolled in Kent prepare for a career in educating people with speech defects.   Aside from that, she wanted to find “a nice Jewish boy” and get married   When the “heavy” topics of the day came up, she dodged them by making jokes.   The only negative on her was that she giggled too much. [163]

            Jeffrey Glenn Miller, the third victim, may have seemed like a better prospect.   He had worn his hair long – on May 4^th, restrained by a headband – and had been seen taunting and shying stones at the Guard.   But in the ten days following the killings, the FBI had been able to turn up nothing more on him.   On the 14^th, however, they got to interrogate a female acquaintance of his at length.   She had left the campus at two on the afternoon of the 2^nd and had not returned until 8:00 PM on the 3^rd.   A half hour later, she saw a crowd gathering on the Commons and went out to see what was happening.  By nine, she had bumped into Miller, who told her, “They burned the ROTC Building… ([C] – two words) MILLER ([C] – three words) watch it, there may be trouble, they let them get away with it for two nights and there may be trouble.”  

 

                 It was her impression that MILLER did not know who burned the ROTC Building…  She stated that ([C] – 2/3 line) she never heard JEFF MILLER

            propose any type of violence and although he was against the war in Vietnam, he did not dwell on that…  she never knew of any groups or politically active

            groups of which MILLER had been associated with though that she does recall that in the wintertime he might have belonged to a hockey team (6, 2, 126)

 

 

            That left only Allison Krause.   And on that same day, they logged an accusation against her made by a coed who had lived on the same residence hall, that Krause had been “treating herself for syphilis, was considered to by of loose moral character, and associated with a great many of the male students.” (2, 19, 6)   But when they tracked the lead to Student Health, they learned that she had only used the facility three times, twice for colds, and once for a bruised knee.   Simultaneously, county coroner Robert Sybert released his findings that, among other things, he had found no trace of venereal disease in either of the murdered women. (2, 19, 34).  

            Then they did one interview too many: this time with [C] – from the context, Bonnie Henry, the inseparable companion of both Krause and Levine.   Henry was emphatic about Krause’s monogamous relationship with Levine.   She had qualified for the Honors College as a freshman, but had transferred to Liberal Arts so she could take classes with him.   “Allison was not really close to anyone but [C] but she helped other students scholastically…   When ALLISON not reading or studying, she spent most of her leisure time with ([C] – two lines). (6, 2, 77).   In a typically redundant section of the report, censored differently, this reads,  “When ALLISON was not studying or reading, she spent most of her leisure time with BARRY, with whom she was in love.” (2,  19, 7).

            Worse still, Henry could account for most of Krause’s time throughout the four-day confrontation.   The threesome had been downtown on North Water Street the evening of the 1^st, but had left as soon as the trouble started, Krause voicing loud disdain for the vandals.   The two women were together on the Commons after dark on May 2^nd, but Krause decided not to join the crowd at the ROTC building and stayed on the hillside by Taylor Hall throughout the fire.

They did lose touch with each other on the 3^rd, because Henry “holed up” in her room, too terrified of the Guard to come out during the occupation.    Krause came by her room on the morning of the 4^th to try to encourage her friend to come to the noon rally.   But Henry was still too afraid of the soldiers, and Krause, remembering she had to meet Levine on the Commons at noon, rushed off when she realized she might be late.   (Photos of the demonstration show her alternately running and walking across the front of the crowd, looking for him, and finally reunited with him on the hillside just before the Guard moved out.)   So when would she have had time to force her way into a dormitory rest room in the company of two “hippie-type” girls and fill up the Pepsi bottles?   And why did she ditch the bottles before arriving at the rally? she is not seen holding anything in the photographs.   Henry had frequently been in Krause’s room and had never seen a gun or any other kind of weapon.   “ALLISON had no purpose in going to the rally at noon Monday other than as an observer and to see first hand what was going on like other students.” (6, 19, 78-79).

            The day’s labors on the Lough dossier were almost as discouraging.   An audience member during his eyewitness at Oberlin College recalled, “Professor LOUGH’s position was very general in manner and not inflammatory in any respect.” (5, 2, 689)   The agents returned as ever to the campus police, who had virtually nothing new: the connection with the Student Mobilization Committee and the Free Kent University (this time they claimed that Lough gave the Molotov lecture while teaching for the FKU; a clipping from the Cincinnati Inquirer from October 1969 about a flap in the state legislature concerning professors giving instructions on Molotov construction (it did not name Lough, but the KSUPD insisted further investigation would have implicated him); his speech at Bloomington and another at Case Western.

            A Kent State professor offered himself as a fount of derogatory information on Lough, but immediately admitted that “most of the information that he had developed regarding the activities of… LOUGH… was second-hand knowledge…  but felt this information would be of value.   The specific accusations were:

            Prior to the 1968 Democratic National Convention he had seen bumper stickers around campus that read “Confrontation in Chicago”.   He had also seen one on Lough’s car.   “[S]omeone had told him that LOUGH was responsible for the placing of these stickers.”

            “[C] continued that he had heard that a student, whose identity he did not know, could testify in court that THOMAS LOUGH had taught some of his graduate students how to make firebombs.”

            He said that another [C] had a drawing “showing construction steps in the making of firebombs” distributed to students by Lough the previous year.

            And he knew someone else who claimed that Lough had urged students to riot, and someone else who would testify that Lough was in Fred Fuller Park showing the students how to riot. (5, 2, 687)

            There is no record of any followup to these charges.

            In the midst of this rumor-recycling, the agents got a diversion, if perhaps an unwelcome one.   The dorms had been ransacked by, in successive and sometimes overlapping searches, the campus police, the National Guard, the FBI, and state patrol detectives.   Now county prosecutor Ronald Kane held a press conference to display the radical weapons and drug caches that had been seized, and acted sorry that the reporters had shown up.   He maintained a testy silence while Captain [FNU] Hayth of the OSHP (Ohio State Highway Patrol), after announcing he wouldn’t comment on the display, commented on each item in it.   An empty wine bottle must have been used for smoking narcotics.   Pills of any kind were also narcotics; “It turns from opiates to syringes, antibiotics, vitamins… “

 

Q.    I see a fire hose nozzle that was probably taken off a dormitory fire hose to be used as a trumpet.   Ah, how is this a weapon?

A.     It makes a real handy mace, if it’s picked up by the little end.

Q.    Also makes a real handy noise.

A.     Right, right --  [164]

 

 

            Not-so-subdued cackling ran through the ranks of the press, as word went around that the syringe had belonged to a diabetic, that several of the guns on the long table were cap pistols, and that the campus police had been forced to fire one of its detectives who had stolen thirty dollars from a student during the search. [165]     Three days later, venting to the local establishment at the Lion’s Club, Kane claimed the coverage had been “distorted” and – remarkably, for a man to whom the FBI would surrender the investigation in a matter of weeks – that this whole Kent State business was being “overplayed”. [166]

 

 

            Saturday, May 16^th.   The agents met with two KSU employees, faculty or more probably administration, to get more information on the 23 Concerned Faculty.   The respondents replied that

 

                 to their knowledge the identity of these 23 is not generally available but that they would bet that many of the people listed as being active with the NUC

            would be identical with the 23 Concerned Faculty. (5, 1, 651)

 

 

            So the agents went to “University records”, got a copy of the NUC mailing list attached to a letter in the correspondence files, and showed it to a campus police officer.   “[H]e recognized their names as belonging to the extremely active individuals involved in campus activist and anti-war groups.” (6, 2, 653).   They took back to the two original interviewees and used it as a refresher to elicit new condemnations.   They of course had the most to say about Tom Lough.   But they accused him of only one additional crime:

 

                 LOUGH is currently associated with the Akron Community Program, which is a Government Assistance program…

                 …several State vehicles have been observed in New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities parked at locations near groups of leftist people and

            checks to determine to whom this car is assigned have determined it was signed out to LOUGH at the time. (5, 2, 655-656).

 

 

            Once again, with a campus cop in tow, they returned to the Daily Kent Stater clipping files to squeeze them for whatever else they had on Lough:

            11/19/68, he had spoken at an SDS teach-in on campus.

            1/10/69, he was on the faculty of the Free Kent University.

            4/23/69, he was a member of 3-C (Concerned Citizens for the [Kent] Community).

            (Date [C]): he “was a member of a panel formed to discuss MALCOLM X’s life and ideas as part of a commemoration of MALCOLM X.”

            (Undated): “LOUGH was quoted as saying, ‘Faculty members who came out in support of the administration during the recent crisis [the incident at the Music and Speech Building] gave their support blindly.” (5, 2, 690-703)

            They also came up with articles on the SDS and its four demands (10/29/69), a demonstration against ROTC led by Mark Rudd (11/16/69), a joint demonstration by SDS and the Student Religious Liberals against ROTC (5/21/69), and the crimes of SRL leader Vince Maduga, including announcing Jerry Rubin’s appearance on campus (4/2/69). (6, 3, 680 and 687).

            A University official told them that a student had told him in the summer of 1969 that Lough had passed out a diagram of a Molotov Cocktail in class.  Another school functionary, [C], had confronted Lough about this, and the accused had replied that the diagram had appeared on the August 24, 1967 cover of the New York Review of Books and that he had used it to illustrate a point during a lecture. (6, 3, 477)   A Social Problems student stated that “Dr. LOUGH made some passing reference to an article in ‘Popular Science’ concerning Molotov Cocktails.” (6, 3, 498).  

            When they tried to get information from a faculty member on the New University Conference, he started to comply, then “in an angry manner stated that he considered the interview concluded, that he was not signing the rights form, and ushered the Agents to the door and slammed the door as the Agents departed”(5, 2, 664) – the kind of punctuation they were beginning to get more frequently.

 

 

            Sunday, May 17^th.    The KENFOUR team conducted only three interviews.   It was not religious scruples that dictated this kind of inactivity; the investigation had first gotten up a head of steam on Sunday the 10^th.   Were Cusick and Sullivan hoping that their own pled-for deadline of the 18^th might be observed after all?

            The young woman they spoke to could offer nothing as an eyewitness.   She had been working the evenings of May 1^st through the 3^rd.   She had come out to the campus on Monday the 4^th at 11:30 AM to pick up her girlfriend, and had left with her at half past noon, but stated she had seen or heard nothing of the confrontation.   She later attended a Saturday evening party (date [C]) but claimed no one there mentioned the burning of ROTC, nor had she.   Beginning with the next paragraph, censorship renders her statement progressively more incoherent.   It appears that she may have returned to the same apartment and an occupant she met in the hall said someone concerning another resident named “Aquinas”.   Two-thirds of this paragraph are censored.   The following paragraph is blacked out completely except for three white spaces containing the name”AQUINAS”.

            In what survives of the next two paragraphs, the name “Aquinas” appears along with two repetitions of Sandra Scheuer’s.   In the fifth, Aquinas is quoted to the effect “that the first thing young people should do is to attempt to convince their parents that what is happening on the college campuses today is right and that if they cannot convince their parents, they should kill their parents”.   [C] correctly compares this statement to the statements made by Jerry Rubin during his visit to Kent State and elsewhere.   In the fragments legible through the next two pages, [C] tries to recruit the source for some unnamed radical organization. (6, 2, 288-292)

            The second interview is ostensibly with a different woman (at least, the physical description of her varies slightly from that of the first) but much of it is a verbatim repetition of what the first said.   Were it not for the anachronism involved, one might be entitled to suspect that the paragraphs had been manipulated on a word processor or computer.    The crucial difference is that most of the first paragraph involving “Aquinas” – the one that was completely deleted in the previous statement, but for three repetitions of his name – survives.

 

                 [C](LNU), according to ([C] – one line) that AQUINAS, the person who lives in ([C] – 2/3 line) is a ‘freaky’ looking guy, but he is a beautiful person

            and ([C] – four words) AQUINAS’ bravery because AQUINAS was at the ROTC building, right there with the top guys who started the fire.

            [C](LNU) stated he did not have enough guts to have started that fire or do any burning himself so far.   [C] described AQUINAS as slender build,

            light or brownish beard, long, 5’7” and possibly 130 to 135 pounds. (6, 2, 294-296)

 

 

            A campus policeman contributed more on Tom Lough.   At half past noon on the 4^th, he had been dispatched on a call involving a “hysterical female student” in the Union.   When he got there and started to try to calm her down, they drew a crowd; “some of these hippie types looked like they had not changed their clothes for two years”.   One of the onlookers had announced that the Guard had fired on the students “for no reason”.   The campus cop had replied that the ONG could not have fired their weapons for no reason.   At this point Lough broke in, saying, “I’ll tell you what happened.   The Guard is on campus and students have been murdered.”   The cop told Lough he should not use that word.   Lough replied, “I know what happened; I was there.   Those students were murdered,” adding that “all the students had been unarmed and not a rock was thrown.” (6, 3, 479).

 

 

            Monday, May 18^th.    A few promising new leads appeared, and turned sour just as fast.   A student recalled being drawn outside on the evening of the 3^rd by the sight and racket of students marching and the Guard firing tear gas.   There he heard two young men making “inflammatory speeches”; “both of the speakers made inferences that led [C] to believe that the speakers themselves may have participated in the destruction of the ROTC or knew who did.”   He quoted one as  saying, “Tomorrow we’ll have to assemble.   We’re going to have to get the pigs off campus.   There are four other wooden buildings we’ll have to burn.”   But aside from the barest rudiments of physical descriptions, he could provide no information with which the FBI could locate the suspects. (6, 2, 43-44).

            Another key player made a belated first appearance: the black militant.  A freshman reported seeing a “negro male” brandishing a machete and taunting the police in the early hours of the second, after the riot on North Water Street.   He introduced himself to the source as a Black Panther from Chicago who was “going to show you guys how to riot”.   He showed up again at the ROTC building that evening, carrying the machete “and a box in his hand which was about 6 inches square”. (6, 2, 344-345).   Radical or provocateur?   There was no way to tell because their was no way to locate him; the physical description was too general.

            And then there was the inevitable witness who had seen “one man with a pistol running towards the National Guard and believes that this man also was carrying a camera and may have had a gas mask on.” (6, 2, 142-145).    (Was there anyone on campus who hadn’t seen Terry Norman?)

            Evidence against Tom Lough got more diluted and qualified as it came in, perhaps because now it was coming from students who had heard him teach, instead of campus security and jealous faculty rivals.   A coed stated Lough told the class he would show them a “leaflet [sic]… printed on the front page of a nationally subscribed [sic] magazine” showing the construction of a Molotov.   But on the 4^th he did not produce it as promised and “it was forgotten” (6, 3, 499).  

A male classmate remembered that day’s “lecture” as being rather an open discussion of the weekend’s events “and Professor LOUGH gave a small dissertation against the use of violence.”

 

                 [C] stated that he had heard a great deal of talk that the FBI was investigating Dr. LOUGH involving the use of Molotov Cocktails… the only

            comments that LOUGH had made pertaining to this was that anyone could learn how to make a Molotov Cocktail simply by going to an encyclopedia. (6,             3, 504-505).

 

 

                 A graduate student sought out the “FBI spaces at KSU, identifying herself as a newly-appointed member of a group formed to open up a dialogue among students, faculty, and townspeople.   She wanted the agents to know that some of the first feedback it had picked up from the latter involved scary rumors of an anti-student vigilante group forming in town. (6, 3, 720-721)   There is no sign that the FBI followed up.

            The G-men traveled to Canton to interview their key witness from the “subversive house” in the presence of her parents.   After she had given a lengthy statement about the events of May 1^st through 4^th, they abruptly asked her about the phone call received at the house from someone stating it had taken three flares to burn the ROTC building.   She denied that the person who had taken the call had “announced” this as its content after hanging up, then reversed herself.   The agents warned her about the legal penalties for lying to federal officers and confronted her with discrepancies in the times of events she had recounted.   She agreed that “she could not be sure of the times and she could be off by as much as an hour.”

            Then they told her that “certain individuals” had stated that she had told them about four men entering the house and claiming that they had just burned ROTC, and that she told “another person” that ([C] – five individuals) had burned ROTC.   “She vehemently denied making any such statements and that she knew in advance about the arson.”   She replied that things she had said must have been “misconstrued”.   They moved on to the report that she had been frightened about what “the Project” might do to her if she failed to conform to their destructive plans (see above, May 8^th).   She said that she didn’t know of any “Project” – then, that they must have confused the Akron Housing Project (a student-to-ghetto outreach program) with some radical organization.   “She also stated the remarks were taken out of context.” (7, p. 90 [Release 7 consists of a single volume]).   (In sum, she gave every appearance of cooperating, actually told the agents nothing, frequently reversed herself or changed the subject, and kept her poise under extended grilling laced with threats of federal prosecution.)

            To that extent, it had been another frustrating day for the feds.   But then came one incredible break.   A doctoral candidate working in the top residence administration job at the high-rise dormitory complex, Tri-Towers, told of his building being stormed by “approximately 300 demonstrators” escaping the National Guard sweep on the night of the 3^rd.   The refugees were beating on the doors, pleading to be let in; mustering his “staff of 30”, admitted them.   He claimed that Allison Krause was among the first to enter, shouting obscenities (which he quoted liberally).   The fugitives crowded into the rotunda of the lounge area, where he alleged they listened to radical speakers exhort them to all manner of mayhem.   [C] identified around sixty of them as “hard-core militants, including Krause, ([C] – three words; probably “and Barry Levine”).   While he was trying to calm the students, Allison and Barry “continuously shouted obscenities at him and acted extremely hysterical”.   [C] became “disgusted” with Levine and “and [C] had to push him down.   At this point ALLISON struck [C] with her hand.”   He added that “ALLISON KRAUSE was known to be a ‘freak’”, which he explained had supplanted the term “hippie” as “one who is dirty in his dress and who advocates resistance to present policies.” (6, 2, ______). [167]

            Allison Krause, radical, had been reborn.   Could she still be linked with the Pepsi bottle story?   There were still problems.   The original story had involved three women and had been set on the morning of May 4^th, just before the noon rally.   (The implication of the informers was that the women were filling the bottles with urine so they could throw them at the Guard.)   One of them could not be Allison because she was was either Barry or Bonnie Henry before the confrontation.   One of the informers had re-tailored it on the 13^th; this time the incident took place on the 3^rd, the cast became two women and one man, and one of the informers only suspected, but did not see, the women urinating in the bottles. (1, 10, 910).    The version offered by Crzyston now didn’t mention bottles of any kind.   Krause is (as always) with Levine, but the other two women are missing.   Krause is not depicted entering a rest room.   The story still needed work.   But a master of lurid fiction was even then on his way to Kent.

 

            Despite this one break, the level of investigative activity had tailed off sharply.   Again, in the absence of any admission by the FBI that records of the decision-making process directing it even exist, one is entitled to speculate about events that might have influenced the pace of the KENFOUR team.   For one, the President had gone off for his long weekend in Florida, which Haldeman had hoped would help slow his chief’s manic tempo.   According to Haldeman, it didn’t work out:                                                                                                                                                                                 

 

                 Friday, May 15^th.   In K[ey] B[iscayne].   The unwinding process is not succeeding.   P. on the phone every few minutes w/ little things to f/u on.

            Wants new poll on Student protest.

                 Saturday, May 16.    In KB.   More of the same.    He just keeps grinding away --- call after call after call…  he sure has not gotten his mind off of

            business…   I talked him into considering at least staying over ‘til Monday.

                 Sunday, May 17.   …Wants Agnew to take {Clark] Clifford & the other turncoats on…   still determined not to let down on follow-through. [168]

 

 

            J. Edgar Hoover had visited the White House on the 13^th and 14^th, just before the President left for Florida.   Apparently he either called or visited him there on the 15^th.   On the 16^th, the Presidential attention was consumed with heading off the Cooper-Church Amendment, a Senate proposal to cut off funds for the military in Cambodia.   Sunday was devoted as usual to assessing the week-end print and electronic media analyses of the issues, which Nixon as usual found pregnant with dastardly assaults on his leadership.   This provided a redundant hardening of the President’s world view:  “we can now fight more brutally than before   no illusions that we can gain by wooing opposition”. [169]

            And on Monday, he was already on his way back to Washington, and Hoover was in touch with him as soon as he got in --  perhaps even before he left.   Did he report on the results of the KENFOUR investigation?   Nixon, in his unabated mood of truculence, may have found them wanting.   Alone with Haldeman on the flight back, he had broached the subject of removing Richard Helms as head of the CIA. [170]    Soon his growing conviction that both the CIA and the FBI were falling down on the job of subversive hunting would lead him to form his own White House intelligence service, the Plumbers, members of whom would be arrested in the Watergate apartment complex two years later.   Whatever of his other powers his advanced age had eroded, Hoover retained an exquisite sense of the presidential impatience with the Bureau’s efforts.   This alone might have prompted him to restart an investigation that was running on empty.

 

            Tuesday, May 19.   The students were finally being allowed back on campus to pick up their personal belongings, giving the agents a freshly-stocked trout stream.   They were immediately able to pick up more information on the latest addition to their cast of villains, the black militant.   A freshman had seen a “Negro male” carrying a machete at Lincoln and Main Streets after the riot on North Water Street.   He was described as age 20-22 years, 6’ – 6’1” tall, 140 pounds, Afro type haircut, and who wore a long bullet around his neck.”   This man told the source that “he had been in Vietnam and was a member of the Black Panthers from Chicago.”   The witness saw the black man again around nine on the evening of the 3^rd, carrying a tan briefcase “10 X 12 X 5” with the name “Al Tate” taped onto it. (6, 2, 31-32).

            A classmate had seen “a Negro boy” at around one a.m. on the 2^nd, also at Lincoln and Main, leading the students in taunting the police.   This suspect was “19 to 20 years of age, 5’10”, 150 pounds, black hair, worn short”.   “He thought that [C] lived in Johnson Hall… had been present in Chicago at the riots there…  is a ‘militant’ and scares a lot of people because it is reported he carries a knife.” (6, 2, 54-56).   A third, trying to make his way back to campus after the riot on North Water Street, encountered

 

                 a Negro male whom he knew as [C]…   [C] was brandishing a sword approximately three feet long and was wearing a green, white, and red armband

            which [C] understood as the symbol of the Black United Students…  [C] was uttering words to the effect of ‘I’m going to get one of them if I get close.’

            enough.’

 

 

            He too saw the same suspect again, around nine p.m. on the 3^rd, near the Union.

 

                 [C] was carrying a wooden box with a handle, and the lid of the box had a lock which was secured, and he observed that [C] had this box with

            him during the entire evening. (6, 2, 347 and 350).

 

 

            They talked to a witness who recalled the onrush of student fugitives at Tri-Towers on the 3^rd (and from the context was probably one of Crzyston’s sub-informers).   He had heard two of the refugees arguing, one having spoken of “we” burning the ROTC building.  “[C] had question [sic] this person as to what he meant by ‘we’ and was told he meant ‘me’…  this person was about 5’7” tall with long, light brown hair parted in the middle… and had a very scraggly beard on his chin, somewhat resembling a goatee.” (6, 2, 389)

            They went to the state liquor control board office to pick up background on North Water Street.   The LCB admitted they had an undercover agent planted on the Strip, but refused to identify him, instead making his notes available.   These contained physical descriptions of “leaders” who frequented Seaver’s, the “hippie bar”. (6, 2, 186).   (None of the notes referenced violations of state liquor laws.)   They also spoke to a source, apparently a bartender,on the Strip.   “[C] advised that he had become frightened by the mood of the crowd in front of the bar ([C] – one line)…  the crowd across from the bar appeared to have been led by three or four  ‘straight looking’ individuals with short hair.” (6, 3, 694-695). 

            The return of the students enabled the FBI to continue tracking down Social Problems enrollees, albeit with diminishing returns:

 

                 During the first weeks of this course, Dr. LOUGH announced to the class that in a future class, he would conduct a lecture on Molotov cocktails.

            To [C]’s knowledge, this talk or lecture never occurred, and he never received any leaflets on Molotov cocktails from Dr. LOUGH. (6, 3, 487)

 

                 At no time has LOUGH or any student passed out or provided any literature, pamphlet, or instructional material relative to the construction of  any

            Molotov cocktail or incendiary device. (6, 3, 492)

 

             

            It was now becoming clear that the source of the rumor was Exam Question 75:

 

 

75.    LOUGH showed the class how a Molotov Cocktail was constructed because _____________________--.

                 …LOUGH later advised the class he would not show the class how to make a Molotov Cocktail, but inserted the question on the test to point out

            that the ingredients for a Molotov Cocktail were readily available to the public. (6, 3, 488)

 

                 …he did state that the correct directions on how to make one appeared in a past issue of Life magazine…

                 Dr. Lough never expanded on his question and when asked by a student when he would speak on the subject, he always put the student off. (6, 3, 501

 

 

            The more interviews they did, the more harmless the Molotov lecture looked.   True to the definition of fanaticism, they redoubled their effort the more indistinct their objective became.

 

 

 

 

           

  

 

           

 

 

     

 

           

 

 

               

 

           

 

 

           

 

               

 

 

              

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                           

 

 

 

 

Chapter Four: Thomas Aquinas and the Pepsi Bottles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            Wednesday, May 20^th:    Haldeman’s hopes that the President would mellow now that the crisis had passed were being mocked.   Nixon’s MacBethian broodings had darkened to the point of frightening his toughest aides.   Certainly none was tougher than Charles Colson, the hulking ex-Marine officer who was then usurping Murray Chotiner’s role as chief White House hatchetman.   On the evening of the 19^th, the President had invited his inner circle out to dine with him on the yacht Sequoia celebrate the possibility of all going to Moscow for arms limitations talks.   But instead of rejoicing, Nixon ranted at Kissinger about leaks to the press, the lapsed into a soliloquy that had Colson smelling brimstone:

 

                 The President’s finger circle the top of his wineglass slowly.   ‘One day we’ll get them – we’ll get them – we’ll get them on the ground where we want

            them.   And we’ll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist – right, Chuck, right?’   Then his eyes darted to Kissinger.   ‘Henry knows what I mean –

            just like you do in the negotiations, Henry – get them down on the floor and step on them.   Show no mercy. [171]

 

 

            There were some objective reasons why he might have a sense of enemy.   The national student strike had closed two hundred and eighty-one campuses. [172]    Students and hardhats still battled each other for the streets of New York.   Liberals and moderates in his own party were threatening to support the Cooper-Church Amendment cutting off funds for military operations in Cambodia. [173]    Blacks were marching across the South to protest police killings.   And the stock market, after a rally the previous Friday, hit its lowest point since March 1963.

            Nixon spent the 20^th striking out in all directions, but never forgetting who his arch-enemy was:

 

                 … now is the time to hit on Cambodia…  have to take all-out offensive.   Esp. wants VP to strike out now.   Got our latest poll – shows great

            majority disapprove of student protest – so P. wants to take that on hard. [174]

 

 

                 PR   get this poll data around

                         get across the fact that people are

                                                against the students.

                 PR   see if we can get an assault on closing

                                                schools…

                         Murph & Reagan – student issue – our poll.

                         have to get out the anti-student line

                                                hang on Cambodia. [175]

 

 

            Whatever relayed pressure there might have been, something was driving the FBI to revisit a failed investigation and somehow make it work.    The KENFOUR agents visited

 

                 [C], Ohio Bell Company, 154 Deplyster Street, Kent Ohio, [who] made available copies of the toll calls from ([C] – two or three words).

            This information was furnished in a confidential nature and should be Protected.

 

Attached is a list of calls by date, place called, amount of charge, time, and day.   All the particulars are blacked out.   “[C] records are confidential and may not be made public except upon issuance of a subpoena duces tecum.” [176]

            A KSU student in Akron showed agents contact prints he had taken of events May 2^nd through 4^th, and the agents listed them by sequence – three and a half single-spaced pages of them. (6, 2, 208-211).   There is no way of knowing how many photographs the FBI had collected by now, and no record of their disposition.

            They were able to develop fresh suspects by questioning the students who had just been allowed back on the campus, with the usual problem.   A coed reported that another [C], (LNU) had bragged about how she “had stoned the pigs and cut their hoses”, and hinted that she had helped burn the ROTC Building.  She told the informant that more was due to happen that more was due to happen, but “I can’t say [what]; it’s a secret.”   The suspect was described as a white female, eighteen years old, 5’8”, with long curly brown hair, brown eyes, and wire-rimmed glasses (6, 2, 329) –  and since they had nothing but that and a first name to go on, the agents never found her.

            A male student identified another [C] from the photo albums, and accused him of “distributing communist literature to various students”, but could not say where he could be found.   He stated that [C] had returned to his apartment ten minutes after the shootings and then departed immediately, leaving behind his “personal belongings and books”.   He further said that [C] was a member of SDS and “a believer in certain communist philosophies and on occasion has ([C] – two lines.”   Apparently he and [C] were housemates, or landlord and tenant, because he admitted the agents to [C]’s apartment and showed them the “post-sized quotations” on the walls: “Victory to the American working class”, “Long live the people’s Republic [of] Albania”, “Terrorize the bourgeois”, “America, fix it or fuck it”, etc. (6, 2. 337)    There is no discernible further reference to this suspect in the report, either.

            And now that the students were back on campus where they could be questioned, there was another problem.   Not only had all the real radicals on campus  cleared out as soon as the first trouble started – because by 1970, the dullest of them knew there would be an immediate crackdown.   But by now, anyone even remotely construed as an activist had left town – with the exception of those seeking martyrdom – as their landlords, friends, and family testified, e.g.,

 

                 He advised he has not seen his son in the last four or five weeks.   He further stated that when his son had heard of the demonstrations, burning

            of the ROTC building and subsequent killings at Kent State University, his son took off.    [C] advised that ([C] – 1 ½ lines) said his son felt that he

            might be blamed for the above-mentioned demonstrations. (6, 2, 327; EA).

 

 

            As for those who returned to find they had been accused by others, they were not always overawed by the inquisition:

 

                 [C] was recontacted and advised that it is the most erroneous statement that he has ever heard that he previously made a statement about having

            guns in his possession.   He does not know how to handle any type of gun nor has he ever fired one. (6, 2, 738)

 

                 On the evening of May 2, 1970, [C] advised that he was not on campus and he could prove this by ([C] – 2/3 line), Ohio, whom he was with the

            entire evening at his apartment at [C]…   YOUNG pointed out that there definitely had to be a coincidence because he certainly did not participate in

            any demonstrations at Kent. (6, 2, 146).

 

           

            A third said that he wouldn’t tell them anything because all he knew was hearsay – and he reminded them pointedly that hearsay was worth nothing.   He did admit that he had been arrested for a curfew violation on the night of May 1^st – 2^nd.   “[C] could not remember telling any person that ‘his roommate was responsible for the burning of the ROTC building’.” (6, 2, 28)   A graduate student stated that “it was his opinion that the University might have had the building burned themselves as a means of getting rid of campus dissenters.”   At this time, the FBI was getting a number of reports about men getting close haircuts and shaving their beards, the implication being that these formerly hirsute radicals were now trying to escape in disguise.   This graduate student posed a more obvious if unpalatable explanation:

 

                 he has recently trimmed his beard and cut his hair shorter because ‘people in the Kent area have been shooting at people with long hair’.

            He said he has been shot at and spit on in the course of his activity. (6, 3, 613-615)

 

 

            They called on a doctoral candidate in chemistry ([C], but from the context, Bobby Franklin, one of the speakers at the May 1^st rally), who promptly announced that he did not wish to talk with the FBI because it was a “racist” organization.    He did answer questions on the Free Kent University.   The only course offerings he could recall were progressive education, Zen Buddhism, and Classical Guitar.   The only one he had attended was progressive education; he had sampled computer programming, but had found it too elementary.   “He was not familiar with any classes… under the name ‘Guerrilla Warfare Class’.”

He admitted that he knew Tom Lough, but only from meeting him at a party. (6, 3, 511-512).   As if to second Franklin’s lack of awe with the FBI, a female senior told them – in response to their rote question whether she knew of any organizations behind the ROTC fire – “that she did not know of any organization involved, however, she stated that the ROTC did not belong on campus and she felt if they had to burn a building, that was the best one.” (6, 3, 560)

            It had been another bad day, and now it got worse – the female sophomore from the “subversive house” called back.   She told them she had lied to them two days previously about circulating among groups to get information on the 1^st.   The agents asked her if she was “emotionally disturbed or whether she was ever under the care of a psychiatrist or psychologist”.   They asked her again if she knew who had burned down the ROTC building.   She said no.   Then she added that

 

                she had heard [C] and [C] were two of the individuals who burned down the ROTC building…   after being very evasive she finally stated that she

            that she had heard [C] tell this to [C]…   Then she stated that she was not sure if this was where she had heard the information.

 

 

Once again, they warned her about the penalties for lying to federal officers.   She said she would call back when she remembered.   She called back.   Most of the ensuing paragraph is blacked out.   Then one of the agents told her to get off the phone and put her mother on; he warned the mother to advise the girl to “cooperate”. (7, 93).

            They broadened the search from radical utterances and individuals to radical haunts and publications.

 

                 [C] also stated that he believed the headquarters for organizing the demonstration was above the awning shop on Water Street which is across the street

            from the J & B bar.   He further stated that ([C] – one line) JEFF MILLER’s ([C] – ½ line) as he never recalled seeing her on campus before.   He believed

            ([C] – three words) JEFF MILLER’s ([C] – three to four words) and the one feature that sticks in his mind that ([C] – 2/3  line.) (6, 2, 122)

 

 

            A university police/official told them that “hippie” type KSU students were doing subversive things at a local dry goods shop.

 

 

                 [A]bout a week ago he went to the St. Marques Clothing Store and observed several individuals, apparently Kent State University students,

            mimeographing sheets of paper who advocated boycotting such places as the Coca Cola Company and other known corporations.

                 He stated ([C] – 3 ½ lines) (6, 2, 37)

 

 

            Another informant told them that “many ‘freaks’ congregate at ([C] – 1/3 line) in orders to discuss the various happenings of the day.”   This source adds that

 

                 RUPE ([C] – 1 ½ lines).   Rupe dealt in illegal narcotics traffic and that he was [known?] to participate in various protest demonstrations in Kent,

            Ohio.   RUPE allegedly spends some of his leisurely [sic] time in the Strike Center on North Water Street. (6, 2, 340).

 

 

            Also with regard to subversive publications,

 

 

                 [C] stated he had been contacted by Avon Publishing Company to submit an article as to the cause of the demonstrations and riots…   he did submit

            such an article…  it would appear in a paperback book entitled ‘Four’… to be released on about May 20, 1970. (6, 3, 526)

 

                 The headquarters for this paper is Brandeis College.   This paper is published at [C] in Kent, Ohio, through the facilities of the United Christian

            Fellowship.

                 [C] stated that he sometimes distributes his strike paper through the St. Marques Clothing Store and this location has also served on occasion for

            groups of students to meet and discuss their political philosophy. (6, 3, 366-368).

 

 

            But try as they could to strike out in new directions, the agents were in the end reduced to searching for sign on ground long since trampled smooth.

Because of the amount of exact repetition involved, it would be pointless to continue quoting the sort of reports that kept coming in.   The following is a representative sample:

 

                 ([C] – 1 ½ lines) telephone [C] advised that her permanent residence is ([C] – 1 line).   She said that she is currently a junior at Kent State and

            is 21 years old.

                 She advised that she could furnish no information concerning the burning of the ROTC building on the KSU campus May 2, 1970.   She said that

            she had no information concerning the Kent Free University or the Kent New University Conference.   She said she knew nothing about the 23 Concerned

            Faculty and could furnish no information of value concerning the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Kent.

                 She stated that she does have ([C] – ½ line) for ([C] – two or three words) this quarter at KSU and believes that [C] is a very good professor.

            She stated that she knew of no inflammatory statements made by [C] in KSU classes. (6, 3, 528).

 

 

            Having beaten the bushes flat searching for something on Tom Lough, and finding nothing to go on in the candid admissions of  campus radicals like Bobby Franklin, the agents now starting asking the students if anyone on the faculty had ever made “inflammatory statements”.   The responses were as monotonous as the question, e.g., “He advised that he does not recall [C] ever making any inflammatory statements either in or out of class.” (6, 3, 545).   Some students took the occasion to expand on the above minimal defense of their professors:

 

                 [C] is her favorite teacher and is the first person she sought out for words of comfort after the shooting of the four students at KSU.   [C] is a ‘tiny’,

            mild-mannered lady, who has never been heard to make any type of  inflammatory statement…   she encouraged her students to be peaceful and she

            is known to be opposed to violence of any kind. (6, 3, 561)

 

 

            The students were closing ranks around their teachers.   The bits and pieces of subversion they unearthed now were in those grey areas where civil libertarians lurked.   One woman told them she had gone into the Hub on the morning of May 4^th for a cup of coffee.   She had noticed a group of thirty-five to forty students “which she considered to be ‘hippy’ individuals by their dress and appearance” sitting in the back.   She sat at a table near them.   Lough came in and joined them, asking them, “What is our next move?   Have we been successful?   Do you think we are doing a good job?   We are planning a big rally on the Commons which is a good idea.   Get out and spread the word.” (6, 3, p. 514).   This utterance may have struck the source as subversive.   But others might be tedious enough to construe it as exercise of Constitutional privilege in the areas of free speech, association, and assembly.

            Doggedly the FBI pressed on.

 

           

 

            Thursday, May 21^st.   Returning students who had been “fingered” by the FBI, or who otherwise knew the FBI was looking for them, turned themselves in, tired of waiting for the knock on the door or the ring of the telephone (both had come to be frightening sounds in Kent in late May).   One such, an out-of-towner who had come to Kent on May 2^nd to see what was going on, “appeared for re-interview” at the Cleveland office.   He implicated another youth for having pictures of “CHE GUEVERRA [sic]” and revolutionary sayings on his walls, and furnished physical descriptions of several friends, but it didn’t help him.   The agents confronted him with having interfered with firemen at the ROTC building.   He admitted “he helped pull the fire hose away from the firemen’for kicks’” but refused to say whether he threw rocks at them.   He said he didn’t want to make things worse; he had quit his job and postponed his wedding because he expected to be arrested shortly. (6, 2, 252).

            Other interviews did not go as well.   Advised that “an interview was desired of him regarding his participation in or knowledge of the anti-war rallies and resulting violence” at KSU, another suspect proceeded to account for all of his time from April 29^th through May 7^th, and listed corroborating witnesses to support his claim that he had never been on campus at all. (6, 3, 648-650).   Nor had another on May 4^th, the day informants had reported his being there and carrying a gun. (6, 3, 746).   A third “denied any knowledge of bombs being made at his residence”, although he admitted that three weeks prior to the confrontation a visitor had claimed that he had made bombs for the Weathermen. (7, 31).

            They continued to chase down members of the SDS, despite the assessment of their own COINTELPRO operation that the organization was dead at Kent State by mid-1969.  

 

                 [D]uring the Winter Quarter of 1969, he was affiliated with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Chapter , but he does not consider himself to

            be presently affiliated with SDS. (6, 2, 258)

 

                 [C] advised that she never joined this organization.   She stated that in 1969 she attended two or three meetings or gatherings on the invitation of [C]…

            he invited anyone he saw to the SDS meetings. (6, 3, 676)

 

                 She advised that last year she attended a rally held by SDS and was arrested.   She attended this rally as a bystander and was not a member of the

            SDS at that time and is not a member of SDS now. (6, 3, 671)

 

 

            They accused a non-student who had been arrested at the 1969 Music and Speech Building incident as an SDS member.   He also protested that he had only been a bystander.   He had gone over to the building to see what the demonstration was about and had been attacked by the need to use the rest room.   When he emerged, the corridors were empty and the building, sealed by the police.   He pled “no contest” to a trespassing charge because the fine was only $ 50 and he could not afford more money to hire a lawyer. (6, 3, 669-670)

            The trail of one of the radical ringleaders – Ron Weisburger, the alleged founder of the Free Kent University – ran cold.   On the 20^th, they found the house at [C] abandoned, vacant.   A note on the back door read, “This building is bugged and extremely hot.   Pick up mail on the table.”   The next day, a faculty member told them that Weisburger had been a graduate assistant during the 1968-69 school year.   Another added that “WEISBURGER was last a Kent State student during June 1969.” (6, 3, 627 [administrative section]).

            By now they only had one alleged radical who had been observed doing anything destructive at the ROTC fire: Jerry Rupe, who had burned a small American flag before the big fire was set.   (Was Rupe the same person as “Aquinas”? a question that will be deferred until, although not necessarily answered, later on).   The campus police had seen him at several other demonstrations.   An informant told them that on May 3^rd, “RUPE did not conduct any of the main speeches.”   A coed thought that he looked “similar to the picture of the guy waving a flag in the blood of JEFF MILLER…  in a recent issue of ‘Time’ magazine.”  Another source “definitely identified RUPE as ([C] – 1 ½ lines).   RUPE was a frequent visitor to STRIKE headquarters located on North Water Street in Kent, Ohio.   [C] also stated that the rumor was all over town that ‘the FBI was looking for RUPE’.” [177]

            They only heard two new accusations, one from a clerical employee of the University:

 

 

                 She said the most radical [person] in her office is a girl named [C]…  [C] constantly refers to the police in general as ‘pigs’, has used expressions

            from time to time such as ‘kill, kill’, and at one time stated that ‘they should have burned the ROTC building’.   [C] has vowed not to cut her hair until

            the war in Vietnam is over and at present her hair is very long. (6, 3, 77).

 

 

 

 

            A faculty member, who bragged to the agents of being “100 per cent American, conservative”, accused another in uselessly general terms.

 

 

 

 

                 [C]… heard that this professor was making inflammatory statements and inciting the students to demonstrate.   He said he has determined the name of

            this instructor to be [C], a temporary instructor in the [C] department. (6, 3, 623-624)

 

 

 

 

            The other three indictments clearly fell into the area of “thought crime”, where investigation was getting  more risky (see below).

 

 

 

 

                 [C] did advocate changes in the administration in a humorous way.   He stated that LEWIS required the following three books as course texts:

                 ‘The Kerner Report; that title of the book is the ‘Report on the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.’

                 ‘The Invasion from Mars’, by HADLEY CANTRILL.

                 ‘The Walker Report: Rights in Conflict’

                 Most of the classes consisted of discussing changes necessary in the administration and any types of demonstrations that had taken place. (6, 3, 580)

 

 

                 She added that, in the middle of April 1970, he made remarks in class against the campus police department wearing guns on campus inasmuch as he

            felt guns had no place on a college campus.   In discussing mob behavior and campus disorders [C] frequently asks the question, ‘Could it happen at

            Kent?’ (6, 3, 582)

 

 

                 [S]he remembered two occasions within the last six months when he dismissed his classes for the purpose of the students being able to attend

            rallies.  She did not remember, however, specifically what these rallies were for… she has on several occasions heard [C] say that there was too

            much ‘apathy’ among students on campus. (6, 3, 523-533)

 

 

                

            They finally cornered one of the “radical” graduate assistants, but got less than a full confession.

 

 

 

 

                 [C] was asked if he had urged his students to ‘go out and defy the National Guard by standing in front of their bayonets.’   [C] strongly denied

            this and stated that his lectures to his class on Monday May 4^th were of the discussion type…   [C] stated that he told his students to ‘stay away

            from the rally at noon on May 4, 1970, because the Regime will defend itself.’ (6, 3, 610)

 

 

 

 

            Accused of membership in the 23 Concerned Faculty, a faculty marshal attempted to explain the ‘organization’ to them.   On the 3^rd, he and the other teachers involved had asked for an immediate convocation of a general faculty meeting, to defuse the situation as it existed the morning after the ROTC fire.

 

 

                 [A]fter President WHITE refused to call a faculty meeting, the assemblage hastily drew up a statement outlining what should be immediately

            undertaken in order to meet this crisis and prevent further violence…   This statement was then signed by 23 members of the faculty. (6, 3, 606)

 

 

 

 

            Student accusations against the faculty had pretty well stopped coming in.   In their place the Bureau received the standard disclaimer: “[C] advised that [C] has definitely made no radical or  inflammatory statements with regard to political affairs.” (6, 3, 579).   There was an even more categorical way of foreclosing further inquiry: “he knew that [C] was a professor at Kent State University but that he had never been in any of her classes and knew nothing about her.” (6, 3, 569).   The faculty, assessed in the collective,

 

 

                 [S]he was not aware of the political convictions of any of the above instructors…  current affairs are discussed occasionally but that at no time

            has [sic] any of the instructors become outspoken about any current political activities….  none of the above instructors are involved in any political

            action groups at KSU. (6, 2, 99-100).

 

 

 

 

            and as individuals,

 

 

 

 

                 [C] advised that he has never heard [C] in any of the sessions of the above class refer to any political situation.   [C] commented ‘99% of the

            time [C] stuck strictly to the subject matter’…    [C] has never mentioned President NIXON,  the war in Vietnam, or student demonstrations on

            the campus of KSU. (6, 3, ______)

 

 

 

 

            “He stated in his opinion [C] is definitely sympathetic to the New Left Movement, but does not inject his thinking openly in his lectures.” (6, 3, 577-578)

 

 

                 [C] recalled that [C] stated ‘NIXON has no constitutional right to commit troops to Cambodia’ and also ‘NIXON is transcending the powers

            of his ofice’…   ‘It would be highly advantageous to impeach NIXON.’

 

 

 

 

in the wake of the Cambodia invasion, but added that this was the only time the professor discussed politics.” (6, 3, 577-578)

            As more students decided not to cooperate with the inquisition, a source within the KSU administration tipped the FBI that an organization was actually forming to oppose it, the Kent Community for Non-Violent Change.   Faculty members forming the group had announced three goals:

 

 

1.      The possible disarming of the campus police,

2.      The removal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the campus,

3.      An implication that there is a possibility that the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Department of Justice must indict a couple of the

            faculty members to ‘clean their skirt’.  (Meaning unknown).

 

 

 

 

             

            Despite the disclaimer in parentheses, the meaning must be all too clear to the FBI.    It had looked the other way in the murder of the four.   It had failed to find a radical cabal behind the ROTC arson.   But they had been ordered to find one.   Their only escape was to charge that the building had been burned by a “climate of subversion” fostered by the faculty.   They were warned further by an associate professor they tried to interrogate

 

 

                 That the general feeling of the faculty as a whole is becoming adamant on their attitude toward the Federal Bureau of Investigation.   The faculty feels

            that asking questions of their students as to what is taught in the classroom is an infringement upon their academic freedom.

                 [C] also indicated that members of the American Association of College [sic – should read “University] Professors are presently taking statements

            from students and faculty alike concerning the above accusations. (6, 3, 622)

 

 

 

 

            The Kent Community for Non-Violent Change proved in the end the lesser threat to the Bureau.   In a process like that which had fractured the anti-war movement, not only the whole body but each of its committees split into a left and right faction that spent more time fighting each other than they did the encroaching campus police state. [178]    However it was not to expire until the FBI could open a dossier on it, based on reports by “moles” planted in its membership by the University. [179]

            But Doris Franklin, of Kent State’s AAUP (American Association of University Professors), had cabled the national office asking for legal assistance against the FBI.   Michael Grossman responded for the national that they should meet with Michael Geltner, a young Ohio State law professor also affiliated with the American Civil Liberties Union, to discuss the possibility of a class action suit against the Bureau and the Ohio police apparat. [180]

 

            The ACLU: the Bureau’s ancient enemy, despite recurring mole problems of its own.   And when the ACLU appeared on the horizon, the press must be just over it.   There were also signs that the FBI might be losing its mandate from the top, as the President’s attention became diverted by other problems.   That same day, the President met with Bernard Lasker, chairman of the Board of Governors of the New York Stock Exchange about the worsening performance of the markets, especially since the 4^th of May. [181]

 

 

 

 

            Friday, May 22^nd.     J. Edgar Hoover also suffered from divided attention.   On the 22^nd, Clyde Tolson – his shadow, deputy, and inseparable off-duty companion – reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy.   John Mitchell arranged for him to stay on as an annuitant.   Tolson – beset by a duodenal ulcer, hypertensive arteriosclerotic heart disease, survivor of two strokes; unable to write or shave with either hand, blind in one eye, walking with a limp – passed the mandatory physical. [182]    But he could not survive for long – nor, Hoover must have realized, could he himself.   In his waning years, the sole object of his existence – aside from dogged combat with the long-vanished international conspiracy – had been protecting the reputation of his beloved Bureau.   And barring some dramatic breakthrough, the KENFOUR investigation would do nothing to enhance that reputation.  (Events would swiftly prove that the Justice Department attorneys supervising it were already looking for a way to dump it.)

            These days it would not require much dumping.   A student showed up at KSUPD headquarters with seven photographs he had taken on May 3^rd of the ruins of the ROTC building, which he had promised to the FBI during an earlier interview.   “A review of these photographs revealed that they were of no value to this investigation and they were returned to [C].” (6, 2, 117).   They took another long statement from someone who had seen Jeff Miller fall.   But, as is uniquely the case with Miller, it survives so heavily censored that there is no way to tell what was said about him.

 

 

                 He continued that the circumstances, at that time appeared to be in a complete state of chaos and confusion and he recalls that ([C] – three lines).

            MILLER ([c] – one line).   He stated that ([C] – two lines).   He further explained this by saying ([C] – 2 2/3 lines). (6, 2, 284).

 

 

 

 

            They got a statement from a Kent City policeman, one of the many who worked as bouncers on the Strip, still looking for a way to connect the SDS with the riot.   As the disturbance began, the source related, “some individual whose identity he does not now recall said in effect, ‘Look over there.   They’re just out of jail, and they’re back doing the same thing.’” (6, 3, 697).   And a female dorm counselor reported an “unknown white male” for agitating students to “Get out in the streets and fight the pigs.”   He asked to broadcast the message through the dorm’s public address system and she refused.   He left without a following.   She furnished a general physical description. (6, 3, 707).  

            The agents unwittingly got to talk with a young woman who had come to symbolize the whole tortured event for most of the world.   She was a self-proclaimed “drifter”, who had “bummed” her way from Atlanta to Youngstown, Ohio, then “hitched” to Kent regularly for two weeks before the crisis so she could frequent J.D.’s “disco” on the Strip.   She was there on the evening of the 1^st when the trouble started – she claimed, because the local police arrested a KSU student in front of the same establishment for intoxication.   The bystanders became agitated “as they felt this arrest was not warranted”.   She further asserted that the reason the crowd started the bonfire was to draw the police back into the area, and that they started breaking windows when there was no immediate response.   The crowd was then drawn to the Kent State campus by a rumor that there was a demonstration in progress there against the Cambodian incursion.   She had gotten separated from “two other chicks” she had come to Kent with, so she spent the night with friends who lived in town, whom she refused to identify.

            She went out to the campus the following night and was in the crowd at the ROTC building.   Did she know who burned the building?   She refused to say; “she would not reveal the identity of those persons if she knew them.”    She admitted that ‘we cut the fire hose”, but would not identify who “we” had been, or if it included herself.   She was put to flight during the Guard sweep of the campus and stranded in Tri-Towers, where she slept until late the next afternoon.   Having heard there was a curfew downtown, she swam the canal and made her way back to her friends’ house.   She was back on campus at noon on the 4^th and took part in the rally.   The demonstrators, including herself, did not disperse because “they had as much right to be there as the ONG did.”   After the lethal volley, she caught a bus to Columbus, where she took part in demonstrations at Ohio State. (6, 3, 733-734).     She was to elaborate on this statement.

            KENFOUR also took a call from a woman who insisted that she tell them everything she knew about Jerry Rupe.   Thirty years later, only the Bureau knows the substance of what she said.   First paragraph: “RUPE was an extremely violent person ([C] – 2 ½ lines).   RUPE allegedly ([C] – 1 ¾ lines).   Second paragraph: “[C] said that ([C] – six lines).   And so on.   All that survives censorship is her presumably amateur diagnosis: “a periodically violent person having a physical disorder that causes him to have periodic abnormal seizures…  she feels RUPE has a mental problem,” and that he had connections with “big time [drug] pushers” in Florida.   Nothing legible in the statement connects him with the events of May 1^st through 4^th. (6, 3, 733-734)  CHECK FOOTNOTE.WITH ABOVE.   Whether it dealt with the same radical or not,  a student also “stated he has heard of an individual by the name of ‘TOM AQUINAS’ but refused to further identify this person or provide his whereabouts.” (6, 2, 287)

            The only skirmish in the attack on the faculty was with a graduate assistant who indignantly told them he was a conservative.

 

 

                 [C] denied that he ever urged his students to express dissent with rocks, stones, or by any means, although he did state he suggested to his

            students that they go out on the Commons on May 4^, 1970 at noon in order to observe the type of weird students who would be leading the rally.

           

He added that he had attended a faculty meeting the previous day, where he heard that the ACLU was withholding information from the FBI. (6, 3, 621)

            A student furnished a circular letter from a professor to his students in which the former  stated he would provide the grades they needed “to avoid explusion or the draft”.   He asked his students to contact him so they could meet off-campus: “We must return to our former dialogue immediately and plan concrete, rational action to combat the forces of violence.”   The informer liberally paraphrased this as, “Professor [C] allegedly informed the members of his [C] class to ‘fight the pigs to  get the pigs off campus.” (6, 3, 615)    A coed gave them a hint of some of the motives of those who had come forward:

 

 

                 When [C] was interviewed by an Agent previously she did not desire to furnish the name of her professor, who had talked at the rally when they

            buried the Constitution.   Today [C] received her grade in [C], which was [C].   She wanted to let the FBI know, therefore, that the name of the [C]

            professor who talked at the rally is [C]. (6, 3, 611).

 

 

 

 

            But another contacted the Bureau after partaking of the spreading common knowledge that the witchhunt was on and on hearing that one of her professors had been targeted:

 

 

                 [T]he course dealt with facts concerning violence and he discussed matters ‘as they are’…  he is a very straightforward individual and is not afraid to

            discuss the reasons for violence openly…  he would openly discuss dissent but did not ever advocate any type of violence…

                 [S]he had contacted the FBI in order to make her views known as she feels that some students may interpret the teaching procedure of [C] wrongly.

            (6, 3, 585)

 

 

 

 

            An “anonymous source” provided them with a copy of a circular letter from Tom Lough to his Social Problems students, accompanying the final exams he had mailed to them while the campus was shut down.    It was a long, hortatory document urging them to keep resisting, learning, and experiencing May 4^th and its aftermath as a means to personal growth.   It included one message that redounded with other things the agents were beginning to hear.    Lough told the students to report any search of their rooms to the ACLU furnished the phone number:

 

 

                 Do not be intimidated.   You are in the right, legally, and the ACLU lawyers are firmly behind you with lawyers and money.   The situation is that

            it is the officer of the law that have apparently broken the law this time, and it is very important to correct this through the courts. (6, 3, 515-518).

 

 

 

 

           

            Saturday, May 23^rd.   A student admitted watching the ROTC fire from a distance, and added that it was too great for him to identify anyone.   He furnished a vivid description of the killings, without accusing any radicals. (6, 2, 115)   Another admitted to being at the fire, but at “the end of the crowd”, so he couldn’t identify anyone either.   He also confessed he had yelled “Fucking pigs off campus” at the May 4^th rally, but otherwise denied everything.   The agents didn’t even bother him with their “shopping list” questions radical organizations (FKU, NUC, 3C, SDS). (6, 2, 38)   A female University employee had more nebulous “evidence” against the faculty:

 

 

                 [A]lthough she did not have any firsthand knowledge of it, it was rumored that some of the professors in the English Department, Psychology

            Department, and History Department had given oral guidance to their students in the classroom to revolt against any authority which might attempt

            to interfere with them. (6, 2, 167)

 

 

 

 

            Two students offset this with statements for the defense:

 

 

 

 

                 [H]e has no professor which he would considered radical but considers [C] as a liberal but not a radical.   He said prior to having [C] as an

            instructor, he heard that she was interested in human rights.   He said [C] has stated that ([C] – one line) but since his course with her is a [C]

            course, she never strays from the subject matter. (6, 3, 568)

 

 

 

 

            The second joined those who had tried to explain Tom Lough’s exam Question 75, showing the agents a copy of the question on a “study sheet”:

 

 

 

 

Lough showed the class how a Molotov Cocktail was constructed because (1)  this information is not publicly available, (2) he wanted the class

            to be ready for the revolution, (3) he wanted the class to think about the relationship between secrecy and self-control.

                 …statement # 3 was  considered to be the correct statement.

                 He advised that LOUGH did not distribute any printed literature on assembling a Molotov Cocktaiil to the class as that or any other date to his

            recollection. (6, 3, 521)

 

 

 

 

            The campus police supplied a copy of the circular letter and appeal for support from the Kent State Massacre Witnesses, dated May 13^th.   It described the purpose of the group, which was to travel as far and wide as their means would permit, testifying to what they had seen on May 1^st through 4^th.   It called on the Kent State students now locked off their campus to join “the mass actions which have been called for Memorial Day, May 30^th, in every city.” (6, 3, 733).

 

 

 

 

            Sunday, May 24^th.   The records reflect no investigative activity for this date.

 

 

 

 

            Monday, May 25^th.    A previously-interviewed subject called back to “advise at this time that he feels that the Quite Rightly Dress Shop, Kent, Ohio, is a meeting place for the radical students at Kent.” (6, 3, 761).

            President White’s office gave them a letter with an attached letter and clipping.   The letter, dated May 14^th, was apparently from a colleague of White’s at Western Michigan University.   The clipping, from a local newspaper, describes an appearance at WMU by Ron Weissenberger [sic].   It stated that  “Weissenburger” was active in the May 4^th incident at KSU and was now advocating violence elsewhere, (6, 3, 607-609).   This obviously was the same person who, their sources had told them, had left Kent in mid-1969.

            They called on a female graduate student, who told them she was content to stand by the statement she had given the ACLU.   After all, she had given it two weeks before, when the details were fresh in her mind.  When they pressed her for details about subversive organizations and faculty on campus, she “stated that she did not feel that this was any matter for investigation and the FBI had no business in making inquiries in this matter.” (7, 44).

            They only got one more report on the faculty, the defense of another teacher by another student.

 

 

                 [C] has Professor [C] for a class entitled ([C] – three to four words) and [C] stated that [C] advocated criticism, but encouraged his students to

            derive a positive solution that would not entail violence.   At no time did [C] recall hearing [C] urge his students to participate in violence in order to

            express his views. (6, 2, 205).

 

 

 

 

            Another students paused in his long, harrowing account of the killings to tell the agents he had already made this statement  to the ACLU on May 6^th.   “He said his testimony was recorded and notes were made.” (7, 45).     May 6^th – nineteen days before.   The ACLU  had been interviewing when the FBI was still struggling to set up on campus.   Could they know everything the Bureau knew – or more?

            The obsession with Jeff Miller persisted, as must mystification about what it was based on:

 

 

 

 

                 She advised [C] JEFFREY G. MILLER initially on Friday, May 1, 1970.   She explained that ([C] – two lines).   She explained that ([C] – two lines).

            She stated that ([C] JEFF MILLER [C] – ½  line).   JEFFREY ([C] – 2 ½ lines).   JEFFREY ([C] – one line). (7, 51)

 

 

 

 

            A landlord told them he had rented a room to [C], who returned to it on the afternoon of the 4^th, grabbed a few of his belongings, and announced he was headed for Cleveland.   The informant stated [C] had been a member of SDS “when it was an accepted organization in 1969”.   When it disappeared from campus and Kent, the subject had developed friends in one of its successors, the Revolutionary Student Movement II (RYM II).   He reluctantly named five as members, all [C] in the report except for Ken Hammond.  “The above-mentioned members of RYM II basically believe in non-violence and wanted to change the country primarily through political means.” (6, 3, 646-647)

            An unidentified party submitted a statement on the “key radical”:

 

 

                 ([C] – ½ line) I was talking with a person known only to me as “Aquinas” and resides in ([C] – one line), Kent, Ohio.   I was at “Aquinas’”

            apartment when he told me ([C] – ½ line) at the burning of the ROTC building.

 

 

 

 

            This person identified “Aquinas” in twelve photos in the FBI KENFOUR albums. (7, 104)   Another young woman reviewing the albums identified the

 

 

 

 

                 Person in the photographs… carrying a flag and has a white shirt on and a dark colored vest.   This individual is also jumping in the blood from one

            Of the victims shot by National Guardsmen on Monday, May 4, 1970… whom she knew only as “Aquinas”.

 

 

 

 

            She stated that a week after the shootings, “Aquinas” ([C] – five  lines).   The next paragraph is completely [C], three lines.   Then,

 

 

 

 

                 [C] advised that in her opinion, AQUINAS is a radical and does not agree with anything that has to do with the United States Government.   He is

            a quiet person and on occasion, has bragged to her and her friend [C] that he has smoked pot and has taken certain types of drugs…

                 She feels that in any demonstration, this person would act non-violently as he was  usually a quiet individual who did not do much talking. (6, 2, 297-298)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            Tuesday, May 26^th.    The KENFOUR team took three walk-in statements, containing nothing new of substance.    She also visited a young woman at her workplace and she

 

 

                 immediately advised that she did not wish to speak with SA’s [C] and [C] about anything no matter what is was.   She refused to state where her

            husband, [C], might be located and advised that she was acting upon the advice of her attorney, whom she refused to identify. (7, 69),

 

 

 

 

            Another woman contributed a statement about “Aquinas” that sounded for the most part like the others:

 

 

 

 

                 [C] advised that ([C] – one line) and AQUINAS ([C] – ½ line) used “pot” and would be considered as radicals.   She also advised that she had never

            been in their presence when they were using “pot” .   She also advised that AQUINAS was a eird ascting individual but that she would consider him a

            non-violent individual.   She also advised that individuals living at the above address were against the Establishment. (6, 2, 300).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            Wednesday, May 27^th.      One new statement, and two re-interviews.   They returned to the “subversive house” yet again and asked a resident the question they had asked so often: had anyone entered here on the evening of May 2^nd  and announced, “we burned the ROTC building”.   And finally the subject spelled out the answer that should have been obvious all along:

 

 

                 He replied that they had not.   He was then told that ([C] – 2 2/3 lines) stated that someone might have said this, but that if he did, or anyone else,

            it meant the students by “we” and not that they themselves had actually taken part in the burning. (7, 97-100)

 

 

 

 

            They also re-visited the young female nomad whose statement they had taken on the 22^nd.   The context described in both statements is practically conclusive to the effect that she was Mary Ann Vecchio, the girl kneeling and screaming over Jeff Miller’s bloody body in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by John Filo.   Although James Michener tried to make her a major figure in his Kent State book, she was never anything but what she admits to in these interviews:

a fourteen-year-old runaway from Florida who had nothing to do with being a college student, the anti-war movement, Kent State, or any radical organization.

She had merely wandered onto the scene fleeing a miserable home life.   The agents questioned her at length without learning anything about the perpetrators of the violence, except for the National Guard.    And yet she concluded her six-page statement with a paragraph that caught the essence of Kent State in a brutally succinct way:

 

 

                 Just prior to this shooting incident she was standing next to a student.   She asked him his name and he said it was JEFFREY.   After the shootings

            ceased she noted that JEFFREY was shot and ran to his side with the other students.   One of the other students felt JEFFREY’S pulse and said he      

            was dead. (7, 113).

 

 

 

 

So she screamed, and then hid, and then ran away again.

            They re-interviewed a coed they had questioned about Sandra Scheuer, with the result of another statement rendered indecipherable by censorship.   She could only add more pallid information about “Aquinas” – “all she knew of him was that he wrote poetry”. (7, 116).

            That evening President Nixon entertained the Nation’s financial elite with a dinner at the White House.   He went on at length about how the Cambodian invasion had been a success.   They listened patiently until he got to the part they had come for: his assurance that US troops would be out of Cambodia by June 30^th, and out of all Southeast Asia within a year after that.   Down Pennsylvania Avenue, J. Edgar Hoover was becoming enmeshed in a crisis caused by another Oval Office scenario (see below).    Just as the KENFOUR investigation was drying up in the field, pressure from the top was easing to nothing.

 

 

 

 

            Thursday, May 28^th.     The agents took one last civilian statement on Aquinas:

 

 

                 [S]he did not know his real name and really did not know him well… he always appeared to be quiet and never said anything in her presence

            which would indicate he was a radical or believed in violence or was an activist of any kind.   She said that she had not heard from anyone that he

            participated in any demonstration on campus. (7, 116).

 

 

 

 

            They checked with the Kent City Police

 

 

 

 

                 RICK FELBER is an associate of JERRY RUPE and that he also resides at [C].   [C] said that FELBER as well as RUPE is engaged in selling

            narcotics in the Kent area…

                 He said that RUPE is a “prominent narcotics peddler” in Kent, and that he observed RUPE on May 2 and 3, 1970, in mobs of people on or

            the Kent State University campus. (7, 128).

 

 

 

 

            and with the Cuyahoga Falls Police: “he is suspected of using or selling narcotics.  [C] also took part in peace marches ([C] – ½ line).”   As regards another [C],

 

 

                 He has been picked up in the past passing out Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) literature in [C] and has been a great supporter of SDS.

            He was also involved in peace marches in [C] on May 13 and May 16, 1970. (7, 142-143).

 

 

 

 

            Leafletting and marching for peace might be difficult construe as crimes, unless the FBI saw them as part of the national conspiracy to destroy ROTC – and they had obviously established the link long before.   But what did drug offenses have to do with burning ROTC?   The appearance of these charges suggest the outrageous, which was soon to become obvious – the Bureau intended to clear the blotter of this arch-crime onto a couple of small-time pushers.   Immediate corroboration of this suspicion is impossible, for these entries end the KENFOUR reports for May.   A few more dribbled into the Cleveland field office in June, but, essentially, the investigation was over.   It had not been the Bureau’s finest hour.   They had never found, or had shielded, the person(s) who burned ROTC.   They had taken virtual confessions of cold-blooded, multiple murder from the Guardsmen, none of whom would ever pay any kind of penalty.   They had ignored voluminous evidence of massive violations of civil rights by clubbing, gassing, bayoneting, illegal detention and illegal search and seizure by authorities at every level.   But they had found none that the four-day confrontation had been engineered by any radical group – with the possible exception of agents of the national intelligence agencies, who were also shielded.

            But they had left a monument  at Kent State and, by extension, every other campus in America.   Students and teachers would never be able to communicate with each other in full confidence again.   The latter would henceforth censor every utterance in every lecture – even if unconsciously – worry about each book assigned or guest speaker invited, lest these “items of evidence” turn up in an investigative report.  As word got around about who was targeted, the targets were informally but forever tarred as radicals – equally infuriating to the conservatives who were included on the list and the real radicals who had been left off.   While they were alive, they could combat the defamation, however feebly.   That option was not open for Allison Krause.

            The FBI had not been able to connect Krause with the Pepsi bottle story.   There were problems of date, time, and cast of characters, not to mention a host of other details, some of them too obvious to belabor (why would young women trying to make Molotovs enter a rest room?  did they expect to find gasoline there?  were the informers so unacquainted with the basic facts of female anatomy as to lack appreciation for the difficulty of a “hippie girl” urinating into an aperture as small as a soda bottle?).   But inconsistency of  fact had never stood in the way of a prolific author of lurid fiction like James Michener.   He started with the same quartet of informers: Louis Urbano, Patrick Dolney, and Nicolas Haskakis, the receptionists on the desk at Johnson Hall, and their control, resident counselor William Fitzgerald.   (Haskakis was he who had taken a photo of  Jerry Rupe burning a small American flag at the ROTC fire.   The FBI could not add it to their albums because the crowd surrounded Haskakis and pummeled him to the ground; he was only saved when activist Ruth Gibson persuaded him to surrender the film.)

            Michener introduces the tale by quoting glowing things people had said about Allison Krause, then adding, “However, such micrometer judgments vanish with the testimony of a student who held a part-time job tending the dormitory desk at Johnson Hall.”   It has Krause charging into the lobby, spewing obscenities – an element borrowed from Crzyston’s May 3^rd version --  carrying Pepsi bottle(s), and forcing her way into the rest room.   (Was it locked?)   One of the informers, afraid she was making a “Molotov Cocktail”, peeks in after her, to see her standing with her jeans dropped down around her knees, holding the Pepsi bottle between her legs.   She re-emerges, still foul-mouthing the informers, as Levine arrives.   Together they go up to the sundeck, but Fitzgerald follows them and orders them to leave.

 

 

                 “I didn’t frisk her to see what was in the bottle.”   But the men on the desk were satisfied that she had been urinating in it.   This was a trick, they found

            out, that had been developed at the Chicago confrontation during the Democratic convention. [183]

 

 

 

 

            Michener seems to have been fascinated by this shock end, for he experimented with it through several drafts.   Later in the year, he returned to Kent.   The first thing he did when he hit town was meet with the informers.   As he related back to senior editor Andrew Jones (who had been with him in Kent that summer) and “researchers” for the magazine,

 

 

                 But me they love.   Why?   Because those smart cookies deduced, since seeing LL, that I have to be a scret [sic] employee of the FBI because,

            as they told me, “There was nobody else on this campus who could have told you what we told the FBI and we know that you saw their report”…

            And when the Sunday paper came out with the stry [sic] that Nixon had appointed me to the new commission, they were more than satisfied with

            their shrewdness, and I must say that I was impressed. [184]

 

 

 

 

            Michener supplied the same addressees with an expanded account of this meeting in a memo the following day.   Dolney and Urbano called on Michener as soon as he checked in at the Kent City Motor Inn.   Together they drove to the Brown Derby restaurant, where Michener had “hung out” with local rightists banker Bill Nash and prosecutor Seabury Ford –  who was to indict twenty-five students, non-student youth, and faculty (none of the Guardsmen) – during his summer stay.   On the drive out, they told him they were willing to tell him anything he wanted to know because they knew he was working “with the FBI”, since they had told no one but the G-men about the hippie girls and the Pepsi bottles.   “They had an almost hateful attitude toward Allison,” Michener added, “whom they regarded as a complete bum…   I believe there was a strong anti-Jewish prejudice also.”

            Michener did not use the most explicit version of the tale in his as-published book, opting for cumulative innuendo about Krause instead.   The reason for his caution is more than suggested by a memo he received from Andrew Jones: “The new Allison Krause material with the Coke bottles is most adroitly handled; it gives the reader all he needs to know to reconstruct the action without putting our necks on the litigation block.” [185]    Thus the FBI’s most enduring accomplishment --- bearing a tale that shored up the Middle American mythology about Kent State.   But the greater moral failure would be left to its parent organization, the US Department of Justice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Five: Pregnant Silence, Aborted Justice.

 

 

 

 

 

            Sunday, June 1^st.   Sgt. D. C. Wells of the Ohio State Highway Patrol took a statement from Terry Norman.   None of the associated documents indicate why the OSHP – supported by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigative, the state’s mini-FBI – was continuing to investigate May 4^th.   At one point, the notorious “student photographer” was asked,

 

 

Q.    For what purpose were you taking pictures?

A.     Basically, it was free lance, but the Campus Police and people of higher offices were getting a hold of these pictures for prosecution.  I can’t

say who these people are, they are doing an investigation of their own, too.

Q.    For what reason, personally, were you taking pictures?

A.     The Agency was giving me film.

 

 

 

 

He admitted he had been taking pictures for the campus police for two years, but for “the Agency”, only since Jerry Rubin’s appearance in April 1970.

 

 

 

 

                 Q. How many photographs did you take?

                 A.  Between 50 and 150.

                 Q.  Where are the films?

                 A.  In the hands of this particular agency. [186]

 

 

 

 

            Monday, June 2^nd.    The FBI took at statement from a KSU coed at [C] (the word blacked out is too short to be Cleveland, and may be “Kent” or “Akron”).

 

 

                 ([C] – 2/3 line) SANDY SCHUER [sic], who was killed on Monday, May 4, 1970, was not a political activist.   Although she does not know for

            certain, she doubts very seriously if SHUER would be a part of the demonstrations on campus.   She heard from ([C] – ½ line) SHUER was coming

            out of Taylor Hall when she was shot. (7, 34)

 

 

 

 

            Reporter Jack Nelson broke the story of the FBI inquisition in the Los Angeles Times.   He charged that KSU Provost Louis Harris had turned class rosters over to the Bureau so it could track down students of particular professors and interrogate them about the opinions they expressed in class.   Harris protested that “the only thing they were searching for was the type of presentation that would provoke violence, that they were not attempting to ascertain the political ideology of students”. [187]

 

 

 

 

            Tuesday, June 3^rd.   J. Edgar Hoover responded to Nelson’s expose with a statement that “certain professors at Kent State University had furnished instructions to students on how to make Molotov Cocktails and otherwise instructed students in militant activities relating to the incident under investigation.” [188]

 

 

 

 

            Wednesday, June 4^th.   The Cleveland field office issued its periodic progress report for the period 5/26/70 through 6/4/70.   For the first time the KENFOUR heading was changed from “UNSUBS” (Unknown subjects) to

.

                 [C]

                 PETER CHARLES BLEIK

                 DOUGLAS CHARLES CORMACK

                 RICK FELBER

                 THOMAS GRAYDON FOGLESONG

                 [C]

                 [C]

                 JERRY RUPE

                 DALE D. SMILEY

 

 

 

 

            Information on these “subjects”  not blacked out of this report through censorship has been reviewed.   Rupe had been seen burning a small American flag. 

He was also accused of unrelated drug offenses by local police, as was Rick Felber.   Cormack had admitted demonstrating at ROTC and pulling on a firehose.  Nothing had been adduced regarding the others named.   The routing slip for this report has only one entry, which has been crossed out but is still legible: “White House”. (7, B)

 

 

 

 

            Thursday, June 5^th.    The White House had not been vociferous on the subject of campus unrest for some time.   Now, having placated the business elite during dinner at the White House on the 27^th, President Nixon finally ventured onto a college campus.   But it was his idea of a campus: the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, a college notoriously an adjunct of its football team and fraternities.   He was not invited by the University itself, but by the Crusade in progress on campus under the de facto White House chaplain, Billy Graham. [189]    “[A] small band of protestors” was isolated and suppressed by campus security, local police, the Secret Service, and vigilantes from the Society of Christian Athletes, [190] and the President was hailed as a conquering hero.

            Buoyed by the accolades, he made his televised address to the Nation on Cambodia on June 3^rd.   Relying heavily on visual aids, he repeated what he had told Wall Street six days before: the Cambodian invasion was a total success.   (No mention was made of COSVN.)   And his aides and partisans all told him the speech was a total success too.   Having declared himself the winner, could the President now relinquish his vendetta against the student movement?

            On June 5^th, he convoked the directors of the mega-spy apparatus – the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency – to tell them he was not satisfied with their CI (counter-intelligence) capabilities.   Announcing that “Certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands of Americans – mostly under 30 – are determined to destroy our society”, he demanded that the master spies undertake a draconian new program of coordinated surveillance of and direct action against the New Left, particularly the student anti-war movement.   Flanking the President, along with the ever-present Haldeman and Ehrlichman, was the man who would oversee this giant secret offensive from the White House, a former Young Americans for Freedom activist and just-discharged Army CI officer, Thomas Charles Huston.   The supreme irony was that this plan would forever bear his name, although he was never anything but a pawn for the CIA.   And yet it was foredoomed from the outset, largely because of the immediate and visceral aversion J. Edgar Hoover conceived for the youth, who he derided to Sullivan as “[t]hat snot-nosed kid… that hippie intellectual”. [191]

            Recruiting Huston was the first successful ploy in CIA master counterspy James Angleton’s campaign to penetrate the White House, as was recruiting Sullivan, in the FBI.   Sullivan had been turned years before.   He decided to use Huston on their first meeting, June 19, 1969, when he saw how easily he could impress the young man with the need to replace Hoover (implicitly, with himself) because the aging Director would oppose the illegal tactics needed to defeat the New Left.   “In fact I had outlined the same problem in a classified personal letter to Richard Helms…   but Helms felt there was nothing either of us could do about it as long as Hoover was in control.” [192]    Sullivan was convinced that the CIA had to lead the struggle to save civilization from the hippies because Hoover’s FBI had been permeated by the old man’s legalistic timidity and anti-intellectualism. [193]   As if another irony needed to be extracted from this same occasion, Nixon, in introducing his master plan for the ideal police state, was only ordering the intelligence chiefs to do what they had been doing all along and what they would continue to do after the Huston Plan was dead.   “Not only were they deceiving the president and his representative; they were playing games with each other.” [194]    The meeting is thus briefly dealt with despite its implications for the future of the country to indicate the kind of pressures on the FBI’s top leadership at the time.   Hoover would be engaged for weeks in a successful attempt to keep his FBI out of anything so likely to tarnish its reputation forever.    He could spare no attention to an investigation that had already discredited itself in the relatively minor arena of Ohio.

 

 

 

 

            Friday, June 6^th.   Cartha M. “Deke” DeLoach, the FBI’s second-in-command, walked into J. Edgar Hoover’s office and announced he was retiring.   DeLoach’s position had become untenable following a series of articles concerning his personal corruption by Jack Nelson (see above, June 2^nd).   “Apparently a deal was struck between the Los Angeles Times’  management and the FBI: an end to the Times’ investigation of DeLoach in exchange for DeLoach’s leaving the government.” [195]    Hoover and his erstwhile heir apparent discussed the situation for nearly three hours, Hoover “doing ninety-eight per cent of the talking,” but DeLoach remained firm.   “Well, I thought you were the one who would never leave me,” Hoover concluded in tones of ultimate reproach. [196]    He stopped speaking to DeLoach, cut him off from top-level mail, and, the crowning insult, appointed his arch-rival Sullivan to succeed him as Director (although Sullivan did not learn of it immediately).   In effect, it was another effortless coup for Angleton and the CI.

            Sullivan would now become Director of the FBI on Hoover’s death, which seemed to Washington cynics might come at any hour.   It was no longer in his interest to subvert the FBI.   He began to denounce the Huston Plan to Hoover, redundantly supporting the Director’s resolve to kill it.   For Sullivan, it was a spook’s tour de force.   He had been double-crossing the FBI for years to curry favor with the CIA, and now he double-crossed the CIA. [197]     Had he forgotten that betraying the Agency could have ultimate consequences?

            His way to the top clear, he would now stumble over a pebble.   In October, during a routine “the radicals are coming” speech to the United Press International, he deprecated the Red Menace, stating that the generational ferment would go on “if the Communist Party in this country didn’t exist at all.” [198]    Hoover had just finished testifying before Congress to the article of faith that had sustained him for forty years and would until his death: that the Communist Party was behind not only the anti-war movement and student unrest, but every other ill of humankind as well.   He fired Sullivan.

            When Nixon learned of Sullivan’s termination, his first reaction was, “Will he rat on us?” – particularly with regard to the White House role in the Huston Plan.   Ehrlichman’s reply: “It depends on how he’s treated.” [199]     Sullivan became head of the newly-formed Office of Narcotics Intelligence.   Three years later, he was still making himself useful to the President by testifying to the Watergate Committee that, for instance, the Huston Plan was J. Edgar Hoover’s idea. [200]    Eventually he retired to his home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, where officials of President Jimmy Carter’s “new” FBI came to consult him through the agency’s scandals of the late 1970s.  His repose was marred by an automobile accident, which triggered a heart attack.

            Before dawn on November 9, 1977, Sullivan went out into the freezing woods to meet “two hunting companions”,. according to the official account.   Later that morning, local law enforcement announced that he was dead, killed by a single 30-06 round through the neck.   The shooter happened to be the son of a state trooper; although his rifle had a telescopic sight, he claimed he had mistaken Sullivan for a deer. [201]     He was fined and had his hunting license suspended. [202]     The New York Times obituary – which, quite incredibly even for this journal, memorialized Sullivan as a “liberal Democrat” and claimed his split with Hoover had come over Sullivan’s desire to prosecute civil rights violations in the South – did raise one interesting point: Sullivan’s career had taken off in World War II with “an undercover intelligence mission to neutral Spain”.   It is difficult to imagine the 30-year-old Sullivan “tangling with Axis spies in Madrid” and surviving without the aid of  the Office of Strategic Services, the father of the CIA.   The obit also noted that Sullivan was slated to appear as a witness against one of the senior agents finally indicted for COINTELPRO. [203]    In fact, he was a star witness against several of the Bureau’s Hoover loyalists.

            But if his death was a fortunately timed “accident” for the upper echelon of the FBI, there were other beneficiaries.   On September 12^th, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio ordered a new civil trial in the Kent State murders.   On October 20^th, just two weeks before the “accident”, the court refused to reconsider its decision.   As the CIA’s man in the FBI and the supervisor of the KENFOUR investigation, what might Sulllivan have testified to about the Agency’s role in Kent State, had he lived?

 

 

 

 

            Tuesday, June 10^th.   Writing for the New York Times, John Kifner picked up and expanded on Jack Nelson’s story about the FBI inquisition at Kent State.   “A small group of liberal… professors… appear to have been singled out for investigation.   The agents have also been given access to the campus police department’s extensive files on ‘potential troublemakers’.” [204]    And Arthur Krause filed a six million dollar lawsuit against Governor James Rhodes and others in the wrongful death of his daughter and the other students.

 

 

 

 

            Wednesday, June 11^th.   The agents took the second statement in two days from a freshman coed who had nothing to add to the general consensus about what had happened on the fatal weekend.   There is no record of  further investigative activity for nearly a week.

 

 

 

 

            Tuesday, June 16^th.   The Akron Resident Agency received a call from [C], office of the state fire marshal.   [C] advised that the Portage County Prosecutor, Ronald Kane, planned to recall the county grand jury into session on July 1^st.   He announced he would proceed against any suspects in the ROTC fire “even in circumstances wherein only one witness has identified a suspect as being involved in the burning.”    Simultaneously the Kent Police advised it would ask for indictments against Jerry Rupe, Rick Felber, and [C] for dealing drugs. (7, npn., memo to file, June 17, 1970).

 

 

 

 

            Thursday, June 18^th.   SAC Cleveland advised Director SOG that Kane would meet on May 25^th in Ravenna with Robert Murphy and Jerris Leonard of  the Justice Department “to discuss action Kane plans to take and for him to learn the Department’s plans”. (7, npn., teletype, June 18, 1970).

 

 

 

 

            Friday, June 19^th.   Robert Murphy sent a long memo to Jerris Leonard on “Preliminary Conclusions and Recommendations” (actually, the date mark stamped on the document is illegible; someone has written in “19” in pen).   The first section of this document could not be more forthright and concise, e.g.,

 

 

                 (1).  There was no sniper.

                 (2).  The Guard was not surrounded and could have continued in the direction in which they were going;

                 (3).  Only a few students were within 30 yards of the Guard – none was closer than 20 yards;

                 (4).  Even if the Guard believed they were being charged by the students, other alternatives – specifically bayonets and a limited supply of tear gas

            -- were available.

                 (5).  At least three responsible members of the Guard, including the Captain in charge of Troop G, state specifically that the lives of the Guardsmen were

            not in danger.   (p. 2, emphasis added).

 

 

 

 

He then proceeded to quote at length from the self-incriminating statements of Guardsmen Morris, Pierce, McGee, and Zoller, and the sergeant over Herschler.   There is no mention of that by Sergeant Shafer, the most ingenuously bloodthirsty of all (see above, May 7^th).

            Section II seems to have been written by a different author, one so skilled in the shell game of exegesis as to have been Jesuit-educated.   Murphy dismisses the possibility of a criminal trial because the “rules of evidence will preclude telling the whole story of the incident”. (p. 5)    Then he raises the prospect of the United States bringing a civil suit against those responsible.   Then he rejects this in favor of letting the “recently appointed Presidential Commission” (the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest) take over.

            It strains credulity to posit that even a young attorney could be unaware that the presidential commission had been used throughout the turbulence of the 1960s as a device to evade, not address social crises – deliberating for months and then producing reports to be shelved in the infrequently-visited stacks reserved for government publications.   He may not have known that Nixon had planted persons on the Commission’s staff who would strain every resource to keep vital evidence from the Commissioners.   But if he read newspapers or watched television news, he had to have known that Nixon surrogates had been attacking the Commission and its work almost from the day it had been appointed.

            He finally decides that prosecution of the arsonists of May 2^nd be left strictly to the local authorities.   He gives no reason for this except that federal prosecution of these persons would inhibit “extensive and frank interviews regarding the shootings with students and faculty members”.   But these interviews had been concluded.   He does note that “[t]he FBI’s investigation into what certain professors taught in their classes has already had that effect”. (p. 6) [205]

            A narrative chronology by Murphy and his colleague Robert Hocutt, “Summary of the Kent State Incident,” is attached.   At the top of page 2, the authors explode a key article of Nixon-Hoover dogma by stating “the FBI has uncovered no evidence” that the SDS had been behind the four-day crisis.   After this promising beginning, however, the “Summary” runs rife with unconvincing claims of ignorance, glaring omissions, and downright errors.   For example, with regard to the May 1^st riot on North Water Street: “There were members of a motorcycle gang present at some time during the night’s activities but statements conflict on the question of whether they participated in the incident.” (see above, May 1^st).   It notes three meetings of the authorities on May 2^nd ; there were five.   “[We] do not know upon what factual basis, if any, the decision was made” to bring in the Guard.   The “Summary’s” chronology of the evening of May 2^nd is absurd on its face.   “Troops began arriving in Kent at 7:00 p.m.”   But, “[b]y 10:30 p.m., at least 400 members of Company A and Company C, 145^th Infantry, and Troop G, 107^th Armored Cavalry, Ohio National Guard, had arrived in Kent.” (p. 7)   “At 8:30 p.m., the FBI [!] was notified that the building was on fire.”   At 9:00 p.m., the firemen left the ROTC Building, “which was not yet ablaze”.   “In the absence of the firemen, at about 9:45 p.m., the ROTC Building flared up and began to burn furiously.” (p. 8)   The obvious question of why is ignored.   If only if a footnotes, the authors do raise a skeptical question about the quality of  local intelligence:

 

 

                 4/  One Kent police officer has stated he saw Allison Krause about to throw a rock at the ROTC Building on May 2, 1970, but he stated that

            he looked away before she threw it.   It is strange to note that she was the only person he could identify in the entire crowd.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But this promising self-invitation to investigate the conspiracy to defame Krause is never followed up.

            They mention Governor Rhodes’ press conference on the 3^rd, but with no mention of its wildly inflammatory content or the fact that it was broadcast into the Guard’s bivouac area.   They do not mention Rhodes’ meeting at the airport with President White or his telling White that the campus had been invaded by four to five hundred outside radical agitators.   There could be no more understated way of describing the Guard’s conduct on the evening of May 3^rd than, “The National Guard fired tear gas into the crowd and advanced upon them with bayonets…   Two students were probably bayoneted at this time.” (p. 11; emphasis added.)   The “Counsellor” at Tri-Towers stated that Allison Krause “became angry and obscene… she scratched him in fighting her way into the lobby”.   Not according to Crzyston’s statement to the FBI; she had struck him, after he had “pushed” her boyfriend “down”, when everyone was gathered in the lounge. (p. 11).

            On May 4^th, “it was General Canterbury, acting on orders, who was determined that the rally could not be held.” (p. 12)   Acting on whose orders?   The footnote on Page 17 reads, “19/ Some students probably came ‘equipped’ with bags full of rocks in anticipation of a confrontation.   There are references in various interviews to people carrying bags.”   The bags can be seen clearly in the numerous photographs of the incident.   Neither their shape nor the way they are being carried admits the possibility that they are full of rocks; they are book bags.   The authors go into detail about what happened after the Guard moved out, but many of the details are irrelevant and some, misleading and mistaken.   Of Canterbury’s breaking formation and leading his men up over the hill and down onto the practice field, they state that he is chasing an indeterminate “group” of demonstrators, rather than a dozen hecklers. (p. 17)   Of the Guard’s sally onto the practice field: “We believe that the rock throwing reached its peak at this time”.   They admit that the Guard kneeled in a firing position then, but omit elaboration on the circumstances – the soldiers aiming out over 200 yards of empty field, a fence, and, on the other side of the fence, at a few students in the parking lot, five of them walking through the shot with books under their arms, the others merely watching. [206]

            They also pass over the prime evidence, particularly derived from the photographs, that the murders were premeditated: twelve of the soldiers are seen to  be hanging back, as their comrades move out on the return march to the practice field, in a kind of “huddle” on the practice field.   And the same twelve men continually look back over their right shoulders – the other men on the line are looking straight ahead – not in the direction of the crowd on and around the Taylor Hall verandah, but at the twelve isolated hecklers who have been defying them for twenty minutes, now scattered over a Prentice Hall parking lot which in moments will be awash with blood.    The “Summary” actually states that “[t]here is a curious lack of photographs from the time the Guard left the practice football field until the time of the shooting.” (p. 29)   This is simply and blatantly false.    The return march must be the most extensively photographed peacetime small unit manuveur in the history of the US Army, captured by the Kent State University News Service, Mike Glaser, the Akron Beacon-Journal, Ronald McNees,  Richard Harris Jr., and of course the virtually continuous series by John Filo. [207]

            But however many issues these documents evade, they return in the “Summary” to Murphy’s original points:

 

 

                 The Guardsmen were not surrounded…  They could have easily continued in the direction in which they were going.   No Guardsman

            claims he was hit with rocks immediately prior to the firing…(p. 24)

                 There was no sniper… (p. 25)

 

 

 

 

            and add a shocking new admission: “We have reason to believe that the claim by the National Guard that their lives were endangered by the students was fabricated subsequent to the event.” (p. 21) [208]    Or at least, it would shock Middle America when leaked to the press (see below).

 

 

 

 

            Friday, June 20^th.   Senator Stephen Young, Democrat and dean of the Ohio delegation in Congress, rose on the floor to add his voice to those in the press denouncing the FBI inquisition.   Regarding Nixon’s appointment of the Commission on Campus Unrest by way of preamble, he recalled the fate of previous presidential commissions on the racial crisis and violence:  “Both of these groups made thoughtful and valuable recommendations.   For all practical purposes they have been ignored entirely.”   Then he got down to it:

 

 

                 FBI investigators have been accumulating large volumes of information, but have shown only minimal interest in the activities of National Guardsmen on

            the day of the murders.   Most of the FBI’s efforts have been directed toward questioning students and faculty at Kent State about the teaching techniques

            and political beliefs of some professors.   The killing of four innocent young people has been made the excuse for an inquisition of the Kent State faculty

            and students…

                 …it is  very doubtful that the current FBI inquiry will result in anything but a whitewash of the Ohio National Guardsmen or a mild slap on their wrists.

            At the same time, it is fair to predict that J. Edgar Hoover’s inquiry will try to show that the Kent State students were inspired by leftist elements intent on

            creating violence.   It is an old FBI technique reminiscent of the witch-hunting years of the 1950’s, the days of “Joe McCarthyism”. [209]

 

 

 

 

           

            Monday, June 22^nd.   Jerris Leonard forwarded the Murphy-Hocutt documents to John Mitchell.   His covering letter ignored their preference for the “presidential commission”.   It stated “I would envision that we would not proceed with a federal grand jury at this time nor by August, but would rather work closely with the district attorney.” [210]    And with John Mitchell’s blessing, the entire case was turned over to Ron Kane.   It would not be known for another eight years that the ultimate source of the determination that there would never be a federal grand jury was President Richard Nixon. [211]

 

 

 

 

            Tuesday, June 23^rd.   The Canton Police advised they had arrested Jerry Rupe and were holding on drug charges in the Stark County jail in lieu of $ 15,000 bond. (7, p. 2 [but near the back of the volume]).

 

 

 

 

            Friday, June 26.   A student furnished a belated statement on the ROTC which raised a point worthy of investigation.   The sequence was as others had related it: the students’ fumbling attempts at arson, the long-delayed appearance of the firemen, the students’ interference with them, the even longer-delayed appearance of the campus police.   But they “left the front of the ROTC building on the southwest side completely unprotected…  he believed it was left unprotected because this is where the fire actually was started”. (7, pp. 15-19)   There was no followup.

 

 

 

 

            Wednesday, July 1^st.    A student furnished a detailed account of the entire four-day confrontation which, however, contained no new details.   This is the last report in the KENFOUR file. (7, pp. 23-26)

 

 

 

 

            Tuesday, July 7^th.   Leonard advised his fellow assistant attorneys general Will Wilson (Criminal) and J. Walter Yeagley (Internal Security) of the proceedings of his June 25^th meeting with Kane.   After returning to SOG to confer with Mitchell, they decided to turn the “shooting” phase of the case over to the locals as well.   Their rationale is quoted without comment:

 

 

                 There are adequate Ohio statutory provisions to cover such a situation.   I believe that the issue of provocation and its availability as a defense is

            questionable enough so that Kane ought to be willing to take the entire matter surrounding the shootings to the state [sic] grand jury. [212]

 

 

 

 

 

 

            Wednesday, July 8^th.   Leonard sent a memo to Hoover requesting that the FBI follow up on 39 points.   The questions themselves indicate the depth of ignorance still surrounding the events of May 1^st – 4^th confounding the men who had just devoted one of the FBI’s most massive investigations to them.   Why had Satrom called in the National Guard?   With whom did he speak when he called “Columbus” at 5:30 p.m. on May 2^nd and asked that the Guard be committed?   What went on at the other two meetings now acknowledged to have been held on May 2^nd, aside from the three that Murphy had cited in his memos?  Who made the decision on May 4^th that no rallies would be permitted?   How much tear gas did the Guard have left when they decided to fire bullets instead?   Identify the Guardsman who had told the Akron Beacon-Journal, “The guys have been saying that we got to get together and stick to the same story, that it was our lives or them”, and ask him to elaborate.   “26. Please obtain copies of all records showing which weapons had been issued to which Guardsmen.”   Follow up on the report that “[C] reported that a National Guardsman advised her that the ‘mood of his buddies was to shoot as many hippies as he [sic] could.” [213]

            Or, this is as much as can be gleaned from the document released by Justice to the Kent State Archives in 2000.   There is a version of the original report in the Scranton Commission files with the proper names intact.   [C] is identified as a “Mrs. Grayson”, a local woman. [214]    Actually, the FBI had long since interviewed her about

 

 

                 her conversation with one of the national guardsmen down town on the afternoon of the shooting.   This man was stationed on duty near the police

            station the afternoon of the shooting.   He advised her strongly in view of her hairdo and dress to go home as quickly as possible.   (She was wearing

            a mini skirt and long straight hair.)   He said the mood of his buddies was to shoot as many hippies as they could.   She said he told her that the men

            had been drinking. (1, 11, p. 1277).

 

 

 

 

            There is no record that the FBI followed up on this or any other of  Leonard’s 38 points.   There followed two weeks of silence.

 

 

            Tuesday, July 21^st.   An unidentified Justice Department attorney hand-carried a “prosecutive summary”, probably the Murphy-Hocutt document, to Ronald Kane in Ohio, to serve as the basis for local prosecution. [215]

 

 

 

 

            Thursday, July 23^rd.   The FBI was scheduled to testify at the Scranton Commission’s hearings in  Washington, D.C.   Hoover did not appear, sending Sullivan instead to read his statement.   According to the statement, there had been only one act of violence at Kent State, the burning of the ROTC building.

This assertion was juxtaposed to the allegation that a Kent State professor had taught his students how to make Molotov Cocktails.   Sullivan assured the Commission that “the FBI has absolutely no interest in legitimate student and professorial activities.   It is none of our concern.”   He then moved on to urge that a “permanent solution” be found to the problem of student unrest. [216]

            As if sent by Heaven in lieu of a thunderbolt to punish such utterances, the Akron Beacon-Journal published the “prosecutive summary” in its final edition, setting forth Murphy’s conclusions with emphasis: there had been no sniper, the Guard had not been surrounded when they fired, nor had they been in any danger,

the self-defense alibi was fabricated after the fact, etc.

 

 

 

 

            Friday, July 24^th.   The wire services picked up the Beacon-Journal story and virtually every major newspaper in the country ran it.   It went off like a “nuclear device” on Main Street.

            Nixon was on the phone to Hoover at 8:47 a.m. that morning, frothing – tongue-tied, if Hoover’s first paraphrase of the conversation was accurate: “The President said he told his people he was going to have it ‘shot down’ as he was not going to have this student business erupting as, basically, what do you expect the Guard to do[?]”.   In the same memo, Hoover recast the President’s message more coherently: “The President was quite disturbed about the article in the paper and directed me to take steps to have it ‘knocked down’ insofar as the FBI was concerned.   I told him I would see that this was done.” (3, Section 32, loose memo).   But Nixon was only the precursor of abusive mail that deluged SOG from members of the previously Silent Majority, demanding to know how “their” FBI could have betrayed the National Guard and sided with “student rioters”.   Hoover had a form letter prepared disowning the “Summary” and the article.   The FBI did not draw conclusions, it recited, only conducted investigations.   If the correspondent sounded far enough to the right, he enclosed some of his favorite anti-communist, anti-radical literature.

            Hoover sent a letter of his own to John Knight, the Beacon-Journal’s conservative editor, rebuking him for “distorting” the “Summary”.   Knight replied, “I am surprised at the hostile tone of your letter.   There is no need to lecture the editor.”   The exchange was lost in the avalanche of hate mail the paper received.  A year later, when it won journalism’s ultimate accolade for its Kent State coverage, the paper’s unsigned front page editorial led off, “We never thought to see the day when the Beacon-Journal was sorry to win the Pulitzer Prize.” [217]

            Who had leaked the “Summary”?   Veteran Cleveland SAC Charles Cusick, who had been shunted aside when Sullivan took over the investigation, was willing to hazard better than a guess.

 

 

                 Kane is a small-time County Prosecutor, highly impetuous, politically ambitious, and obviously is highly impulsive…  the political motivation locally

 

            is to the effect that nobody wants to see the National Guard prosecuted…  The National Guard are his constituents in many instances….

                 …Kane because of his impetuousness thought he could make political hay out of grabbing the entire package.   After Kane made such a commitment

            to Leonard, he obviously thought the matter over and realized the highly controversial issues which existed and it would appear that he has now turned

            the tables on the Department of Justice, and has dumped the entire thing in the Justice Department’s lap. (3, loose memo, A. Rosen to Sullivan).

 

 

 

 

If so, he had not dumped it in time.   In October, the local grand jury he had given it to indicted 25 persons, none of them Guardsmen.  The Guard could not be found guilty of anything, the grand jury ruled, because they had fired “in the honest and sincere belief” that they would have been harmed if they hadn’t.   The real guilty parties were the university administration, which had permitted too much dissent (had “over-emphasized… the right to dissent”), engendering too much criticism of “our institutions of government”, and the students themselves. [218]    The provincial tone of their findings became meat for the nation’s political cartoonists when it became clear that the student crime that shocked the jurors most was their use of bad language.   Derision was such a frequent editorial response that all missed the grand jury’s single sally into the truth: it deplored the university police for their “shocking inability to protect the Kent City firemen” on the evening of May 2^nd.   Inability?   KSU had boasted one of the largest and best-equipped campus police departments in the country.   But the grand jury report immediately corrected itself on this score: the KSUPD had not been unable but unwilling to protect the building.   “It is obvious that the burning of the ROTC building could have been prevented with the manpower then available.” [219]    No one raised the question of why it had then been permitted.

            The grand jury had made 770 findings in all and had been entitled to make none, ruled federal judge William K. Thomas in Cleveland three months later.

It had exceeded its authority and violated the Constitutional rights of all concerned, particularly in its condemnation of free speech on the campus.   He ordered its report burned and copies stricken from the record. [220]    Thus was the fruit of the inquisition itself consigned to the flames.   While this burning may be admired as an act of judicial purity, the historian must deplore it (as the destruction of any record).   How many answers were thus lost forever?

            It took another year to try and sentence the alleged arch-criminals.   Radical mastermind Jerry Rupe, in fact a 23-year-old sandalmaker who had never attended Kent State, was found guilty of misdemeanor obstruction of a fireman.   Was he “Aquinas”? had he lived at the “subversive house?   Did anyone still care?   From his own standpoint, the six-month sentence he received now must have seemed trivial compared to the ten to twenty years he was doing for drug trafficking.

The case against Peter Charles Bleik “collapsed when a key witness for the state said he was unable to identify Mr. Bleik as one of two men he had observed throwing gasoline-soaked rags into the ROTC building,” and he was acquitted. [221]    Larry Shub and Tom Fogelsong pled guilty to first-degree riot charges; the other charges against them were dropped.   The fifth defendant, Mary Helen Nicholas, was acquitted of interfering with a fireman – and with that, the state of Ohio had had enough.   It asked that charges against the remaining 20 defendants be dropped.

 

 

            And that is how the FBI punished the evildoers and protected every American family from the radical conspiracy.   Its work goes on today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                    THE END

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                

           

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

           

 

 

 

           

 

           

 

 

 

Thomas – 23