Alone in Cover-Up Country
A girl kneeling by a slain boy on a sidewalk, lists skyward in fury . . . a middle-aged man wet-faced on TV, the camera motionless, riveted on his silences, whirring at grief . . . Allison Krause. Governor Scranton. James Michener . . . Hurtful images, a jumble of names—until recently little else surfaced at the mention of “the tragedy of Kent State.” The events of April 30 to May 4, 1970, from President Nixon’s announcement that U.S. ground troops were in Cambodia to the actual shooting of students by National Guardsmen, weren’t remote in time. But keeping track of outrages has grown increasingly hard. And for many sleazy reasons “the authorities” have pressed people to forget from the start.
For Peter Davies, author of THE TRUTH ABOUT KENT STATE: A Challenge to the American Conscience (Farrar. Straus & Giroux. $10.00: paper, $3.50). these obstacles weren’t stoppers but prods. A New York insurance man and private citizen who has pursued the truth about the shootings and their sequel for three years. Davies assumed without hesitation that energies of conscience were everywhere intact and that right action was bound to follow from sound knowledge. Kent State constituted a failure of justice: the nature, causes, and costs of failures of justice need to be ferreted out: an informed citizenry will not stomach official misdeeds. Therefore probe.
As everyone now knows, this decision—this refusal to forget has had consequences. In the period since the 1971 decision by Attorney General John Mitchell against convening a grand jury on violations of civil rights at Kent State, much has been revealed about the scale of such violations elsewhere—breaking and entering, theft, other acts committed in the name of “national security.” There have also been disclosures, in a variety of contexts, about pre-1970 U.S. aggression in Cambodia that was concealed when the ground invasion was announced. And new knowledge of both kinds has cast fresh light—and irony—on the entire Kent State episode. But in itself this knowledge couldn’t have brought about an official reopening of inquiry. Credit for that accomplishment goes to the parents of the victims, public interest lawyers who brought suits in state courts, church groups and foundations who helped finance the suits, liberal congressmen—and. in large measure, Peter Davies.
Soon after Mitchell was indicted last May. Deputy Assistant Attorney General William O’Connor admitted that “the Justice Department had for some time possessed evidence upon which to seek indictments against one to six Ohio guardsmen for depriving the [undergraduate] victims of civil rights without due process of law.” In midsummer, when the Davies book was in galley proof. Senator Birch Bayh forcefully raised the subject of Kent State in hearings on the promotion of an official involved in the original Mitchell decision to drop the case, and shortly thereafter Attorney General Elliot Richardson announced that the Justice Department was undertaking a re-investigation.
At this writing, the results of the promised probe aren’t known, but they will surely update the research presented in The Truth About Kent State. Yet, surprisingly, this is unlikely to diminish the value of the book. The reason is that, while Peter Davies’ text in one of its dimensions is a cry of protest, in another it is a cool inquiry into the anatomy of a (possible) pro-amateur coverup—a successful attempt to clarify how and why such events can occur. Within months of the episode, both the Scranton Commission and Mitchell declared the shootings to have been “unnecessary, unwarranted. and inexcusable,” Davies notes, and he adds: “If the American people had recognized from the beginning that the shooting down of unarmed civilians on a crowded college campus by combat-equipped troops was wrong, the Justice Department would have responded to the political will of the majority. Instead the shootings were generally condoned.” The central question must then be: why so? What forces combined to hide the injustice from general view?
The answer provided in the book begins with a reckoning of some assiduous mythmaking from above that helped to create false divisions between old and young, school and community. The public had been taught in this period to perceive college youth as The Enemy and to conceive of the campus as a key arena in which the struggle for The Good (an orderly society) would necessarily be fought. The teacher of the lesson was not simply the nation’s Chief Executive, although vilification of campus activists as “bums”—the word was used only a few days before the shots were fired—strengthened belief in the inevitability of “war.” The media played a role and so did state and local officials. (On the day of the Kent State shootings, the Governor of Ohio was forty-eight hours away from a hotly contested primary in which he was running as a law-andorder candidate: his rhetoric throughout the campaign dramatized his keenness for the war: his summons of the National Guard, at a moment when campus calm had been restored, confirmed the notion that none but combat “procedures” could be relevant.)
A second force leading people to condone shooting the unarmed was inferior on-the-spot reporting and sustained on-the-spot lying in high places. Time and again word was passed bv “the authorities” that the troops were in danger; evidence suggesting that the troops’ first shots weren’t fired in fear or panic went virtually unreported. Davies observes that the Guardsmen were separated from their victims by a hundred yards and more at the time they shot; that, owing to the manner in which the riflemen swung about from an established line of march to take aim. the first volley looked to have been coordinated in advance; that a student armed with a loaded pistol who had received pay as a federal government campus spy—“internal security” again— was seen to have flourished the weapon, in view of the Guardsmen, just before the firing; and that members of the platoon that fired had time and occasion, shortly before the slaughter, to work out a plan of action.
He further quotes assertions in a federal summary of a voluminous FBI study that “the crowd apparently was initially peaceful and relatively quiet,” that Guardsmen had not been attacked by a sniper, were not surrounded, were not hit with rocks immediately prior to the shooting; that an arm bruise suffered by a Guardsman ten to fifteen minutes before the shots were fired was the only injury serious enough to require “any kind of medical treatment” occurring before that fatal volley; and that, finally, “we have some reason to believe that the claim by the National Guard that their lives were endangered by the students was fabricated subsequent to the event.”
In substantiating this review of the facts. Davies relies on scrupulously detailed readings of several dozen photographs included in the text. But his emphasis throughout is on the way the media covered the story. He acknowledges that the Akron Beacon Journal sought out information from others besides Guard commanders and university spokesmen. But this was. he insists, the exception: for weeks the media’s primary sources were figures like the general officer in charge who, early in the disturbance, was seen hurling stones at students. And the result was that no perspective on the shootings other than as acts of self-defense became widely available to the public at large.
A third reason for public acceptance of the murderous response to the Kent State demonstration is. in Davies’ mind, dimness about guaranteed rights, notably the right of peaceful assembly. Every Kent State investigator has agreed that a disastrous jump in levels of fury occurred at the moment when Guardsmen undertook, without constitutional sanction, to break up an announced, orderly, public meeting of protest. The truth About Kent State quotes Justice Brandeis: “Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for the law: it invites everv man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”But to understand this cycle in relation to what happened at Kent State requires, first, awareness of the fundamental rights originally transgressed. and. second, suspension of the habitual assumption that law enforcers are never themselves law breakers. The absence of both insured the invulnerability of the exon era tors.
As should be said, the basic patterns Davies discerns the overarching mvth, on-the-spot falsification of events, ignoranee and manipulated confusion about the specifics of the law—are scarcely astonishing. Neither is the evidence that’s cited as these patterns are traced. And one or two omissions might be remarked. Should not the author have addressed himself specifically to the previous investigations, analyzing their failure to rouse protest? The Scranton Commission’s impact was weakened by the need to back off from talk of conspiracy (at the time the draft was submitted, an Ohio grand jury was theoretically in process of investigating the Guardsmen’s behavior), and by the Nixon Administration’s abuse of the Scranton report as leftoriented and permissive (the treatment implied that no anti-Administration punches had been pulled). I. F. Stone’s articles, on The Killings at Kent State, though firm in protest. were brief and had no purchase on a mass audience comparable to that of James Michener’s Kent State, which was initiated by and excerpted for the Reader’s Digest. And Michener’s chief concern was not the distribution of justice, but the drama of conflicting lifestyles.
To dwell on this or that omission, though, would be as wrongheaded as to slight Mr. Davies’ book as “merely topical.”The Truth About Kent State is, in the end, the work of a partisan; details that reflect badly on the student-victims are occasionally softened. As already indicated. the author didn’t work entirely alone in his effort to force an official re-investigation of the case. (The title page of the book lists “the Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church" as co-author; the appendices include two articles by other writers on due process in civil disobedience, and on church obligations in a time of repression; the parents of the victims were consistently supportive: the National Council of Churches, aided by the generous-opportunistic hand of the Playboy Foundation, helped to finance a number of pertinent lawsuits.) And obviously there’s no assurance that information about why this cover-up worked will either save us from the next one. or bring histiee closer to other student victims at Jackson State and elsewhere. But despite these qualifications. The Truth About Kent State does waken uncommon optimism in its reader. For while the cover-up story is infuriating. the teller himself possesses distinguished and enlivening personal qualities—doggedness that’s in no wav vengeful, steadiness of concern. belief in the possibility of marshaling fact toward decent ends. competence in that work, trust above all in our capacity for electing to make ourseives responsible. Of course it still matters, the voice on his page keeps implicitly repeating, of course your best self cares, could never really forget it, couldn’t possibly let it go.
All royalties from The Truth About Kent State are to be devoted to the continuing quest for justice in the case: the gesture, like the book, stands as an admirable civic deed.
Without hope and the existence of a feasible route to justice, deeds of the above kind are unimaginable—which explains the weight of futility burdening Michael J. Aden’s AN AMERICAN VERDICT (Doubleday, $6.95). At the same time that effort was being pressed to bare the truth about Kent State, community and civil rights groups, newspapers, and others were struggling in Chicago against what they saw as another cover-up—the police version of a bloody dawn raid on the city’s Black Panther headquarters. The struggle led to a federal grand jury (no indictment but a report containing many previously suppressed facts), and later to a Special Cook County grand jury indictment of State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan for conspiracy to obstruct justice. The evidence brought forth left no doubt of a cover-up in many minds, but the verdict was exoneration, and it was final—no legal avenues left, no ground for adopting a rallying tone and speaking positively of challenges to the American conscience. case closed.
An American Verdict is the story of the Hanrahan trial. It begins and ends with views of the West Monroe Street neighborhood in which, on December 4. 1969. Fred Hampton (head of the Illinois Black Panther Party) and Mark Clark (a party member) were killed, and four other party members wounded by police bullets. (The police had a search warrant: their mission as stated by Hanrahan was “to seize sawed-off shotguns and other illegal weapons stored [at this] depot.”) The method throughout is impressionistic: scenes and snippets of testimonv from the trial are interspersed with short takes on the character of Mayor Daley, the birth and history of the Panthers, developments in the culture of street gangs, a cop awards night, the Chicago Irish in fact and fiction. Campaign '72, and a number of other subjects. The ground of protest is fully mapped: Fred Hampton, killed in his bed, never fired a shot, nor did most of the Panthers whom Hanrahan charged with attempted murder and armed violence. And the verdict does not go unexplained:
A “conspiracy to obstruct justice" supposedly is hard enough to prove in the most favorable of contexts, but here the defense has owned the context, has owned it all along. Who. after all, were these defendants hut young men. men in their prime, supported not only by official regulations (always a help), but by their own sense of rectitude, of mission, of comradeship, and . . . sustained in the end by the emotional apparat of the whole close [law enforcement] world they live in—which came to include finally the prosecutor.
But the dominant note of An American Verdict is of helplessness and meaninglessness, and long before the end the book’s air becomes difficult to breathe. Mr. Aden remembers a happier moment, a time in which the country seemed almost capable of effective self-scrutiny— “one wild brief period of time—was it three or four or two years ago? was it this year? ever?—[when] we nearly looked at [ourselves].” Since then, however,
there have been changes. The children. or many of them, have come back down from the hills. We have lowered our skirts. Raised our sidebums. Proclaimed that we are a bit wearied and preoccupied, and leaving a number of dead behind us and some strange disconnected memories . . . we are moving back to the business of the country. It seems odd. and faraway, and not quite believable that we were ever anywhere else.
And the book’s closing sentences— the return to the scene of the atrocity-stutter amid the obliterations of time:
The house on West Monroe Street is a house like any other there. An old row house, now getting older; the green paint, a lime shade, now flaking into other colors. Did something happen here? Was it important? Two sehoolkids come walking back down the block —the same two, two little black girls. Earmlifts and mittens. Time passing everywhere. Time passes. Time.
Mr. Arlen’s earlier books -Exiles, an affecting,, finely reserved memoir of his parents, and The Living Room War, edgy, bitter commentaries on television—are works of distinction. The critic tempted to remark that despair in An American Verdict is more pretentious and less securely rooted in a response to experience than seemed the case in the previous writing has a point, but not one with great bearing on the future of this talent. Arlen’s assignment was. at bottom, to register fully a defeat: responsible to the material, he correctly refused even to propose that Hanrahan’s subsequent loss at the polls, after his exoneration by the courts, could be seen as just retribution. The meaning, to repeat, is carried unremittingly in the tone: when coverup conquers, nerves are blasted and hope disappears.
Nailing the conquerors, so says the truism, is the job of the press. But those few reporters who labor at it intensely aren’t uniformly blessed with mass, attentive audiences. “It took ten years for the circulation to reach 20.000,” says Neil Middleton in his introduction to l. F. STONE’S WEEKLY READER (Random House, $7.95), a new collection of this journalist’s pieces, “but by then the Weekly’s, reputation was firmly established, and with the last issue the circulation reached 70.000.” The figures are a reminder that a readership of millions doesn’t await the independent investigator if he is issue-oriented, bent on reporting complicated interactions of governmental and social forces, or a confirmed anti-scandalmonger. It’s all too easy, to be sure, to dismiss scandalmongers. 1. F. Stone has never been a sensationalist after the manner of, say, a Jack Anderson, whose pieces have also been collected this season (The Anderson Papers by Jack Anderson with George Clifford; Random House, $6.95). The editor of the Weekly could never write relishingly, as Anderson does, that “one of the most valuable species of American life [is] the informer.” And Stone’s mistakes are characteristically traceable to misreadings of evidence, rather than (as with Anderson in the Eagle ton affair) to simple addiction to the pleasures of besmirchment. But it should be conceded that there are few sequences in I. F. Stone’s Weekly Reader as fully circumstantial in their witness to the trials of reporters up against The System, or as revelatory in detail of The System’s ways of working, as Anderson’s series on ITT and Dita Beard. Self-congratulation thickens as the reporter tells what comes down once an Attorney General. a huge conglomerate, and a hostile Senate committee decide to tip damnation on you. But at their best these pieces remain indispensable materials for students of the Watergate world that was opened to view this past summer, and they do much to temper skepticism about the essential value of the Anderson enterprise.
Stone’s power to disarm skepticism flows partly from patience and energy, partly from a marvelous ability to fill in. by imaginative speculation, gaps between apparently unconnected public deeds and utterances, and partly from being right early and often. (“Devotion to freedom should begin at home,”says a June, 1962, piece on Freedom Riders and President Kennedy’s evasiveness about Meredith at Ole Miss. “If we can’t have it in Mississippi, we won’t win it defending dictators in Vietnam.”) The Reader has a number of the bestknown pieces on the war, on race issues in the sixties, and on Joe McCarthy and witch-hunt days. The qualities of character—fair-mindedness. quickness to praise selfless servers, absence of priggishness, freedom from obsession with hypocrisy—are as visible when Stone considers a countryman complaining that blacks are “pushy,”as when he’s noting, matter-of-factly. in a footnote, which of the big liberal wheels on the letterhead of a cause did and didn’t dog it when he was needed. Proof of the possibility of effective individual contention against the great They who pretend they’re beyond challenge, this correspondent’s work has kept its edge over a period of decades. And it goes on, luckily, shaping something rare in these times—a reporting life that actually matters, one continuous civic deed.