Word: kent
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most startling and depressing passages in James Michener's account of the Kent State tragedy are not those about the killing of four students one year ago (he deals with that almost mat-ter-of-factly), but those wherein he records the hate and anger-against a whole student generation-that surfaced afterward. A mother of three Kent State students: "Anyone who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes or barefooted deserves to be shot." Where did this Ohio woman get such ideas? "I teach at the local high school," she replied...
...finds a sexual basis to much of the conflict. Women resent the bra-lessness and supposed bed hopping of today's coeds. Men seem to envy a sexual freedom they did not know as youths. Nothing quite so enraged Guardsmen, Michener claims, as the middle-finger gestures of Kent girls, their obscenities, their appearing naked at dormitory windows to invite the troops to "make love...
...probably never be a more thorough, minute-by-minute account than Michener's of the three days of disorder that preceded the shooting. Michener drew on the determined legwork of two professional journalists from the Reader's Digest and twelve young reporters from local newspapers and the Kent School of Journalism. He also spent three months in Kent himself, at first sitting anonymously in bars on Water Street to get the feel of things, later operating out of a motel, where anyone with something to reveal knew where to find him. (Some students and academics would meet...
Valuably, the book shows how easily divisions within a community can escalate toward tragedy. Michener convinces the reader when he says: "Kent could be your community." He conveys the diverse personalities involved: the shy, scholarly university president, the ambitious anticampus county prosecutor. He demonstrates fondness for the students who died and also revulsion at the window-smashing and arson tactics of the student rioters. Michener puts some controversies into perspective. There were off-campus agitators inflaming the crowd, and most students were unaware that the fatal Monday rally had been declared illegal...
...uncharacteristically rhetorical conclusion: "The hard-core revolutionary leadership across the nation was so determined to force a confrontation that some kind of major incident had become inevitable." Yet there have been more explosive campus confrontations without gunfire. As Vaclav Koutnik, a professor from Czechoslovakia visiting Kent State, wryly told one of Michener's researchers: "Russia took over my whole country without killing one student. Your soldiers couldn't take over a Plot of grass." It is not enough for Michener to describe the shooting as "an accident, deplorable and tragic." Triggers were not pulled accidentally, either...