Once the shooting occurred, was it just chaos?
Yeah, it was chaos as soon as the shooting started. It was chaos from there on. I mean nobody knew what to do. People had gotten killed, there were four students that were killed, there was one that was permanently injured, and there were seven or eight I think that were shot and recovered from their wounds. Of the four that were killed, I think three of them were part of the protest. That doesn’t depict whether they were radical protestors or they were like me, standing there watching, but they were there in the group. There was one that was simply walking from class back to her dorm to have lunch and just wanted to get out of there and most of the shooting was toward the dorm.
So, everybody kind of dispersed. There was a group of college professors that were actively trying to get the Guard out of there and people went back to their dorms and the magnitude of what you had just seen was hard to digest no matter what your world view was. I mean, there was a group of people who were anti-war and their immediate conclusion was it was a National Guard, it was a conspiracy of the authorities, and they were against the students and they did it and so this was a confirmation of their world view. There was another group of people whose world view was that they might not have understood the war but they weren’t vocally against the war who would have seen it a different way. To me that was one of the lessons learned out of there, we all stood and watched the same thing and even immediately after that there were different conclusions forming as to what caused it. That kind of helped form some of my life views on how decisions are reached and I look back on that whole process and I see a number of decisions that were made by various people along the way that had they not been made there would not have been four dead students.
The first one was, as I said, the first night in downtown Kent if they hadn’t emptied those bars and declared a state of emergency the chain of events probably wouldn’t have moved toward a confrontation between the students and the National Guard. You had a governor who made a very bad decision about allowing the National Guard to show up on campus. I guess the next bad decision was the decision to cancel the rally. You had a rally, let the kids protest. I think the decisions by the students, whomever they were, to burn the R.O.T.C building. If you hadn’t burned the R.O.T.C building you probably wouldn’t have had the pressure to cancel the rally and you probably wouldn’t have had the confrontation and finally the confrontation itself. Don’t throw things at somebody who has a loaded gun. The decision to allow the National Guard to go into a crowd control, riot situation, for which they weren’t even trained, with loaded rifles, was another monumentally stupid decision. So, you had a series of very bad decisions that ended up with a very, very bad outcome.