The sound of gunshots follow the word "Point." Four students soon lay dead. Two days later, two more would die at Jackson State University, as police fired without provocation into a dorm.
Strubbe gave a copy of the Kent tape to the FBI soon after the shooting (he has kept the original in a safe deposit box). Eight Guardsmen were later tried for civil rights violations, and acquitted. Neither their officers, nor Nixon, nor Agnew, nor Rhodes, nor the FBI, were ever brought to trial. But massive volumes of research---including an epic study by James A. Michener and William Gordon’s Four Dead in Ohio---strongly imply an explicit conspiracy to intimidate the national anti-war movement.
After 37 years, Strubbe's tape got its first widespread public perusal last week. Six months ago, Alan Canfora, 58, one of the nine wounded Kent students, learned it had been given to Yale University's archives. Last week he played it to a group of students and reporters at a small university theater.
In fact, it seems highly likely no shot ever rang out prior to the order to fire. Nor could the Guard, who killed a student as much as 900 feet away from the rally, say they were under any serious attack from the students.
The Kent State killings are now prominently featured in virtually every history book of the United States used in American schools. The accounts often include the famous photo of an anguished Mary Ann Vecchio crying for help next to the dead body of student protestor Jeffrey Miller. (They were 265 feet away from where the shot that killed Miller was fired.) Rendered into song by Neil Young's classic "Ohio," there are few more definitive moments in the history of this nation.
But meaningful analysis of the implications of this tape has been mysteriously missing from the American media. The Associated Press did carry a widely-runstory about the surfacing of this evidence, as did National Public Radio. But the Columbus Dispatch, in Ohio's capital, buried the report on page A-5 under the innocuous headline "Victim shares audio tape of Kent State shootings." Virtually absent from the major US media has been a concerted examination of the fact that the keystone in this monumental American saga has been re-set.
For we now know that a premeditated, unprovoked order was indeed given to National Guardsmen to fire live ammunition at peaceful, unarmed American students, killing four of them. The illegal order to arm the Guard with live ammunition in the first place could only have come from the governor of Ohio. The very loud, very public nod to shoot some "brown shirt" students somewhere in order to chill the massive student uprising against the Southeast Asian war was spewed all over the national media by the second-highest official in US government.
Now the magnitude of Kent State's impact on American politics and culture, already immense, has been significantly deepened.
Alan Canfora intends to use this tape to re-open investigations into what happened at Kent State 37 years ago.
But the media's apparent unconcern about confirmation of the official order to carry out these assassinations may bear a simple message: be prepared for them to happen again.
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Bob Fitrakis's forthcoming book, THE FITRAKIS FILES: COPS, COVERUPS AND CORRUPTION, containing further background information on James A. Rhodes, is at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.solartopia.org.
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