The New York Times recently ran a lengthy obituary for John Cleary, one of the students wounded by Ohio National Guardsmen during an anti–Vietnam War protest at Kent State University in May 1970. Four students were killed and nine wounded when twenty-seven soldiers fired their powerful automatic M1 rifles into the unarmed crowd of protesters and onlookers. The soldiers fired sixty-seven shots in thirteen seconds. One of those killed, William Schroeder, an R.O.T.C. student, was 127 yards from the soldiers. Another student was 250 yards away when he was wounded.
Cleary, a nineteen-year-old freshman, was hit in the chest. A photograph of him lying on the ground and bleeding profusely appeared on the cover of Life, once the largest-circulation magazine in the country. It was like being “hit with a sledgehammer,” he later recalled. The singer/songwriter Neil Young memorialized the killings in his popular rock lament, “Ohio,” with the riveting refrain “Four dead in O-hi-o.” I was a college freshman at the time, and the killings seemed to make plain the depth of the Nixon administration’s cruelty and cynical expansion of the war into Cambodia that spring. A nationwide student strike closed hundreds of college campuses, including my own. After years of mounting opposition to a seemingly futile war, the nation was even more divided—and more violent—than it is now under Trump, who is clearly emulating Nixon’s divide-and-conquer brand of politics.
Nixon’s popularity among what he called the “silent majority” of Americans was in some respects the original MAGA movement. For many Americans—perhaps even most—the dead and wounded students deserved what they got. It didn’t matter that two of the students killed were mere spectators, and, like Cleary, not involved in the protest. Sadly, it didn’t matter to Cleary’s parents either. The Times obituary quotes historian Brian VanDeMark, author of Kent State: An American Tragedy (2024): “In the aftermath of the shooting, [Cleary’s] conservative family and neighbors in upstate New York pressured him to say nothing critical about the guardsmen who had shot him and 12 others. He began not just hiding his involvement but denying it.”