KENT STATE

An excellent graphic retelling of a climactic moment in American history.

Kent State University represented a slice of the American dream, a place where the children of blue-collar workers in northern Ohio could gain an education. Most of the students, as accomplished Backderf shows, were intent on gaining that education and, with luck, staying out of Vietnam. Three events conspired against them: Richard Nixon declared the invasion of Cambodia on a Friday night when National Guardsmen, already riled up by a labor strike in the author’s hometown, were dispatched to Kent State to contain student demonstrations. Kent State, he writes, was “hardly a hotbed of radical politics.” Even so, there were representatives of five law enforcement organizations on campus, including undercover FBI agents, as well as 1,200 National Guardsmen, who were ready for a fight. When one squad among them decided to shoot, perhaps directed to do so by a senior officer, at least a quarter of the soldiers fired directly into the ranks of the student demonstrators. Backderf raises a number of points that other chroniclers—especially James Michener, an apologist for law and order—failed to emphasize: Some Guardsmen, reviled and insulted by the students, were clearly out for blood; though depicted as kids, like the students they faced, most were in their 30s, with “little in common with the bohemian, far younger college students of 1970.” Nixon and the FBI, among others, wanted to make an example of the students. As the author’s notes show, he’s done more homework than other writers, too. The shooting may have been a “calamitous blunder,” but in the end—and Backderf’s depiction is gruesome—four students died, one, ironically, an Army officer in training. And the Guardsmen? After a long coverup, with destruction of evidence, not a single one has been held accountable or punished for murders in which Nixon exalted—and an astonishing number of Americans endorsed.

Four dead in Ohio, indeed—but Backderf’s vivid, evocative book does a splendid job of keeping their memories alive.