The Kent State killings of 20 years ago today were a watershed for American college campuses of the Vietnam era.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets as the country's Vietnam War policies were called into question. For many Utahns the events of May 1970 remain sharply in focus.The turmoil was sparked by President Richard Nixon's announcement that he had sent troops into Cambodia, which until that time was officially neutral in the war. The Cambodian invasion was viewed at the time as widening the already unpopular war.
At University of Utah, the Kent State killings touched off rallies attended by thousands of students; a sit-in in the administration building; an attempted takeover of the student newspaper, The Daily Utah Chronicle, by protesters; the burning of a wooden building already scheduled for demolition; an explosion in the National Guard Armory; and a student vote on whether to shut down the U.
Emotions ran high for over a week. Rumors spread wildly that police were invading the campus, and although the situation had the potential of escalating dangerously, it never did.
Former U. students, administrators and faculty plus a former sailor who was in Vietnam recall May 1970 and what the events meant to them:
-James C. Fletcher: Former NASA director, Fletcher was University of Utah president 20 years ago. In those stressful days in May, he felt the most pressure from the community. It was "a public relations disaster," Fletcher remembers.
The former U. chief clearly remembers the sit-in outside his Park Building office, recalling instantly that 83 students were arrested.
"The students were really well-behaved . . . We kept talking to them, and they kept promising they wouldn't destroy things, and they didn't," Fletcher said.
The sit-in was prompted by a list of demands, presented to Fletcher the night before at his home. Among them were that the National Guard would never be called in ("I couldn't promise that; I didn't have the authority") and that no speaker at the U. would be censored ("That was easy; we didn't censor speakers.")
Actually, Fletcher had his own worries about the Guard. When a explosion went off at 4 a.m. at the National Guard Armory, then Gov. Calvin L. Rampton was vacationing at Lake Powell. Fletcher was unsure of the lieutenant governor, concerned that he might call out the Guard and turn the U. into another Kent State.
He called Rampton, who immediately returned to Salt Lake City to meet with U. officials. The Guard never set foot on the U. campus that May.
-Earl M. Jones: A noted artist, Jones believes he was denied tenure at the University of Utah because he was one of the 83 arrested during anti-war demonstrations in May 1970. All charges were dropped soon after.
"We tried to get a resolution from the faculty just asking the president (U. President James Fletcher) to send a telegram to Nixon, and we couldn't do it. We couldn't even get close to doing it. The faculty took the ridiculous position they couldn't get involved in politics."
He and one other faculty member were arrested along with the students, he said. "It was very frustrating for me because there weren't more faculty who were critical of the war, or willing to risk their positions to make a point."
-Ray Haeckel: Involved in the U.'s public-relations efforts for the past two decades, Haeckel said, "It was like Orson Welles' `War of the Worlds.' People were calling to say that they heard on the radio that the students had taken over the university, were burning the Union and that the National Guard had been called in."
-Bruce Plenk: A student demonstrator and now a lawyer who tackles cases in the interest of low-income people, Plenk recalls, "Many of us thought the university ought to close and not continue business as usual in the face of that kind of atrocity. The atrocity really was bombing and then the president lying about it; then the killing of the students at Kent State . . .
"Being involved in the anti-war movement in the late '60s made me what I am today . . . I'm still involved in trying to get the government to change its policies."
-Randy Dryer: Now a 41-year-old Salt Lake attorney specializing in media law, Dryer was student-body president. Many participants have a vivid recollection of Dryer standing on top of the police paddy wagon, bullhorn in hand, announcing the name of each student as he or she was arrested.
"I ended up playing an interesting role, not by design. I filled a vacuum. I knew personally several students who were organizing the strikes, and I had a fairly good relationship with the administration. I ended as the go-between between the two groups."
The attorney, who described himself as a small-town boy from Ogden at the time, said, "It also opened a lot of doors for me. I gained notoriety and visibility that I wouldn't have had. No one knows the ripple effect."
-Jon Ringwood: Now the world/national editor for the Deseret News, Ringwood was with the Navy in Vietnam at the time."For the troops, the Cambodia incursion was a real morale-booster," he said.
Soldiers there were kept ignorant of the massive demonstrations at home. "The military held up all newspapers, news magazines, and censored all news about the shootings," he said.
Later, when the troops learned about Kent State, many shrugged about the deaths of four college students. "We lost several gunboat crews during those 35 days on the river," Ringwood says, and that was a small part of the overall toll during the incursion.
-Reid C. Davis: A student protester turned Midvale lawyer, Davis and some friends in the university dorms asked faculty members to sponsor a schoolwide boycott of classes. "The power one holds as a student is minimal. We were showing a great deal of opposition in revulsion to the war in Vietnam, and from a student point of view, it was all we could do."
Afterward, he became involved in the union movement and worked for 10 years as a pipefitter. In 1981 Davis returned to law school and earned his degree "with the intent of representing working people and the less-powerful people in society."
-Robert Deglas: A former member of the Students for a Democratic Society, he now co-owns a llama des-ert expeditions company in Moab called Canyonlands Llamas: The events of May 1970 made him more reclusive.
Deglas is still concerned that government officials are "certainly not responsive to the poor people or there wouldn't be thousands of poor people on the street. They're not responsive to the environment or we wouldn't have Exxon Valdez" environmental disasters.
-Jim Davis: Now the mayor of South Salt Lake, Davis was a student who headed up Union Board, which ran activities in the student union. Davis, now 44, helped organize the campuswide vote on whether students should strike and said the experience made him "more liberal and sensitive to social issues."
"One of my greatest problems was picking the people to count the votes. They had to be above reproach. You have to go back and remember what the U. was like in those days, so you couldn't pick any in political science or philosophy," Davis said.
He settled on the dean of the College of Business.
-Stephen Holbrook: A student protester, Holbrook later became a state legislator, helped raise $4 million for the homeless, and now works as director of Project 2000, a coalition for Utah's future: In 1970, "There was a sense that both everything was possible, everything was falling apart, and perhaps no real sense of a concrete direction that all these various emotions and ideals and so forth were going to go in."
-Kathryn Collard: A student protest leader, Collard, now a lawyer in Salt Lake City, remembers "a feeling that individuals makes a difference . . . we had an obligation to witness the immorality of the things that were being done at that time by the government in our name, both at home and abroad . . .
"Most of us (the activists of the '60s and early '70s) did not go into politics. Most of us went into what I guess you'd call community service, in a way."
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20 years ago at the U.
May 4: Four students die, nine are wounded at Kent State University.
May 5: Radicals unsuccessfully attempt to take over student paper.
May 6: U. President James C. Fletcher asks 3,000 students at Union rally to remain calm; students give list of demands to Fletcher.
May 7: 500 students peacefully stage Park Building sit-in, 83 arrested when they refused to leave; student government requests "academic amnesty" for arrested students; 1,000 attend memorial to Kent State victims; 41 faculty issue a statement of support for student protesters.
May 8: U. students vote to condemn Kent State, Nixon's Cambodian invasion but vote to keep the university open.
May 11: Intercultural Center, which was scheduled to be demolished, is burned by arson-caused fire.
May 19: Academic suspension lifted of arrested students.