Outer Darkness

KENT STATE, WHAT HAPPENED AND WHY by James Michener. 559 pages. Random House. $10.

The most startling and depressing passages in James Michener's account of the Kent State tragedy are not those about the killing of four students one year ago (he deals with that almost mat-ter-of-factly), but those wherein he records the hate and anger--against a whole student generation--that surfaced afterward. A mother of three Kent State students: "Anyone who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes or barefooted deserves to be shot." Where did this Ohio woman get such ideas? "I teach at the local high school," she replied. Another mother speaks to her daughter: "It would have been better for America if every student on that hill had been shot." The daughter protests: "Mother! I was there. Only a miracle of some kind saved me." Replies the mother: "You would have deserved it."

After the shooting, people in the town began flashing four fingers at students. When one townsman was asked what it meant, he explained: "This time we got four of you bastards. Next time we'll get more." Other residents turned this into a macabre jingle: "The score is four,And next time more." Michener finds such sentiments appalling, but so prevalent that they add up to a "frightening portrait of mid-America."

Vile rumors were spread about the four dead students. The bodies were all said to be filthy, some infected with lice. One girl was said to be pregnant, syphilitic and on hard drugs. The gossip was so widespread that the county coroner, who had examined the four, felt it necessary to deny each allegation. "These were four clean kids," he reported. Why, then, such talk? "Precisely because they were largely guiltless of any crime against society," Michener says, "they must be denigrated and torn down, because otherwise that society would have to declare itself guilty of murder."

Minute-by-Minute. Michener's book, at one level, is a plea for concessions between generations. Noting that most of those calling for more bloodshed were women, he finds a sexual basis to much of the conflict. Women resent the bra-lessness and supposed bed hopping of today's coeds. Men seem to envy a sexual freedom they did not know as youths. Nothing quite so enraged Guardsmen, Michener claims, as the middle-finger gestures of Kent girls, their obscenities, their appearing naked at dormitory windows to invite the troops to "make love, not war."

There will probably never be a more thorough, minute-by-minute account than Michener's of the three days of disorder that preceded the shooting. Michener drew on the determined legwork of two professional journalists from the Reader's Digest and twelve young reporters from local newspapers and the Kent School of Journalism. He also spent three months in Kent himself, at first sitting anonymously in bars on Water Street to get the feel of things, later operating out of a motel, where anyone with something to reveal knew where to find him. (Some students and academics would meet him only after dark.)

Though he is also a novelist, Michener does not show a disciplined novelist's skills in the telling of this fatal drama. His account is disorganized and repetitious. It runs pretty far afield, too, variously embracing such things as Michener's view of faculty tenure (he is against it) and the origins of Opalocka, Fla., home town of the famous runaway teen-ager photographed grieving over one of the dead students.

Valuably, the book shows how easily divisions within a community can escalate toward tragedy. Michener convinces the reader when he says: "Kent could be your community." He conveys the diverse personalities involved: the shy, scholarly university president, the ambitious anticampus county prosecutor. He demonstrates fondness for the students who died and also revulsion at the window-smashing and arson tactics of the student rioters. Michener puts some controversies into perspective. There were off-campus agitators inflaming the crowd, and most students were unaware that the fatal Monday rally had been declared illegal.

No Reason Why. As regards the shooting, Michener concludes--as did the FBI--that the Guardsmen who fired were neither surrounded nor in danger. "On their left flank there was nobody except a few Guardsmen stationed at Johnson Hall. In the rear there was a handful of gadflies, mostly girls, who posed no threat. Straight ahead the commons was almost empty. The closest student on the right seems to have been at least 20 yards away." Yet at the top of the hill the Guardsmen turned, then fired 55 M-l rifle bullets, five pistol shots and one shotgun blast in 13 seconds. The closest wounded student fell 71 ft. from the firing squad; the nearest dead youth was 265 ft. away, nearly the length of a football field.

Michener never explains why the Guardsmen fired their guns. He doubts that as a group they had been ordered to fire, but, he believes that "some kind of rough verbal agreement" was reached among the Guardsmen when they huddled just before retreating up the hill. So far, no Guardsman has revealed what was said at that huddle. "It is inconceivable," Michener concludes, "that the 76 men who were penned in on the field that day will be able to maintain their wall of silence indefinitely. In the years that lie ahead, someone will talk, and a flood of testimony will be released."

In the absence of such testimony, Michener is stuck with what is, for him, an uncharacteristically rhetorical conclusion: "The hard-core revolutionary leadership across the nation was so determined to force a confrontation that some kind of major incident had become inevitable." Yet there have been more explosive campus confrontations without gunfire. As Vaclav Koutnik, a professor from Czechoslovakia visiting Kent State, wryly told one of Michener's researchers: "Russia took over my whole country without killing one student. Your soldiers couldn't take over a Plot of grass." It is not enough for Michener to describe the shooting as "an accident, deplorable and tragic." Triggers were not pulled accidentally, either at My Lai or at Kent State.

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