On a cold morning in March 1977, I drove off from Yale University’s Sterling Library in a white van provided by Yale on a somewhat delicate, even secretive, mission: to obtain a manuscript about the shooting of 13 students — four of whom died — by Ohio National Guardsmen during a student demonstration at Kent State on May 4, 1970, along with 10 boxes of research papers developed in preparing that manuscript, and deliver them to Yale before the Kent State Library found out about the donation and objected.
I would almost fail in that mission due to a patch of black ice 100 miles away.
The manuscript was of a book first published four years before, in 1973, by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: The Truth About Kent State: A Challenge to the American Conscience by Peter Davies, a Staten Island insurance executive. It was being donated to Yale’s Manuscript and Archives Division after the author had rejected Kent State University Library as a possible repository in 1974.
Davies had asked me to help find him an absolutely safe place for his papers. I called Yale’s associate librarian, Herman Kahn, and asked if Yale would like the manuscript. He replied on April 10, 1974, in a long letter that began, “First, let me say that it would be a source of pleasure and satisfaction for us to be able to add this unique record to the manuscript collection in this library.” Unfortunately, Kahn would not experience that pleasure. He died the following year.
When I entered Yale Divinity School in September 1976 as a degree candidate, the first thing I did was contact Kahn’s successor, Lawrence Dowler (later the archivist at Harvard University) and we agreed to complete the donation of Davies’ “unique record” to Yale. It would be known thereafter as the Kent State Collection at Yale, and Davies would retain control over its contents, especially whether they were to be used as evidence in a court.
Needless to say, the folks at the Kent State Library were not pleased.
Even 18 years later, in 1995, at Emerson College’s Kent State colloquium marking the 25th anniversary of the shootings, the Kent State Library archivist declared publicly that “the Yale Kent State Collection properly belonged at Kent State.”
I reminded her that the reason it wasn’t at the Kent State Library was because her library would not promise Davies it would protect the safety of the documents and guarantee him control over their use in legal proceedings, especially in any future trials. (Kent State University and its library receive funding from the state of Ohio, which was being sued by the parents of the slain students at the time.)
Four students were killed — Allison Krause and Jeff Miller, who were participating in the demonstration, and Sandy Scheuer and Bill Schroeder, who were bystanders. Two were 20 years old and two only 19. Nine other students were wounded, including one who would be paralyzed for life.
The thesis of The Truth About Kent State — its “challenge” to the American conscience — was that chronologically arranged photographs of the shooting seemingly show an Ohio National Guard sergeant giving a hand signal to his comrades, who are carrying M1 rifles. Specifically, the sergeant appears to wheel around and point a pistol at the demonstrators. His troops then turn in unison and fire 61 rounds into the crowd of students.
In other words, it wasn’t a spontaneous accident. It was planned.
The closest fatality was 30 yards away. The farthest was 90 yards away, almost the length of a football field.
Those photographs showed the “truth” about Kent State, that it might have been pre-planned or agreed upon;. But there was no proof that the Guard, in addition to killing and maiming students, had beforehand “conspired” to “deprive the students of their civil rights.”
No plot. Just those photographs, which seem to show a signal by a leader.
An Instrument of Justice
I was driving Yale’s van to Davies’ home, fearing every minute of the way that something would go wrong and I wouldn’t get the 10 boxes of documents and the manuscripts safely back to Yale before Kent State found out it was finally losing the collection to another university.
After all, Kahn’s death and the appointment of his successor had already delayed things by two years. I was fearful something might delay it further and Kent State would mount an effort to pressure Davies to abandon his donation to Yale.
I wanted a fait accompli. Let the Kent State Library find out about it after it was over.
In fact, as I took the exit ramp for Staten Island on that cold March morning, I thought such a delay was about to happen again: I hit a patch of black ice and the van swerved out of control. Luckily I knew enough not to brake and took my foot off the accelerator instead. I pulled out of the skid.
When I unloaded the van safely back at Yale with the 10 boxes and the manuscript, I felt a great burden off my shoulders. The papers would not be lost to history or manipulated as trial evidence. They were now locked in one of Yale’s sacred manuscript vaults, fully under the control of its author’s direction from his home in Staten Island.
Herman Kahn would have been pleased, as he had predicted he would be in his April 10, 1974 letter to me.
Mission accomplished.
Later, the parent of one of the slain Kent State students would say that the documents going to Yale, instead of Kent State, might be “the only justice we ever get.” I was honored to have been an instrument in that justice, even a minor one, as the driver that day (black ice and all).
It’s All on Tape
And so the documents rested safely at Yale for 30 years. I actually forgot about them for years at a time. An occasional scholar would use them, but to no earth-shattering effect. They were never manipulated in a courtroom trial.
They mostly collected dust in Yale’s secret vaults until 2007 when Alan Canfora, one of the students wounded at Kent State 37 years before, came to Yale to see what this Ivy League Kent State Collection contained.
He intuitively knew what he needed to find. Perhaps the scar on his flesh from a guardsman’s bullet reminded him subconsciously every day. Perhaps.
And find it he did.
It had been sitting there on a shelf for three decades, just waiting for him: The only tape recording of the shootings made that day, created when a student put a tape recorder on his dorm room windowsill and turned it on.
The original tape had been given to the FBI after the shootings and is not available to the public, perhaps lost. But this was a copy of the original. If anyone knew it was there it had long been overlooked or forgotten.
Canfora, who in 2007 was working as a researcher, immediately knew its significance.
And he knew something else, too: In the 37 years since the shootings, digital enhancing techniques had been perfected that could reveal previously unheard sounds on that tape.
Those techniques seemed to uncover the sound of a person saying “Point. Shoot.”
Three years later, those techniques revealed more: the sound of a scuffle and a pistol shot immediately before the shooting. Yale had been courageous in creating the Kent State Collection in 1977. But it seemed to get cold feet around 1985, when The New York Times reported that the actual weapons used by the Ohio National Guardsmen in the shootings would be donated to the Kent State Collection at Yale. Influential Yale alumni were not pleased, and that donation was quietly abandoned.
Then, for reasons still unclear, Yale decided that it would close its Kent State Collection to any new donors.
Unfortunately, they did not notify me of that decision, and in 2007 I blundered into trying to get the papers of the recently deceased Kent State president, Glenn A. Olds, donated to the collection.
Olds died in 2006, at age 85, and his widow gave me permission to approach Yale about donating his papers to its Kent State Collection. Yale was not interested in further donations, even from a Kent State president who had received his doctorate from Yale itself. (Olds had become Kent State’s president after the shootings. Since he had previously been appointed by President Nixon to serve at the United Nations, many at Kent State felt he was a Nixon spy sent to cool down student protest at the university. When his widow died on 2010, his papers went to his family. The extent of a Nixon connection, which might have been proved or disproved by the donation of his papers to Yale, will now probably be lost to history.)
Today is the 48th anniversary of the Kent State massacre. Memories fade. Witnesses and participants die. However, the Kent State documents still sit in the vaults of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, with its 10 million volumes, one of the great research libraries in the world.
They rest in climate-controlled tranquility.
They are waiting patiently.
Waiting for history’s scholarly eye.
Paul Keane was program coordinator of Kent State University’s Center for Peaceful Change in 1972-73, the university’s official memorial to the Kent State dead, and was present at the shootings on May 4, 1970. He lives in Hartford.