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.)