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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.