Hard as it may be to believe, there was a time when American politics was as polarized as it is now and dominated by a president as dishonest as Trump. President Richard Nixon may have lied less frequently than Trump, but the lies of “Tricky Dick” were arguably more deadly. Among the biggest and most blatant of those lies came into public view on April 30, 1970, when Nixon, who only two years earlier ascended to the presidency claiming to have a secret plan to end the Vietnam War, announced the expansion of that war: the US invasion of Cambodia (after having secretly bombed Cambodia). The announcement sparked outrage among the young, student strikes at 60 colleges and universities, and demonstrations, some violent, on dozens of campuses. Nixon further inflamed the political atmosphere by denouncing the protesters as “bums blowing up the campuses,” and local Nixonian politicos, most notably Ohio Governor James Rhodes, echoed such demagoguery, likening the anti-war student activists to Nazi “Brown Shirts.” Rhodes followed through on his angry rhetoric by calling in the National Guard to Kent State University, with tragic consequences.
On May 4, 1970, the Guard fired without warning on a crowd of unarmed anti-war protesters at Kent State University, in a 13-second barrage of 67 shots that killed four students and wounded nine. The killings sparked the most widespread student protests in American history, with demonstrations involving more than 4 million students, over 350 student strikes, the shutting down of some 500 colleges and universities, and 73 violent protests, resulting in some 1,800 arrests. Soon after Nixon learned about the shootings at Kent State, his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, told the president, “They’ll blame it on us.” Nixon agreed and quickly adopted a bunker mentality that shaped much of his approach to the backlash over the invasion of Cambodia.
Nixon’s private response to the Kent State tragedy, recorded in the diary of his top aide H.R. Haldeman, was chilling. Not a word of sympathy for those killed or wounded—or for their families. Instead, his focus was on political strategy: “Very aware that the goal of the Left is to panic us, so we must not fall into that trap” (May 6). Even Haldeman could not help noting in his diary that Nixon was “pretty cold-blooded” in planning to fire Interior Secretary Walter Hickel for expressing sympathy with the student protesters (May 7). Not justice but tribalism drove Nixon’s views on the investigation of the shooting: “Very concerned about press report that FBI said [National] Guard was at fault at Kent State. Called [FBI Director] J. Edgar [Hoover]…. P[resident] told Hoover to knock it down.… Really afraid we’ll end up putting the Administration on the side of the students and really doesn’t want that” (July 24). The political firestorm over the Kent tragedy forced Nixon to appoint a Commission on Campus Unrest. But rather than looking to the commission for lessons about how to avoid future campus bloodshed, Nixon sought to use it cynically to promote public backlash against student protesters: “wants Scranton commission to go ahead with open hearings because it keeps the student unrest issue alive through the summer and works to our advantage. Wants to be sure to get some really horrible types to testify. Then need to get our right-wing types to blast the whole thing. Gets a little involved but should work” (July 17).