A New Look at Kent State

To fix guilt for the fatal shooting of four students at Kent State University in May 1970 appeared to be impossible amid the polemic and passion of the time. An Ohio grand jury attempting to assay culpability in the confused events placed blame on Kent State students and administrators and exonerated the National Guardsmen who fired into the crowd of demonstrators. But in making its report, the jury exceeded its authority under state law, and its findings were judged illegal by a federal court; they were ordered expunged from the public record, although 25 indictments against students and faculty members were allowed to stand. Federal officials and a presidential commission studied the shootings, but withheld a decision. Last week the Board of Christian Social Concerns of the United Methodist Church, the nation's second largest Protestant denomination, sought to reopen the case. The board, the activist arm of the relatively conservative church, issued a report suggesting that at least some of the Guardsmen on the Kent State campus had decided in advance to fire on the students and, on a prearranged signal, opened a fusillade that left four young people dead and nine others injured.

The study, based on work by Peter Davies, a New York insurance broker who developed a private passion for the case, does not claim access to any new evidence of those tragic 13 seconds of firing on Blanket Hill. Citing federal investigations and a recent book by James Michener, Kent State: What Happened and Why (TIME, May 3), Davies argues deductively that the deaths resulted from a conspiracy by at least some of the Guardsmen. He suggests that discrepancies in Guardsmen's testimony and photographs of the shooting--including a picture of a huddle at the bottom of the hill before the soldiers whirled and fired on the crowd--are circumstantial evidence of such a conspiracy.

The report concludes with a plea for a high-level federal inquiry into the question of the National Guard's actions and motivations that day at Kent State. A Justice Department official, insisting that the study contained no new information, announced that the Government had not yet decided whether to call for a federal grand jury hearing into the charges. At week's end, the spokesman said, the matter was "under review at the highest authority."

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