FIGURE 2 Richard Nixon, Cambodia Address, April 30, 1970. Photograph by Jack E. Kightlinger. White House Photo Office, WHPO 3448–21A. Courtesy Richard Nixon Library, National Archives and Records Administration.
Tonight, American and South Vietnamese units will attack the headquarters for the entire Communist military operation in South Vietnam. This key control center has been occupied by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong for five years in blatant violation of Cambodia’s neutrality.
This is not an invasion of Cambodia. The areas in which these attacks will be launched are completely occupied and controlled by North Vietnamese forces. Our purpose is not to occupy the areas. Once enemy forces are driven out of these sanctuaries, and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will withdraw.
Nixon acknowledged that the American people wanted to see an end to the war, but he appealed for support for an invasion that he described as part of a plan that would allow the United States to withdraw from Vietnam. He issued a warning to those people, especially student radicals, opposing his program: “My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed.”4 Despite Nixon’s attempt to portray the Cambodian adventure as merely an “incursion” by the armed forces of South Vietnam, the growing opposition to the president’s Vietnam policies in Congress and among the press strongly denounced the action as an illegal US invasion of Cambodia.5
Senator Charles Goodell, a Republican from New York who had been appointed to fill the unexpired term of the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, introduced a resolution of impeachment. Two days after Nixon’s speech, James Reston wrote in the New York Times that “it is a thunderingly silly argument to suggest [as Nixon had] that wiping out the enemy’s bases in Cambodia will get to ‘the heart of the trouble.’” Reston argued that “as a television show and a political exercise it [the speech] may have been effective, but as a serious Presidential presentation of the brutal facts of a tragic and dangerous problem of world politics, it was ridiculous.”6
By 1970 student opposition to the war had become widespread, and the Cambodian invasion stimulated protests across the country. In some cases, ROTC buildings on campuses were destroyed, although it was not always clear whether students were responsible.7 Student leaders called for a national student strike against the war. It is difficult now to recall how unsteady the United States seemed to be in those days. Watergate, with all of its dislocations, was still ahead, but in less than ten years America had witnessed the murders of President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, and African American leaders Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King Jr. Police attacked dissidents in Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention in what official reports later called a police riot, and rioters torched America’s inner cities. Analysts wrote of “student unrest” and “civil disturbances,” and wondered whether history itself was broken.
President Nixon and other national politicians stoked resentment against the students. On May 1, the day after his Cambodia address, Nixon visited the Pentagon for a military briefing and stopped to speak with a group of civilian employees. A woman in the group told Nixon, “I loved your speech. It made me proud to be an American.” A New York Times reporter recounts the incident:
Smiling and obviously pleased, Mr. Nixon stopped and told how he had been thinking, as he wrote his speech, about “those kids out there [in Vietnam].”
“I have seen them. They are the greatest,” he said. Then he contrasted them with antiwar activists on university campuses. According to a White House text of his remarks, he said:
“You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around about this issue. You name it. Get rid of the war there will be another one.”
The Times reporter wrote, “The President’s use of the term ‘bums’ to refer to student radicals was the strongest language he has used publicly on the subject of campus violence, although he has been known to employ such terms in private.”8
On May 2, the Army ROTC building at Kent State University in Ohio was burned down during a student antiwar demonstration. The circumstances were suspicious enough that serious observers speculated the fire might have been part of a scenario of provocation by police or other government agents.9 On Sunday, May 3, Ohio governor James Rhodes, a Republican who was trailing in his Senate primary campaign, took advantage of the situation to visit Kent State, where he vowed to keep the university open despite the advice of others that closing it for a time would allow things to calm down. Rhodes held a news conference, warning,
The scene here that the city of Kent is facing is probably the most vicious form of campus-oriented violence yet perpetrated by dissident groups and their allies in the State of Ohio. . . . We’re going to use every weapon of law enforcement agencies of Ohio to drive them out of Kent. . . . They’re worse than the brownshirts and the Communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America. . . . We are going to eradicate the problem, we’re not going to treat the symptoms.10
Asked by reporters what the governor’s remarks meant for the National Guard, “General Del Corso clarified it for the newsmen. ‘As the Ohio law says,’ the general pointed out, ‘use any force that’s necessary even to the point of shooting. We don’t want to get into that, but the law says we can if necessary.’”11
The next day they did. After chasing students, including many who were simply walking to class, across the Kent State campus, the National Guard slashed several students with bayonets and later fired at students who presented no immediate threat to the Guard or others. Four students were killed. Nine were wounded by gunfire.
The events at Kent State intensified campus protests across the nation. After Nixon’s Cambodia speech, many university presidents shut down their campuses for short periods or for the rest of the academic year—Columbia University was closed from May 2, and some other campuses followed after Kent State. Student strikes and demonstrations spread rapidly.
Nixon supported the National Guard while implicitly disclaiming responsibility for the massacre. At the regular White House news briefing on May 4, press secretary Ronald Ziegler read a statement from the president: “This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy. It is my hope that this tragic and unfortunate incident will strengthen the determination of all the Nation’s campuses—administration, faculty, and students alike—to stand firmly for the right which exists in this country of peaceful dissent and just as strongly against the resort to violence as a means of such expression.”12 Nixon’s rhetoric in this statement is peculiar—the only active agents to whom he alludes are “administration, faculty, and students,” who appear to be responsible for inviting tragedy. The National Guard and Nixon himself disappear into the passive voice. But the president also professed his good intentions.
In New York City on May 8, construction workers using crowbars, other tools, and hard hats attacked an antiwar rally on Wall Street held in honor of the Kent State victims. Seventy people were injured. The mayhem spread to City Hall, where an American flag flew at half staff to commemorate the Kent State students: the construction workers demanded that it be raised to full staff. Other rioters attacked the nearby Trinity Episcopal Church, tearing down its flag and a Red Cross banner.13 It was rhetorically convenient for the Nixon administration and its supporters to depict resistance to the Vietnam War as limited to radical, privileged college students, and this depiction has survived in collective memory. And yet many working-class Americans opposed the war, and the draft, and resistance to the war could be found in all ranks of society and in the military.14