See how it looked in 1970

White House-dissident gulf widens as Kent State investigation begins

By Saville R. Davis | Staff correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Washington

The gulf between the Nixon administration and the dissenters among this nation’s young people is widening. Each side considers that it has a serious and mounting grievance against the other.
President Nixon and Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew have given a general impression that they hold the student side responsible for the violence at Kent State University this week.

In his public statement on the incident, Mr. Nixon used the phrase “when dissent turns to violence” and addressed an appeal against violence to campus elements, with no mention of national guardsmen or politics. This caused his statement to be interpreted by the news media generally, and by his critics, as placing the major blame on the student side. He had earlier described campus militants as “bums” in an informal Pentagon talk.

The seeming emphasis in the President’s statement was partly reinforced in a speech by Vice-President Agnew. The Vice-President spoke after the Kent State University affair, but he said he had written it earlier.

No blame could be assigned in the Kent State shooting, he told a Washington audience, until an investigation was held. In his prepared speech he then strongly criticized opinion makers in the United States who, he charged, commit “philosophical violence” and are more dangerous than the “paranoids” who demonstrate on college campuses. These persons, he said, “encourage a malaise that argues for violent confrontation instead of debate.”

These “elitists” tell young people that law enforcers are more dangerous than lawbreakers, that bomb throwers are heroes and policemen are pigs.

Whether the President intended to imply that the throwing of rocks by students, or a possible sniper shot at the national guardsmen on the Kent Sate Campus, was responsible for provoking the killing of four students by the guardsmen, was not clear.

He may not have intended to imply that the shootings were a proper response to the throwing of rocks, but in the absence of any further elaboration from the White House, his statement was taken in that sense by many newsmen and critical groups of protestors. The ambiguity in the Agnew speech tended to reinforce this impression, despite his disclaimer that he was offering a verdict on the Kent State incident.

Report questioned

Both spoke at a time when an assertion by a National Guard officer at Kent State that a sniper had shot at his men from a building was countered by an assertion of a New York Times reporter on the spot that he had heard or seen no evidence of a shot before the volley of the guardsmen, which was directed not at a building but into the student crowd. These questions of fact will be the result of an investigation by the Justice Department, the White House announced. Until then, emotions have been sharpened by the conclusions put on the Nixon and Agnew statements.

Since its inception the Nixon administration has managed to talk in a language and with opinions which have rubbed most young people the wrong way and increased their sense of alienation from the federal government. The President might have played it another way with considerable political profit to himself. The essence of the campus battle, from the practical standpoint of who has the momentum and who is able to act more decisively, has been the battle for the middle ground of student opinion.

Had the President chosen to appeal to the student who wants to protest but does not wish to act violently or be drawn into violence by the militants he might have helped to bring large numbers of them onto the nonviolent side. There are some signs that he has thought he was doing that.
Instead, he has almost always talked in a manner that repelled or angered the politically active element of moderate students, thereby helping to drive many of them in frustration into support for the militants.