The Cambodian Incursion Revisited (Report‪)‬

Introduction and Literature Review On May 4, 1970, hundreds of students congregated on Kent State University's Commons, a popular campus meeting spot, to protest the United States' recent invasion of Cambodia. When the students failed to comply with an order to disperse and instead responded with rocks and shouts of "pigs off campus," Ohio National Guard troops, called in to quell the demonstration, advanced toward the students, firing canisters of tear gas that drove them beyond a hill overlooking the Commons. What happened next remains unclear forty years later, but when the dust settled four students--Allison Krause, Sandra Lee Scheuer, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, and William K. Schroeder--had been fatally shot by the Guardsmen. The Chicago Tribune described the incident as a "scene of unreality ... [one would] expect to see in Viet Nam ... not at a school." (1) The situation was not helped when White House Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler read a tone-deaf statement from President Richard M. Nixon that bemoaned the consequences when "dissent turns to violence." (2) Less than two weeks later, James Earl Green and Phillip Lafayette Gibbs were killed by police during antiwar protests at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Across the country, from the University of Maryland at College Park to Illinois State, and from Columbia University to Williams College, campus disturbances were reported, and thousands converged on Washington for a major protest on May 9. The Nixon administration's ten-day-old invasion of Cambodia had reinvigorated the Vietnam protest movement. (3)