13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings

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Description

Thirteen seconds passed. Sixty-seven shots were fired. One nation watched . . .

On May 4, 1970, Ohio’s Kent State University was in chaos following President Richard Nixon’s announcement that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia would continue, with student protesters on one side and the National Guard on the other. That day, young Chicago Tribune reporter Philip Caputo had been sent to the campus to cover what gave the impression of just another student uprising. But by the time he arrived, things had erupted into one of the most watershed moments of the antiwar movement, with four students dead and nine wounded in a hail of bullets fired by panicked guardsmen. Now, thirty-five years later, the writer of A Rumor of War looks back on that terrible day, discussing his own emotions, the nature of political discourse and civil disobedience, and what happened to those who were there and how they still live with the pain and anger on a daily basis. It was a time when The usa turned upon itself and our nation’s innocence was lost.
Philip Caputo, writer of the classic Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War, returns to the turbulent era of the late 1960s with 13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings. Caputo carefully sets the stage for the tragedy–the gunning-down of students on the Kent State, Ohio, campus–as he shows the pressures slowly building: Richard Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia, the militaristic missives of the ultra-leftist Weathermen, and statements such as high-profile California governor Ronald Reagan’s declaration about student protests, given three weeks before the shootings (“If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with”).

Whilst important events surge and roil all the way through the book like massive currents, Caputo focuses primarily on the smaller stories of the students injured and killed by National Guard bullets. Caputo, a journalist then writing for the Chicago Tribune (and who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1972), was on the scene soon after the shootings took place. He writes with immediacy, clearly drawn back to the moment even after 35 years have passed. Probably the most students who died that day were active in campus politics, Whilst others were caught purely by misfortune, but all paid an out of this world price. By allowing readers to consider more about the students and the circumstances that surrounded May 4, 1970, Caputo turns the story of Kent State into a kind of tragic novel. The book itself is short: under 200 pages, including summaries of court testimonies that make up the bulk of the index. But the poignancy of what The usa lost that day comes through clearly in Caputo’s dense, no-nonsense writing. –Jennifer Buckendorff

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