67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence

Review Advance praise for 67 Shots“In Howard Means fine hands, we discern how the terrible events at Kent State unfolded—relentlessly, ineluctably—like a Greek tragedy. Through dogged and imaginative reporting, 67 Shots shows us how the tragedy fed into, and was fed by, the larger maelstrom of the times. In this definitive account, Means has deftly extracted Kent State from the amber and exposed it to fresh air once again. —Hampton Sides, author of In the Kingdom of Ice and Hellhound On His Trail“Howard Means does a marvelous job of weaving together the many strands of memory and the records of the times to create a nuanced portrayal of a moment in American history too often reduced to the lyrics of a Neil Young song. This balanced account does justice to the perspectives of students, National Guardsmen, campus administrators, and local residents alike, both for and against the demonstrations. --—Kenneth Hammond, Chairman, Department of History, New Mexico State University, and Kent State student-protest leader (1970) Product Description Howard Means skillfully tells the story of the 1970 Kent State University shootings, one of the most tragic and iconic moments in American history.At midday on May 4, 1970, after three days of protests, several thousand students and the Ohio National Guard faced off at opposite ends of the grassy campus commons at Kent State University. At noon, the Guard moved out. Twenty-four minutes later, Guardsmen launched a thirteen-second, sixty-seven-shot barrage that left four students dead and nine wounded, one paralyzed for life. The story doesn't end there, though. A horror of far greater proportions was narrowly averted minutes later when the Guard and students reassembled on the commons.The Kent State shootings were both unavoidable and preventable: unavoidable in that all the discordant forces of a turbulent decade flowed together on May 4, 1970, on one Ohio campus; preventable in that every party to the tragedy made the wrong choices at the wrong time in the wrong place.Using the university's recently available oral-history collection supplemented by extensive new interviewing, Means tells the story of this iconic American moment through the eyes and memories of those who were there, and skillfully situates it in the context of a tumultuous era. About the Author Howard Means is the author or coauthor many books, including the first biography of Colin Powell and Louis Freeh's bestselling memoir My FBI. He has collaborated on dozens of titles, including bestsellers by Robert Baer (See No Evil, Sleeping with the Devil), George Tenet (At the Center of the Storm), and David Wessel (In Fed We Trust, Red Ink). A former syndicated columnist, Means was senior editor at Washingtonian magazine from 1989-2000. He lives in rural Virginia.