Comment: Have we forgotten the lessons of Kent State?
By Charles Holden, Zach Messitte and Jerald Podair / The Washington Post
President Trump’s near-daily news briefings have moved beyond his usual gaslighting and political theater. Careless words about prematurely opening up the economy are empowering angry, sometimes gun-wielding protesters across the country, demanding an end to stay-at-home orders. It is no longer just a partisan exaggeration when Washington’s Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee warns that the president’s “unhinged rantings and call for people to ‘liberate’ states could also lead to violence.”
While most of us shudder at the prospect of domestic political violence, the deepening fractures that Trump’s often-flaming-hot rhetoric have fueled in the past four years are a painful example of just how corrosive words can be to our sense of community.
A half-century ago, the same kind of political speech contributed to the often-overlooked reaction to the deaths of four students protesting U.S. involvement in Cambodia during a demonstration at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. In the run-up to this tragic episode, the slashing attacks of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew enabled President Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” to shrug off and, in some cases, celebrate the shocking events on the Ohio campus. To them, the shootings represented a grimly satisfying, overdue “law and order” response to years of unrest.
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It started with a transformation of the office of the vice presidency. Agnew grew bored with its traditional, ceremonial functions. Tired of attending ribbon-cuttings and funerals, he decided to turn his busy speaking schedule into a Republican revenge tour. During the autumn of 1969, with the help of Nixon wordsmith Pat Buchanan, Agnew went from city to city delivering campaign-style attacks against the administration’s enemies. The menacing tone of these speeches, which often targeted the media, thrilled Nixon’s silent-majority base, which felt maligned by the cultural elites Agnew loved to skewer.
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