The Kent State shooting was the 1970 killing of unarmed student protesters by the Ohio National Guard. John Kiriakou recounts that a friend of his parents lost a daughter — one of those shot and killed — and that in his household Governor Rhodes, who ordered the Guard to open fire on unarmed students at a peaceful protest, was regarded as “the devil.”[1][2] He names it, with the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, among the events of 1968–69 that formed his political conscience.[3]
In a separate telling, Kiriakou traces those political-conscience memories further back, to sitting on his father’s lap watching news coverage of buildings on fire and being told a “very bad man” had killed Martin Luther King, followed a couple of months later by his mother, crying, telling him Robert Kennedy had been killed; he calls 1968 “nightmarish” and says it got worse in 1969 with the Kent State shooting.[4]