The Kent State shooting was the 1970 killing of unarmed student protesters by the Ohio National Guard. It is one of the few historical events John Kiriakou claims a direct personal connection to, and he returns to it in two distinct registers: as the thing that made him a man of the left, and as the last comparable convulsion before the one he believes is coming.
The family connection
A friend of Kiriakou’s parents lost a daughter at Kent State — “she was one of the five that was shot and killed,” as he puts it.[1][2] Asked whether losing a family friend’s daughter was a large part of his identifying with the left, he agreed that it very much was.[1]
In his household the Ohio governor who ordered the National Guard to fire was, flatly, “the devil.” Kiriakou’s own framing of the order has stayed the same across tellings: open fire on unarmed students at a peaceful political protest — “What is this? North Korea?”[3]
The 1968–69 sequence
Kiriakou consistently sets Kent State at the end of a run of events he remembers from early childhood — “I’m just old enough to remember 1968 and 1969. I was a kid.”[4][5]
The sequence begins with him sitting on his father’s lap while the news showed buildings on fire. He asked why, and his father said a very bad man had killed Martin Luther King and black people were very upset — a sentence Kiriakou says he still remembers being phrased exactly that way.[6][7] A couple of months later his mother cried all day because Robert Kennedy had been shot and killed.[6][8] In a Cyprus telling he dates the two killings precisely — King in April, Kennedy in June — and describes the gigantic demonstrations, in some cases riots, against the Vietnam War that followed, with Kent State coming a year later.[9]
Compressed, the run he recites is: “Martin Luther King’s assassinated, then Bobby Kennedy’s assassinated, then Kent State, and then the summer of love, and everybody’s in the street, and the cops are shooting unarmed people.”[10][11][12] He calls 1968 “nightmarish” and says it got worse in 1969 with the shooting.[13][14]
As a measure of the present
The reason Kiriakou raises Kent State is almost always comparative. Having lived through 1968 and 1969, he argues the country is now “just as split” as it was then — a division he says he has not otherwise seen in his adult lifetime.[4][10]
His Cyprus account draws the arc out further and ends darker. After Kent State, he says, the country entered a period in which nothing so severe happened; now “we’re getting ready to explode again. Like it’s coming. Everybody sees it that it’s coming.” What makes it worse in his reading is that the division itself is disabling — “nobody feels that they have the power to stop it” — and he expects the consequence plainly: “it’s going to get worse before it gets any better. And worse is going to mean people are going to die.”[15] He also notes he is speaking freely while a pardon application is pending, saying he has “literally nothing to lose.”[16]
Alongside the same memories he traces the political narrowing he objects to: from what he calls the free thinking of 1968 and 1969 through Watergate in 1974, to a present in which the two parties “pretend to have these significant political differences” while “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”[3]