Books: Law-and-Order

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THE TRUTH ABOUT KENT STATE

by PETER DAVIES

242 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$10. Paperback $3.50.

Many acts of the Nixon Administration emerge in a more sinister light these days. That is especially true of the Justice Department's original refusal, under Attorney General John Mitchell, to seek any indictments of Ohio National Guardsmen for killing four Kent State students in 1970.

There is a curious parallel between the Justice Department's handling of the Kent State investigation and its initial Watergate studies. In both cases high Justice Department officials lavishly praised the thoroughness of the FBI's investigations—and then, apparently for political reasons, ignored the logical conclusions to be drawn from the evidence. At Kent State the evidence suggested that the shootings were "unwarranted" and that Guardsmen had "fabricated" self-protective excuses.

But officials initially refused to present evidence to a federal grand jury, contending that chances of a successful prosecution were too slim. Yet a similar fear of losing in court did not prevent Mitchell's Justice Department from moving unsuccessfully against such ideological foes as Daniel Ellsberg and the would-be Kissinger kidnapers.

Peter Davies' book is primarily a concise and easily followed compilation of the essential facts upon which Guardsmen might possibly be prosecuted. It is also an account of the agonizing struggle by parents of the Kent State victims, various church groups and Davies himself to convince an unresponsive Nixon Administration that a federal grand jury should examine the matter thoroughly. With the jury's power to issue subpoenas and grant immunity, Davies argues, the still obscure truth of precisely why the Guardsmen fired their guns could be secured. Davies, 42, is a New York City insurance broker who has spent most of his spare time for the past three years pursuing the case out of an ordinary citizen's response to what he considers a challenge to the American conscience.

Illustrated with some precise, previously unpublished photographs, the book convincingly dispels initial claims by Guardsmen that their lives were endangered by an onrushing mob of students, that they were encircled and had run out of tear gas, and that they had come under fire from an unknown sniper. Davies, along with the President's Scranton commission, the FBI and every journalist who has written a Kent State book, presents contrary evidence on all these points. At the time that the Guardsmen suddenly wheeled and fired from a vantage point atop a hill, they had already dispersed the crowd and had a clear exit route back to their assembly point. Even at the time of firing, a number of Guardsmen were so unconcerned that they turned their backs on the students. The closest slain student was nearly the length of a football field away from the riflemen who killed him.