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An American Tragedy
by Brian VanDeMark
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Prologue
People don't withhold the whole truth unless the whole truth is too much to bear. For years, he didn't tell people the whole truth—not even his wife. He knew, of course, that he should tell the whole truth, but he always hesitated. His decision initially reflected the danger of legal jeopardy, then the burden of personal responsibility. Telling the whole truth would lead only to harsh criticism and endless speculation about his motives, and he had no desire to deal with either. And he failed to see how it would benefit the victims. Critics couldn't punish him any worse than he had punished himself.
He had spent years in pain, reliving memories of the shooting. Vivid and disturbing, they resurfaced unpredictably, flickering like fish in murky waters. They haunted him, but he could not switch them off. They magnified what he withheld, but it was its very smallness that made it so terrible. Whenever he thought about the victims, it was about what went through their minds in their last seconds, all the things they would never do, their devastated families. Reporters, investigators, and historians did question him—at first every day, then every few weeks, then every year or so around the anniversary of the shooting—but he never told anyone exactly what happened. He convinced himself that this had been the right decision, and he did not see how reversing the decision would serve any useful purpose.
He was an introspective man who spent a lot of time alone pondering what happened; it had worn a deep groove in his mind. But no matter how controlled a person is, keeping a secret gets heavy and tiring and lonely. He could only hold out for so long. He sought relief from the heavy burden that had dogged him for decades. He wasn't happy about going over all of it again, but he had reached a certain age. The past few years had not been good ones for him. He had undergone two serious heart operations and felt he needed to get something off his chest that he had been holding back, make peace with things, and correct the historical record before it was too late. He wanted a clear conscience and an end to the tension. He hoped he would feel better, but he could just as easily end up feeling worse.
"Enough time has passed," he told me. A long silence followed. "I'm willing now to talk with you about it. I'm going to tell you only the truth. I'm not afraid of what's down the pike." It was the only story about the Kent State shooting that nobody but him would ever be able to tell.
Matt McManus was a twenty-five-year-old platoon sergeant in Company A, First Battalion, 145th Infantry Regiment of the Ohio Army National Guard on May 4, 1970. The eleventh of twelve children, he was orphaned when five years old and never adopted. He joined the guard at eighteen and became a leader among the enlisted guardsmen. He was intelligent and confident, he liked his men and they liked him, and he was firm but kind. But for more than fifty years, he withheld exactly what happened at Kent State University shortly after noon on that sunny, breezy spring day—the events that led to the death of four students and the wounding of nine others during a protest against the Vietnam War. He came to think of May 4 as a separate, private world that he guarded against all kinds of inconvenient questions. His elusiveness wasn't readily apparent because it had been cultivated to such a degree that it became almost invisible. There were some things he would discuss only in the abstract. He avoided others so subtly one hardly noticed him doing it.
When I wrote him to request an interview, his wife opened the letter and told him, "If you read this, you know there will be sleepless nights." But he read my letter and responded with an eight-page letter of his own. He agreed to talk with me, but he wanted "a face-to-face discussion" because "it's best to look into one's eyes and feel the pain he or she may be experiencing." "It's because of what I saw that I hate to go back to that day," he told me in a phone call a few days later. "My mind goes back to an incident that I'd prefer not to remember, but that I can't forget." A long pause. "We need to remember the students who died and were wounded that day," he then said.
Reprinted from Kent State: An American Tragedy by Brian VanDeMark. Copyright © 2024 by Brian VanDeMark. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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