Cambodia and the Kent State Shootings
Nixon widens the war into a neutral neighbor, and National Guardsmen kill four students protesting it at home.
Quick facts
- Cambodia incursion announced
- 30 April 1970
- Kent State shootings
- 4 May 1970
- Students killed
- 4 (Krause, Miller, Scheuer, Schroeder)
What happened
After Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk was overthrown in March 1970 and his successor Lon Nol demanded North Vietnamese forces leave their border sanctuaries, Nixon ordered a US-South Vietnamese ground incursion into Cambodia on 30 April 1970, limited to a 30-kilometer strip and to the end of June. The operation seized large quantities of North Vietnamese rice, weapons, and ammunition, but its public announcement, appearing to widen a war Nixon had promised to wind down, set off the largest wave of campus protests in US history. At Kent State University in Ohio, Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on demonstrators on 4 May 1970, killing four students, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Schroeder, and wounding nine others, one of whom was left permanently paralyzed. A federal commission later concluded the shootings were unjustified.
Why it matters
Kent State turned the war's cost at home from an abstraction into dead American college students shot by their own government's soldiers, and it hardened the divide between an administration convinced it needed to widen the war to end it and a public that read the widening as betrayal of Nixon's own promises.
How we know
Kent State University's own historical accuracy project, drawing on the federal Scranton Commission's 1970 report and the subsequent historical record, documents the sequence of the shooting minute by minute.
Sources
- Kent State University. The May 4 Shootings at Kent State University: The Search for Historical Accuracy · Reputable sourcekent.edu · The domain "kent.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. Ending the Vietnam War, 1969-1973 · Reputable sourcehistory.state.gov · The domain "history.state.gov" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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