“Anyone who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes, or barefooted deserves to be shot,” a Kent resident told a researcher.

“Do I have your permission to quote that?”

“You sure do. It would have been better if the Guard had shot the whole lot of them that morning.”

“But you had three sons there.”

“If they didn’t do what the Guards told them, they should have been mowed down.”

A letter to Life later that summer read, “It was a valuable object lesson to homegrown advocates of anarchy and revolution, regardless of age.”

Time had called the Silent Majority “not so much shrill as perplexed,” possessed of “a civics-book sense of decency.” Pity poor Time, whose America was but a memory.

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

At Northwestern, students carried a flag upside down, the symbol for distress. “A hefty man in work clothes,” according to Time, tried to grab it, saying, “That’s my flag! I fought for it! You have no right to it!” The kids started arguing. “There are millions of people like me,” he responded. “We’re fed up with your movement. You’re forcing us into it. We’ll have to kill you. All I can see is a lot of kids blowing a chance I never had.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland