h an attack on Cambodian sanctuaries to destroy communist command-and-supply buildings, while containing the protest that he knew his action would provoke. His gamble failed, when poorly trained National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University, on May 4. This made the expected protests much worse than anyone in Washington could have foreseen. The wave of demonstrations on hundreds of college campuses paralyzed America's higher-education system. The Kent State tragedy ignited a nationwide campus disaster.Between May 4 and May 8, campuses experienced an average of 100 demonstrations a day, 350 campus strikes, 536 colleges shut down, and 73 colleges reported significant violence in their protests. On that weekend, 100,000 people gathered to protest in Washington. By May 12, over 150 colleges were on strike (VN H. and P.) Many of Nixon's activities during the second week of May revolved around the Kent State crisis. On May 6, he met with thedelegation of the university. But with the storm of people on the outside of the White House, the government never completely stopped. Despite Nixon's claims that the media did not portray his serious intentions accurately, his own records reveal almost no discussion of Vietnam, Cambodia, or Kent State at the time. On December 15, Nixon announced his intention to withdraw an additional fifty thousand troops in 1970. Even the president's faith in that position was shattered after the unprecedented nationwide protests against his invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970. (Lewis, 83). As the Nixon administration tried to piece together in the weeks after the crisis, a dramatic decline in antiwar occurred once the colleges closed. The nationwide response to the Cambodian invasion and the Kent State killings was the last movement by the people, which had such an impact like the summer of 1970. Nixon began to plan a new and even more vigorous offensive against the movement. Ho...
