Let’s face it. America has a history of strong men making their jobs too big only to have those jobs cut down to size.
Think FDR and his four terms as president. Think Nixon and his criminal words on White House tapes.
Think J. Edgar Hoover and his 44 years as quasi- dictator at the FBI.
James Comey, a former FBI director, is not J. Edgar Hoover. He didn’t create the FBI and run it for 44 years. He didn’t wiretap Martin Luther King’s romantic bedroom and then anonymously recommend he commit suicide.
Comey didn’t amass private information on presidents and politicians he wanted to submit to his way of doing things. Comey didn’t imagine the FBI could secretly act like an extra branch of government.
But if a grand jury had dared to indict the director of the FBI in 1970, as it just did former FBI director James Comey in 2025, I’d be clicking my heels and shouting with disbelief.
You see on May 4, 1970 the FBI had just taken over my university and forced it’s 18,000 students to abandon their rooms and leave campus. Then Hoover’s FBI began desperately searching those rooms for non existent weapons.
The government needed somehow to justify to shocked Americans the unjustifiable. Why had the Ohio National Guard fired their rifles into a crowd of student demonstrators, killing, four and wounding nine, one paralyzed for life?
To this day that question remains unanswered. A generous interpretation has been that the guardsmen were rookie kids too and pulled their triggers out of fear and frustration with girl protestors giving them the finger, like 19-year-old Allison Krause, one of the fatalities and with boy protestors heaving rocks at them.
I know what the FBI did because I was a graduate counselor in the dorms and had to abandon campus myself along with those 18,000 that day.
The minute I saw Jeffrey Miller’s body lying face down on the asphalt with blood trickling 8 feet into a pool at the curb in front of Taylor Hall (the building with the trademark cement pagoda) I decided not to wait for the FBI or the university president to shut the campus down.
Dean Kahler, who was shot an paralyzed at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, holds a photograph he took of a U.S. National Guardsman talking to students during the 1970 anti-war protest, during an interview in his home Thursday, May 2, 2024, in Plain Township, Ohio. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
I got in my car and drove out of town with only the clothes on my back toward Cleveland, 60.miles away.
On my way out of town I saw telephone wires laying on the ground with men working on them. Were they repairing them or disconnecting them after the shooting, trying to isolate the protestors?
I began to be apprehensive that something more sinister might be going on than a bunch of 20 year old Ohio National Guardsmen with itchy fingers firing into a crowd of students.
That was May 4, 1970. no students were allowed back on campus for four months until September, 1970. Spring classes had to be completed by mail, land mail. And by long distance telephone calls charged by the minute.
In the meantime the FBI was unable to find any weapons in the belongings of 18,000 students. They did however confiscate the rock collection of my resident advisor (RA) in Manchester Hall, who was a geology major and needed that collection for research.
His FBI confiscated geology rock collection wound up as an exhibit on a table displayed by the Portage County local grand jury as an example of weapons alleged by Portage County officials to be potentially weapons which students had collected with the intention to attack Ohio National Guardsmen.
No one would dare indict the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in 1970 for “unreasonable search and seizure” of 18,000 students private possessions.
Not on your life.
It took three years to get guardsmen indicted by a federal grand jury for the shooting itself and then a judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence. Four dead in Ohio wasn’t evidence enough.
There’s no J. Edgar in front of Mr. Comey’s name in 2025. He’s the incredible shrinking former FBI director. So forgive me if I am not unhappy that a FBI director James Comey has been indicted by a grand jury even if only for the act of lying.
OK there was politics involved. But his indictment is America. America was born cutting a king down to size. I don’t want to trivialize that impulse 249 years later. It’s America’s birthright.
Paul Keane is a Connecticut native, a retired Vermont teacher, and a graduate of Yale University Divinity School and Kent State.
https://www.courant.com/2025/10/13/opinion-why-i-am-not-unhappy-about-comey-indictment/
